Three Minutes to Midnight

by A. J Tata

  Maeve stopped walking and sat in the corner that diagonally faced the door. She wanted a full view the next time the door opened. This time she would be prepared. After some fitful sleep with only a threadbare blanket, a few bottles of water, and a bucket to pee in, she sensed that morning was approaching. Even though she was less than two days into her redeployment from nine and a half time zones away, she sensed the dawn approaching like a distant siren.

  As her anxiety began to spin out of control, she turned to her comfort zone, teaching. She visualized herself preparing a lesson plan for her geology class at North Carolina State University. Organizing her thoughts, connecting the logic: her husband, Piper, and the clue she had left behind. There was more, though.

  It all came down to the clue, the henna and what she had done with it.

  Calming her mind, as she had trained herself to do in combat, she synthesized the information—Piper, the danger, and her husband—as best she could. Someone had figured out, she assumed, that she harbored secrets that only a few people knew. Her top secret clearance was augmented by several compartmented, need-to-know layers of authorization, like additional encryption. While she had perfected state-of-the-art lateral drilling techniques in Afghanistan, she was not proud of the fact that she had essentially stolen millions of cubic feet of Pakistani natural gas.

  Yet she had done so. And now there were ships full of liquefied natural gas steaming from Karachi, Pakistan, of all places, to multiple ports along the East Coast. Initially believing that the natural gas was part of a joint Pakistan-Afghanistan agreement, she had uncovered documents suggesting otherwise in her handler’s office near their Spin Boldak border outpost. Based on those documents, she was convinced that these ships might be used as weapons, dirty bombs, against the United States. Boston, New York City, Newark, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Norfolk all were in danger.

  So she had left the clue, the henna, in Piper’s room, next to a picture of her and Piper.

  The documents involved three sets of numbers. Her handler, Jim, had departed the remote forward operating base in Afghanistan one evening, leaving her alone with the small security force that guarded the mouth of the mine shaft. She had gone looking for their next, and last, mission folder. The missions always came into the top secret fax in his plywood room/office, and as she was thumbing through those documents, the machine had whirred to life, delivering a page with numbers, an amount of money, and some basic directions.

  She had memorized the three sets of numbers and the dollar amount, one billion. As she ruminated on what to do with the information, the machine had spit out another page. Shocked, she had covered her mouth and backed out of the room, retreating to the relatively safe confines of her room. She knew that the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Army monitored or collected every computer keystroke she made, every Web site she visited, and every piece of paper she possessed during her tour of duty. She hadn’t dared write down the numbers, but she’d been concerned she would confuse or jumble them upon her redeployment. So she had improvised.

  Now, sitting in the corner of her cell on her second day back in the United States, Maeve lifted her shirt and looked at the fading diagram she had etched on her stomach with henna. Unaware that henna tattoos were all the rage back in the United States, Maeve had designed her own immediately after finding the information, disguising the numbers inside a triangular diagram that somewhat resembled the pyramid on a dollar bill. The numbers were latitudes and longitudes. As a geologist, she was adept at map reading and thought that the numbers represented locations on the East Coast of the United States. But that was as far as she’d gotten.

  Now, betrayed by her husband, worried about her daughter, and fearful of possible imminent attacks on the East Coast, she hugged her knees and rocked softly against the hard walls of her confinement. She felt much the same way here as she had in Afghanistan, locked up in a compound near the Pakistan border. The Taliban fighters had swirled past their underground redoubt like a river current slipping past a boulder. The enemy had never detected their location, and her handler, Jim, had made sure she was well fed and secure. He had catered to her basic human needs of food, shelter, and water. There were other needs, though, which she chose not to think about.

  Looking at her stomach in the dim light provided by the glow of the backlight of her Army-issue wristwatch, Maeve thought that now the pyramid tattoo and its fading clues couldn’t disappear fast enough. Not only was she concerned that her captors would learn that she had smuggled the information out of Afghanistan, but she felt that the symbol was a visual reminder of the twelvemonth grind of combat she’d endured.

