Three Minutes to Midnight

by A. J Tata

  “Appreciate the permission, Elaine,” Grace snapped. She turned to Mahegan and said, “We were about to question the Shred. Maybe you have some special techniques?”

  “Maybe I do. Depends on what you’re trying to find out.” Mahegan looked at Ted, whose eyes were wide as he listened to the conversation.

  “He knows stuff about what is happening at the drill site. So, we figure it’s time for him to tell us,” Brandy said. She lifted the flashlight and said, “We took his ass down hard.”

  “Up all night?” Mahegan asked. The three women were amped on something, maybe just caffeine.

  “Been drinking that five-hour energy stuff all night long,” Elaine said. “We’ve got a buzz, for sure. Hiding out by our big rock.”

  “So why don’t we all sit down?” Mahegan said. He guessed that was the best way to get a handle on the awkward moment. Theresa sat next to Brandy but kept her furrowed brow stare on Mahegan, and Elaine pulled over a chair from the computer work area, which was standard fare in all hotel rooms. Grace sat on the bed nearest the door. Mahegan remained standing.

  “So who tied and gagged Ted?” asked Mahegan.

  Brandy raised her hand. “That would be me.”

  “Did you take the battery out of his cell phone?” Mahegan asked.

  The ladies looked at one another.

  “No. We pulled it from his pocket, though. It’s right there,” Brandy said, pointing at the table.

  Mahegan saw the blinking light indicating there was a message. He walked over, picked up the cell phone, and crushed it against the corner of the table. He picked at the shattered parts, snatching the SIM card and the battery and pocketing both.

  “People were tracking you, Grace. They’re probably tracking him. We don’t have much time, so let’s remove the gag.” After thinking for a moment, Mahegan asked all the women, “Are your phones on?”

  “Of course,” Elaine responded, as if Mahegan were an idiot. Then, “Oh shit.”

  “Remove your batteries, just to be safe. If you can’t, then turn off the power completely.”

  The women fumbled with their phones. Brandy and Theresa had Droids with removable batteries, but Elaine had an iPhone, which turned off. Grace kept her burner operational.

  That task completed, Mahegan thought through his approach with Grace. He had neared a trust boundary where he was willing to share certain information with her, but he knew nothing about the three watchers. He had to make a decision, though, about the women and the information he would share with them, if any.

  Brandy had stood and had started walking toward Ted when Elaine said, “Wait a damn minute. How do we know if he’s not going to scream or something stupid like that?”

  “I’ll shoot him,” Mahegan said, holding up his pistol. He nodded at Ted, who had clearly heard him and who acknowledged his cooperation with a silent nod.

  “Fair enough,” Elaine said.

  Mahegan briefly pictured Elaine and Grace together. Elaine dominant and in control, with Grace more submissive and tender. He could see it.

  Mahegan was also thinking about the high technology tracking devices that Throckmorton and Gunther had used to find and follow them so far. How long did they have before this room would be burned? he wondered. How had Ted found Elaine? If they were holed up in hide positions, watching the drill site, how had Ted found them?

  Brandy made quick work of the handkerchief, and Mahegan thought of the old English proverb “In for a penny, in for a pound.” He was vested here, and he might be able to enlist the help of the watchers. Sometimes it paid off to hold secrets, and sometimes it was more profitable to share information. While Mahegan wasn’t necessarily in a sharing mood, they had captured Ted, and his bounty of information, whatever it might be, was equally their booty, whatever their purpose.

  “Okay. I’m going to ask the question here, ladies,” Mahegan said. Then to Ted, “How did you track Elaine and find her?”

  Elaine snapped her head toward Mahegan and then toward Ted. “Yeah. Good damn question.”

  “Elaine, please be quiet,” Mahegan said. The timbre of his voice was that of a commander issuing orders, but restrained.

  He sized up Ted, who was shaking his head, smiling. The man had an arm in a sling from the crushed wrist. His forehead was swollen and red from where he had slammed it into Grace’s front door. The ropes crisscrossed his chest and legs, binding him to the second chair in the hotel room.

