Three Minutes to Midnight

by A. J Tata

  He bagged both of their heads to prevent blood from staining Grace’s carpet. Mahegan then dragged both men into the living room, positioning them between the white sofa and the fifty-five-inch, flat-screen TV hanging from the wall. The neutral carpet would most likely not go unscathed, but he had no options. He stood and stared at them, and they reminded him of dead bodies on the battlefield. Mahegan turned and closed the slider, locked it, and then replaced the bar and shut the blinds.

  He peeled back the white trash bags from each of their heads, as if they were wearing burial shrouds. He frisked both men, landing two more knives, a smartphone, one Glock 17, and two wallets. He placed the items on the glass-topped coffee table in front of the sofa. For the first time, Mahegan noticed the large painting above the sofa. Depicted was a ninja, stealthy and covert, facing off against a samurai, official and obvious. This contradiction intrigued Mahegan and perhaps could help him understand Grace Kagami better.

  He took the duct tape and secured their ankles and wrists and then bound them together at the knees and the chest area. He put a strip of tape across each of their mouths. The man with the severed knee ligament had regained consciousness, and Mahegan could see tears streaming down his face. Mahegan figured the pain was unbearable, especially with the additional torque the tape was adding.

  He sat on the sofa, facing the two injured and bound men. In less than three hours of having a beer with Grace, Mahegan had seriously injured three men. He pored through their wallets and found two identical identification cards showing green banners across the top that read PERMANENT RESIDENT. The cards also listed the men’s names and their country of origin, Turkey. Stamped on the back was the alphanumeric sequence EB-5.

  Mahegan recalled that Grace Kagami had mentioned something called EB-5, which involved visas and investments. He pored over the other documents in their wallets, surprised that the home invasion team had not sanitized themselves prior to the mission. One of the men had a smartphone, and it showed three missed calls from a 910 area code number, which, Mahegan knew, covered the area from Fort Bragg to Wilmington. He removed the battery and the SIM card from the phone prior to pocketing the device.

  As the other man began to awaken and struggle against his binds, Mahegan looked up. He had sufficient information to begin questioning them. Though he would have preferred to have them in separate soundproof rooms, he didn’t have that option. He stood and pulled the tape off the mouth of the man nearest him, the climber.

  “Seni kim gonderdi?” Mahegan asked. (Who sent you?)

  Big brown eyes looked at Mahegan. The man was shocked perhaps that he knew a small amount of Turkish or scared that they had been so thoroughly defeated. The other man’s eyes came to life, as well. In the darkness, the eyes glowed, like small lights in a dark forest.

  “Kimse.” (Nobody.)

  Mahegan looked at the balcony climber’s injured arm, put the heel of his boot directly on the man’s shoulder, and slowly let his weight shift onto that one point. The man screamed loudly, pain obviously ricocheting through his body. Mahegan stepped away and knelt next to the balcony man’s head. He reached over, picked up one of the knives from the coffee table, and placed it against the neck of the man who had done the boosting, then stepped over and crushed the booster’s injured knee under the same boot heel.

  Mahegan asked the same question again as he came back to the balcony man. The booster was writhing in pain, and with each movement, the duct tape pulled and stretched his already severely damaged ligaments and tendons.

  “Sana söyleyemem!” (I can’t tell you!)

  Mahegan had run out of patience, and perhaps the man could see that in his eyes. He lifted the knife and placed the tip against the man’s larynx. He said in English, “If you won’t talk, I’ll make it a permanent condition.”

  Mahegan could see the man understood the words. He immediately coughed out, “Shred. They call him Shred.”

  Ted the Shred. Ted Throckmorton. Mahegan had kicked his ass, and he’d called his goons to go after a woman.

  “I told you he plays for keeps,” Grace said.

  Mahegan looked up and immediately put the duct tape back across the man’s mouth. Grace was standing at the far end of the combination dining and living room. Her arms were crossed, but she seemed more aware than before.

  “And I told you I did, too. They were coming after you, not me.”

  She paused. “I guess I’m glad you stayed.”

  “We need to get you out of here. Go pack a bag. Now.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Just do what I said. Now.”

