Three Minutes to Midnight (29 page)

The Taurus dropped onto the Persian carpet with a dull thud, and the echo was soon overtaken by Sharon Throckmorton's sobs. Twice Mahegan's age, she cried like a baby into his chest, gripping his shirt with well-manicured fingernails and gulping for air every so often.

After a few minutes, Ted's mother went limp. He picked her up and cradled her in his arms, then laid her on the sofa, her red hair fanning out like exotic coral on the white pillow. Tears continued to race down her face, and Mahegan felt intensely sad for her. While Mahegan didn't have children, at one time he had had a mother, whom he had lost in a similar fashion—to violence. What made the situation worse was that events were unfolding rapidly, which would only heighten her pain when she realized the full extent of her husband's complicity.

Mahegan wished he could do something that would reduce her feelings of loss. But he knew from his own past that nobody could do that. Violence had defined his life, he realized, from the moment he'd thrown three older kids in the river when he was thirteen to this very moment. No matter how hard he had tried to avoid it, his world had been a kinetic tornado. Gunther in the diner. Fights in the juvenile system after killing two of his mother's attackers. Then the military, where he had excelled because of his intellect and strength. Yet, somehow, he had not lost the compassion his mother had cultivated in him through her love.

And so he gave Mrs. Sharon Throckmorton a moment to mourn her son and the lifestyle she had lost. Mahegan pocketed the Taurus and sat in a leather chair at a small desk beneath an HD television hanging on the wall. To his back was a sliding glass door that led to an overhanging deck that looked out onto the wooded park. He stood, slid the curtain closed, and sat down again.

His hand bumped a remote-control computer mouse that was sitting alone on the desk. Its silver body and red LED button gave it a futuristic appearance. The HD television screen blinked and came to life with a reel of a surfer dropping down the face of an overhead wave, tucking into the pocket, and letting the lip cover him until he was finally spit out of the tube in a blast of spray as the wave crashed into the ocean.

The ten-second video was on a loop and replayed continuously, like a giant screen saver. Mahegan realized on the third loop that the surfer was Ted, who was actually shredding what was a nice barrel of a wave. In the background he recognized Crystal Pier in Wrightsville Beach. Mahegan had worked on a deep-sea fishing boat out of Wrightsville Beach more than a year ago and knew the small tourist village. He saw from the GoPro video that the pier was new, its wood still a light tan, the color of sand. The video could be as new as last week or from five years before, when the new pier was completed after a hurricane had wiped out the old one.

“What's that?” Sharon asked.

Mahegan turned and saw that she was sitting upright, running a hand over her skirt.

“Just a screen saver, I think,” Mahegan said.

Sharon stared at it. “That's from two weeks ago. He was proud of that. He rarely got covered up at Wrightsville.” She wiped at both of her cheeks, stood, and walked toward Mahegan. “I'm sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about.”

“Lots to be sorry about,” she said, sitting in a chair opposite him.

“Let's work in the other direction. Let's try to find something to be thankful for,” Mahegan said.

“I already offered that up to you, and you shot me down.” Sharon laughed a tinny, hollow laugh, as if she might be a little crazy. Mahegan realized she was embarrassed.

“You're a beautiful woman, but I don't go where I don't need to be. Plus, I've got a mission to complete, and I think you could help me.”

“Help you? How?” She leaned back in her chair, interested.

“I know who shot your son. I can give you a measure of . . . justice.” He thought about that word. Revenge was too simple. The complicated emotions that washed over him every day were more than that. Revenge was about the avenger. Justice was about righting a wrong, bringing order to the universe, and setting things straight.

“You said it was someone who worked for Brand?”

“That's right. What do you know about these EB-Five folks?”

“Oh, Lord, don't get me started on that. All these buff nineteen- and twenty-year-old chicks with those men. Once I saw Brand had his own harem, I freaked. He didn't have just one mistress. He was like an Arabian king.”

“To what end, though? Think about that, can you?”

“I don't need to think about it. It's all about getting that natural gas before anyone else does.”

Mahegan nodded. It was more than that, he knew. “Did you believe Ted to be a good man?” he asked. “At the end of the day, was he the man you raised him to be?”