  When she returned to Fort Bragg two nights ago, she’d felt an immediate sense of urgency to let someone know about the liquefied natural gas container vessels. But she hadn’t known whom she could trust. Everyone, her commander, her peers, had seemed to be staring at her as she went through the out-processing routine of medical checks and equipment turn-in. But she’d remembered her CIA briefing and the documents she had signed, which required her silence and discretion. The questions that so alarmed her, that caused her to flee the small building in a remote corner of Fort Bragg, had challenged her commitment to those secrets.

  Rocking, rocking, rocking. Her mind reeled.

  They had briefed her at CIA headquarters in Langley that her mission was of the highest importance to national security. It was all about future energy independence. She would help perfect hydraulic fracturing techniques in a combat zone where there were no legal requirements or restrictions. Upon her arrival in Kandahar, she had linked up with a tall, handsome man who would become her handler. He had said to simply call him “Jim.” During her Army training she had heard that all CIA operatives had three-letter names and that none of them were real. There were lots of Bobs, Dons, Rons, and Jims in Afghanistan, she’d been told.

  They had flown in a small propeller airplane called a CASA to a dirt runway in Afghanistan, along the Pakistan border. Just across the border in Pakistan, she had seen a massive, shiny new fracking well and a natural gas conversion plant. On the approach, she’d been able to see the beehive of activity in between Quetta and Spin Boldak, maybe ten miles from the border.

  She and Jim had landed, disembarked from the airplane, and immediately got in a Hilux pickup truck, which was baking from the desert heat. They had driven due east toward the Pakistan border and had parked in a cave at the base of a large foothill. Inside the cave was a door that led to a state-of-the-art drill operating room, like a command center. Two smaller rooms were on either side. These were the sleeping quarters. It was all plywood and electronics, in contrast to the dusty, barren hills above them.

  Maeve looked at Jim and asked, “This is where we do it?”

  Jim smiled, a slight dark beard covering his face. “Yes. This is where we do it.”

  Back then Maeve had not fully understood the meaning of Jim’s smile or comment. For the next year, though, she diverted fracked natural gas from Pakistan, through the plant’s liquefying process, to the port of Karachi via a pipeline. She operated the drill that snaked through miles of Pakistani desert and mountains north, east, and south of their position, using a software override program that Jim had installed in both the Pakistan refinery and the actual control station just across the border in Afghanistan. She was in effect stealing a small chunk of Pakistan’s seventeen trillion cubic yards of natural gas reserves.

  Her days were spent operating the drill like a video game. She sat at a console, with four computer monitors facing her. Like a fighter pilot, she had a joystick, and she remotely steered the depleted uranium drill bit through the layers of earth, seeking the most porous veins of gas for ease of movement. Using a crew of military contractor roughnecks to do the heavy labor, she targeted a dozen prime fracking locations, one a month. Study, prep, drill, inject water and chemicals, capture the gas, liquefy, pipe, and load aboard a ship in Karachi, Pakistan.

  At first, she didn’t know w
here they were going when the ships departed Karachi. Maeve knew only that they carried about 260,000 cubic yards of liquefied natural gas apiece, which was about 162 million yards of gaseous natural gas. The liquefying process condensed the gas by a ratio of ten to one. Even twelve shipments would amount to less than two billion cubic yards, a small dent in the trillions available to Pakistan. That was how she rationalized what she was doing. The mission was important to her country. She was a patriot. Every soldier had to do his or her duty.

  Then, gloriously, the last day came. She walked into the bright sunlight, noticing the construction that had begun around the small hillock that had been her home for the past year. She walked to the vehicle, turned, and for the last time saw the sign hanging loosely on the entrance to what was now a fully operational forward operating base in Afghanistan. She remembered thinking it was odd that the U.S. construction company was advertising to its inhabitants that this base camp was their construction site.

  JAMES GUNTHER AND SONS CONSTRUCTION, INC.

