The Copper Story Hallway conversation Two executives walk quickly toward the president's office. One is taller and better dressed than the other. Short one: "He didn't delete the databases. If he did that, we could recover from backups. Instead, he's been overwriting them." "We've got an investor call next week, Bill. Next week!" Short one, conciliatory: "We can audit our contracts vs the old hard copies. We don't have precise daily volume numbers." "Christ. Well why can't we just verify the payouts?" "Yeah, I know I said that, because that was the first thing we discovered he had changed. But he didn't just do that. Contracts are trashed. We'll have to hope we can recover hard copies. Our well data is suspect. There are counterparties that we don't think exist. "Anyway, those are all bad problems, but not critical. We can amend invoices later. But right now, your marketers are selling product we may not have. You'll have to buy on the spot market to fulfill some of these deals" "Christ! Have you told anyone in the trading room?" "I've been telling them, and you, since yesterday! They don't listen. They think I'm the guy that refills the printer toner. When I said we lost reporting on those production sites, I meant we literally have no idea what's coming out of those lines." "Well the traders are just selling based on historical output then. That's not a big deal." The shorter one stops walking. The taller one keeps walking, then looks over his shoulder, makes an impatient gesture with his hands. The shorter one stands still and waits. He talks in a quiet voice. "No, now you're not listening to me. Edward didn't shut off monitors. He didn't delete information. He set up a swarm of malicious processes." "They make really small changes. Five percent more than normal at this site, a different counterparty somewhere else." "And it looks like it's been going for at least since Christmas. Some agents even revisit the same records, and the second time, the data is set back to correct values." "How is Ed not in prison right now?" "First of all, nobody knows where Ed is. Second, my team is scrambling to keep this business operational. We don't have time to explain to some idiot detectives that think this guy stole a fax machine." "Give me solutions Bill." "Tell the traders to shut down. That's the biggest risk. They are writing deals but the expected outputs are suspect. Sell spot 30-day average deals." "Next, we're using manual data from our teams at the sites right now. The old timers at the ET basin already are showing some of the other mines what to do." "Christmas though? How did you find out about this so late?" "Because nothing was that strange. It was only when Nadine noticed how our transportation costs didn't make sense given production at the mine, and they're always perfectly inline. "That was Thursday. It's Tuesday now, Bill. You sat on this? You should have told me that day Bill! I have to look like an idiot now in there." "Damn it, we're lucky we caught this at all! This is an elaborate attack we're dealing with, by somebody that was an expert on our infrastructure. Hell, he designed most of it." "Is he stealing from us? What did he do this for?" "I don't know why he did it. I'm picking up the cards after he went in the system and played 52 pickup." "Bill, let me do the talking in here." The taller one knocks on the wooden door and when the elderly man looks up from his newspaper, the tall one says, "Paul, we need to talk." Night out bar hopping Sasha had managed to find the producers of those bracelets, with Maggie's help. Sasha listed them online and they are very popular and now she has more in her account than she ever imagined. Maggie and Sasha visit a big city (Cusco). Maggie insists they get a nice hotel for a change. They spend the day in some spa then go shopping. Way "girlier" than Sasha is used to, but Maggie is fun to be with. Then they get tarted up and go to a trendy restaurant / night club. Dudes preen for their attention for a while, but Maggie and Sasha are uninterested. Then they leave the club. And walk around through the bar district looking at all the vendors on the street. Then they run into some other traveler friends while walking outside. They stand in line at another club, then Sasha laughs at the price to get in, but then the oily dudes come out and whisper to the door man and suddenly they are showed in. Dance battle with Maggie, Sasha, and their friends from the road inside the club. Later, they all sit in a big booth. Maggie is flirting with the oily guys. Sasha looks around the room. She turns back and sees Maggie smiling at her. Beaming. Sasha smiles back. "This place is silly, Mag!" She has to yell. "I know! Isn't it great?" Maggie yells back. A few hours later, and they're all much more drunk. Maggie is the center of the room. Sasha envies how gleeful her friend can be. "I'm attracted to the person, not so much the gender. But mostly, I'm into boys. I've messed around with a few girls, though, and it's been nice." "Would it sound narcissistic if I say I really wish I could make out with myself?" Maggie raises her hands over her head. Sasha looks up from her drink. "Wait, so you wish you could maybe see your own reflection, and then kiss it, and all