  She nodded, then looked at the two men, then nodded again, as if to acknowledge that she understood on all accounts. She understood that her ex-boyfriend had sent them to get her. She understood that Mahegan had disrupted their home invasion. And she understood that Mahegan would protect her until further notice.

  Mahegan cut the duct tape binding the two men, grabbed the attackers’ car keys, and lifted one man onto his back. He carried him to the black SUV he had spotted earlier, opened the back, and dumped the man onto the carpeted surface, ensuring that the man hit his bad arm. He repeated the process with the other man, dumping him knee first into the cargo compartment. He drove the SUV to the pub, performed a minimal wipe down to remove his prints, and then drove his own car back to Grace’s apartment. That took fifteen minutes.

  When he returned, Grace was waiting for him with a backpack.

  “I locked the back door and cleaned up. Here’s your flash drive, and here’s all their stuff, each piece of evidence individually bagged.”

  Mahegan stared at her.

  “I’m a forensic tech, remember?”

  In the melee perhaps he had forgotten. His protective instincts had made him circle the wagons. His skills were most useful then. Hers could be useful now.

  “I remember. It’s clean?”

  Grace rolled her eyes. “You’ve seen my place, right?”

  Indeed. He believed she had tidied up nicely.

  “Where we going, Hawthorne?”

  “The only safe place I know of right now.”

  They got into his Cherokee and drove to his apartment in Apex. In his apartment, she dumped her backpack on an old rocker that had come with the place. He watched her assess the random furnishings and the relative tidiness.

  “Hey, thanks,” Grace said, looking at Mahegan. Then she smiled. “But I’m not seeing where you’re sleeping.”

  Mahegan smiled. There was only one bed and no sofa. “Sleeping bag. On the floor, by the door.”

  Grace grinned. “Yeah, okay, Kemosabe.”

  “That would be you. You’re Kemosabe.”

  Grace shrugged. “Let’s fire up that flash drive,” she said, yanking her MacBook Pro from her backpack. She set it on a small wooden table, where Mahegan ate his meals. Two wooden school chairs were on either side of the table.

  “You sure? It’s the last couple of days of footage of the Throckmorton house.”

  He watched Grace Kagami’s mind spin, come to a conclusion, and register the answer in her eyes. “Sure.”

  “It’s almost four a.m. You certain you don’t want to rest?”

  “I’m okay,” she said. “Look. Again, thanks. The last thing I expected was to be involved in some kind of frigging ‘missing person, sex party’ scenario. It’s a shock to the system, for sure. And then a home invasion ordered by my ex? There’s some serious stuff going on here. So, I’d rather start investigating than sleep.” She retrieved the flash drive, inserted it, and shifted the MacBook so that they both could see the screen. She clicked on the media player, and they sat down and watched. The video started two days before the party, and she fast-forwarded through much of that.

  Mahegan watched as the images spun across the screen at eight times the normal speed. Nathan Daniels had had HD-quality cameras, possibly GoPros, focused on the master bedroom, two of the guest bedrooms, and the large sunken family room. The cameras must
have been mounted in the top corners of windows, with the exception of the one on the tree branch Nathan had fallen from.

  “Stop,” Mahegan said.

  Grace shifted and looked at Mahegan. A few seconds later, she stopped the video.

  Mahegan nodded at her, lightly removed her hand from the track pad, and rewound the video until they were looking at a panoramic view of the back deck off the master bedroom. It was nightfall; some lights were on in the house, showing dark images of people standing around and drinking wine or beer. It was like looking at a shadow box. Mahegan pressed PLAY, and he saw a darkly clad figure approach the steps to the deck from the backyard. It was a woman, small and agile. The time stamp on the video put them about an hour out from when witnesses reported hearing a gunshot. Mahegan stared at the grainy image and thought he saw a pistol in the woman’s hand.

  As the video continued in slow motion, the woman turned her head prior to ascending the steps, as if to ensure she wasn’t being watched. As the head turned, eyes looked directly at the camera. Both in real life and on the video, Grace Kagami was staring directly at Mahegan. The morning sun was edging over the horizon, casting dull plumes of light through the windows, as Mahegan leveled his hardened gaze on Grace.