  The airplane flew in and retrieved her, and tears of joy streamed down her face.

  Now tears came again, as she remembered. Huddled in the corner of her prison cell somewhere in North Carolina, she silently rubbed her outer garment above her fading tattoo. And she prayed that the right person, or people, would look in Piper’s room and find the clue. Her trembling hand found the bare skin beneath her T-shirt, and she absently raked her fingers across the tattoo on her abdomen. Its message and what lay beneath it were secrets she had carried home from Afghanistan.

  Thinking of the threat that she believed the nation faced, she removed her Army-issue wristwatch, set the minute hand to three minutes before twelve, and pulled the crown out so that the time would freeze in place. She then stuffed it in the corner with her nametape.

  Maeve’s head jerked up at the sound of a hasp rattling. The door opened slightly, slowly, and the first things she saw were a pistol and a flashlight.

  Then she heard a familiar voice.

  “Hey, Maeve. So good to see you again,” CIA Jim said. “Ready to do it?”

  CHAPTER 9

  WHILE HE HAD REMOVED NATHAN DANIELS’S LARGER EXTERNAL drive from his jeans, Mahegan had placed the small flash drive in his jeans pocket. As he listened to Grace close her door, he sat down in the computer alcove she had pointed out. She used an exercise ball as a seat instead of a chair. He couldn’t make that work, so he unplugged the MacBook Pro and sat down at the kitchen table with it.

  While the laptop was powering up, he noticed the neat row of pans hanging above the sink in descending order of size. The appliances were brushed chrome and black. Yellow curtains covered the bay windows in the breakfast nook, where he sat. The monitor went straight to the home page without asking for a password prompt. Either Grace was lax about security or Throckmorton routinely went through her files. He seemed like the type.

  After plugging in the flash drive, he clicked on the icon and the media player instantly displayed a frozen image of the back deck at the Throckmorton mansion, zoomed out to capture much of the back of the house in grainy relief. Mahegan heard a dull thud in the backyard, like the sound of a sack dropped on the ground. Or two feet leaping over a fence. He withdrew Throckmorton’s pistol from his coat pocket and hustled silently to the sliding glass door. Moving the curtain slightly, he saw two men standing on either side of the patio, motioning to one another, like a room-clearing team.

  These men were young, solidly built, and sporting close haircuts, like military. But there was something ethnic about them, perhaps foreign. Their noses and the planes of their faces reminded Mahegan of Slavic soldiers he had met on a mission in the Balkans. They looked like cage fighters. He briefly wondered what their connection to Throckmorton might be when one of the men formed a cup with his hands and the other placed his foot in the cup to gain a boost onto the deck above.

  Mahegan needed to rapidly disable the bottom man. He figured the top man was putting about two hundred pounds of pressure on the bottom man’s flexed knees. A hard, flat strike against the lateral collateral ligament, the outside of the knee, would immobilize him but not prevent him from reaching for any weapons. Mahegan needed a two-part strike on the bottom man before he would tackle the top man.

  Mahegan crouched and quietly removed the protective bar from the well of the slider. Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast, he thought to himself. The blinds were vertical slats, so he stayed low, flipped the lock, and opened the door in one quick motion. The plastic blinds chattered in his wake, but he was already on the lower man in two quiet steps. The man climbing to the deck was blocking the line of sight of the man doing the boosting.

  Mahegan felt the heel of his Doc Marten boot crunch into the side of the man’s knee, ripping the ligament and collapsing the femur onto the tibia. Hearing the bone to bone crunch before the man’s agonizing scream reassured Mahegan that his next step, a slight movement to the right, was the proper move.

  The bottom man spun away to the left, then rolled onto the ground like a gymnast. Mahegan heard the top man whisper loudly, “Ne oluyor!” (What the hell?)

  Turkish, not Balkan. Mahegan’s time in the mountains of northern Iraq, working with the Kurdish resistance, had taught him plenty of Turkish phrases, especially slang ones.

