Three Minutes to Midnight (9 page)

“You're secure. I'll be downstairs.”

“You don't have to be,” she whispered.

He hesitated. “Actually, yes I do.” He walked quickly, her scent reaching out like a long arm, pulling him back. But he was strong. He knew desire could be fulfilled another day, when it was right.

Tonight he had to protect her, this woman he barely knew. Mahegan determined that she needed him in that way more than she needed him in any other.

CHAPTER 8

M
AEVE
C
ASSIDY PACED FIVE STEPS ACROSS AND FIVE STEPS BACK
, then repeated the process for the 157th time. She was odd that way. She did the math. Her stride was greater than three feet, so she was walking over fifteen feet across each time. She knew plywood came in four-by-eight-foot sheets typically, so it was most likely sixteen feet across. Her cell was four sheets wide and two sheets deep. The deep sheets were end to end, while the wide ones were side by side. Sixteen by sixteen feet.

A single trip across the plywood box was a sortie, as the military called it. One hundred fifty-seven sorties at sixteen feet each equaled 2,512 feet, which wasn't much, not even a half a mile, but it was enough to help her burn some nervous energy.

With each hour that passed, her mind shifted from confusion to clarity . . . and fear. She raced between three thoughts: Piper, danger, and her cheating husband. She held close the precious few minutes she had spent with her daughter, Piper, after arriving at their home yesterday afternoon, before heading out in search of her husband. Not
their
daughter, but
her
daughter. Pete Cassidy was not high on Maeve's priority list right now. He had always seemed to be a good husband, but the shocking image of him with another woman, coupled with a year at war and what
she
had done, erased any memory of the before picture.

Pace, pace, pace. More sorties, more steps. Absently, she clutched her reddish-brown hair, which was oily and sticky. Her mind spun from Piper to the second of the three thoughts, which was the danger she suspected was bearing down on the United States. Her knowledge of what might lie ahead was dangerous for her and her family.

Maeve had left the only clue she could safely leave behind: a half-used bottle of henna extract. Henna, a plant that grew in Afghanistan and that men there used as makeup, for example, lining their eyes or darkening beards with it, was her big clue.
How stupid
, she thought to herself. Who could help her? But that simple bottle of henna extract that sat perched on the top of Piper's chest of drawers was her only hope . . . and perhaps the only hope for several cities along the East Coast.

Pace, pace, pace. Had she done enough? In the darkness, she looked at the outline of her crumpled uniform jacket in the corner of her cell, had an idea, stashed it away, touched the wall, walked to the other side, touched that wall, and continued her regimen.

She tried to stay focused on Piper with every step, but her alternating strides brought images of her frenzied departure from their home in Cary, the candlelit room in Raleigh, her husband groping an attractive woman, and the sheets twirling, as if spun by a dervish, which was the third thought that haunted her. Then she was back to Piper, who was hugging her mother, most likely not entirely remembering her, which hurt. Maeve remembered inhaling the scent of the fine blond hair, freshly bathed with baby shampoo. The clean, innocent smell of her child was offset by the wicked scent—oils and lotions—of her husband's infidelity. The fear of a catastrophic attack on the East Coast, using liquefied natural gas, or LNG, which she had helped steal from Pakistan, then overrode everything else.

Maeve stopped walking and sat in the corner that diagonally faced the door. She wanted a full view the next time the door opened. This time she would be prepared. After some fitful sleep with only a threadbare blanket, a few bottles of water, and a bucket to pee in, she sensed that morning was approaching. Even though she was less than two days into her redeployment from nine and a half time zones away, she sensed the dawn approaching like a distant siren.

As her anxiety began to spin out of control, she turned to her comfort zone, teaching. She visualized herself preparing a lesson plan for her geology class at North Carolina State University. Organizing her thoughts, connecting the logic: her husband, Piper, and the clue she had left behind. There was more, though.

It all came down to the clue, the henna and what she had done with it.