  “You guys are something else,” Ted said. “Three dykes, a bi criminal, and a BFI.”

  “BFI?” Elaine asked, obviously still engaged.

  “Big effing Indian,” Mahegan said. “I’ve heard it all before. Now, Ted, I guess you’ve been in touch with at least your dad, if not some of the others from the fracking operation. You guys are in deep stuff. You’ve lost six workers, maybe seven, and you know all the other bad things your father and his partners have done. So answer my questions, or I will hurt you even worse than I did the other night.”

  “Damn. You did all that?” Brandy asked, nodding toward Ted.

  “I told you he’s saved my life, like, ten times,” Grace added. “Now, let him do his thing.”

  Mahegan saw that the right wrist was in a cast, which could be used as a lethal weapon, if Ted were given the opportunity. He pulled out his Duane Dieter Spec Ops knife and flipped open the blade with a well-practiced turn of his wrist. He stepped toward Ted, who began stuttering.

  “Hey, man. Hey, man. What the hell, dude?”

  Mahegan lifted Ted’s right forearm and slid the knife inside the cast, then sliced through the plaster easily. He removed the cast loop over the thumb and tossed the device aside like a Civil War doctor disposed of severed limbs.

  “I’m going to grab this wrist right here,” Mahegan said, placing his large thumb on top of the broken ulna. “And I’m going to squeeze until you tell me how you found Elaine. I imagine you think you’re tough, but trust me, you aren’t.”

  At the slightest pressure on the weal, Ted howled.

  “Wait a sec, Ted. We had an agreement that you weren’t going to make any loud noises that might call attention to us. You’re violating all kinds of agreements here, which is going to have severe consequences for you immediately, because I’m guessing we’ve got precious little time,” Mahegan said.

  “Damn. I’m liking this,” Elaine whispered.

  “So, last chance,” Mahegan said. With a little more pressure on Ted’s wrist, tears streamed down the man’s face. Having surfed, Mahegan knew that the wrists were crucial for paddling and popping up into position on the board. Ted wasn’t going surfing any time soon unless he was an idiot, which, Mahegan figured, might be the case.

  “We have a cell phone scanner. A Stingray. I’ve got numbers, and we’ve got a GPS tracking system.” Ted coughed. “Damn it, let go!”

  “We’re getting somewhere, but we’re definitely not there,” Mahegan said. “Where is this system, and who controls it?”

  “Man, you guys are in way over your—”

  Mahegan applied enough pressure to break the bone, again. He felt it give through the soft tissue that had swollen to protect it and help the injury heal.

  “Damn. Damn it!” Ted howled again. Mahegan passively watched him grimace and squeeze the words out of his tightly pressed lips. “Okay. Okay. It’s at Dad’s compound, but you don’t need to be there. You can access it through a computer. That’s how I found Elaine. Like that app you can use to find your phone if you lost it.”

  Mahegan released Ted’s wrist. He had more questions, but that was a relevant piece of information. He looked at Grace. “So Elaine’s phone number is in that system right now?”

  “Too late for that, man. The last known location will show us here.” Ted smiled. “So you guys are screwed. Trust me, if these green-card guys see a target-rich environment like this, they’ll drop everything. The environmental whack jobs, the BFI, and the lab tech who’s supposed to be working the scene from the shooting are
too big a bull’s-eye to pass up.”

  “I agree,” Mahegan said. “On second thought, batteries back in your phones. You ladies, please go do your thing. Watch. Give me one looking out the window there, one of you at the end of the hallway, watching the back, and one in the lobby. Read a newspaper or something. If you see black pickup trucks and some folks who look foreign, give Grace a call.”

  “That’s half of Apex,” Elaine said.

  “You’ll know the difference. Military haircuts, physically fit, and possibly openly carrying weapons.”

  “You mean the guys from the fracking site?” Brandy asked.

  “Yeah, those guys.”

  “Hell, we’ve been watching them and know what they look like.”

  “Roger,” Mahegan said. “Now get moving.”

  The three ladies moved toward the door. Theresa, who was leading, stopped. Looking at Mahegan, she said, “You were at the drill site. You and two Mexican gentlemen. You worked all day, digging holes and putting in a fence. I saw the fight you had with the guy with the scar.”

