JOHN RAMESH DROVE BACK along the gravel road into a valley of eucalyptus trees. Charlie sat on the passenger side, trying to figure a way out. The road inclined gradually, winding north and west in the general direction of the copper pit. The Jeep vehicles cut back and forth behind him until they came to a fork in the road and they all turned away. Ramesh, chewing on a toothpick, lifted his hand and waved.
He passed through a chain-link gate, past a sign that said “Construction Site” and “No Admittance.” Lifted the radio mic from the dash and spoke into it, then accelerated up a dirt road, bouncing along the rough surface. The truck was cluttered with crumpled paper bags, protein bar wrappers, newspaper pages. There was an empty energy malt drink bottle between the seats. The windows were streaked and dirty.
“You seem mighty interested in that copper mine,” Ramesh said, smiling again.
Charles Mallory didn’t speak.
“Who you working for?”
“Omega Aqua.”
“Not something they’d be interested in, is it?”
Charlie was silent. He looked at the granite outcrops in the distance.
“Want to tell me what’s so interesting to you about it?”
“Not a lot. Except I don’t think it’s really a mine.”
“No?” Ramesh seemed amused. “What would it be, then?”
“Part of a post-disaster preparedness plan, maybe? If I had to guess.”
Ramesh drove on in silence for a while, his arm out the window. “You’re a pretty smart guy, aren’t you?”
“Not really. That’s just what I hear in town. People are talking. They seem to know something’s up.”
“Do they?”
Charlie glanced at Ramesh, saw the small droop of his right eyelid and suddenly realized why he seemed familiar. Ramesh resembled a man who had been in the news once, who worked for Black Eagle Services, Landon Pine’s military contracting firm. He looked like one of the contractors who had been accused of killing civilians in Afghanistan.
“You have anything to do with what happened last night?” Ramesh said.
“Last night? How do you mean?”
Ramesh gave him a once-over, chewing his toothpick. The breeze was blowing cool and moist through the open windows.
“I’m sure you heard some I.E.D.s go off.”
“I.E.D.s?”
“It wasn’t kids with firecrackers. Anyway. We’re going to drive up the hill over here and then I’m going to give you a firsthand look at that mine you seem so interested in. How’s that sound?”
Mallory was silent, figuring. Ramesh drove steadily along the bumpy, gradually inclining road. Self-assured, not in a hurry. “If this thing does comes through here—this thing that you’ve been hearing about in town—what do you think’s going to happen?”
Mallory didn’t reply.
Ramesh smiled and repeated the question.
“I don’t know.”
“You want me to tell you?”
“Sure. If you’d like to.”
“It’s going to be bad for a week, ten days, maybe. And then everything’s going to be good again. I’d say ‘back to normal,’ but that’s not accurate. It’ll actually be a lot better than normal.” The ground sloped steeply uphill, and Ramesh shifted gears. Charlie watched the mouth of the open mine, widening in front of them as the truck bounced along the dirt road.
“I’m just sorry you’re going to miss it,” Ramesh said.
“Am I?”
“Because I think you’d find it interesting. Maybe even educational.”
“What am I going to miss?” he said.
“What are you going to miss? A marvel of engineering, that’s what.”
“Really?”
“Yep.”
“That’s how you see it.”
Ramesh made a throaty sound but didn’t speak right away. “In the long run, that’s how everyone’s going to see it. A lot of problems are going to be fixed very quickly. People are going to be amazed.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Yep.”
“You mean, that eight and a half million people died?”
This time, Ramesh didn’t smile. He made the sound in his throat again.
“You’re a funny guy, you know that?” Ramesh said, and then he went quiet again. Charlie needed the silence to ponder what was coming. To understand what Ramesh was going to do once they reached the pit. How he was going to execute this.
They passed another sentry post and a gate, this one a single wooden barrier. Jeeps were parked on either side of the gate, one with a Browning machine gun mounted on the back, the other with a light anti-aircraft gun. Contractors. As he approached, Ramesh lifted the wireless radio mic from the dash and said, “8-C 13 coming through.” Moments later, the gate lifted.