Calming her mind, as she had trained herself to do in combat, she synthesized the information—Piper, the danger, and her husband—as best she could. Someone had figured out, she assumed, that she harbored secrets that only a few people knew. Her top secret clearance was augmented by several compartmented, need-to-know layers of authorization, like additional encryption. While she had perfected state-of-the-art lateral drilling techniques in Afghanistan, she was not proud of the fact that she had essentially stolen millions of cubic feet of Pakistani natural gas.

Yet she had done so. And now there were ships full of liquefied natural gas steaming from Karachi, Pakistan, of all places, to multiple ports along the East Coast. Initially believing that the natural gas was part of a joint Pakistan-Afghanistan agreement, she had uncovered documents suggesting otherwise in her handler's office near their Spin Boldak border outpost. Based on those documents, she was convinced that these ships might be used as weapons, dirty bombs, against the United States. Boston, New York City, Newark, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Norfolk all were in danger.

So she had left the clue, the henna, in Piper's room, next to a picture of her and Piper.

The documents involved three sets of numbers. Her handler, Jim, had departed the remote forward operating base in Afghanistan one evening, leaving her alone with the small security force that guarded the mouth of the mine shaft. She had gone looking for their next, and last, mission folder. The missions always came into the top secret fax in his plywood room/office, and as she was thumbing through those documents, the machine had whirred to life, delivering a page with numbers, an amount of money, and some basic directions.

She had memorized the three sets of numbers and the dollar amount, one billion. As she ruminated on what to do with the information, the machine had spit out another page. Shocked, she had covered her mouth and backed out of the room, retreating to the relatively safe confines of her room. She knew that the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Army monitored or collected every computer keystroke she made, every Web site she visited, and every piece of paper she possessed during her tour of duty. She hadn't dared write down the numbers, but she'd been concerned she would confuse or jumble them upon her redeployment. So she had improvised.

Now, sitting in the corner of her cell on her second day back in the United States, Maeve lifted her shirt and looked at the fading diagram she had etched on her stomach with henna. Unaware that henna tattoos were all the rage back in the United States, Maeve had designed her own immediately after finding the information, disguising the numbers inside a triangular diagram that somewhat resembled the pyramid on a dollar bill. The numbers were latitudes and longitudes. As a geologist, she was adept at map reading and thought that the numbers represented locations on the East Coast of the United States. But that was as far as she'd gotten.

Now, betrayed by her husband, worried about her daughter, and fearful of possible imminent attacks on the East Coast, she hugged her knees and rocked softly against the hard walls of her confinement. She felt much the same way here as she had in Afghanistan, locked up in a compound near the Pakistan border. The Taliban fighters had swirled past their underground redoubt like a river current slipping past a boulder. The enemy had never detected their location, and her handler, Jim, had made sure she was well fed and secure. He had catered to her basic human needs of food, shelter, and water. There were other needs, though, which she chose not to think about.

Looking at her stomach in the dim light provided by the glow of the backlight of her Army-issue wristwatch, Maeve thought that now the pyramid tattoo and its fading clues couldn't disappear fast enough. Not only was she concerned that her captors would learn that she had smuggled the information out of Afghanistan, but she felt that the symbol was a visual reminder of the twelvemonth grind of combat she'd endured.

When she returned to Fort Bragg two nights ago, she'd felt an immediate sense of urgency to let someone know about the liquefied natural gas container vessels. But she hadn't known whom she could trust. Everyone, her commander, her peers, had seemed to be staring at her as she went through the out-processing routine of medical checks and equipment turn-in. But she'd remembered her CIA briefing and the documents she had signed, which required her silence and discretion. The questions that so alarmed her, that caused her to flee the small building in a remote corner of Fort Bragg, had challenged her commitment to those secrets.

Rocking, rocking, rocking. Her mind reeled.

They had briefed her at CIA headquarters in Langley that her mission was of the highest importance to national security. It was all about future energy independence. She would help perfect hydraulic fracturing techniques in a combat zone where there were no legal requirements or restrictions. Upon her arrival in Kandahar, she had linked up with a tall, handsome man who would become her handler. He had said to simply call him “Jim.” During her Army training she had heard that all CIA operatives had three-letter names and that none of them were real. There were lots of Bobs, Dons, Rons, and Jims in Afghanistan, she'd been told.

