Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1)

by Jerry Hatchett

  "That's the hitch. As they sit, they only measure down to a tenth of a volt and tenth of a hertz."

  I felt my hope deflating. "Aww crap, th—"

  "Hang on," Matt said. "I have Abdul working on it. He says the stations can measure down to the micro level if that's what we need. It's just that the current software's not set up to use that level of precision, because we've never needed it."

  "Who's Abdul?"

  "Abdul Abidi, my right-hand man, one of the smartest guys you'll ever meet."

  "Okay."

  "He's cobbling together an app right now that will get the data and then populate an online database. I gave him your email address, and as soon as he has it up and running, he'll shoot you the location of the database, login creds, everything you need."

  "Bless you, brother. I appreciate this more than you'll ever know, and I'll owe you big time."

  "You owe me nothing, Sam. They have your kid. Find her, and let me know if I can do anything else to help. I mean that."

  "Thanks, Matt."

  "Later," he said, and then he was gone.

  CHAPTER 96

  McCARRAN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

  LAS VEGAS

  COURTNEY MEYER

  THE PILOT ANNOUNCED that landing was imminent and advised that large electronics should be shut down and stowed. Meyer was the only passenger and she ignored the silly command. If they crashed, the state of her laptop wouldn't affect the outcome one way or the other. After poring through Flatt's reports and the supporting data for most of the flight, she had spent the last half hour composing her thoughts, as well as a list of questions for Flatt. As the plane touched down, she began her final readthrough. Close enough. She closed the laptop, bagged it, and gathered up the papers around her.

  She was on her feet the moment the plane came to a stop on the tarmac, her soft leather briefcase in one hand and the handle of her roller bag in the other. One of the pilots came out of the cockpit, opened the door, and folded down the little set of stairs. She descended into the late afternoon desert environment, the sun just above the western mountains painting the other business jets around them a soft amber, the air like a blast from a furnace. A black SUV was waiting no more than fifty feet away. Meyer walked toward it as the driver exited and came to meet her. When they met, she stopped briefly to shake his hand and then resumed her pace. He was part of the bureau's Critical Incident Reponse Group, a specialized sector that handled kidnappings and other intense scenarios.

  Inside the truck, she pointed both her AC vents at her face and sucked in the cool air as they pulled away from the airplane and made their way along a service road that took them out of McCarran International Airport. Meyer said, "Progress on the girl?"

  "Nothing tangible yet, but everything is in motion. I talked to Memphis a little while ago. They've mobilized everything they have and additional resources are being brought in from other field offices."

  "Good," Meyer said.

  "I'm hearing there's an Eastern European O-C element?"

  She nodded. "Major enterprise, headed up by an old man named Max Sultanovich."

  "The one who bugged out of Memphis on the run?"

  "The one and only. The organization is run mostly out of Kiev, but with a heavy presence in Russia, Georgia, Chechnya, Moldova, you name it. Word is there's even a strong tie to Putin himself."

  "What's the Vegas connection?"

  "It's complex and, frankly, bizarre. Sultanovich used to own the land that the SPACE casino sits on."

  "Are you kidding?"

  Meyer shook her head. "How long till we get there?"

  The agent pointed to his ten o'clock. Meyer leaned forward, looked out the windshield, and gasped. "Holy moly."

  "Yeah, we get that a lot from people who haven't seen it before."

  "I knew it was big, but that…it's…"

  "Like something from a movie?"

  She just nodded and continued to stare. "More like a city from the future landed in the middle of the desert."

  CHAPTER 97

  SPACE

  ABOUT FIFTEEN MINUTES after my conversation with Matt, the email from his man Abidi showed up. It contained a web address, username, and password. I popped a browser, went to the web page, logged in. It was bare-bones, but it had all the data I needed, spread across four columns: STATION #, VOLTS, FREQ(Hz), LOCATION. The station number was obviously an internal designator for Decker Digital. Voltage was expressed to three decimal places, frequency to two. Location was in latitude and longitude. Perfect.