“He was,” she said. Sharon paused, looked at Mahegan. “He tried his best to be a prick like his dad, but he was too much like me. Kindhearted. In the end, though, Brand corrupted him and me. Sex, drugs, money, you name it. Grace even came to me crying once that Ted had hit her. I thought, ‘No way,' but she showed me the bruises. I love Grace, and I believed her. She's kind and good-hearted. But Brand had beaten me, and Ted had to be like his dad, I guess. When I came over here to talk to Ted, I found him in the bathroom, crying and puking his guts out. He kept saying, ‘I didn't mean to do it.' So, it happened, for sure. How someone can actually make you a different person than what you know yourself to be . . . I don't know.” She shook her head solemnly.

“What happened the night of the party? Why were you with Pete Cassidy?”

Sharon looked away, then down at the Persian carpet. “How do you know about that?”

“I just know,” Mahegan said. He wasn't going to turn on Grace or on Nathan from next door.

“Brand invited him over. He had been working some kind of small deal with the guy. He was a banker, a nobody, but someone Brand apparently had met somewhere. It might've even been LinkedIn. Knew his wife was a fracking expert. Anyway, he wined and dined him and brought him home that night, drunk. Meanwhile, Jimmy shows up with a van full of nineteen-year-old Russian and Serbian girls and some of his buddies. Brand disappears—I presume with one of the hotties—so I said, ‘Screw it. This guy's drunk and hasn't been laid in a year. How bad could it be?'”

“Who's Jimmy?”

“Jimmy's bad. That's who Jimmy is. Big man Gunther's son.”

As soon as she said it, Mahegan knew, almost like when one experienced a flash in the mirror before getting rear-ended, that this Jimmy was the same Jimmy from the fight at the river when he was a child. He could sense now, without knowing how, that something in his life was coming full circle.

All the violence of the past fifteen years, the kinetic tornado that had been chasing him all this time, had begun with a move he and his mother had never wanted to make. He had often wondered about the path his life might have taken if they had stayed in Frisco. Would there have been peace? Had he left his natural habitat behind as a child in a way that would keep him always at odds with the universe? He thought about a Croatan maxim: “When a man moves away from nature, his heart becomes hard.”

Frisco had been his natural habitat. His nature. And now he was a hard man. He had tried returning to Frisco after leaving the Army, but he had kept drifting along the coast, restless and out of bounds, maybe not with a heart of stone, but with a heavy heart, one full of guilt and grief. Frisco hadn't worked without his mother there. Once she had died, Mahegan realized, there was no home, regardless of where he lived. Mahegan held his father's memory close, too, but he wasn't prepared to confront what he had learned just a few weeks ago. Instead, he thought about who had started it all.

Jimmy. Jim. James, Jr.

The kid who had told his dad about the big Indian who had kicked his ass. The dad who had hit on his mother in the diner. The dad who had killed his mother. Jimmy. The spark that had ignited the flame.

Jim and James Gunther.

Gunther and Sons.

“You okay, mister?”

It was Sharon, bringing Mahegan back to the present from a place where his mind was spinning like a dervish.

“I'm okay. What's Jimmy got to do with all of this?”

“He's the one who's been out selling this program, getting those EB-Five applications, selecting the prime beef women and the young men to do their chores.”

“Is he the one who shot Maeve Cassidy?”

Sharon nodded. “Yes. I had my Taurus, which I see is in your pocket right now.”

Mahegan nodded. “It's your gun. How bad was she hurt?”

“I don't know. Initially, I didn't know who she was, and saw she was packing under that uniform, so I kept my pistol up. Hell, I
was
banging her husband, and she'd been gone in war for a year. Kind of a dynamic situation.”

“What happened next?”

“I ran naked down the hall while all hell broke loose.”

Mahegan could figure the rest out, though. Jim probably cold-cocked Pete Cassidy while he cleaned up Maeve. She was the prize. He took Maeve to the cell where Mahegan had found her nametag and watch. Now she was drilling, using the tools and techniques learned in Afghanistan.

“One thing didn't make sense to me,” Sharon said. “The guy's wife knew Jimmy. She said, ‘What are you doing here?' And he called her ‘dear Maeve.' Strange.”

“How could they have known each other from before?”

“Jimmy was gone overseas for several months. Nobody would ever tell me where, but I suspected Afghanistan, because I kept hearing Brand talk about making Pakistan's natural gas liquid. He also kept mentioning a ship. Ted would meet him sometimes. I never liked it.”

“What did Ted do mostly?”

Sharon shrugged. “He was a list guy. He made lists of stuff and people that they needed.”

“Do you know where the lists would be?”

“He had a MacBook Air, so probably on that.”