Ramesh waved at the guards, and the guards waved back. They looked bored. He accelerated, the wheels spitting gravel as the truck sped up the slope toward the open-pit mine. Then he took his foot off the pedal for a moment. Not in any hurry. “I mean, do you really think anyone’s going to notice if eight million poor Africans go to sleep one night and don’t wake up the next morning? Honestly?”
Charlie didn’t say anything. Anger wouldn’t serve him now. He had to concentrate on what was going to happen. The immediate future. Meaning the next five or ten minutes.
Ramesh gunned the accelerator pedal, let his foot off it again. “You have to look at it in context,” he said. “Have you ever spent any time in those shanty towns? Do you really think they serve any purpose? Half those people are starving to death, anyway. Most of them are illiterates. Suffering from AIDS, malaria. Horrible diseases. Many of them earn nothing. Don’t have electricity or running water. Where you and I come from, most people have never even heard of this country.”
“I see,” Charlie said. “So put them out of their misery, you’re saying.”
“Shit, yeah. Do you think these people are contributing to the world in any meaningful way? No. They’re taking up space is what they’re doing. It’s a shame, too. The fastest growing populations in the world, they’re all in places like this, where the last thing people are equipped to do is raise children.”
Mallory was silent.
“It’s not popular to say those things out loud, I realize. I’m sorry, but it’s the fucking truth.”
His tone had gradually loosened, so that it almost seemed as if he were talking to himself now, or to a person who didn’t exist. And Charlie understood why: because that’s how Ramesh thought of him, as a person who wasn’t going to exist for more than another five minutes. “The hole’s right up here,” Ramesh said. “I’m going to take you up to it. Let you look right down into it. Satisfy your curiosity. How’s that sound?”
The ground continued to slope upward, the truck rattling and banging over it. Finally, it topped out into a plateau, which was maybe forty feet wide and a hundred feet long. Train tracks ran along the western edge. Ramesh slowed as he came to the end of the road, swerved the truck sideways and parked.
“There you go,” he said.
Charlie looked to his right, into the giant thousand-foot-deep canyon he had seen from a distance. He listened to the echo of the wind. Ramesh pointed his 9mm gun at Charlie as he carefully opened the driver’s door and backed out of the truck. He walked backwards and then to his left, his eyes locked on Mallory’s.
Charlie knew he would have a window of maybe one second, as Ramesh turned toward the front of the truck and stepped past where the window frame and the dirty glass obscured his view. In that moment, he found the empty malt bottle between the seats with his left hand, passed it to his right hand and concealed it inside his jacket. As Ramesh moved past the second window support, Charlie pushed the bottle into his right jacket pocket.
Ramesh kept the gun aimed as he came around the front of the truck, all business now. He released the passenger door and pulled it open, motioning with the gun for Charlie to step out.
“Okay,” he said. “You ready? Let’s have a closer look. Go ahead, keep walking toward the edge of the pit. I’ll be right behind you.”
He waited until Mallory had begun to walk and then he walked, too, keeping a distance of ten feet. Charlie heard his work boots crunching on the gravel, matching him step for step. Ramesh was cocky, but he wasn’t going to take the chance of being careless. Charlie knew that. The gun would stay aimed at his back.
Charlie took short steps, his arms slightly raised and out to his sides, acknowledging that he was a prisoner. Eight feet from the lip of the mine, he stopped and looked at what was in front of him. He breathed wet stone, standing water, sulfur.
“Keep walking,” Ramesh said.
Charles Mallory took another two steps, his arms half raised. He turned slightly to his left, saw the train tracks behind Ramesh and the three giant plastic chutes extending from the pit edge to the tracks—waterslides to wash the bodies into the hole.