  The voltage and frequency values occasionally changed a bit, so the data was live. I watched it and figured out that the system was pulling a reading from each station once per minute. Now that I had the data, I sat back and thought about how to best utilize it. More accurately, I tried. My mind kept wandering to Ally, imagining her shock as those animals grabbed her. The fear. The horror. Her trying to understand why this was happening to her. What were they doing to her? Where was she right now? Locked in a room? Tied to a chair? As these thoughts spun through my mind, the blackness materialized in my mind and soul, first as scattered gossamers, wispy patches that grew until they merged into each other. No. Not now. I suppressed the black, pushed it deep. She needed my mind on what was before me right now. The black would be fuel, a cold burn.

  I returned to the numbers. As a first step, I got the numbers from the professor's email and wrote them on a Post-it note: 122.493V @ 60.29Hz. Stuck to the top of my screen, that fluorescent pink square would be my rallying flag. I pictured the setting of the rape videos in my mind. A room with a bed. Beside the bed, a tripod. On top of the tripod, a Canon C300 camera. A power cable hung from the camera down to the floor and connected to an AC adapter. From the other end of the AC adapter, an electric cord emerged, laid on the floor, then up the wall where it terminated with a plug in an electrical outlet. An outlet feeding its child a diet of 122.493 volts, oscillating 60.29 times per second. Where was that outlet?

  As a rudimentary first step, I searched the web page of data for any occurrence of either “122.493” or “60.29” and got no hits. Not really a surprise. These were very precise numbers that varied pretty much continuously. I looked back to the professor's email to verify my memory; the numbers were mean averages. How would the professor have calculated them? Best to ask him and be sure. I got his phone number from the email and dialed. Please answer, please answer.

  He did. "Hello?"

  "Professor, this is Sam Flatt."

  It took him a moment to process the name. After a few seconds, he said, "Hi, Mr. Flatt. How can I help you?" His voice was refined, almost aristocratic sounding, a mismatch to his email style.

  "I have a quick question about the power artifacts you found in the videos."

  "Very well."

  "Can you give me a basic rundown on how you calculated those averages?"

  "Certainly. I measured the artifact once per second for the duration of each video, then calculated a simple mean average. Is that what you mean?"

  "Exactly," I said. "Thanks so much, professor."

  "My pleasure."

  With the call finished, I looked back at the web page and its gently morphing columns of data. Now I knew how to approach it, and it would require one more phone call. I picked up my phone and was starting to dial when a knock sounded on the door to the conference room. A second later, the door opened and Nichols stuck his head into the room. "Someone here to see you," he said. "Says she's FBI."

  CHAPTER 98

  SPACE

  COURTNEY MEYER

  UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES, even working a normal case, Meyer would have been tempted to spend some time checking out SPACE. She had no idea anything so futuristic, so staggering in scale and realism, even existed. But this wasn't a typical investigation.

  Meyer walked with Nichols, the man who met her when she stepped from the SUV. After what seemed miles of walking and a brief ride on an elevator, they entered a small vestibule that served as an a
nteroom to a medium-sized conference room with glass walls. Inside the room, a man she assumed to be Sam Flatt worked at a table arrayed with several computers. Nichols knocked on the door to the conference room. The man inside looked up from behind a computer screen, then stood and came to the door. Meyer was startled: Her mental picture of Flatt had been that of, well, a nerd. The specimen headed her way was anything but. Tall and lean, he was not just handsome. He was good looking in a way that she found disarming, a little roguish but with no thug vibe.

  He stepped through the door with a hand extended. "Agent Meyer, Sam Flatt."

  She shook his hand, which was on the rough side, again not in keeping with her preconceptions. Meyer nodded. "I'm truly sorry about your daughter. Let's get to work on finding her."

  "Yeah," Flatt said. "Let's do that." He held the thick glass door to the conference room open with a finger and gestured for her to enter, then motioned Nichols in before stepping back into the room himself. He took a seat at the head of the table and said, "Have your people found anything yet?"

