Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1) (4 page)

S
PACE

T
he bizarre FBI
call was the first thing on my mind when I woke. Maybe I should have played it a little cooler and tried a little harder to coax some info out of her, something that would let me make sense of something so weird. I Googled Meyer and found nothing particularly useful, just a barebones bio and a few cases in which she was mentioned, all organized crime, typically RICO. Crap. I hadn't done anything wrong, but that didn't mean this woman wouldn't come after me just because I pissed her off. The feds can ruin an innocent man through sheer attrition.

I called a top-shelf private investigator I used from time to time, and asked him to dig up everything he could on her. Then it was time to put Special Agent Meyer out of my mind and get to work.

T
he IT department
at SPACE was the nicest I'd seen. Ever. At the center of a large room of desks and cubicles was an elevated server room they called “the tower.” At a glance my guess was that it housed no fewer than fifty racks of servers; it was a glass-walled wonderland of monster computers and blinking lights, the nerve center of the empire. I walked past the cubicles and approached a desk on a raised dais just outside the tower. A balding guy in his thirties, wearing glasses that were a little too hip for his face and a SPACE lab coat, looked down at me from the desk as if I were a peasant drawing near his royal throne.

He said nothing, just arched his eyebrows at me.

I said, "I'm looking for Jerry Rose."

"I'm Dr. Rose."

Dr. Rose? A PhD running IT? Interesting. "Sam Flatt," I said.

He sighed and peered at his screen. "What can I do for you, Mr. Flatt?"

"Jacob Allen told me you were the man to see for access to a few servers."

More peering. "I have your name here as someone I'm to 'aid in data retrieval,' but I assure you no one is going to 'access' my servers."

His servers. I turned and looked at the always-at-the-ready James Nichols, who said, "Tell me what you'd like me to do, Mr. Flatt."

Leaning in so I could whisper in his ear, I said, "Sam. Sam. Sam. No more 'Mr. Flatt,' remember?"

He cracked a small grin and nodded.

I climbed the steps to Rose's desk and extended my hand. "Let's start over. I'm Sam Flatt. I'm here because I've been hired to examine some data that is very important to your employer, my client. We're working for the same boss, and I'd be most grateful for your cooperation."

Rose exhaled through his nose and took my hand in a limp little excuse of a handshake. "I'm very busy, Mr. Flatt, so if you can tell me what data you need—specifically—I'll see what I can do."

In less than a minute, I'd had my fill of this little prick. I walked back down the steps, found an empty chair, carried it up the dais, and plopped it down right beside Rose, who had never even bothered to stand. With forced calm I pulled my laptop from its sheath, found an electrical outlet and got my laptop plugged up. I then plugged it into an empty network jack on the back of his desk and with a flourish hit my power button. When I was up and running, I said, "I'm here to harvest data related to employee two-one-six-eight. I need admin access to the Exchange server that houses that account. I need admin or root to the primary print server for that account, admin or root to the servers containing her network shares, and admin or root to any servers and routers that handle outside traffic for that account."

Rose's face was somewhere between confused and indignant. He looked at me, then at Nichols, and said to Nichols, "This is completely unacceptable!"

Nichols shrugged.

What I wanted to do: Grab the lapels of the weenie's lab coat and shake him till he rattled. Instead, I said, "Dr. Rose. I've told you what I need. Will you arrange that, or not?"

"I most certainly will not."

Looking to Nichols, I said, "Jim, will you please see if Mr. Allen is available?"

He touched an icon on his phone and put it to his ear. A couple seconds later, he said, "Yes, this is Nichols. Can you please tell Mr. Allen we have a situation in IT that requires his attention….Yes, thank you….Hello, Mr. Allen, I'm in IT with Mr. Flatt and he's hit some resistance in getting the access he needs….Yes, sir…thank you." He ended the call and slipped the phone back into his pocket.

Five seconds later, Rose's phone rang. He glanced at its screen, picked up the handset. "This is Dr. Rose."

