Three Minutes to Midnight

by A. J Tata

  “No, the picture. That’s what I mean.”

  “That picture is none of your concern,” he said. “But this one is.”

  Mahegan withdrew from his pocket the photo he had removed from Piper Cassidy’s room and showed it to her, happy to change the topic away from the Throckmorton photo of his father. “Here.”

  She stepped forward and took the picture from Mahegan. “This is her? Maeve? And her baby, Piper?”

  “Yes, but the important part is on the back. And her husband is dead.”

  “Dead? As in killed dead? Or heart attack dead?”

  “Murdered. Shot in the forehead. Probably while holding the child.”

  She looked at the image of Maeve and Piper Cassidy, mother and daughter. “My God. And now her husband and her father is dead,” Grace said, pointing at each face.

  Both mother and daughter had chestnut hair. Piper’s was still in the reddish-brown phase, while Maeve’s had taken on a darker shade. Their facial features were similar, especially the eyes: copper irises flecked with thin bands of amber, which made them look alive with excitement. Electrical was the word that came to Mahegan’s mind as he stared at the images.

  “Okay. You’re frigging forgiven. I understand the stakes here, I think,” Grace said. She pushed at Mahegan and said, “Asshole.”

  Mahegan turned to Grace and said, “Look at the back. The picture she drew.”

  Grace studied the drawing and said, “It’s kind of random. The dollar-bill pyramid with the mystical floating eye.”

  “The term below that is what has me intrigued. It’s like an e-mail address, but not quite.” Mahegan pulled the bottle of henna extract from his pocket. “Found this in Piper’s room, next to the picture and a shower kit.”

  “Henna? Like the tattoos?”

  “Never thought of that. It’s mostly used to darken men’s hair and beards in Afghanistan.”

  Grace lifted her wrist with the Latin phrase Esse quam videri written in small cursive letters. “Remember? In two weeks I’ll replace this with some famous Hawthorne quote, I’m sure, but this is henna.”

  “I do now, but maybe she was trying to dye her hair? To run away if she felt she was in that much danger? It was in the child’s room, so perhaps she was doing that for both of them.”

  He watched Grace process his theory. “She changes her hair, she’s still got the same issues. Someone is after her, and she has to care for Piper. A disguise doesn’t buy her much.”

  “I found this, also,” Mahegan said, removing the nametag and handing it to her. “In a wooden cell on the Chatham County line.”

  Her eyes darted from the cloth strip to Mahegan’s eyes and back. “She’s alive.”

  “Not necessarily, though I believe that. All this means is that her uniform was in that cell. But you’re right. It’s a good sign.”

  “And something else,” Grace said. “This tells me she leaves clues. She’s trying to communicate. Work with me, but this is what I do. I study evidence and draw conclusions.”

  “Okay.”

  “Henna is all the rage for tattoos nowadays. The drawing is a clue. The PiperCub phrase is a clue. So we need to think through what she’s saying. What is she telling us?”

  Mahegan looked out of the window. He saw treetops, the rooftop to the Anderson home, a long winding gravel driveway, and steam lifting from the Shearon Harris Nuclear Power Plant in the distance.

  “PiperCub2012 obviously refers to her daughter and the year she was born,” Grace added.

  Mahegan could see Grace was on another azimuth.

  “Yes, that’s clear, but what about this user name?” She went to the laptop and typed in a common address lookup function, then typed in “PiperCub2012.” The search engine spun for a few seconds, and then she proclaimed, “One result in Cary, North Carolina!”

  Mahegan watched her fingers click across the keyboard. Raising her hands in triumph, as if she’d scored a touchdown, Grace proclaimed, “Bingo! It’s an Instagram account, according to this investigation account I use.”

  Mahegan knew that Instagram was an application where people could upload pictures, but that would require a password. Recalling the picture, he lifted it and looked at the back. There was a line underscoring PiperCub and an arrowhead pointing to the left.

  “On Instagram now,” Grace said.

  “I think it’s this simple,” Mahegan said. “Try PiperCub spelled backward.”

  Grace looked at him, he showed her the back of the photo, and she nodded.

