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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?”

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.