JASON WELLS’ HONDA ACCORD turned onto Amadi Drive at two minutes before ten, proceeded about fifty yards along the empty street and pulled to the curb in the shadows of a banyan tree. Charlie stepped out from beneath an awning, opened the back door, and slid in. On the floor behind the seat, he saw, were two 7.62 bolt-action Remington M24s with fixed 10-power scopes and another weapon that resembled a stovepipe M-1 rocket-propelled anti-tank gun, only its barrel was narrower. The DPG, Destabilization Propellant Gun. There were also two spray tanks that appeared to be eight or ten gallons apiece.
Wells drove another twenty minutes through the potholed suburbs, making frequent turns and switchbacks, his eyes scanning the roads to make sure no one was following. Finally, he pulled to the curb on a block of 78th Avenue and cut the headlights. Lowered the windows and waited. Power lines buzzed above them. The shadow of a stray dog moved across the street. They were in a neighborhood of small clapboard houses and shady trees. Mallory could see people in the houses. Two minutes after Jason parked, a vehicle pulled from the curb two blocks ahead.
Nadra.
THE FIRST TWO plants were easy, as Jason Wells had predicted. They followed Nadra’s dark, late-model Jetta along an increasingly rural dirt road until they came to the scrubby farmland that bordered the northern suburbs. Nadra turned off her lights, then, and she drove by moonlight for another mile, shifting finally to neutral and letting the car drift to a stop under a canopy of trees, avoiding the use of her brakes. Wells did the same, about a quarter mile behind. Mallory and Wells covered Nadra as she ran through a field of weeds and wild grasses, dressed in black, moving in a crouch, two C-4 plastic explosives cradled in her hands.
Charlie knelt in front of the car. Wells crouched fifty yards away to the north, watching her through the scope of his sniper rifle. Triangular alignment, connected by cell phones. Charlie saw Nadra scurry into a field of withering maize stalks, moving toward the tracks south of the train station.
The station had closed at nine, but it was patrolled overnight by a foot guard. It was also possible that there were cameras around the platform or above the tracks, but they hadn’t seen any in Okoro’s aerials. The security post was at the front of the station, and Nadra was approaching from the rear. If the guard began a patrol, Charlie would dial her number and the cell phone would vibrate, warning her. That was their arrangement.
The night air was cool and scented with honeysuckle, the sky full of stars. Lightning bugs glowed in the trees. He watched her scuttle out to the tracks and step over two sets of passenger rails, passing a pair of detached freight cars, and then coming to the unused train line that led to the pit.
Charlie listened: He heard Nadra shifting rocks from the center of the track, working in the shadows, then using a rock to scrape a hole in the dirt underneath. The sound stopped and started, seeming unnaturally loud in the silence. Moments later, he heard the rocks again. Nadra covering the C-4 explosive.
Mallory looked at Jason Wells, who was watching her through his scope. When Wells caught his eye, he heard something else, a clicking sound. Faint, but steady. Becoming louder. Charlie froze. Footsteps on the boardwalk platform were moving toward Nadra.
Jason, crouched on the edge of the maize field, raised his left hand. Charlie reached for the cell phone and pressed Nadra’s number. Seconds later, he heard a scrambling sound. Feet sliding in rocks.
The footsteps on the wood stopped. Then resumed, echoing louder across the field. Mallory finally saw the man. Watched him reach the end of the walk and look out in his direction. A large, stooped older man wearing a black-and-white security uniform. He turned to his left, where Nadra was, then looked up at the sky and seemed to say something. Then the man reached into his pocket, pulled something out and held it in his hand. A phone? No, cigarettes.
He lit a cigarette, blew out the match. Looking in Charlie’s direction again. Could he see the shape of the car against the edge of the field? Mallory watched the glow at the end of his cigarette as the man inhaled. Then the guard turned and began to walk back, toward his office at the front of the station. Mallory let out his breath, listened to the guard’s footsteps. He heard Nadra scrambling farther south of the station, preparing to plant an explosive on the second set of tracks.
Two minutes later, he saw a figure running under the trees, back through the field. Nadra.
One down.
The second plant was a cell phone tower, about four miles to the northeast. There were several communications towers around the city, but this one appeared to be the least secure—the only one Jason wanted to risk taking out. A seventy-foot galvanized steel monopole that rose up from a remote field about a quarter mile from the road. A tower that transmitted cell calls in the northeastern quadrant of the city. There did not seem to be any guard, or cameras, just a tall fence surrounding the base, where the transmitters, receivers, and communications cables were stored. Strategically, it wouldn’t be a crippling blow, but psychologically, combined with the others, it would have an impact on Priest. It might force his hand and make him show himself.