Mahegan slid open the desk drawer with his large hand. Lying in the center of a neat roll-out, fold-down computer tray was a MacBook Air laptop, a cooling vent beneath it. He powered it up and turned to Sharon. “Password?”

He was mildly surprised when she said, “Shred-four-twenty-two. April twenty-second was his birthday.”

After he typed it in, a large image of Ted getting barreled inside a different wave came up on the screen. His hair was slicked back, and he had a huge smile on his face as he held up his hand, making the Hawaiian “shaka” sign, thumb and pinkie finger thrust outward.

“Did your son have a conscience?”

“He did. Yes. Why are you asking these questions?”

“I think he found something out. I think he defected.”

“If he found something out that was illegal, he would.”

“Well, it's illegal to hit women, but I think he found out something worse than that.”

Mahegan scrolled through the Finder function in the software and began typing words in the Spotlight function, scanning for what he thought he needed. When he typed in the word
Chinese
, he received multiple hits for several files. He began to scan the files and saw what he feared most. Then he typed in
Russian
and again found information that chilled him to the bone.

Mahegan didn't scare easily, but what he had just learned was larger than Maeve Cassidy, bigger than anything that he could have imagined.

“You look like you've seen a ghost.”

“I think I have,” Mahegan said.

He shut the laptop and turned to Sharon.

“No man ever has a reason to hit a woman. So I won't say he was a good man, because he wasn't. But once he realized what this is all about, he took himself out of the situation, probably to think.” Mahegan nodded at the surfing video loop on continuous replay. “Went surfing. And then he came to the right conclusion.”

“What was that?”

Mahegan reflected on what he had seen in Ted's files, on what General Savage had told him, and on what he had personally observed over the past three days.

“This is a terrorist attack.”

CHAPTER 28

M
AEVE WAS CURIOUS ABOUT THE SUMMIT MEETING THAT APPEARED
to be taking place in the observation room just beyond her control room. In the reflection of the monitors she could see four men huddled over a small tiled breakfast table.

The drill bit was at the second kickoff point, ready to begin boring upward into what the map showed was a rich vein of shale gas deposits. Her gut told her the bit was resting exactly 180 degrees from that azimuth, directly underneath the Shearon Harris Nuclear Power Plant.

As a geologist, she had studied nuclear power only as it related to other geothermal types of energy production. She was not an expert on the topic but knew enough to understand that a nuclear facility's most vulnerable spot was its cooling pool where spent fuel rods were stored.

She heard a noise, but didn't dare turn her attention away from the screen. Someone had entered the control room.

“Hey, Cassidy. We're going to give you a break,” James Gunther the elder said. “We need to know how to fix an operational snafu.” He was wearing his usual overalls and white thermal underwear with long sleeves and a small square pattern.

“What about the drill bit?”

“They're lowering the concrete casing right now. It'll be a couple of hours before you can drill again. This is the primary vein. The first cut was to test your skills. This cut is the biggie.”

“I need to see Piper. I promise I will do whatever you need, but I need to know my girl is okay.” Maeve tucked her oily hair behind her ears. She felt like a baying animal, cornered, with no recourse.

“Maybe if you give us some good answers, we can work something out,” Gunther said. She watched him flip a switch that connected her drill pulse to the detonator on the
LNG Labrador
—theoretically, anyway, she now knew. “Now, move your ass.”

Maeve stood and followed him, feeling her weary body groan and ache with the days of sedentary but mentally exhausting work. She half shuffled up the three steps to the observation room, where more televisions and computers blinked and scrolled information. Helicopters and boats along the Cape Fear River were swarming around the
LNG Labrador
. It was prime-time news. She leaned against a chair, depleted, and struggled to sit.

Jim sat across from her, wearing his trademark backward baseball cap. He grinned and rolled a toothpick across his lips from side to side. That look confused her. Her loneliness and despair could do that to anyone, she guessed. But what had happened in Afghanistan was her cross to bear. Brand Throckmorton was at the end of the table, overdressed for the early morning meeting, as if he had just come from another, more important discussion. Gunther pushed her down into a chair.

“Here's the deal,” Gunther said. “The Russian and the Chinese guys are arguing over how much explosives to put in the perforating charges. We'll be ready for that by nightfall today. In case you're not aware, it's three a.m. right now. This is a critical blow. The critical blow. Once we get the gas flowing from the first two wells, we're ready to push this along the new pipeline. But shale is different in different places. You're a geologist. Why is Ting doubling the amount of explosives for just this very first perforation in the second drill line?”

We've got a guy
, she thought
. Well, why don't you go ask the guy, you assholes?