  “Worked. We’re in. Oh my God.”

  Mahegan leaned over Grace’s shoulder and looked at the image on the screen.

  “It’s like a dollar-bill pyramid,” Grace said.

  “Numbers along each leg of the triangle,” Mahegan said, pointing.

  “She makes a henna tattoo with a clue or series of clues in it?”

  “Her mission was sensitive. They probably checked everything but the one thing they really couldn’t check, her body.”

  “She’s got some rockin’ abs,” Grace muttered.

  The picture was obviously a selfie. The angle of the camera, probably a smartphone, was askew, but the quality of the photo, Mahegan had to admit, was good. Even her handiwork was precise, and Mahegan was reminded that she was a scientist, accustomed to neatness and order. The dark orange tattoo was a rough facsimile of a pyramid, with neatly drawn bricks inside the triangle upon which the floating eye rested. Along each of the legs of the triangle was a set of numbers.

  “Write these numbers down. Here,” Mahegan said, pointing.

  Grace scribbled each of the numbers on a piece of paper, then went to work on the keyboard. “I’m changing this password to make it harder to do what we did,” she said.

  “Print the picture, too,” Mahegan directed.

  She quickly hit PRINT, and his printer whirred to life via bluetooth, then spit out a fair-quality photo of the tattoo.

  He retrieved the picture, studied it for several minutes, and then placed it in his safe.

  “I’m guessing numbers. Numbers are usually things like safe combinations, phone numbers, building addresses. That kind of thing,” Grace said.

  “Addresses,” Mahegan said.

  “Three ten-number addresses?”

  “She’s a geologist. Try latitude and longitude.”

  Grace sat down and punched the Google Earth button, then typed in the first ten-digit number. They watched the globe spin until it provided an overhead view of the Brunswick Nuclear Plant, just south of Wilmington, North Carolina.

  “Oh, damn,” Grace muttered.

  She typed in the next number, and the globe spun a short distance to the McGuire Nuclear Station, located just north of Charlotte, North Carolina.

  “Double damn,” she murmured.

  “I can already tell you the third, but type it in, anyway,” Mahegan said. He walked over to the window, looked at the steam drifting skyward. “Shearon Harris?”

  “Shearon Harris. Triple damn.”

  The map coordinates were for North Carolina’s three nuclear power plants.

  “That explains the watch,” Mahegan said. He pulled the watch he had found next to the nametape in the holding cell.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Three minutes to midnight.” He showed her the face of the watch with the minute hand stuck three clicks from the twelve o’clock position. Grace shrugged.

  “Every year the nuclear scientists get together and move the minute hand on the nuclear Armageddon clock based on their assessment as to how close the world is to nuclear disaster.”

  “Is three good or bad?”

  “The closest it’s ever been.”

  CHAPTER 15

  BRAND THROCKMORTON SAT WITH HIS TWO PARTNERS IN OVERSIZE burgundy leather chairs in a semicircle that faced the river-rock fireplace. Though the hunting lodge on his family property in western Wake County was the size of a small mansion, Throckmorton considered it a cozy place for them to enjoy th
e occasional cigar, scotch, or woman, whichever they preferred. He ensured there was an ample supply of all three. The fireplace faced them like a gaping mouth. It was over ten feet wide and was long enough to fit whole tree trunks, which it often burned. Clearing the rig site a half-mile down the hill had provided ample wood fuel supplies for years to come.

  Throckmorton had decorated the place in a Civil War theme, given that there was an old Underground Railroad warren located on the property. An original 1853 Enfield three-band musket hung over the hearth, like a sentry keeping watch. One of Throckmorton’s work crews had found the muzzleloader in a stream, and one laborer had attempted to pirate the treasure. Throckmorton had secured the rifle while dispatching a team to make sure the day laborer never returned.

  Confederate flags dangled on either side of the mantel, which was made of wood he had refurbished from two carriages of twelve-pound Civil War cannons. The painting above the musket showed Sir Walter Raleigh with his boot on the neck of a Native American. Throckmorton rarely brought visitors to the lodge, so his decorating faux pas and historically clashing artifacts and artwork persisted without challenge. Neither of the Gunthers cared about the decorating as long as the cigars, booze, and women were available.