  Meyer shook her head. "Our investigation is being run out of the Memphis field office, and they're fully engaged. Nothing to report at this point. Have you received any demands from the kidnappers?"

  "No," I said, "but I'm sure that's coming."

  They spent the next half hour going through Meyer's list of questions, occasionally diverging for a discussion of some point, or for Flatt to pose a question of her. She didn't pick up anything new that struck her as significant, but she did get a lot of holes filled in and she was now convinced Flatt was right about the kidnapping being tied to what he was working on here in Las Vegas. He had a strong investigative mind and continued to impress her.

  Meyer stood. "I need to make some calls, get in sync with my guys here and in New York. Is there somewhere I can work?"

  "I'm sure Jimbo can find you a spot," Flatt said, pointing a finger at Nichols.

  Nichols stood. "You bet. Come with me, ma'am."

  As they left, she turned back and said, "I'll be back, Mr. Flatt."

  He nodded. "Call me Sam."

  CHAPTER 99

  SPACE

  I STILL REMEMBERED the dirty trick Meyer had pulled, but she seemed to genuinely regret that. More important, she seemed serious about helping to find Ally. I'm not naive. She has her larger investigation in mind, as well, but she was here now and helping, and that's what mattered to me. My resentments could be put on a shelf.

  Now that I had the room to myself for a bit, I returned to the issue of the electrical power I'd been working on when Meyer arrived. I got a phone number from the Abidi email and called.

  He answered on the first ring. "Decker Digital, this is Abdul."

  "Abdul, Sam Flatt. Got a second?"

  "Sure."

  "You happen to have historical data for these monitoring stations?"

  "Mountains of it. What do you need?"

  "Has Matt filled you in on what I'm doing?"

  "He has, yes."

  "Great. I need to be able to search the station logs for a range of parameters."

  "Such as?"

  "I have a video whose camera was powered at one-two-two-dot-four-nine-three volts, sixty-dot-two-nine hertz."

  "And you want to know if logs show a station that was outputting that kind of power?"

  "Almost. Those numbers are averages calculated over a duration of several minutes, so I'm thinking I'd start by searching for settings that match, plus or minus two volts, and plus or minus one hertz."

  "That's doable," Abidi said. "Rather than reconfiguring the whole online system I set up for you, how about I run the search here, against the raw data? I can send you the results."

  "If you don't mind, that would be fantastic."

  "You got it."

  "Oh, Abdul?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Can you include time stamps in the results?"

  "Of course. Anything else?"

  "Not now. Huge thanks."

  "Welcome. I'll be in touch soon."

  I said goodbye and ended the call. Then I did something I should have done way before that moment: I prayed.

  MEYER WALKED BACK in about fifteen minutes after I got off the phone with Abdul.

  "Just wanted to touch base," she said. "I'm headed to meet my team." She picked up a Post-it pad from the table and scribbled a number on it. "That's my cell. Call if you need me, or if you hear anything, okay?"

  "You got it," I said.

  She was barely out the door when an email arrived from Abdul.

  FROM: aabidi@deckerdigital.com

  TO: sflatt@flattforensic.com

  Results attached, Sam. I think you'll find them interesting. BTW, I "linkified" the locations for you, so clicking the lat/lon will open a Google map showing where that station sits. Good luck!

  I DOUBLE-CLICKED THE ATTACHMENT, an Excel spreadsheet. When it opened, I scrolled down to see the total number of hits and was surprised to see there were only 298. They were all clustered around a period of days, several months ago. I guess that was a weird combination of voltage and frequency, for which I was thankful. Even better, the latitude/longitude values were the same on every line of the spreadsheet. I clicked one of the locations and my browser opened and started loading a Google map. My heart pounded when I saw what was loading. It was a map of Las Vegas, and the marker designating the exact location for the power monitoring station was on the Strip. When I zoomed in, my heart beat even harder. It was only two blocks from where I was sitting.