Maeve coughed. Her throat was sore. She ached inside. Hunger had come and gone. She was dehydrated. Needed water. Needed to see Piper. Food could wait. She knew the answer but was loathe to tell them.

“It is not unusual to use more explosives on the first charge, as it is the one farthest away. I'm assuming they've done all the density testing and formulas to calculate how much they need?” It was a question. Her voice croaked as she talked. “Water, please.”

Jim slid an unopened water bottle across to her. “Drink up.”

Maeve debated whether to tell them her theory.
Assess and act.
She couldn't forget what had worked for her so far. She was assessing. Why were they asking these questions? Because they didn't know, which meant the Chinese or the Russian or both were the de facto leaders of this operation. Her assessment led her to believe that she had information that they did not have. That could give her a strategic leverage point.
Could
being the operative word.

“Have you seen the density testing of the area you've got me drilling into?” she asked Jim.

“I've studied it, Maeve. Calls for two kilograms. They're putting in ten kilograms in each charge.”

“That's too much,” she said. “I don't care where you're fracking. That's just too much. Have you just asked them?”

Throckmorton looked bored. James Gunther looked at Jim.

“I have,” Jim said. “They said their calculations show a need for more explosives.”

Of course. If you were going to drill through the bottom of four nuclear power plant cooling pools, you were going to want to do two things. Drain the water, which would get sucked back through the shaft she had drilled during the fracking process and dumped into Jordan Lake, and jumble the secured fuel rods so that they touched. She knew that much about nuclear energy. If the rods touched one another, a meltdown was guaranteed. With its hundreds of spent fuel rods from all across the country resting in four twenty-yard-deep Olympic-sized swimming pools, Shearon Harris was a prime target. No amount of aerial or aboveground security and reconnaissance could prevent this attack.

“Maybe they're right. No one has drilled this shale deposit before. What kind of readings did we get from the first shaft?”

“Normal. Everything was normal. Perfect, in fact,” Jim said.

Maeve said, “So just tell them to use five kilograms, which is on the high end, anyway, instead of ten kilograms. Take charge of them the way you take charge of me.”

She hoped they would understand the insult. Three men ordering around a woman, yet being told what to do by male investors.

“What are you saying?” Gunther asked, rubbing his gray stubble.

“I'm saying that you three men take the path of least resistance. Seduce my husband and kidnap me and my baby while you let these international rogues run all over you. Bow up to them, not me.” She nodded emphatically, directly before James Gunther's backhand caught her across her face, twisting her neck to its limits, the tendons and ligaments straining to protect the vertebrae. What little spit she had left dribbled out of the right corner of her mouth as the welt began to form immediately.

“Go for it. See if any of those others can drill as fast or as accurately as me.” She spit out some blood onto the table. “You think I care? You're going to kill me, anyway, so why should I even play in your scam?”

Gunther paced the room. Jim stared at Maeve, thinking. Throckmorton smoothed the lapels on his suit coat.

“Because of Piper,” Jim said. “She lives.”

“And I die? Is that the trade?”

Gunther spoke over his son. “There is no trade. You do what you're told to do. Or your precious little girl and you die. There are no deals here. All my life I've been working hard. Honest wage for an honest day's work.”

“So what's my wage? Right now I'm slave labor. Illegally held. If I promise not to go to the police, can we agree that if I keep your secret, you'll help me disappear? Quid pro quo?”

“Maybe if you leave the country,” Throckmorton said, speaking up for the first time. “Maybe if you get us through this little hiccup, finish the rest, we will buy you a one-way ticket to Mexico or some Caribbean country. How about that?”

Maeve processed the comment. It was the first time that any of them had offered any shred of hope. It was much better than nothing, which had been her thin gruel for the past few days. Now there was hope, as fragile as it was.

“Okay,” she said. “I'll take that deal.” Maeve had her hands on the table and felt them weaken. Her arms were trembling, as if she had no control. Her eyes fluttered up into the top of her eyelids as she passed out.

She awoke to the sound of heart monitors and to multiple restraints across her arms and the rest of her body. She looked to the left and saw three men in body casts, grimaces frozen on their faces, the result of some terrifying industrial accident or worse. To her right were two more men, one whose monitor had just quit beeping and was spitting out the shrill indication of a stopped heart, like an off-key instrument in a symphony.

The nurses rushed to his side, all young and beautiful, applied the paddles, yelling, “Clear!” about five times, but with no luck. The man had died.