Nadra had no problem climbing the fence with the two fifteen-pound explosives in her knapsack. Jason covered her through the scope again as she set them at separate locations—one to take out the transmitters and receivers, the other to take down the tower itself. Mallory crouched on the edge of the road, a hundred yards below Wells, watching both directions. At one point, he saw headlights in the distance, seeming to approach but then moving away on a southeasterly road. He turned back to the field. Nadra was running toward them again. Perfect. Four explosives planted.
“Now for the main event,” Jason said as he got back into the car.
Nadra took the DPG and the tanks from Wells’s car. He gave her a ten-minute head start, then began driving back in the direction they had come, along the edge of the suburban homes. After almost half an hour, he came to the old logging road that would take them into the forest. Wells punched his headlights off and drove more slowly, following the turns in the road in the spaces between the tree canopies. The trees became denser, obscuring the sky; the road narrowed.
They reached the fork: two logging roads, one of which went right, to the north, the other, left, to the southwest. Nadra had taken the fork to the right; Jason turned left.
He drove carefully over the bumpy road for another twenty-five minutes, inching along at times, finally seeing the gap in the tops of the trees that marked the clearing. He let the car coast to a stop, shifted into park and got out. Charlie lifted one of the rifles from the floor and handed it to him. From here on, they’d make better time on foot.
Both men stood in the woods for a moment, listening to the silence. They could see the lights of the airfield through the trees now, across a shallow valley—the chain-link fence, the rear of the gatehouse and the hangar. They were facing northeast, looking at the back of the complex. “See you at 11:55,” Jason whispered.
He headed toward the clearing to the south and then into the deep forest on the other side, toward the spot he had chosen earlier. Position One. Charlie got behind the wheel of the Honda, eased the door closed.
Their targets weren’t people; they were cameras. Five security cameras mounted on towers facing the north and east sides of the complex, the nearest about two hundred meters away, the farthest about five hundred and fifty meters away. Wells would take out the first two, Mallory the other three.
Without touching the brakes, he turned the car around by reversing, downshifting, and slipping it into neutral, scraping against trees and running through shrubbery. Then he began to drive the way they had come, keeping the lights off. At the fork, he downshifted and went left, the direction Nadra had gone, but only for about twenty yards, into a thick forested stretch where he let the car ease to a stop on its own. He looked at his watch: 11:08.
He removed the rifle from the back of the car and started walking until he found the spot that gave him a clear view of the northernmost cameras. Position Two. At 11:19, his cell phone vibrated. He saw that it was Nadra’s number. She would have called Wells, too. She was near the northeast corner of the complex. Mallory waited. Showtime.
Jason Wells fired first. Mallory heard the quick, sharp sound of the medium-weight bullet thudding into the first camera, and then the second. Followed by silence. He waited another four minutes, until Wells set off his diversion: a slow fuse gasoline bomb triggered with a small plastic explosive.
Mallory crouched then, and he aimed. Dialed an elevation into the 10-power scope of his rifle to correct for the arc at four hundred meters.
Sighted. Adjusted.
Fired.
He saw the bullet smash into the camera, the glass lens shattering, and felt a quick rush. Then he sighted the second camera, farther north. Adjusted his rifle. Dialed in a new elevation. Fired. Missed.
He looked south and saw the glow of flames beginning to light the trees where the dry shrubbery had caught fire on the ground below the pine and eucalyptus trees. He aimed the gun at the camera again as it moved slowly to its right, toward his position. Checked his adjustment, fired. This time, the bullet took out the front of the lens. Yes. He turned his rifle to the northeastern edge of the enclosure next. The longest shot, some five hundred fifty meters. Mallory dialed in the new elevation. Aimed. Fired. His bullet nicked the side of the camera, knocking it slightly off kilter but not disabling it. Mallory set up to try again. Checked his setting. Aimed. Fired. Hit it this time, the lens shattering. Bingo. All of the cameras were disabled now on the east and the northeast perimeter of the field. Mallory stood and began walking back to the car, feeling pumped with adrenaline.
Nadra should be north of the airfield now, in the woods near the northeast corner of the fence. By the gas tank, waiting for a response. Position Three.