that?" "Yeah! Does that sound narcissist?" Donuts the next morning Maggie and Sasha watch ridiculous Peruvian kid shows and tease each other about the preposterous events of the night before. There's a knock at the door. Some Americans are there. They introduce themselves as people from the US Embassy. They've brought coffee and doughnuts. They're very friendly. Is an older man and two younger women and then a couple of hulking security dudes. The women do all the talking. They ask for details about meetings with the men they were buying them drinks the night before. The Americans explain the men may be affiliated with organized crime. Sasha mentions how she didn't intend to see them again, but she is surprised when the Americans ask if she would be willing to meet them again in order to investigate a missing American girl. The girl dated one of the members of this organization and hasn't been seen in a week. After they leave, Maggie says she doesn't believe they're trying to find a missing American. The State Department wouldn't send those folks out. Sasha asks how does she know all that. Maggie says "because Americans get kidnapped constantly down here. And within hours, you pay the ransom, and they let you go." "Anyway, the guys last night were cartel and they look down on people running ransom rackets." Camping in the mountains This is after Maggie and Sasha just visited the village, handing over cash and filling up the truck with boxes more of trinkets. They're feeling wonderful. "I saw this place the last time we drove out, and I thought would be a fun place to spend the night." Sasha says, pulling the truck off the side of the road. Then she realizes Maggie wasn't listening. "Mag -- hey -- we're here -- Mag -- hey, hey, sleepy -- wake up!" Saha reaches across and pokes Maggie in the shoulder a few times. Then shakes her. Then pinches her. "Ouch!" Maggie sits up. "Wow!" Maggie looks out through the filthy truck windshield. She can see for miles across canyons. When Sasha turns off the truck, the engine kicks a few times and then finally the quiets stops. No other sound replaces it. They sit quietly for a bit. The peace and silence is wonderful after hours of listening to the noisy unhealthy truck engine. Maggie leans against her door and pushes it open and then steps out. "We're staying here tonight, right?" She looks back at Maggie. "Yeah. Welcome to Apocatequil canyon! Amazing, right? "Anyhow, you got sick of sleeping while I do all the driving?" "No, well, yeah, it was getting dull; but this is amazing! I want to watch the canyon tonight from here." Sasha and Maggie talk after cooking dinner. They sit on a rock shelf and look at the sky. A giant black bird lands right on their truck. It looks around and then spots Sasha and stares at her. "Hey, so, what did you mean when you said I get dumb when boys are around?" Sasha kicks Maggie and then gestures at the bird. Maggie whispers "That's the biggest bird I've ever seen." In the tent, later, Sasha describes a few psychedelic experiences she has had. She has had visions of herself becoming some kind of monster... a starving corpse that hunts people. "Not that sexy, S" "Wasn't trying to set a mood." Maggie looks Sasha's face. "You're inscrutable, S. I can't see what you're thinking." Maggie continues after realizing that S wasn't going to break the poker face. Then Sasha winks at her. And then they both laugh. Maggie rolls on her back. "When I was 19, I moved back to the states and went to college. I thought it was going to be this great adventure. Finally I wouldn't be the one whitey trying to fit in. It would be all Americans. I got to the city like several weeks before school started." "The thing was that I got there, and I didn't know anybody. So I would try to go out. I would go to the college health center and run on the treadmill. It was mostly empty though. I so desperately wanted to make friends. I would talk to the old lady that checked my IDs. She could tell I was all alone. She invited me to go to her church with her and I was like, "sure!" And I went and this church was really out there. They were really out there, like praying to get this guy out of prison after he had beaten up some doctor in the parking lot of a women's health clinic." Sasha laughs in surprise and then catches herself. Maggie glances at her. "Yeah, the church met in an old car dealership and during the service people would start howling and speaking in tongues." "Our housekeeper, Bere, who pretty much raised me as my family traveled around, she gave me these." Maggie touches the yellow and gray beaded necklaces around her neck. Sasha studies them with her eyes: several long strings of different beads, wrapped multiple times around her neck. "Well, the leader of the church said these beads held a demonic presence and I needed to have spirits cast out." Sasha smiled a little. Maggie notices and pauses telling the story. "What are you thinking?" Sasha shrugs. Maggie says "No, I can tell you had a thought! What is it?" Sasha relents. "It's just funny how they sneer at all the other religions of the world. The primitive brown people. And then behind their own closed doors, they're into super weird shit." Maggie grins. "Or we are so dead inside we travel around looking