  While there were no slaves burrowing their way to freedom on the property, there were a fair number of indentured servants working the land and anything else Throckmorton demanded. The problem with Throckmorton’s family property was that none of the Durham sub-basin was directly beneath it. But Throckmorton had devised a plan. The Department of Commerce had approved a jobs scheme for him and then he had received approval for an EB-5 program for the gas well. Originally billed as an energy project to create three hundred jobs in Wake and Chatham County, Throckmorton’s plan had pegged his target at twenty-five million dollars. He needed just twenty-five international investors to pony up one million dollars apiece or—and this scenario was less desirable—a greater number of investors to give five hundred thousand to one million dollars each. Of course, there was a 10 percent markup on each contribution, which equated to a cool two and a half million dollars at the outset.

  The U.S. State Department had then issued the visas to whomever the contributors wished, as long as they were family members. “Like Abscam,” Throckmorton had once said, “only legal.” Abscam was the infamous FBI sting that captured U.S. politicians taking bribes in exchange for securing visas for Saudi Arabian nationals. It was such a good idea that today it was a formal program that incentivized foreign direct investment.

  Throckmorton had courted a special clientele that could secure his compound, including this hunting lodge; women who could provide special “services”; and men who could manage the gas well. His goal was to steal every bit of the Durham sub-basin shale deposits and move the gas along the newly constructed pipeline within the North Carolina Railroad right-of-way, all the way to the port of Morehead City, where Petrov would have Russian tankers waiting to ship the gas. The only real issue was the low price of natural gas in relation to other energy commodities.

  Throckmorton’s study of fracking in Texas had proven that perseverance and cutting corners paid off. If he could go shallow with the drill on the edge of the shale formation, then he would go sideways into the vein, moving the drill in and out at ten-degree intervals. He would use the explosives to fracture the shale in multiple locations across the miles of compressed fossil fuels and then suck all the natural gas out from under the property owners in Chatham County.

  Thinking of the drilling made him think of Maeve Cassidy, their expert driller.

  “So is she doing what we need her to do?” Brand Throckmorton asked Jim Gunther. Throckmorton pulled at his ascot and looked at the others in the room. He considered himself a man of refined tastes, and his partnership with James and Jim Gunther had challenged that notion. He viewed them as ruffians, but nonetheless appreciated their skills.

  “Adds new meaning to the term wildcatter,” Jim said, rubbing his stomach where Maeve had cut him.

  Throckmorton had seen Jim stumbling out of the control room and had ushered him quickly to the makeshift infirmary, where two of the nurses were cooling their heels, dressed more like the prostitutes that they were than the professionals that they wanted to be. Counting all the injured—the two Serbs, the two Turks, Petrov, and now Jim—Throckmorton knew that the medical team had used their learned skills more in the past two days than they had in the two months that they had been in America. And there were still two missing, causing him to wonder about the reliability of his crew. They had stitched and bandaged Jim’s gut cut, which in the end looked worse than it actually was.

  “Kick your ass, did she, boy?” James Gunther, Jim’s father, said now.

  Brand Throckmorton looked at Jim, who was rubbing his stomach.

  “I’ll be okay.”

  Throckmorton looked at the father-and-son team, thinking about his own son, Ted. Throckmorton liked to think of himself as the first North Carolina energy wildcatter and wanted to leave a grand legacy for his family. He had studied the oil barons of Texas along with George Mitchell, who had unearthed natural gas from the Barnett Shale north of Fort Worth. Throckmorton had grand visions of his name being linked to the Durham sub-basin in similar fashion. Mitchell had used a new trial-and-error technique called slick-water fracturing. Thanks to Jim Gunther, and now Maeve Cassidy, Throckmorton had his own Department of Defense–tested technique, complete with ill-gotten materials and outlawed special chemicals. Well, Throckmorton thought, they were okay for use in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but not in the United States. No biggie.