Jason would be moving north through the trees, toward Nadra’s location.
A minute passed as Charlie walked back through the woods. Two minutes. Nothing. They had estimated it would take ninety seconds from the firebomb detonation for a response, but four minutes passed and nothing happened.
Charlie felt an apprehension after the brief euphoria. He reached the car and got in. Reversed direction, easing back into the thick shrubbery, snapping down plants and weeds and small trees. He shifted to neutral, then to drive, steering his way back toward the fork in the road.
Then suddenly the silence was shattered with bursts of automatic rifle fire—bullets slamming into the trees, thudding into the trunks. A row of stadium lights lit up the southern corner of the compound and the burning woods.
Mallory shifted to neutral as he rounded the turn, letting the car drift to a stop, then shifting to drive and pressing hard on the accelerator. The trip to the main road would take another ten minutes. Then fifteen minutes more to reach the northern loop. There was more commotion behind him, lights and gunfire. And then the rotors of a helicopter. But he also saw the fire spreading through the forest in his rear-view mirror.
Mallory thought about Nadra, lying in the woods north of him, waiting for Jason. Waiting to go inside the fence.
As he came back to the road, Charlie saw a procession of headlights in the distance and downshifted again. A dozen or so Jeeps, speeding his direction, toward the southern loop road and the south entrance to the airfield. Armed security, probably. He assumed the first phalanx of security people had already entered the complex from the western entrance.
The cars whipped past, not noticing him tucked into the edge of the forest. 11:33. Behind him, fire trucks and helicopters were responding, trying to put out the fire. The diversion had worked, but maybe not well enough. They needed a second, larger diversion. The gas tank. He pictured Nadra again, emerging from the woods with the explosives in her arms, running toward the fence.
Driving with his lights out, Charlie came to the northern loop road, an old trucking route, and turned left. He was traveling west now, parallel to the northern border of the airport complex. To the right of the road was barren scrub land that had once been soybean and maize farms. To the left were fields of tall weeds. Here’s where it gets tricky, he thought.
Twice, truck headlights came at him from the other direction, and Mallory pulled off to the left, finding a spot among the weeds and tree clusters to hide the car. Once, a chopper flew overhead, the beam of its spotlight combing the forest, sweeping across the scrubland and the road. Missing him. At last, he came to the spot on the left that Jason had chosen for him to wait. It was marked by a distinctive v-shaped tree top. Mallory turned toward it and shifted to first gear. Position Four.
He let the car idle. Scanning the woods to the south through his night-vision rifle scope.
Charlie looked at his watch: 11:47. Nadra should have already planted the explosives by the fuel tanks. No, they should have detonated by now. She should have dialed his phone to let them know she was finished.
Where are they?
He watched the fire spreading from the southern corner of the airport. Helicopter searchlights probing the woods. Another truck approached from the west, whooshed past.
11:51. Charlie kept scanning the forest, left to right, for signs of anything moving. Nothing. 11:53. Suddenly, what sounded like a deep peal of thunder jolted him, rumbling the earth, shaking the car. The initial explosion was followed by another. The ground shook once again as the gas tank blew up and a fireball spread across the sky like a mad fireworks display, shooting plumes of flame high into the air, turning to clouds of thick, dark smoke over the forest. Charlie felt the heat as the flames lit up the woods. The main diversion. Jason Wells had placed a cell phone in each of the explosive devices. When he dialed the numbers, the ringing of the phone created a vibration in the bombs, activating a circuit to the blasting cap that detonated the explosive.
He heard three smaller explosions then, in succession, two diversions, one blowing the door off the hangar.
And then another, more distant sound. He saw headlights on the road behind him. Not a truck this time. Something else. He waited, holding his breath. A procession of smaller lights, lower to the ground, seemed to bounce off the pavement, coming toward him from the east. Another caravan of Jeeps.
11:59.
Mallory squinted into the trees, coughing now, as low clouds of smoke spread dark and acrid through the woods.
Where are they? Would they be able to make it through this?
Behind him the Jeeps passed, heading west, maybe fifty yards away.
New sirens sounded in the distance. The smoke had turned thicker. He lifted the rifle again and scanned the forest through the scope. Left to right, right to left. And after a moment, he thought he saw something: a dark shape, moving through the smoke among the trees. Or maybe not. Shifting, going side to side, back up the hillside. Running, back toward Position Four.
Nadra!
12:08.