for a fix by stealing from other people." Maggie looks back at the tent ceiling. "Bere always made a big deal how they would take care of me. I guess people would call it Santeria, but that's really just what people say for stuff that won't fit elsewhere." "Anyhow, that's not the point of the story. Besides going to that weird church with Ella, the old lady that checked IDs at the fitness center, I spent all this time at this cafe that was across the street from my apartment near campus." "I would get coffee and just read books there. I guess I hoped I would randomly make friends." "There was this barista there that I really thought was cool. I was just 17 at the time, and in the US for the first time since I was a child, and I just thought she was the most fashionable and sophisticated person in the world." "I would watch as people would come in and talk to her and it seemed like she knew all the cool people. Like they were all secret agents on some underground." "I would try to start conversations with her, like by complimenting her clothes, or whatever, but she would just stare at me." "Then when the semester finally started, I saw her in my latin american literature class! I was so excited! I grinned at her, and sat down right next to her. Now we could be friends!" "And then it was clear she was a really shitty student; also, I think she wasn't really that good at reading Spanish. I didn't realize that a lot of the other students had barely studied the language before college, and most had maybe spent a semester somewhere." "The class was hard for me because the professor was kind of an idiot, and kept pushing his weird agenda on everything, and he really didn't like the fact that I had grown up in Argentina, because there were a few times where the prof just didn't have his facts straight. "And the professor was fixated on this one author, but in a weird coincidence though.I had already read everything by that guy. He was friends with my parents." "It's funny -- to me, this writer was just this funny old guy that used to show up and parties, and was thrilled to talk to anybody that had read his books. Like, he never expected anyone cared!" "But this professor had somehow made a career by plucking this obscure writer up and calling him this undiscovered genius." "Where's that writer now?" "Oh, he's dead. He was pretty old when I knew him. He had published most of his stuff when he was a young man, like fifty years ago or so." ---- Later Maggie's prof really gets interested in Maggie. He really wants to fuck her, mostly out of some twisted notion that since M is clearly way smarter / more knowledgable than he is, somehow, by bedding her, he will be less of a fraud. The barista is jealous of how M has captured the prof's attention. She befriends M, but really, just to tag along as M keeps getting invited to parties in the professor's circle. M is unaware of this though. One night, M turns down the prof. The barista swoops in and sleeps with the prof and then brags about it to M. M drops out of school and feels betrayed by her friend. ---- In the morning, they hear the sound of mountaintop removal. Is nearly deafening. Miners are using dynamite somewhere nearby in the canyon to search for mineral veins. They drive a different way back. They see a different village, abandoned, with noxious chemicals pooled up in the mud. They realize that's the future of their village. Maggie and Sasha argue in the truck on the ride home. They're both traumatized by the mountaintop removal sounds and the realization that this amazing place is going to be destroyed. When they were at the village earlier, they noticed signs of pollution from the mining. Now Sasha realizes their way of life will end soon. Sasha is surprised by her own attachment to these strangers in the hills. Sasha and Maggie had already planned to split up soon anyway… Maggie is going back home for a bit, and Sasha was headed to the capital city. They say goodbye. Bill stays up all night Bill is at a bar with an older friend and is explaining the mess at work. The guy listens as Bill narrates the layers of traps the last guy set. "You'll like this, Mal. The bots didn't have any innate instructions built in. They would wake up, they look for other bots on the network, they make clones of themselves, then they store those clones elsewhere. "I watched one of the bots run in a virtualized environment and saw it load the company logo file from our website. Then I stepped across the code, and it took way too long to jump to the next step. "So I watched what it did. He was walking across the logo, byte by byte. The bots hide their clones inside the logo." "Steganography" Malcolm mutters. "Yeah, exactly. And it wasn't just in the logo. All sorts of marketing materials are full of bot code. My boss's head shot for example. "All the bots are dead now, except for the ones I've got trapped. It took me a while to figure out how to kill them. Every time I killed a few of the workers, new ones would restart elsewhere. "But I realized there was some upper bound on the population. I guess he wanted to make sure that the number of processes would stay small enough so that nobody would notice. "The bots only cloned themselves when they couldn't detect any nearby