  Executor of his family land along the western edge of Wake County, Throckmorton had asked himself, How can I make a billion dollars? He had found a way, he believed. Tired of being a mere millionaire by inheritance and now plagued with debt from lousy investments, Throckmorton had thought to couple the EB-5 foreign direct investment scheme with the burgeoning penchant for fracked natural gas in North Carolina.

  He had needed labor and know-how, which was where James Gunther and Sons Construction came into play. Acquaintances at first, Throckmorton and Gunther had become business partners at Throckmorton’s urging. The recession had been kicking Gunther’s ass in the road-building business, and he had been sending Jim to score government contracts overseas. Suddenly, a generic request for proposals from the Department of Defense for an exploratory natural gas mission in Afghanistan had come through. In advance of submitting their proposal, Gunther had hired an African American veteran and had put him on their Web site. Then he’d filed with minority, small business, and veteran advantages. They had quickly drilled a few wells in Lee County to demonstrate “expertise” in the energy business. Loathe to choose Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, the president’s administration had steered the contract toward a business in North Carolina, where they needed the votes in the next election.

  Throckmorton and Gunther won the Afghanistan contract, and later Throckmorton code-named his endeavor Operation Isosceles, a cute moniker for fracking in the Triangle of North Carolina. They learned the cutting-edge trade secrets in Afghanistan first and then imported them back to North Carolina. The Department of Defense could put a lot of wind behind the sails of an effort if it wanted to, and without knowing, they certainly helped Isosceles.

  Throckmorton took a long drag on a Cohiba cigar, looked at Jim, and asked, “Where’s my son?”

  Jim spun his baseball cap around so that it was facing backward on his head and kicked his leg over the arm of the worn burgundy leather chair. They were all drinking scotch and smoking cigars that had been imported directly from Cuba via one of the EB-5 clients.

  “Heard he went surfing down at Wrightsville. Hurricane Muriel is churning in between Bermuda and the Bahamas, so it’s supposed to be kicking up a decent swell.”

  Throckmorton looked at Jim and then at the fireplace. He felt his neck turn red all the way up past the ascot to the finely tapered layer of his black-dyed hair. His ascot covered
his anger, but his words still held some bite. “We got all this going on right now, and he’s surfing?”

  “Sport of the kings, they say.” Jim chuckled. “Me? I’m too worried about them giant sharks to do that crazy stuff.”

  “Can we get him over to check on the Morehead City port? That operation needs to come off without a hitch. We’re putting about two million dollars into that sumbitch, so those boats need to be on time, or this whole thing is screwed.”

  “I can call him, but I’m not sure he’s fully on board with all of this, to be honest with you, Mr. Throckmorton. Me and the Shred have had a few conversations, and he seems a bit squeamish.”

  Throckmorton stood, cigar in one hand, with an inch of ash, whiskey tumbler in the other. Its copper liquid leaned like the fluid in an off-center level.

  “I cashed every chip I have. I blackmailed three board members of the North Carolina Railroad to get them to vote for the pipeline to Morehead City in their right-of-way. It is built. Everything is done but the connection from the railroad to here. So don’t tell me my son’s not on board!” The cigar ash fell to the floor like an exploding dot to an exclamation point. “He’s staying on my yacht in Masonboro Inlet, banging UNCW chicks and surfing. Meanwhile, we are up to our ass in alligators, trying to manage all these workers Ting brought in, not to mention running the security company!”

  “You put it that way, Mr. Throckmorton, I might drag my ass down to Wilmington,” Jim said.

  “Shut up, son,” James Gunther said. A man of few words, the elder Gunther could still a room the way a corporate CEO could quiet his staff upon entry to a conference.

  Throckmorton looked at Gunther. Unlike him, Gunther had a presence. He was a large man, over six feet tall. His shoulders were broad from shoveling tar and asphalt for decades as a line worker, then a manager, then as the owner of his company. Throckmorton knew that Gunther still worked his contracting jobs, paving, building, and fracking with his men. His face always carried a three-day stubble, which made him look beyond his sixty years. Gunther was the hick to Throckmorton’s playboy.