  Mahegan kicked the bottom man’s head as if he were Beckham bending a soccer ball during a corner kick. He pivoted and saw the top man hanging from the balcony, undecided. Bad move, Mahegan thought. The man could have been over the balcony railing and onto the deck, possibly through the glass door to use Grace as a hostage. Or he could have been level with Mahegan, better able to square up against him.

  Instead, he was in a vulnerable position. As Mahegan approached, the top man kicked out with his legs. Mahegan caught one in midair, like he was catching a football. He used both hands and snatched the ankle from mid-flight. He rotated his body and twisted downward, feeling something give in the top man’s leg. He felt the man’s body torque against his own handhold on the balcony railing until one of the railing posts snapped and the man fell on top of Mahegan. As if executing one of his high school wrestling moves, Mahegan fell backward onto the concrete and crushed the man beneath his massive frame. He felt the wind leave the man’s diaphragm with an audible “Oomph.”

  Mahegan quickly spun and placed his thumb on the man’s windpipe, crushing it inward while catching the knife-wielding hand that was arcing toward him. The light from a distant streetlamp played off the man’s knife. He could see that it had a long blade, perhaps six inches, reinforced by a stiff leather handle. It had seen plenty of use, and with every second that passed, Mahegan knew he was dealing with hardened killers. He ratcheted the man’s arm outward, twisting the forearm against the shoulder socket’s normal rotation. He felt the man kicking more from a lack of oxygen than from the intention to fight. Mahegan had never understood this reaction, as it simply wasted oxygen and effort.

  He heard the knife fall to the cement and released the pressure on the windpipe fractionally. With both arms occupied, Mahegan centered himself and head butted the man’s face, flattening his nose. Blood sprayed all over Mahegan and the concrete slab. He let go of the windpipe and the arm and grabbed each side of the man’s head and slapped it into the patio with enough force to make him unconscious.

  Mahegan stood, glad he had stayed. He wondered who else might come and what the reporting window might be for these two. Had these two been a diversion? Was someone waiting in a car? He scanned the area, alert. The entire episode had taken less than a minute. But it was a minute that had determined Grace Kagami’s fate, for the better, as far as Mahegan knew.

  His combat mind was racing. He needed to interrogate the two intruders after securing them inside. He needed to defend against near-term future threats. He needed to make sure Grace Kagami was still safe.

  He quickly raced into the house and up the stairs. He placed his hand on the bedroom doorknob and turned it. Pushing open the door, he immediate
ly saw Grace lying on the bed, curled in the fetal position, knees tucked under her chest, hands together, as if she were praying. He saw the steady rhythm of her breathing, as indicated by the rise and fall of her UNCW T-shirt. He walked to the sliding glass door and rechecked it. All secure. On his way out of the room, he noticed the bottle of sleeping pills open on the nightstand. He lifted the bottle and saw that the count was thirty. When he looked inside, there appeared to be at least half that many. A suicide attempt would have drained the bottle. She needed help sleeping, and so she had taken a pill. Satisfied she was safe, Mahegan left the room and closed the door quietly.

  With the priority one box checked, his mind focused on the two men outside and whether there was another immediate threat. Back in the kitchen, he withdrew the pistol from his pants pocket and tugged the curtain to one side so he could peek into the parking lot. There was a dark SUV parked at the far end of the parking lot. It had not been there when he had tossed Throckmorton onto the Lamborghini, and it appeared empty. With the priority two box checked, he tested the front door locks, returned to the kitchen, and found a box of trash bags and a roll of duct tape in the pantry. Again, he noticed everything was obsessively neat—dress right, dress—like in the military.

  Returning to the back patio, he saw both men were still unconscious and idle. The apartment next door was soundless. Grace’s clock had registered 1:30 a.m. He didn’t relish dragging these men into the home they were invading, but he had little choice. With Grace secure, and with no apparent immediate threat, priority three was to interrogate them. He believed there might be a nexus between the attack on Grace, the party at the Throckmortons’ house, and Maeve Cassidy’s location.