Ramesh watched him, ten feet away, and now Charlie watched Ramesh, too. Saw in his eyes what he planned to do. He wanted Charlie to walk all the way to the edge before he shot him. That was the image Ramesh held in his mind, the way he wanted this to go. Charlie lifted his hands slightly higher, a gesture of surrender. He shifted his torso, so that his left side was facing Ramesh and his feet were still pointing forward. He lowered his right hand slightly, touched the neck of the bottle in his jacket pocket.
Charlie looked down into the hole again and shook his head. The wind made a whistling sound on the stone. He felt his heart pounding. He turned his head toward Ramesh, gripping the bottle-neck. He walked another two feet, holding the bottle in front of him. Four feet from the lip of the hole, ten feet from John Ramesh.
“Go on,” Ramesh said. “Go on to the edge, have a look down.”
Charles Mallory lifted his chest and nodded. Took a deep breath. He made eye contact with Ramesh over his shoulder, lowering his right hand, letting a silent communication flow between them. A wordless, ambiguous exchange; a stare-off. The next part would have to happen quickly, Charlie knew. One fluid motion. Wind-up and pivot morphing into the pitch.
His movement had to surprise Ramesh, without startling him.
One chance. Big odds.
Charles Mallory quickly figured the angle and trajectory, the way he had years earlier, standing on the pitcher’s mound on a spring afternoon in another country. And then he grimaced, an expression that might, for an instant, confuse John Ramesh.
Ramesh held his stare, the 9mm handgun pointed at his torso. His eyes creased.
He would be forced to make a split-second decision, Mallory knew: dodge the bottle or fire the gun. The smart move, of course, would be to dodge the bottle. But Charles Mallory was pretty sure he wouldn’t do that. People didn’t usually think that way when they were forced to respond to a sudden challenge. Not when their finger was taut against the trigger of a gun. The chances were much greater that he would panic and squeeze the trigger. Ramesh had the prerequisites: He was cocky and not prepared for surprises. He’d already worked it out in his head how this was going to go.
The odds were good that he would try to do both, but in the wrong order.
And still, it might not work. Charlie knew that, but he also knew that there wasn’t another choice, and the adrenaline that was beginning to kick in would give him an advantage. Mallory twisted his shoulder back toward the pit, made another face, like he was about to cry.
One chance.
They were still holding eye contact when Mallory moved, turning to his right again for leverage. Lowering the bottle against his leg. Twisting hard toward the hole in the earth, and then whirling in one hard motion, pivoting onto his front leg, rotating his body with all the strength he could summon, and rocketing the bottle out of his right hand.
It was the same principle as throwing a perfect strike in baseball, except they were much closer. The most important part was the pivot. Keeping his weight balanced, his front knee absorbing the impact, his arm following through. His eyes staying on the target, seeing it so clearly that, for him, the pitch seemed to happen in slow motion.
Ramesh pulled the trigger a tenth of a second before the bottle struck his face, slightly off balance. He aimed his gun at precisely where Charles Mallory had been standing when he had began to whirl his arm. Chest level, center of his body.
By the time the gun discharged, though, Charles Mallory was no longer there. He was in the dirt, still in the motion of the pitch, following through. Tumbling over the rocky earth.
It wouldn’t have been difficult for John Ramesh to kill him, had there been a second shot. Fortunately, though, there wasn’t.
The base of the bottle slammed squarely into the left side of Ramesh’s face, just below his eye, knocking him unconscious. There was a moment of visible disorientation as he lost the neural connection with his legs, and then he went down backward on his right side, like a boxer caught with a vicious hook. Charles Mallory scrambled to his feet, braced for whatever came next.
But there was nothing to brace for.
It had been a perfect pitch. The batter hadn’t even seen it coming.
John Ramesh lay on his side. Mallory approached him, breathing heavily, feeling another rush of adrenaline. Already there was a swelling around his left eye. Charlie removed the pistol from the grip of his right hand. He stood directly above him, aimed carefully and shot John Ramesh once in the chest, killing him.