neighbors. So I wrote a shitty version of his bot that did nothing but reply to other bots, setting its location to be right next to the real bot." Bill glances up from the table to glance at Malcolm's face. Bill thinks to himself that his solution was pretty goddamn clever but Malcolm looks like Bill is just doing something no more difficult than tying his shoes. "So, there's no more changes to the system happening. Now I just gotta see if I can't rebuild the system to what it should have been." "The worst case would be to just discard ALL the reading for the last four months or so, until we can go with actual readings. That would likely take years. If our counterparties, the people on the other side of the trades, realize we have to trust them, we'll get gutted. Right now, nobody knows we're flying blind." At the end, the old guy, in a Hawaiian shirt and a grey ponytail tells Bill maybe this isn't something that he ought to fix. "Because it sounds like more hassle than it's worth?" Mal frowns. "You won't lose any money if you can't rescue the firm. What does it really matter to you? This is their mess, not yours." "You wouldn't give up." "You want a heart attack too?" Malcolm smirks. "If you're gonna do this, check for the stupid mistakes first. I bet he left the back door open, so to speak. Maybe he did it on purpose to help himself monitor stuff." Malcolm looks down and smiles to himself. "I remember one time we had a remote site. Was an oil rig in the middle of the gulf. We needed to restart this system, but we didn't have shell access. You know what we found? There was a way to trip an error in the system, in a certain section that gave us a debugger. It had been left in the code before deployment." "We didn't need to find something elaborate. They keys were already in the ignition, so to speak. We just triggered the error on purpose and bam, the system dropped into debug mode, and we were in." Bill grins. "So, um, how is your heart doing now?" Bill asks, and Malcolm shrugs his shoulders again. "One other thing about this. My poor boss is visibly uncomfortable. For a while, he would insist I explain to him how stuff was working, so that he could explain it without me there. "Then it switched to where now he just stays quiet. My boss has always been an ass, but now he can't decide if once this crisis is done, I'll be put back in my place, or if I'm about to get promoted. "In this conversation yesterday, I mentioned how the bots were writing copies of themselves into stuff like the corporate logos. And I showed how within my boss's headshot, there was the code." "Then my boss gets real defensive; says it could have been my photo if I was important enough to have one." "Then he got real mad because I said how it actually doesn't work in photos of people with dark skin like me." Malcolm smiles a bit. Malcolm pays the bill for the table of empty pint glasses. They walk to the parking lot and then get in Bill's car. They drive mostly in silence. At Malcolm's driveway, when the car stops, Malcolm opens his door. "Why did he do it?" "I figure he just snapped. Remember, this is a guy was prone to meltdowns already. He was on a review plan already." Bill watches Malcolm climb the stairs into his house. Two hours later, Bill is back home staring at the ceiling in his bedroom wrinkling his eyebrows and muttering to himself. He sits up, walks to the dining table in the front room, turns on a light, and starts his computer. It starts raining outside. Bill types. The room is still pretty dark. He sees an icon light up on his screen. It means somebody replied to a question he asked a few days ago on a mailing list. The answer is useless. The person either didn't understand the question or didn't realize that his answer wouldn't work. Bill mutters to himself. "Thanks for nothing." Bill leans back in his chair. He speaks aloud. "OK, so, how do these bots know how they're supposed to change stuff? Where are they getting their orders from? Who is telling them what to do? Is it random? Is there any order to it?" Bill looks up at the ceiling. "If I had a pet then people wouldn't think it was so weird for me to talk to myself." Bill leans forward, edits a file, then hits enter. The program fails because he had a missing right-parentheses. He fixes it and runs it again. Now it fails because he spelled some labels wrong. He swears quietly while he fixes those. Then he starts the program, and he sees the logging messages blink on the screen: 2018-04-09 13:38:37,394 [4141] check_files_for_gdb 143 DEBUG working on 1 of 1,504,032 possible modules 2018-04-09 13:38:37,394 [4141] check_files_for_gdb 143 DEBUG working on 101 of 1,504,032 possible modules… 2018-04-09 13:38:37,394 [4141] check_files_for_gdb 143 DEBUG working on 201 of 1,504,032 possible modules… Bill kills the program. This approach would take weeks. "This is still brute force! I need something better." Bill does some arithmetic while muttering to himself. "I would need how many compute-hours to find this thing?"