For a moment, he lost her in the smoke and the darkness and the shadows—and then he saw her emerge, running out into the clearing, ducking down, slipping, regaining her footing. Yes! Nadra was safe.
But where was Jason Wells?
Nadra ducked down beside the car. Grabbed the passenger door handle, pulled it open, slid in.
“Jesus,” she said.
“Are you okay?
“I lost my fucking cell phone.”
“Where’s Jason?”
“He should be right behind me.”
They sat and stared into the forest, coughing.
Nothing.
“Come on, Jason!” Nadra hit her hand on the dashboard. “God dammit, come on, Jason! Come on!”
It was 12:12 when they saw him, running through the smoke, coughing violently. He looked disoriented. But when he saw them he changed course, heading straight for the back passenger door and getting in.
“Motherfucking smoke!”
Nadra slammed his palm. Charlie slipped the car into reverse, turned, then drove. The sky was bright with stars and moonlight, but there were no other lights visible to the east for maybe half a mile. He found the road and followed it, lights out, pushing the accelerator hard now, narrowing all of his attention on staying within the edges of the road. It was a while before anyone thought about talking.
“Shit!” Nadra said. Her face was covered in soot.
Jason said nothing.
“What happened?” Charlie finally asked.
“It didn’t work.”
“What didn’t?”
“The DPG. It didn’t work. It wouldn’t go in the tank.”
“Jesus,” Jason said.
He took out his cell phone. Covered the light with the palm of his hand and pushed a speed dial number. Moments later, the ground shook again. Mallory felt the car rattle violently, a tremble down his spine. An orange-black fireball shot into the sky behind them. Another gas tank fire. Maybe they would be too busy now containing the damage to worry about giving chase. Maybe. Charlie pressed the accelerator to the floor, driving sixty, then seventy, on the dark highway, lights out, following the course Jason had mapped. They tasted the odor of burning gasoline and spent explosives in the breeze all the way in. The fire in the woods was burning wildly now.
As the city came into view again, to their right, Charlie turned on the headlights.
He took a series of random turns, becoming lost in the maze of dirt roads that bordered the shanty towns. Everywhere people were gathered outside in groups, staring in the direction of the fire.
He finally found a way into downtown and parked on a residential street. The three of them got out and began walking, past the gawking clusters of curious people. They came to a park and found an open bench among the homeless men. Charlie and Nadra kept watch. Jason Wells sat and took out his phone again. Pushed one number. Then a second. Then a third. Then a fourth. Then he slipped the phone back in his jacket. Mallory turned to the northeast and waited. He saw the first explosion above the roofs of mud-brick houses, followed by a second one at almost the same spot. The ground shook momentarily as if by an earthquake. In the distance, women screamed. The train tracks. He turned to the east, saw two explosions light up the sky almost simultaneously. Felt the ground shake. The communications tower. Then he looked west. Moments later another blast flared up amid the fires outside the airfield. Nadra’s car, parked in the woods. People were running out into the street now, screaming. The breeze tasted of gasoline and acrid smoke. The pavement was littered with ash.
Mallory sat on one end of the bench, Nadra on the other.
“It didn’t work!” Jason said.
“Why?”
“The dart, the propellants, wouldn’t go in the tanks. There was no way. We were given bad information, maybe. I don’t know. I just know we failed. The tanks are still out there. All we have are these diversions.”
“Crap!” Nadra said.
They sat in silence for a long time, thinking about it, breathing smoke, until eventually they had nothing to do but return to their apartments. Nadra asked to meet Charlie in the morning. Then all of them would meet at eleven, to try to come up with a new plan.
The night was alive with the sounds of sirens and surprised voices. Charlie walked back by himself, coughing through the drifting smoke, breathing the acrid taste of failure in the early morning air. He felt weighted down but unable to give in. It was going up tomorrow. Eight million people. They couldn’t allow failure to be an option. It wouldn’t be. It wasn’t.
ISAAK PRIEST WATCHED the spreading fire on the satellite monitors at his home base along the Green Monkey River. The cameras at the airfield were no longer operational. Now the northeastern cell phone tower was out, as well. It didn’t affect him operationally. But it shouldn’t have happened. It couldn’t have, according to the Administrator.
So Charles Mallory was here, after all. That was very interesting. Maybe it was a good thing that he was here. Maybe he wasn’t really the enemy at all. Who had really sent him? It was a very interesting question.