  Mahegan nodded, acknowledging her memory and her professional acumen. “You guys are good.”

  “He looks meaner every day,” she said. “I watch him the most. Him and the two Chinese guys. They’re up to something. The rest are just workers, but those two are in charge of something. Maybe the whole thing. Please be careful. I wouldn’t want anything to . . . happen to you.”

  “I agree. We’ll talk about that, but first we need to squeeze Ted here like a ripe lemon and then get out of here, if we can.”

  “Okay,” Theresa said with a soft voice. Mahegan noticed the phone in her hand and something rectangular bulging under her spandex ninja outfit. Was that a phone, also? Mahegan wondered.

  Before he could follow up, Theresa went into the lobby, Brandy took the hallway, and Elaine took up a post at the window. Mahegan logged his observation of Theresa as he figured that Elaine had stayed in the room because she wanted to hear firsthand the information Ted could provide. She took up a sentry post to the side of the window that looked out onto the street. Mahegan gave her a measure of respect for her tactical skills.

  “Ted. I want to know why your EB-Five commandos have been trying to kill Grace.”

  Again, Elaine’s head snapped up. “They’ve been trying to kill you?”

  “Elaine, please,” Mahegan said.

  “They weren’t trying to kill her. Just wanted to scare her so she would do what Griffyn wanted on the investigation. Dad doesn’t want it getting out that he’s got hookers from Europe over here.”

  “Sex slaves for your dad’s highbrow parties?”

  “Well, technically, they have their visas, and they have skills. But, yes, their primary job is to have sex with whomever Dad is entertaining. CEOs, congressmen, whoever. My dad has hidden cameras and will blackmail everybody if they don’t pass the laws they need. Genius, really,” Ted said.

  “Yeah, genius,” Mahegan replied. He saw that Elaine was standing now and was about to launch on Ted, so he stepped in front of her to block her. “Sit down, Elaine. This is my investigation.”

  “We captured him,” she asserted.

  “You’ll have your turn to ask him some things. Now, please.”

  All his life, Mahegan had worked mostly with men, whether it was in the Army or on the odd jobs he held afterward, such as fishing boat mate, landscaper, and bouncer. What he knew professionally about the women with whom he had trained and fought was that they were keenly adept at ferreting out the right information and making sound recommendations and decisions. He preferred, and usually worked with, a female military intelligence analyst named Cixi Suparman, an Indonesian American Army captain who had attended ROTC at the College of William & Mary. Everyone called her Superman, which Mahegan knew she secretly liked. Her two sergeants were female, as well.

  In Mahegan’s experience, women saw things that men generally didn’t see. Maybe it was the hunter-gatherer thing. He did know that the Israeli government impressed females into their military intelligence and border persistent-stare programs because of their better ability to notice anomalies and change. And so his line of questioning was intended not only to get information but also to reveal information to these women, under the general assumption that they would be equally as cognizant as the tested Israeli women or his intelligence analysts in Afghanistan.

  “Please just listen to my questions and his answers. I have a method here. I want you to process what he is saying with what you have been observing. You represent an environmental group. I have a very narrow interest that, as luck would have it, coincides with yours. So, let’s work this together for the moment,” Mahegan said.

  Elaine nodded.

  Grace looked at Elaine and mouthed, “Thank you.”

  “Explain the EB-Five thing, Ted.”

  Ted was rubbing his forearm, above the swollen ulna. “Man, you really messed me up,” he mumbled. His sun bleached brown hair and square jaw made him look like something between a preppy and a surfer, a look that didn’t quite fit in either domain, to Mahegan. His eyes were cast downward.

  “And I will continue to do so if you don’t cooperate. There’s a lot at stake here. I’m running out of time. People are dying. You’re probably not liable yet, but you could be soon. A smart man like you probably wants to find a way to separate himself from what is going on out at the drill site and your lodge. Maybe you already have. So, tell me about the EB-Five guys.”

  Ted hung his head, shook it, and looked out the window, which was covered with a sheer drape that obscured recognition from the outside but did not block line of sight from the inside.

