Three Minutes to Midnight (11 page)

“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

M
AEVE BALKED AND TURNED AWAY WHEN
J
IM 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 shuddered.

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.

“Right over there,” Jim said, pointing.

Maeve scrambled into the latrine and retched into the toilet. She heaved until there was nothing left to give. Slowly, she pushed herself up from the commode and flushed it. She washed her mouth in the sink and looked at herself in the mirror.

She saw her drawn features, almost unrecognizable, staring back at her. She pushed back her hair and studied herself. Feeling as though she was looking at a stranger, Maeve got lost in her eyes. They were vacant. A year in hell had sapped most of her strength, and now that hell just kept going. There was exactly one thing that mattered to her. She would do anything to get Piper back, even if it meant stealing a billion dollars' worth of natural gas from North Carolina's reserves.

That was the quid pro quo.

Maeve walked back into the room with something gnawing at the back of her mind. It was the part of her that had dueled with this man for months in Afghanistan and had also skirmished with the Taliban. Her survival instinct was in high gear. She sat down at the controls and looked up at Jim, who was perched with his ass on the table.

“Finished?” he asked.

“What do I have to do?”

“Now we're talking.” Jim smiled. “See that vein there? That's the Durham sub-basin of the Triassic Rift—”

“I know what it is, you psychopath. Just tell me what you want me to do!”

“There are almost two trillion cubic feet of gas in there,” Jim continued.

“Why are you telling me what I already know? You want the gas. I'll get the gas. That's the deal, right? I get the gas, and I get Piper back, right?”

“Right. There's just two additional safeguards.”

Maeve looked at the screen showing Piper. Jim toggled a switch, which changed the image from Piper to a split screen showing two nuclear power plants.

“This screen on the right shows the Maguire Nuclear Station. What you can't see is a small, unmanned aerial drone that is rigged with explosives at a dirt airfield in Gaston County, just miles away. If you deviate from the path or stop the drill bit from moving forward without my permission, you trigger a sensor that launches the drone, which is programmed with a flight path into the pipe of the cooling tower. The drone is rigged with enough explosives to implode the facility. Can you say, ‘Bye-bye, Charlotte'?”

Maeve put her hands on her face, wanting to cry, but knowing she had to remain cogent. She muttered, “You bastard.”

Jim nodded and continued. “On the left is the Brunswick Nuclear Plant, near Wilmington. You can see that at the bottom of the screen, in the Cape Fear River, is an LNG ship turning into the waterway leading up to the plant. It is rigged with explosives, and if you deviate from the plan or slow the drill to a stop, it will detonate with several kilotons of energy, like a small nuclear bomb. Of course, the nuclear plant will then have a reaction, which could reach two miles up the road to the military ammunition depot, where thousands of bombs are stored. You will in effect destroy much of the Eastern Seaboard between Wilmington and Charleston, South Carolina. And all of this is traceable to you, Maeve. You filled that ship with gas, and we have records we can release that implicate you in this attack, should it come to pass.”

Maeve leaned back in the chair. Wilmington and Charlotte, North Carolina, were two of the coordinates she had engraved on her stomach with the henna.

“Now, down to business. We've already had the men, the roughnecks, get the drill to the first kickoff point. This is where we need your deftness, your surgeon's touch. You need to take it into the shale, to the designated point. Then, when you're done with that, there's another vein you will drill. The second vein is angled slightly to the south from the main kickoff point, and then there's another kickoff point, at which you'll have to drill straight up.”

“Another one? Fracking uses just one turn. You go down vertically and then get horizontally into the deposit, insert your casings, and then send down your perforating gun and explosive charges. Why a second turn?”

“It's a superrich vein that, my geology team says, we can better tap this way.”

Maeve shook her head, not understanding. In a flash, she had gone from feeble hostage to strident geologist. “That makes no sense.”

“It's what my team is telling me.”

Maeve processed the information. As she stared at the screen in front of her, she saw the image of the drill bit resting at a depth of three thousand feet, shallow by fracking standards. The aquifer was just above this level. Setting off explosives just beneath the drinking water was unsafe, to put it mildly. She studied the path Jim had directed her to follow. The kickoff point was the turning point from the vertical drill line. The image showed her going to the northwest about ten thousand feet, almost two miles and significantly farther than any horizontal drills had ever gone in the United States.