Priest speed-dialed John Ramesh again. It took nine rings this time for him to answer.
“What’s happening?” Priest said.
“We’re containing it. No losses. Greatest damage was an airport fuel tank. Looks worse than it is.”
“The product.”
“It’s all safe.”
“How did you let this happen?”
Ramesh didn’t respond.
“Can you get them?”
“We will.”
“How?”
“We’re pursuing.”
“Not good enough,” Priest said, and hung up.
He had been told that this wasn’t possible. It can’t be stopped now. Gardner had assured him he was protected. Maybe he already knew what Priest had done, what was really going to happen on October 5. Or maybe he suspected.
CHARLIE WOKE IN an unfamiliar apartment before sunrise, fully dressed except for his shoes. He felt grimy, smelled of smoke. He showered and shaved, then pulled on a new set of cheap clothing. Another day.
Except it wasn’t another day.
It was October 5. The World Series day. The day when Isaak Priest was supposed to take the planes up. To depopulate a nation.
As he walked toward downtown, Charlie smelled smoke and felt ash in the air, saw it all over the streets. He still heard Nadra’s and Jason’s voices in his head: It didn’t work. We failed. Crap! He felt the changed mood in town—there were armed contractors everywhere, patrolling alongside the eateries and shops, looking in, watching everyone. Mallory kept his head down, tried to stay out of sight. He had slept fitfully, thinking all night about contingencies.
He was looking forward to his 7:50 meeting with Nadra. To learning something about the Palace and how they might infiltrate it. How they might get to Isaak Priest before nightfall. That was his alternate plan.
He ordered a cup of coffee, black, and watched the street traffic—the armed security details, the bicycle taxis and rickshaws. Finally, he walked to the corner of Lester Avenue. Checked his watch. 7:49. Moments later, an old Camry stopped beside him. Charlie opened the front passenger door.
Nadra was wearing combat fatigues, sneakers, and her tight black T-shirt—but also something new, a camouflage ball cap. She drove them north, into the suburbs, leaning forward against the steering wheel, moving it with her elbows.
“Everything’s different today, isn’t it?” she said.
“Is it?”
“Yeah. I just keep thinking how we blew it.”
“Don’t,” he said. “We didn’t.”
She shot him a look. “No?”
“No. Don’t think that.”
“What can we do, though? The device didn’t work.”
“Different strategy,” Charlie said.
“How? What else can we do? We don’t have any other way of neutralizing it.”
“How about if we go after something else? Priest instead of the poison.”
Nadra didn’t say anything right away. She drove slowly through a neighborhood of sun-bleached, mud-brick homes, making seemingly haphazard turns, her eyes scanning the scenery attentively. Charlie liked being with her one on one. Sometimes she treated him like an older brother, opening up and showing him vulnerabilities that the other members of the team never saw, particularly Okoro, who rarely spoke with her.
“Besides,” Charlie said. “We may be able to buy a day or two with the weather. It’s supposed to rain tonight.”
“I just know we can’t let this happen.” Nadra tugged down on her hat brim. “I mean, crap! When I was crawling through the woods last night, I just realized this is my home, man. I mean, I’ve been everywhere in the world, but this is my home. All night, I thought what I should be doing. How I should be helping the people here.”
“What would you do?”
“What would I do? Teach them. Show them how to use what they have. How to irrigate, for one thing. Most of the farmland to the west of the capital is ruined. For miles and miles.”
“Why doesn’t the government teach them?”
“The government? Crap, the government shuts down any program like that when it starts to succeed.”
This was what Mallory had been wondering: why her country had been chosen for this. “Why would they do that?”
“They’re paid to. Contractors pay them to keep the problems the way they are. Progress interferes with their plans. Huge amounts of money are coming in, promoting a different agenda.”
The road northwest from the Green Monkey River was muddy from the night rains, winding through patchy sodden fields and past volcanic gorges.
“So Priest is down in the Palace, we think,” Charlie said. “Tell me about that. Can we get there this afternoon?”
“We could try. There’s really thick forest surrounding it. Supposedly it’s mined with booby traps. It used to be there were lots of trails in there, but it’s all overgrown now. I used to play in the river down there when I was a girl.”
“Why do they call it the Palace?”
“Just because it looks like one. It was built by a British businessman who owned mines here early in the last century. Then an American corporation bought it. Wanted to turn it into a hunting lodge or something.”
It was beginning to drizzle again. The air smelled clean and rich with wet soil. Occasionally, he smelled something else, though.