  As he lifted his head, Ted stared at Mahegan and said, “My dad partnered with James Gunther Construction. Gunther had been drilling some wells in Lee County. I knew Jimmy from just being around Raleigh. Bars, mutual friends, that kind of thing. Dad cooks up this grand scheme to do the first fracking well and get as much of the Durham shale as possible before the gold rush starts. So, as these people will probably tell you, they’ve been prepping for about six weeks.”

  “What is the makeup of the EB-Five crews, and who is operating the drill?”

  Ted stared at him. Mahegan knew the answer, of course, but he wanted confirmation.

  “Russians, Chinese, Serbs, and Turks, I think. Dad was very specific. As Jimmy and I went around selling the project, which we called Isosceles, we were supposed to get thirty million dollars from thirty people. Each of those thirty people would get one visa. Dad said to make it a package deal. A million in, we pick the visa from a list of possible recruits, and they get a premium on their return. So we picked ten attractive women and twenty athletes who could perform a variety of drill and security tasks. The pay was good. Labor was easy to find.”

  Mahegan did the math. He had personally killed two and severely injured five of the EB-5 commandos. Plus Petrov. That put them at fourteen workers/enforcers. Ted wasn’t doing whatever he was supposed to be doing to contribute.

  “Why did you defect?”

  Ted’s head popped up like a puppet pulled by a string. “I didn’t defect. What are you talking about?”

  It was a guess for Mahegan and a good one. His protest and overcompensation told Mahegan all he needed to know.

  Ted was lying.

  He moved toward Ted’s wrist with both hands.

  “Please, man,” Ted pleaded. “You gotta give me a break here. They’ll kill me.”

  “What did you see? What pushed you away? Made you think twice?”

  Ted hung his head, then looked up. “Oh, man,” he sighed. “Oh, no.”

  “Tell us, Ted. We’re out of time.”

  Mahegan could feel his control of the situation slipping away. It was an instinct developed by years of combat. His aura picked up on threatening stimuli the way spider webs caught flies. He went for the wrist.

  “It’s all in the Underground! I saw it,” Ted shouted.

  Grace’s phone pinged with a tex
t.

  “It’s Brandy,” she said. “She sees a black pickup truck with a topper shell parked across the street, at Starbucks. Nose in toward Starbucks, and the bed is facing us. The tailgate is up, but the window on the topper is open.”

  Mahegan nodded. Women. Analysts. Details. Specifics. They were as good as the Israelis or the Army intelligence operatives. Then he frowned.

  “It’s all about Sharon—” Ted started to say.

  It happened in less than two seconds. Mahegan stepped forward to tackle Ted as he realized what the open topper window meant, but in mid-sentence, right at the word “Sharon,” Ted’s head exploded in a shower of pink mist and gray matter, which landed all over Mahegan and Elaine, who got the back splatter from the bullet crashing through Ted’s skull. There was no percussive sound.

  The hotel room window glass had shattered into a million shards when the heavy-gauge bullet crashed through it and then Ted’s skull. The force of the bullet had snapped his neck forward, but his body had remained awkwardly stable in the chair.

  Mahegan pulled Ted and the chair to the floor, then pivoted and tackled Elaine with one arm while dragging Grace down with the other. Bullets chased them in a line across the floor, like a sewing machine stitching a seam. Lying between the two beds, though, they were out of the direct line of fire.

  Even though their opponents’ tactics had so far been unrefined, Mahegan knew it would be only a matter of time before they adapted. Every enemy did. In this case, the EB-5 commandos were synchronizing information and tactics. They had geo-located one of the phones, most likely Ted’s or Elaine’s, and maybe even had a listening device in Ted’s phone. He didn’t know what the women had said to Ted before he had arrived, smashed Ted’s phone, and removed the battery and SIM card. Whoever was in charge of surveillance would have put a locator in Ted’s phone if they were worried about him defecting, and clearly he had. He had said as much. The commandos were also being less obvious, in a way, and more tactical. A silenced sniper shot was less discreet than a knife to the throat but more likely to avoid detection than a machine gun.