? More typing. Bill blurts out. "Eight months! That's no good" Another notification from the post he made last week. He clicks and reads it to quietly. "You're missing the point and what you're trying to goes against security model that the product is designed for…" "Yeah, genius, I'm trying to crack this system. Of course what I'm doing goes against the model." Then Bill sees how the author of the post is one of the contributors to the project. He looks up the project. Then gets the project commit history. Bill contacts the author of the post. He describes a very sanitized version of the attack. The author says "there's no way to reverse-engineer the keys. That's the point." "Just for the sake of argument though, was there any default key, maybe something in the reference documentation?" He finds out that Ed never generated his own private keys. He used this brilliantly complex system but went with the keys that were in the system, that were never part of the project. Ed used a phrase scrawled on his desk for the salt that spins up the system. He realizes the thing was meant to protect certain latitude / longitude locations. He looks up these locations. He reads the name of the canyon where Maggie and Sasha camped. He emails his boss. He sees how he can get the data back. Sasha at the library Background: several weeks later. Sasha now stays with some squatters / punk rock kids in the capital city. Instead of travelling and seeing sights and wandering, she spends her days in the library reading newspaper articles and learning everything she can about what happens when indigenous folks live on land that will be mined. It is grim. She discovers that illegal mining is commonplace. It often starts before real mining begins. If a big firm can use illegal scouts to discover the relative wealth in advance, they avoid wasting money on mines that turn out to have less resources. In the case of this planned copper mine, there are so many different foreign firms that want to develop the copper mines. The government is eager to sell the rights. The local indigenous people are effectively invisible in the government. Sasha gets a text: PROTEST IS WHEN I SAY SOMETHING DOESN'T PLEASE ME. RESISTANCE IS WHEN I ENSURE IT OCCURS NO MORE. In the locker room "Some changes were easy to reverse. Say you heat water, you get steam. If the steam doesn't escape, and you can chill it, and you've got liquid water again." Bill makes a loop gesture while he explains to Paul while the two of them get dressed. "Well, I don't mean these are easy to reverse. Nothing about this is easy. I should have said the changes are possible to reverse, and I know we've got the correct results. "It seems like initially, Ed was planning on holding the business hostage. The majority of the damage can be reversed because I think he wanted to ask for a ransom." "But take a slice of bread and toast it. I can chill that bread, but now I've got cold toast. I can't un-toast bread." "The stuff he did in the geographics is more like that. Just straight sabotage, but really complex sabotage, as far as I can tell. In his notes, it was clear he wasn't thinking about how to reverse the changes to the geographics. He wanted the stuff to be not noticeable, but wrong." Bill knows from sitting in enough meetings with Paul that he only speaks when there is a silent break in the conversation. So Bill stops talking, even though he had rehearsed this speech by himself in the car over and over, and he was only halfway done. In his head, Bill keeps repeating the unspoken parts. Ed looked like he wanted to make some spots on maps invisible. "Here's where he got sloppy -- -- Ed used the same keys on this as on his own personal stuff. I gave the cops his phone's device ID and the next time he turns it on, they'll find him. But he hasn't turned on his phone in a week or so. Not sure why. He's pretty much gone." Bill bites the inside of his cheek and starts counting the lockers to keep his mind busy. "The company lost some money. You think you had a bad day. But you didn't. You'll go home, get some rest. Other folks might have a bad day today." Bill is doing his best to keep a look on his face. Something that implies earnestness as the older partner keeps talking. Bill points at the older man's locker, where his phone is lighting up. The older man grabs it. "Mr. Jones, how is the family?" Bill eavesdrops but tries not to look like he's eavesdropping. His boss has the volume on the phone turned up so loud though he can almost hear both sides. "Is that a fact. Well may The Lord bless him." Bill looks around the locker room. This place is a relic. He had noticed when he got out of the shower how on the sink counters they had bottles of hair products he was sure nobody used any more. But rich old dudes still use hair tonics apparently. After they play squash. Bill drives home and while he drives, plays his voice mail through his car speaker. "Uh Mr. Morgan, this is Detective Schultz. We need you to call us back. We have some more questions about the information you provided us on Edward Mosby. Please call me back." Next message. "Detective Schultz again. We found Edward Mosby. We would appreciate your help." Later, Bill calls the detective back. Schultz explains that Mosby's body was found in a river. It appears he jumped off the nearby bridge. Maggie at the squat Sasha stands in line at the post office. There's an old TV on the wall. She watches a story about a collapse in an illegal mine and the workers that were