It reminded Charlie of what he had seen on his arrival. The images kept tugging at him, although he hadn’t said anything to anyone.
Finally, he asked Nadra about it. “There were dead bodies scattered all over the countryside outside the city. I saw them from the train. Most of them pretty young.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s going on?”
Nadra didn’t answer right away. When she did, her voice was more measured.
“Some of the contractors go out shooting after dark,” she said. “From helicopters. ‘Night hunting,’ they call it. Some of them hunt from the ground, too, into the shanty towns and the farms. They get drunk first. Some of them put on night-vision sights and use the shanty towns as firing ranges.”
“And no one does anything about it?”
“Not really, no.”
They rode in silence, a long loop back toward the city, Mallory wondering why she’d asked to meet with him. Sensing it was just for the company, to talk before the meeting with Jason Wells and the whole team. Then he thought of the other thing that had been tugging at his thoughts.
“How long has that pit been there?” he asked.
“The copper mine? Since last year.”
“Who dug it?”
“A contractor from South Africa, supposedly. For a local mine interest.”
“How deep would you say it is?”
“How deep? I don’t know. More than a thousand feet, supposedly.”
Mallory thought about that. Deep enough to fit the Eiffel Tower. Almost two Washington Monuments. He had figured eight hundred feet the night before, lying in bed.
“You ever play one of those games where you try to guess how many jelly beans fit in a jar?” Mallory said.
“Not in a while.”
“There’s a formula for doing it. I was thinking about it last night. You figure out the volume by width times length times depth, then divide by the approximate volume of a jelly bean. I’m just winging it here, but if the average volume of a human body is, say, three cubic feet, it means that roughly three hundred to four hundred thousand people could fit in that thing. In other words, it’s almost big enough for half the population of Mungaza.”
She pumped her foot on the brake and looked at him. “So, what, do you think there’s another pit somewhere?”
“Probably not. Better than half the population here lives in shanty towns. I don’t think they’d bother to separate the bodies out from the debris. I think more likely they’d just bulldoze those things down. Sweep them away. Maybe start fires with them.”
“Shit.”
They were back in the edges of the city, both of them absorbed in private thoughts. Nadra pulled the car to a stop on a street of single-story shops, put it in park.
“What are you doing?” Charlie said.
“Parking.”
“Is that what Chaplin said to do?”
She looked at her watch and frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
“What if you were to park and then walk away? What would happen to the keys?”
“I’m supposed to take them,” she said. “But, I mean, crap.” He saw the hint of a smile in her eyes. “Unless I happen to leave them.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Nadra got out and began to walk away. Charlie climbed across to the driver’s side. Shifted it out of park and did a U-turn. Then he began to drive back the way they had come, out toward the copper mine. He wanted to get a closer look.
He drove to the northern edge of town and then west out into the scrub country. Parked in the woods and began walking uphill through the yellow weeds and grasses, stopping several times to look through his binoculars. It wasn’t just a pit. There was more within the chain-link fences: two rows of cookie-cutter barracks-like buildings among the trees.
Charlie walked to an overlook, where he had a clearer view of the pit across the valley. And he saw something else: what looked like plastic water slides twisting from the tracks to the lip of the pit.
Suddenly, the silence was broken. Mallory turned, saw movement through the trees: a caravan of vehicles, crunching up the gravel road toward him. He ducked for cover among the trees, but there was nowhere to go.
Then he heard something else: machine gun fire. Bullets ripped into the gravel and the dirt on either side of him, slamming into the trees. He stayed in a crouch, his heart thumping. The firing stopped. Jeeps mounted with machine guns skidded through the grasses around him. Charlie stood and held up his arms. White-skinned contractors aimed a dozen automatic weapons at him. One of the men told him, in an American accent, to take out his gun and drop it on the ground. He did. A pick-up truck rocked along the gravel drive behind them. Stopped. A man got out, pointing a rifle at him. Another weapon was holstered at his waist, Charlie saw.
“How you doing?”
A short, muscular man, huge arms hanging from a sleeveless shirt. Ponytail. Ruddy face. It was John Ramesh, Isaak Priest’s lieutenant.
Two other men frisked him as Ramesh lifted Charlie’s 9mm handgun from the dirt. He nodded for Charlie to get in the truck and tossed his rifle in back. Ramesh smiled, showing dark and uneven teeth.
“Charles Mallory, right?”