Three Minutes to Midnight by A. J Tata Read Free Book Online Page A

My iPhone. While driving the few miles to his remote apartment, he thought of Gunther; Papa Diablo; Dos, whose real name, he had learned, was Hector Manuela; and the man with the scar on his face, Maxim Petrov. He had made some friends, and he had made some enemies. Not unusual for a day’s work. Tomorrow would be an even better day.
    As dusk enveloped the long wooded driveway to the home of his landlords, Maggie and Andy Robertson, Mahegan veered off the drive onto a dirt road that looped around to a barn about a quarter mile from their house. He parked his government-leased Cherokee in the barn and climbed the stairs to his single-room apartment with a kitchen alcove and a small bathroom and shower. He instantly heard his phone chirping from beneath the floor.
    He rolled back the throw rug, pried up two eight-inch boards in the middle of the hardwood flooring, and retrieved his backpack. Slipping his hand into the mesh netting where he kept his phone, he retrieved it and answered.
    â€œCheck Zebra, damn it,” Major General Bob Savage barked.
    â€œRoger.”
    Both men hung up. General Savage was his boss of sorts. That was the extent of the check-in. Mahegan’s foray into chasing his personal ghosts did not include bringing his encrypted smartphone with him. That stayed secured in his backpack here in his Apex flat.
    Mahegan lived in that gray area between his desire to disconnect completely from the trappings of society and his sense of duty to his country, drilled into him by his mother and his Army comrades. He tolerated his strained relationship with Savage only because the man had converted his dishonorable discharge from the Army into a rightful honorable one after Mahegan’s reflexive killing of that enemy prisoner of war during a combat raid.
    Savage was the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, about an hour’s drive from Mahegan’s rented above-barn apartment in Apex. While the general believed that he owned Mahegan like a master owned a slave, Mahegan knew it wasn’t that simple. He could walk away from their handshake deal and the secret bank account at any time and had considered it on many occasions in the past eighteen months.
    It was rare that Savage called him. Usually, the general texted him on the secure smartphone issued to Mahegan when he agreed to serve as Savage’s off-the-books domestic fixer. The gray area. Many would actually see it as a black area that Mahegan and Savage never should have approached, but after Mahegan had thwarted the American Taliban’s terror attacks on the country last year, the two of them had become convinced of the righteousness of their path.
    He palmed the phone, which fit snugly in his oversize hands, clicked on his top secret Zebra app, and saw he had three text messages from Savage, who was the only person in the world with his phone number. The first message was three sentences long and gave him a name, an address, and a mission to find a body. The second message asked him to confirm receipt of the first message. The third message was a threat to do bodily harm to him if he did not comply with the second message.
    Mahegan smiled, thinking, Fat chance .
    He memorized the address and the name as he replied with one word. Roger.
    The Zebra app automatically erased messages after they had been opened or within twelve hours of being sent, whichever came first. Mahegan had checked the phone in the morning, before heading out to the Wallaby eleven hours ago. He understood Savage’s phone call. The man didn’t want the message erased before he read it.
    And he needed the body of Captain Maeve Cassidy back before anyone learned what she had actually been doing in Afghanistan.

CHAPTER 5
    M AHEGAN SHOWERED AND CHANGED INTO RESPECTABLE ATTIRE , which included khaki cargo pants, a long-sleeve dress shirt, and a blazer. In the blazer was an official Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) badge. He had