  CHAPTER 100

  SPACE

  COURTNEY MEYER

  STANDING in the doorway of the meeting room Nichols had set up for Meyer was perhaps the most unprofessional-looking police officer she had ever encountered. Given the spread of her own butt over the years, she was hardly one to judge someone over a few extra pounds, but this guy was out of control. How the hell could he pass any kind of physical? He wore his pants high with a belt cinched about six inches too tight, resulting in as much belly protruding beneath the belt as above. Atop the acre of black trousers was a skin-tight black T-shirt festooned with an LVPD logo. Completing the caricature, the guy was honest-to-God standing there eating a donut. Flakes of sugary glaze speckled the black shirt and caked the corners of his mouth. Despite the spectacle, none of this was the problem. The problem was that he had his fat ass parked in her way and refused to move.

  "Detective Huddleston," she said with all the patience and calm she could dredge up, "why are you here? And for that matter, how did you know where 'here' would be?"

  Meyer would have bet money that the guy couldn't possibly make a worse presentation than he already had, but when he grinned at her, she realized she would have lost that bet. He had a mouthful of tombstone teeth that somehow managed to make his melon-sized head look undersized.

  He pointed with his donut at the door. Meyer looked and saw that it said, LAW ENFORCEMENT COURTESY QUARTERS. Then he started talking around a mouthful of donut. "This is where they always stick cops. As for why I'm here, this is my town, lady. And I wanna know what the feds are doing here."

  His town. "It's Special Agent Meyer, and I'm having a hard time believing you're as stupid as you look and sound." The tombstone teeth vanished behind a pound of lips. "The Federal Bureau of Investigation is conducting an investigation that has nothing to do with you."

  "So you say, but until I see documentation of that or receive an order from my superiors, I'm not going anywhere."

  Meyer sighed, stepped through the SPACE-logoed onlookers into the hallway, and dialed her phone.

  CHAPTER 101

  LAS VEGAS BOULEVARD

  I EXITED the front "air lock" of SPACE and broke into a jog along the edge of the long driveway, heading toward the street. When I made the sidewalk on the street, I stopped and checked my phone. I had entered the latitude and longitude of the power monitoring station into the phone's GPS, and it pointed me north along the Strip. The Google map showed the walking distance from SPACE
to the coordinates to be just over a mile and the phone showed 6,143 feet. I slid it back into my pocket and resumed my jog.

  It was almost eight o'clock and the sun had dropped well behind the mountains to the west of the valley. The air was still hot, but cooling. It looked like a crystal clear evening was on the way as the peach-colored western sky faded to cerulean overhead and then a deep Pacific blue further east. I finally reached the northern edge of the SPACE campus and pulled my phone again. I had covered about half the distance; just over 3,000 feet to go. I picked up the pace, my shoes smacking the concrete sidewalk that still radiated the heat of the desert day.

  I started looking ahead, trying to figure out where exactly the power station would be situated ahead. The land immediately to the north of SPACE was empty. After that, I saw a couple of utilitarian-looking two-story buildings that had little chance of long-term survival. Someone would eventually pay a fortune for them in order to get the land beneath them. The crews and cranes would move in and some outlandish casino would take shape and climb the sky.

  My next phone check showed 312 feet to go. I was passing the first building, so the second one should mark the spot. I slowed and stopped in front of the second building. Now the phone said I was thirty-two feet from my target, which made no sense. I was standing on a sidewalk with not so much as a shrub showing within anything close to the allotted distance. I looked around again, and then I saw it. Flush mounted in the sidewalk was what looked like a small manhole cover, except it was square. In the center of the cover, I saw a logo that said DECKER DIGITAL.

  CHAPTER 102

  SPACE

  COURTNEY MEYER

  MEYER ENDED her call with her boss, Tom Belt, and waited in the hallway for him to work the political and bureaucratic magic that would get Donut Cop out of her way. While she stood, a man wearing a SPACE SECURITY shirt approached and stuck his hand out.