injured. By the time she gets to the front of the line, she feels terrible. She explains she is there to pick up some documents. Sasha sits outside on the sidewalk and reads them. Sasha crams the papers in her bag and heads back to the squat. Sasha smokes a cigarette while sitting on the steps leading down from the warehouse back door. Maggie walks around the corner. They look at each other for a moment. "Hey" Maggie says it in a lower, slower tone than her usual style. She reaches out to hug Sasha. They embrace, but it feels half-hearted, timid. Sasha inhales one more time and then puts the butt out into a can. Maggie tries not to frown, but Sasha smoking just feels so incongruous. "So, how are you?" Maggie asks. Sasha looks away. Maggie notices Sasha is thinner. "Can I get a tour of this place?" Sasha shows where she's been staying. It's really an old auto garage. As Sasha walks through the huge kitchen, a tall guy with a beard and eagle-like eyes calls to them, calling Sasha, but using a different name. "Who is this?" he asks, kind of smiling, kind of not. Maggie watches Sasha's face, and almost wonders if Sasha is embarrassed of her. This guy is not good looking but his demeanor suggests he is somehow way up in the hierarchy. Sasha explains how Maggie is a friend that was in town. The guy stares at Maggie the whole time. In a weird, "what can you do for me" kind of way. Maggie smiles, hoping to defuse the situation and she puts out her hand, but he doesn't take it, instead he looks at Sasha. And then Sasha says "Mala doesn't shake hands with people". Maggie almost feels embarrassed. She reminds herself though that realizes she's not the weirdo here -- these people are the odd ones. Maggie sits on a couch while Sasha sits at a table and hits a key on a keyboard to wake up the computer. "What did he call you?" Maggie asks. Sasha looks up and says quietly, almost in a whisper "I'm not going by the name you know me as." "What the hell are you doing here, S?" Later, Maggie reads a magazine while Sasha types into this antique computer, stopping every so often to search through heaps of different printed out documents. Maggie looks up. "So, this is what you've been doing since you came here?" Maggie looks around. There's big books and printouts and letters all over. Sasha doesn't reply. Maggie stares at her. Then Maggie stands up and Sasha whispers. "We don't even get a chance to tell the story" Sasha sniffs. Maggie walks across the room and touches Sasha's back. Sasha shivers. "I need to think about what to do next." Maggie frowns. "Sasha, this is consuming you. You look like you're burning yourself out. Let's go out. Let's have some fun." Sasha stares at the ground, then turns to look at Maggie for a minute. Then read more in the papers." "I'm not in the mood to go fucking shopping." "Wow, that was cold." Maggie looks at Sasha. Sasha looks back at her. Sasha says "You should go." Maggie opens her mouth. Closes it. Sasha sees Maggie's jaw muscles clench. Then Maggie walks out. Coffee and a tie pin Later, Sasha is back at her computer, writing letters, when she gets a message on her phone. It says "APOCATEQUIL CANYON". She looks at it again. "What?" "DO YOU WANT TO SAVE IT" Sasha reads that one aloud and says out loud "I'm trying to" "MEET ME HERE" and an address. The address is a cafe. She recognizes the old man from the meeting in the hotel sitting at a table. "You met me and my friend. You really work for the State Department?" "Yes, really. The men you were with that night are soldiers in a particularly nasty cartel." "Did that girl ever get rescued?" He frowns at that. "I get it, she never existed in the first place. That's what my friend said." "Margaret?" Sasha doesn't reply. There is a pause. The man shifts a little forward and lowers his voice. "I understand you are working to stop the mining in the canyon." Sasha barely nods. The man seems to relax a bit. "I was asked to research some of the reports that American mining firms are operating here without obtaining the appropriate permits." Sasha spoke up. "That was me! I filed those writs! These companies are just bribing locals and then tearing shit up! Why didn't you do anything?" He looks back at her. "You think I have the authority to stop this? You think my boss has that authority? This is literally worth billions of dollars. Career public service employees can't stop something like this." Sasha is surprised by how angry she feels right now. She faces somebody telling her that the last months of effort have been a waste. "Seems like me doing all the research was just a way to keep me distracted." He tells a story about how in central Africa, rebels shut down a mine by planting explosives and then calling in threats. "In the end, sometimes that is what it takes". Sasha can't tell if this guy is really willing to use violence to stop the project. Or maybe he is trying to set up / frame Sasha. He might be a double agent, or not. It isn't clear. The guy has a tie clip with an Andean condor on it. Sasha's phone buzzes. Maggie. She sent a picture of the two of them together, grinning. The man abruptly speaks up. "I'm looking for someone serious. I hoped I found one." Sasha looks up. In her mind, she sees herself standing on the edge of a pit.