In the mayhem, Maeve heard two nurses talking.

“He was hit by the car right outside. That madman.”

“I know. Maybe he can help us.”

“We don't even know who he is. But he has hurt many of our people. Now be quiet. The microphones will hear you.”

The second nurse looked at Maeve and then turned to whisper something in her partner's ear. She was about five feet eight inches tall and wore stilettos, white fishnets, and a white nurse's outfit. She had beautiful black hair.

The woman walked over and cast her large brown eyes upon Maeve. She looked Balkan to Maeve. The nurse checked her IV bag, replaced it, followed the intravenous tube all the way to the arm, and slid her hand down to Maeve's hand. Maeve felt something resting in her palm. She didn't dare give a tell to the cameras that were watching. The woman looked at her and nodded.

“You are very good patient. I am Sabrina from Bosnia. I will be back in a moment.”

Sabrina from Bosnia departed, and Maeve took that as her cue to look at what she'd placed in her hand. It was a note. She began coughing, holding both hands up in front of her face. She flipped open the folded note with her thumb and saw the writing.

She stopped her faux coughing fit and lowered her hand into the sheets. Sabrina moved quickly, palmed the note like a Vegas card trickster, and pulled the sheets over Maeve.

Mauve rested her head on the soft pillow and felt the fluids nourishing her body. She also felt another bud of hope. A deal for her and Piper? A helpful nurse? A renegade vigilante wounding the foreigners. There wasn't much time for all of it to come together, but she could hope.

As she felt the pulse of optimism, the nurses and other women all came scuttling back into the makeshift infirmary, frightened looks on their faces. An air raid siren was bellowing in the distance. Bells were ringing. Across the expanse of the infirmary, she saw three men standing in the doorway. She recognized Jim, but not the two Asian men.

Jim Gunther was arguing with one of the Chinese men. “Ting,” she thought she had heard. They both held pistols. Ting got his up under Jim's chin.

“Where's Cassidy? Why you stop?”

“She was sick, Ting. Give her a break.”

Ting looked at the beds. Maeve saw his eyes calculate the damage to his team members, who were in various states of injury around her. His intense stare focused on Maeve.

“You!” Ting said. “Up and to the drill. Can't do it ourselves. Need your expertise. Now, get to work.”

“She needs to rest. Damn it, Ting,” Jim said. Maeve was oddly touched that Jim was fighting on her behalf.

“She no work, she die,” Ting said. “You die, too.”

“I can do it.” Maeve coughed weakly.

Jim and Ting turned toward her.

“See? She ready to go.”

Maeve watched Sabrina turn and undo her leather restraints. Then she helped her stand. A bit dizzy, she gained her balance and walked with Chun into the control room. When she walked past Jim and Ting, she saw fear in Jim's eyes. He nodded at her, as if to say, “Thank you.”

“Up from there,” Ting said, pointing at the second kickoff point. “Straight up into that vein.”

Maeve was too scared to challenge Ting. She had measured the drill length. It would push the bit to within twenty yards of the earth's surface, about where the spent fuel rods were stored, she guessed.

Nodding, she sat down and began to assess the situation. As the Chinese men leaned forward and their shirt collars slid lower, she saw dark ink triangle tattoos with lines and curling notations covering about four inches of both their necks.
Triad
, she thought. These men belonged to the Chinese underground mafia called Triad. So this was an attack by Chinese terrorists?

“We at last concrete sleeve. You can drill at same time. Now start.”

Ting stood over her. She pushed the stick forward, then backed it up, tilting the drill bit perpendicular to the horizontal drill line. This path would take her six hours, maybe eight if she stalled. Once the drill bit began to churn through the reinforced concrete and into the cooling pools, the nuclear attack would begin. She presumed that they all felt safe down here in the Underground Railroad habitat, but she couldn't see why. The death and destruction would be severe within twenty miles of the nuclear power plant and significant within forty miles. Durham, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh were going to be under the dome of the radioactive meltdown. Two million people.

The Chinese men have a way out
, she thought. They had to have an escape plan.

Then she thought,
I can get you to Piper
.

If she and Piper were going to die in a nuclear meltdown, then she would be holding Piper. What she had learned in Afghanistan was that no one ever beat the system. If this was her penance for her one-time misdeed with Jim, then it was a heavy price to pay. Maybe she still had some element of control. She was, after all, the one pushing the drill. Could she disable it and snatch Piper before they were able to accomplish their underground attack? Six hours, maybe more, maybe less.