Free Unallocated Space: A Thriller (Sam Flatt Book 1) by Jerry Hatchett Page B

should have occurred to me earlier that the bracelet might be more than a simple guest ID tool. I wouldn't ignore that possibility again. "And how do you set the system to do that?"
    "Don't know. Somebody else does it. Yours was set up that way before you got here. Didn't realize it myself until I got a text the first time I brought you in here."
    I nodded. "Cool tech."
    "How'd your excursion to the police department go?"
    "They blew me off," I said.
    He arched his eyebrows.
    I said, "Yeah, really."

    I was wading through Gamboa's deep web activity again. I had been about two-thirds of the way through it when I hit the rape site earlier, and that had put my exploration on pause. Once more, I encountered a lot of sites that no longer worked, along with more hard porn. Then, when I loaded the third from last site on the list, everything changed.

Chapter 19
    L AS VEGAS

    C hristine Gamboa

    C hristine Gamboa was enjoying a day off from work. Many of the whales she catered to expected her to be there 24/7, but Sasha insisted she take her day off. He was sweet like that, or at least had a little sweetness in him. As a result, she was on her couch, unshowered, unkempt, endlessly browsing Netflix and never choosing anything to actually watch. She was relaxed enough that she was slipping into sleep and didn't realize it, but that all came to a lurching halt—literally—when the klaxon alarm sounded on her iPhone. The sound of the klaxon might have been enough on its own, but it wasn't on its own.
    That particular alarm tone meant only one thing: Someone had just accessed one of her trigger sites. They would look like dead sites on the deep web to anyone who loaded them, but each one was really an online tripwire, designed to notify her immediately if anyone was snooping on her online history. The problem was that she had never accessed any of the deep web sites from anywhere except her SPACE laptop, and she had thoroughly cleaned it before leaving. So how was that possible? It wasn't, but the klaxon was screaming. She killed the sound, then pulled up the encrypted spreadsheet that would tell her which site had tripped the alarm. While she was scrolling through the list and looking for the specific site, the alarm sounded again. She assumed she had touched SNOOZE instead of CANCEL, but when she looked at the phone, she saw that it was a new alarm. Shit. She killed it.
    It didn't matter which site. Time to go. The alarm sounded again. She killed all sound on the phone and sprang from the sofa, any hint of relaxation long gone. She didn't walk to her bedroom. She ran. Into the closet, where she had a go-bag ready. To the bathroom for a quick pee. She looked in the mirror on the way out of the toilet closet; she looked like hell. No matter. No time. Back into the closet, where she grabbed a plain pink baseball cap and pulled it down over her mess of hair. Then she headed for the door.

Chapter 20
    N ORTH MISSISSIPPI

    M ax Sultanovich

    H e gazed out the window of the sedan as his driver motored them south on Mississippi's Highway 61, the late afternoon sun flooding the flat farmland and its green crops with soft golden light. Max had never seen so many billboard signs on a rural highway. They never stopped. One bastard casino after another promising easy money to idiots who were stupid enough to believe it. He hated such people who believed they could seize wealth without work. Nothing would please him more than to walk through one of the casinos, killing them at random, just for being too stupid to live. Stab one. Shoot the next. Whatever he wanted. But that was useless dreaming.
    "How long?" he said.
    "Minutes," the driver said.
    Six thousand miles he had come to deal with his own special idiot. He had often wished he could accuse his wife of spreading her legs to someone else when Mikail was conceived. He could not. From the moment of his birth, Mikail had looked like him. The same eyes, same Slavic features, same physique. Somehow