They had flown in a small propeller airplane called a CASA to a dirt runway in Afghanistan, along the Pakistan border. Just across the border in Pakistan, she had seen a massive, shiny new fracking well and a natural gas conversion plant. On the approach, she'd been able to see the beehive of activity in between Quetta and Spin Boldak, maybe ten miles from the border.

She and Jim had landed, disembarked from the airplane, and immediately got in a Hilux pickup truck, which was baking from the desert heat. They had driven due east toward the Pakistan border and had parked in a cave at the base of a large foothill. Inside the cave was a door that led to a state-of-the-art drill operating room, like a command center. Two smaller rooms were on either side. These were the sleeping quarters. It was all plywood and electronics, in contrast to the dusty, barren hills above them.

Maeve looked at Jim and asked, “This is where we do it?”

Jim smiled, a slight dark beard covering his face. “Yes. This is where we do it.”

Back then Maeve had not fully understood the meaning of Jim's smile or comment. For the next year, though, she diverted fracked natural gas from Pakistan, through the plant's liquefying process, to the port of Karachi via a pipeline. She operated the drill that snaked through miles of Pakistani desert and mountains north, east, and south of their position, using a software override program that Jim had installed in both the Pakistan refinery and the actual control station just across the border in Afghanistan. She was in effect stealing a small chunk of Pakistan's seventeen trillion cubic yards of natural gas reserves.

Her days were spent operating the drill like a video game. She sat at a console, with four computer monitors facing her. Like a fighter pilot, she had a joystick, and she remotely steered the depleted uranium drill bit through the layers of earth, seeking the most porous veins of gas for ease of movement. Using a crew of military contractor roughnecks to do the heavy labor, she targeted a dozen prime fracking locations, one a month. Study, prep, drill, inject water and chemicals, capture the gas, liquefy, pipe, and load aboard a ship in Karachi, Pakistan.

At first, she didn't know where they were going when the ships departed Karachi. Maeve knew only that they carried about 260,000 cubic yards of liquefied natural gas apiece, which was about 162 million yards of gaseous natural gas. The liquefying process condensed the gas by a ratio of ten to one. Even twelve shipments would amount to less than two billion cubic yards, a small dent in the trillions available to Pakistan. That was how she rationalized what she was doing. The mission was important to her country. She was a patriot. Every soldier had to do his or her duty.

Then, gloriously, the last day came. She walked into the bright sunlight, noticing the construction that had begun around the small hillock that had been her home for the past year. She walked to the vehicle, turned, and for the last time saw the sign hanging loosely on the entrance to what was now a fully operational forward operating base in Afghanistan. She remembered thinking it was odd that the U.S. construction company was advertising to its inhabitants that this base camp was their construction site.

JAMES GUNTHER AND SONS CONSTRUCTION, INC
.

The airplane flew in and retrieved her, and tears of joy streamed down her face.

Now tears came again, as she remembered. Huddled in the corner of her prison cell somewhere in North Carolina, she silently rubbed her outer garment above her fading tattoo. And she prayed that the right person, or people, would look in Piper's room and find the clue. Her trembling hand found the bare skin beneath her T-shirt, and she absently raked her fingers across the tattoo on her abdomen. Its message and what lay beneath it were secrets she had carried home from Afghanistan.

Thinking of the threat that she believed the nation faced, she removed her Army-issue wristwatch, set the minute hand to three minutes before twelve, and pulled the crown out so that the time would freeze in place. She then stuffed it in the corner with her nametape.

Maeve's head jerked up at the sound of a hasp rattling. The door opened slightly, slowly, and the first things she saw were a pistol and a flashlight.

Then she heard a familiar voice.

“Hey, Maeve. So good to see you again,” CIA Jim said. “Ready to do it?”