I don't know what Allen was saying, but Rose's nerdy little face reddened and his nostrils quivered as all defiance drained away. I noticed that the clickety-click of keyboards around the room had gone quiet. We had an audience, and I guessed more than a few of them were enjoying the show. I've spent years dealing with self-important jerks like Rose and their brand of douchebaggery really tries my patience these days. Was I being an asshole myself? Yep. But with guys like this, you have to establish the rules up front. I was here to get to the bottom of a big issue for my client, and I had no intention of wasting time on games every time I needed something.

After maybe a minute, Rose laid the handset back in its cradle. He looked at me with pure hatred, but that was okay because after his best attempt at a Stare of Death, he turned to his screen and started setting up the access I had asked for. I watched his screen and when he finished, I smiled and said, "Thank you, Dr. Rose." Then I moved my chair and turned my laptop so he couldn't watch what I was doing.

A
couple hours later
, I was back in my ersatz lab. While searches ran against Gamboa's email stores I'd gotten from IT, I dug deeper into the binder, looking for policies and procedures for managing the payout rates on SPACE's machines. I found those things, along with a fifty-something-page report on the company's own investigation of the issue. That investigation, conducted by SPACE's security department, had been thorough and meticulous. They had walked through and documented every step of the process, then turned every employee who had access to the process upside down and inside out. That included Gamboa, although she didn't appear to have received any more scrutiny than anyone else. Then again, she was more interesting now because she had bolted from the company without notice. At the time of the investigation, several months prior, she was just one of several key people with that kind of access. The weenie from IT, Jerry Rose, was mentioned several times in the report as the person who conducted the computer-related aspects of the investigation. Logins, credentials, system access levels, things like that. The investigation found exactly nothing amiss and wrapped up with a line that said, FINDINGS: INCONCLUSIVE. It was signed by the head of security, Hank Dobo.

I closed the binder, leaned back in my chair, and stretched. With my eyes closed, I mentally walked through the process of a SPACE employee making a legitimate adjustment to one of the machines: First, someone in management decides to make the change. A written order is issued via email to the head of the Gaming Technology department. The head does two things: he assigns it to a senior technician and files an electronic request for a witness visit from the gaming commission. The commission responds with a scheduled time, although in practice these commission guys run regular routes to the major casinos and adjustments get handled then. The commission regulator arrives, approves the proposed change. The assigned technician loads the configuration console for the machine, remotely, on the technician's normal workstation. At a casino as modern as SPACE, no one need touch the physical machine. It all happens over the network. After the regulator verifies that no changes have been made to the machine since the last commission inspection, he (or she) watches while the technician implements the change. The regulator records the hash value of the machine's source code—this electronic fingerprint is the equivalent of a tamper-proof seal that will be used next time to verify no alterations have taken place. Finally, the machine is placed back into service with its new RTP setting in place.

So where were the holes in this process? One jumped out immediately. The perpetrator could make the change to the source code, let the bogus code work its black magic, then change the source code back to the approved version, thereby resetting the electronic fingerprint to its proper value before it was inspected again. This seemed way too easy, so I dug into the binder again. After a few minutes of reading, I found the safeguard against this. The Nevada Gaming Act for the 21st Century, passed a year earlier and known as NG21, mandated daily electronic polling of slots by the commission to check for things like this, along with additional random polling. Meaning the gaming commission had computers that did nothing except reach out and electronically quiz slot machines 24/7: "Hi there, can I have your digital fingerprint, please?" Inability to connect to a machine, or a response from a machine with other than the expected hash value, auto-triggered an alarm. It would be easy enough to work around a daily e-check, so the real question was how often did the random checks occur?

Nichols had made a couple calls and got me set up with a live test machine, so I decided to answer the question. I connected to the machine with my laptop and set up a trigger to record each time the machine was contacted by something outside the SPACE network. Common sense told me I shouldn't have to wait long. The best way for the gaming commission to keep tabs on any changes made to these machines would be to contact them often. Given the number of machines in Nevada to query, that may sound like a major task, but reality is, a single computer could ping every machine in the state a thousand times a day as long as a proper connection was in place. I expected a ping within five minutes.

After an hour, I still had nothing. I verified my setup, found no problems. I worked on some other issues while I waited. Two hours. Three. Four. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised by a poorly designed government operation, but in this case, I was. I left the ping monitor running and gave a quiet shout for Nichols.

