Three Minutes to Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page B

reservedly blessed her departure, not wanting to lose a good professor but admiring her dedication to country. Her husband, Pete, worked as a banker, and they enjoyed a quiet, almost idyllic life in the town of Cary. She had given birth to their daughter, Piper, four years ago, and when she deployed a year ago, she’d been considering having another child with Pete. Now that seemed out of the question, for many reasons.
    What confused her was that she should be either dead or at home, not bleeding in some purgatory. They were neither rich nor famous, and ransom was out of the question. Her parents were state workers from Virginia, and his parents were both gone. Their total net worth, including their $250,000 house, was somewhere south of $300,000, hardly ransom bait.
    So why, she wondered, had her husband been sleeping with another woman on the night of her return from war? And why had she been kidnapped? She had always considered Pete a loving, caring man, if not a tad too bothered by finances. He wanted the same things she did: a house, children, good neighbors, tailgates at NC State football games, and a happy life. She would never be Martha Stewart, and Pete would never be Warren Buffett. Money would come one day, she had always figured. In her long-range vision—she was a planner—their ship would come in and they would have the house on Figure Eight Island, the beachfront property with the large boat. Before her tour in Afghanistan, she had always believed that day would come through diligence and hard work and perhaps a bit of luck. And she had been just fine with being Maeve Brennan Cassidy.
    Then a year in combat had begun to wear on her, like water on a stone. One day at a time, her resolve had weakened, until she’d begun to believe the elaborate stories of her handler, Jim. Together they could make millions, he had promised. She had listened and remained skeptical. But Maeve had redeployed from Afghanistan a changed person, for sure. She harbored secrets and plans that had seemed abstract in the distant confines of her Afghan redoubt.
    Until last night. The sight of another woman having sex with her husband had brought her back to reality quickly. The secrets were real. The plans were taking shape, even if she wanted no part in them. Her wound was real; it would heal, but the sting in her arm reminded her that she was not living in an illusion. Ultimately, too, her marriage most likely would not survive, but in truth, the damage had been done in Afghanistan.
    Using her right hand, she tucked her auburn hair behind her ears and wiped a few tears away from her eyes. Her world now was this detention cell. New wood. She could smell it. Built just for her? she wondered. Or was she just the first of many occupants to come? There was the slightest whiff of a foul odor that she couldn’t quite place. Like a dead animal, but not as bad, yet.
    With her left arm in the sling, Maeve stood and paced her cell, pushing at the walls in various places. Assess and act. Having been blindfolded and unconscious before being deposited here, she had no feeling for whether she was aboveground, underground, or somewhere in between. There was no give when she pushed on the plywood walls. She used her knuckles to knock lightly in random locations. The duller thuds indicated the studs, and the more hollow sounds signified the gaps between them. One wall, though, sounded altogether different than the other three. To confirm this, she rapped her knuckles on all four walls again, walking in a counterclockwise direction around the small cell.
    Whatever was behind the other three walls was not behind the wall with the door. The cell was most likely surrounded by earth on three sides. Reaching up with her right hand, Maeve knocked against the ceiling and heard the same solid thud she’d heard from the three walls. There was only one way out, she figured, which was through the door.
    She heard metal against metal outside the