  “I can explain,” she said.

  CHAPTER 10

  MAEVE BALKED AND TURNED AWAY WHEN JIM OPENED THE DOOR to her cell and shined the flashlight on her face. She felt pinned in the corner, as if the light were a restraint holding her in place. She went from anxious to frightened.

  “Don’t worry,” Jim said. “Piper is safe.”

  Then the bottom dropped out of her soul. They had Piper. Maeve screamed, “No!” Not the only thing she even cared about anymore. This was beyond surreal. Her only child was in the captive hands of the men who had detained her? She would fight hard, Maeve determined. But she needed to use her mind and get control of herself.

  “Where is she, you bastard?”

  “Safe, Maeve, safe. That’s the truth.”

  There it was, the consoling warden’s voice that had manipulated her in Afghanistan.

  “Where. The hell. Is my daughter!” she screamed.

  “Jesus. I didn’t want to do this.”

  Jim shot her. The voltage from the stun gun caught Maeve in the upper chest area, easily penetrating her T-shirt. She rode the current, fighting it, until she blacked out.

  Later, Maeve was reasonably aware of movement and noise. She awoke to a dreamlike vision of staring at the feet of three men. She heard voices talking, the sounds unintelligible to her so far. They were deep voices, men talking about natural gas and pipelines and ships. She smelled a musty scent, like that of alcohol, probably scotch. The words floated through her fuzzy mind, as if disconnected from the sentences to which they belonged.

  “Just a few million for the LNG . . .”

  “That’s peanuts, hardly worth the risk. . . .”

  “Nothing compared to what we can do here . . .”

  “The market is perfect. . . .”

  “The pipeline was genius. . . .”

  “Where’s the ship now . . . ?”

  “Have to get her to work immediately . . .”

  The fragments of sentences circled around her brain like race cars lapping the infield. Then with renewed clarity she remembered Jim had mentioned Piper’s name and said that she was okay.

  Piper. Her daughter. She shifted against her restraints, suddenly awake and focused.

  “I see our rainmaker is alive and well,” a raspy voice said. Not Jim’s voice. This voice sounded older and gravelly, perhaps from years of cigarettes and bourbon.

  “She’s feisty, so watch out, Dad,” Jim said. She would never forget his voice.

  “Well, Jimmy, you had that woman all to yourself for an entire year. Don’t you think it’s time to share?” the first voice said. Dad? Jim was talking to his dad?

  “I think it’s time to get her into the control cell and get her moving on tapping these veins, like we discussed.”

  Jimmy was indeed CIA Jim, and he was talking to his father, Maeve concluded.

  “I know what I’d like to tap,” a new voice said. This one was higher pitched, sounding subordinate and wanting.

  Maeve strained to see the men from her vantage point on the floor. She saw hardwood tongue-and-groove flooring, a Persian carpet with vegetable dyes, dark hardwood walls, a stone fireplace, the legs of chairs, work boots and casual shoes propped on the bottom rungs of high-top table chairs.

  “Let’s go then,” Jim said.

  “Go get Petrov first. I want to know how he got his ass kicked by a bunch of Mexicans.”

  “He’s down the hill with the rest of the crowd. We’ll get to him after we get Lady Cassidy in place,” Jim said.

  “The rest of the crowd? Those my people. Don’t be so rude. Do I need to remind you about who contributing to this project?” another new voice said. This one was thick, with a reedy accent. Maeve placed it as something Asian. Harsh and throaty. Chinese, perhaps. She wasn’t an expert but had been exposed to enough Asian languages through both her university work in geology and her Army Reserve career.

  Maeve tried to fill in the gaps. How had Jim, now Jimmy, come to be her captor here? What was the endgame? Was Piper’s kidnapping blackmail so that Maeve would do whatever they asked her to do?

  “We get it,” Jim said. “It’s your money. But we got you the visas.”

  “You think this is about visas? That’s where you’re wrong. This is about the one billion dollars, let’s not forget.”