His head was in the door in seconds, his eyebrows raised.

"I have to run a personal errand that will take a couple hours. When I get back, how about we check out that holodeck?" I said.

He smiled. "You got it."

R
ENAISSANCE CASINO RESORT

LAS VEGAS

M
ikail Sultanovich

M
ikail had first seen
her a couple days before, while trailing the Crimean. Since then, not an hour had passed when he didn't think of her. Maybe not even a minute. She was the hottest bitch he had ever seen, and he had seen a lot of hot bitches. More than seen. Bedded. Hundreds of them. Not like this one, though. Her hair. Those green eyes with the little slant. And that ass. The thought of the Crimean slob tapping that, while he wasn't, made his blood boil and his cock stiffen. He couldn't wait to—

The girl was walking away, leaving the Crimean at the blackjack table. The man was his job, but that bucket of fat wasn't going anywhere. He had been at the table for hours. Bastard must have a bladder the size of a melon. Mikail waited until the girl passed the bar where he was sitting, then rose and followed her down a corridor. When she entered the ladies' restroom, he positioned himself for an accidental meeting. It was time for her to meet The Sultan.

S
asha Maslov

S
asha glanced
over his shoulder and smiled. Mikail had done exactly as expected and followed Christine down the hall like a mongrel chasing a champion bitch in heat. Sasha stood from the table, flipped a black chip to the dealer and gestured at his chips. "Send to account."

"Thank you, sir," the dealer said with a tip of the head.

After a brisk walk through the casino, Sasha stepped outside and waited only moments beneath the gilded portico before a Renaissance limo pulled up. He opened the door himself and got in before the driver could make it out of the vehicle. "Take me to the outer space."

C
hristine Gamboa

C
hristine sat
on the counter in the restroom and killed five minutes on Facebook to give Sasha time to make his exit. After touching up her lipstick, she pushed through the heavy door and into the corridor. What a surprise that her admirer happened to be coming down the hallway toward her. When they were three feet apart, he stepped in front of her and, with his hand over his heart, said, "Hello, beautiful. I simply must meet you."

The guy was tall with fair skin and dark hair and features, very Slavic, very good looking. Unfortunately, he also looked like a thug. His shirt was open about three buttons too many, revealing a gold chain as thick as her pinky, buried in thick chest hair. His accent was similar to Sasha's, but much smoother. He had been here a while. He also had to be the dumbest guy on the planet to pick for tailing someone. In addition to leaving his target to follow her, here he was introducing himself, making himself memorable to her. Not that he was invisible to begin with; Sasha had pointed him out two days ago, but still, how dumb could you be?

She gave a small professional smile—she was on the clock, after all—and said, "Hi."

"I am Mikail Sultanovich. Ladies know me as The Sultan."

If not for the importance of her actions to Sasha and the fact that she was representing her employer, she would have burst out laughing. The Sultan? Really? Instead, she said, "It's very nice to meet you, sir. Enjoy your visit to Renaissance." Then she stepped around him and walked away.

M
ikail Sultanovich

A
s he watched
her walk away, Mikail wanted her more than ever. She wore a shiny gold dress that hugged her ass just right. He imagined himself unzipping that dress—no, not so gentle with this one. This one would want the dress ripped from her body. If she didn't, oh well. Sometimes people got what they wanted. Sometimes they got what they didn't want. This was life.

Once she turned the corner back into the VIP table area, he waited a couple minutes, then headed back to the bar where he could keep an eye on that fat Crimean bastard. Now that he had stood so close to her, now that he had heard her voice, he hated Maslov because Maslov was getting that ass and he wasn't. Maybe he would gut the fat sonofabitch when this was over. He walked to the bar, sat on the same stool as before, and looked over to the table where—shit, Maslov was gone!

Mikail walked to the edge of the VIP area, leaned against a gold column, and looked as casual as he could while searching the tables and machines for Maslov. He was nowhere. The girl was nowhere. He started walking the aisles of the main floor. Nothing. Shit. Ten minutes he looked, then twenty, but he was nowhere to be seen. Yes, Mikail was definitely going to gut that fat Crimean piece of shit. No doubt about it.