  Maeve thought back to when she found in the fax machine the piece of paper with the numbers and “one billion dollars” written at the top. There had to be a connection. Her hand touched her stomach, where the fading pyramid held the clues. Were they going to steal one billion dollars in natural gas? At fifteen dollars per cubic yard, natural gas prices were high, but the cost of production was high, also. The gas had to be drilled, fracked, piped, liquefied, and stored. All of that required infrastructure and processing, both of which cost money.

  As if echoing her thought, Jim said, “One billion is going to be a tough get, but we will try, as promised.”

  “Then you should start. Now,” the Asian voice said.

  Maeve heard the thud of footfalls on the floor and saw the feet coming toward her.

  “Just do as we say and Piper will be fine, Maeve,” Jim said. He removed the tape from her ankles, then lifted her and walked her through the doorway, along a hallway, down a set of stairs, and into a tunnel, like a mine shaft. They passed several doors and finally made a left at an intersection. He stopped her at a door that opened into a small room, not unlike the control room from which she had operated in Afghanistan. Before stepping in the room, she pushed back against him.

  “Where is Piper?” she asked. Her words were slurred, as if she had been drinking. “Did you drug me?”

  “Just a bit. Didn’t want to overdo it. First thing you need to know is that everything you say and do is recorded on cameras in every corner. Understand?”

  Maeve processed what Jim was saying. “Yes. I understand.” She nodded.

  “I’m serious. I want you to look at the cameras and understand what I am saying to you. Plus, there will be a guard on this door at all times.”

  She watched Jim’s eyes, then looked at the cameras in each corner of the room, then back at Jim. “I said I understand.” She nodded.

  “Good. We’ve got to have you at the stick. All you’re going to do is exactly what you’ve been doing. What you trained in Afghanistan a year to do.”

  “You mean steal natural gas for other people? That’s what you kidnapped me for?”

  “Kidnap is such a harsh term, Maeve.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this, Jim . . . Jimmy. I did my duty in Afghanistan.”

  Jim chuckled, ran his thumb across Maeve’s dry cheek, stained with salt from the tears. “And now you will do it here, dear Maeve.”

  Maeve shudde
red.

  He still had the shallow beard. He was over six feet tall and wore combat-style clothes: tight-fitting Under Armour shirt, cargo pants, and combat boots. He was strong, she knew. His muscles were honed and firm. She had not noticed any fat on him during their time together in Afghanistan.

  He pushed her into the room, removed a knife, and cut the tape binding her wrists. “Let’s just do this. We all answer to somebody, Maeve, so let’s get this done.”

  Maeve stared at the monitors. She saw the one with the planned drill route that she was to follow. Someone had already mapped it out for her. All she needed to do was navigate the drill bit through the labyrinth without making a wrong turn, which could collapse the vein and forever seal off the possibility of retrieving the gas, like closing the opening of a cave. If she fouled up the mission, she could only imagine what her captors might do to her. Or to Piper.

  The next monitor showed the wellhead, an open field of dirt surrounded by hills on every side. This was where the drill and the pipes were located. She saw the water tanks necessary for the injection of chemicals and water, which separated the shale deposits to release the gas. The monitor was a thermal night-vision camera and showed her everything in a shade of green. Maeve could discern several men standing near a few pickup trucks, most of them smoking cigarettes. The scene looked like many of the combat bombing videos she had viewed. One minute there would be a bunch of Taliban talking among themselves, AK-47s strung across their chests, and the next the entire screen would go white from an explosion.

  The third monitor was blank, until Jim turned it on by quickly typing in a password. Even though she tried to follow his fingers, she couldn’t keep up. The screen flickered briefly and then showed a room with four-year-old Piper sitting in the middle of a playpen.

  “Piper!”

  “She can’t hear you, Maeve. I told you she’s okay.”

  “What the hell are you doing!”

  “She’s fine.” As if to convince her further, he said, “For the record, Piper was not my idea. If that matters.”

  Of course it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Piper was being held hostage, she thought. Maeve looked up, and a young Asian woman picked up Piper and held her, as if on cue. She smiled and kissed the child on the forehead. Maeve felt nauseous and began searching for a bathroom.