Jono looks as though he’s about to say something else but thinks better of it. He leaves to pass along the message while Dao’s men clear the crowd for his car to get through.

Twenty minutes later, Dao finds Sammy waiting at the back door to the office building, smoking a cigarette.

Sammy sees his hands are empty. “Where’s the money?” The smirk is replaced with a frown.

Moving quickly, Dao grabs the boy by his shoulders and slams him back against the wall. He picks up Sammy’s fallen cigarette and presses the lit end into the side of his neck. The boy screams.

“You got your money this month,” Dao tells him. “And you’re not getting any more.”

Sammy slides to the ground, gasping, clutching at his neck. “You know who my cousin is? You’ll pay for this!”

“Tell your cousin the community leader that this company will donate what we agreed on to his community projects and not a cent more. And don’t you ever pull shit like this again.”

Dao watches Sammy scramble away. His cousin isn’t a community leader so much as he’s a local gangster. But Dao isn’t afraid of him. And you let any of them get used to upping their price on you at will, and it’ll never stop.

Better let them learn the hard way. That is, after all, what he’s paid for. To give them the hard way, but only when they’re begging for it.

He feels a lot better now. His phone rings. “Yeah?” he says.

“Nora Watts is back in Vancouver. I saw her myself,” says Van Nguyen, his guy.

Dao goes back inside to hear the update. The boy, his cousin the corrupt community leader, and the protest graft are completely forgotten.

By the fence, the DSLR camera keeps clicking away until the big man disappears back inside. The reporter holding it couldn’t hear any of the exchange, but what he witnessed was an act of brutality toward this country’s protest movement, no doubt about it.

He waits a few more minutes to make sure nobody is coming back out, then he rises, stretches his legs, and heads off to find Sammy Saleh, one of the shining stars of the local conservation effort. Maybe he can get a few pictures of Sammy’s wounds, make a nice little package for the news.

The guy who’d slammed Sammy against the wall and burned him wasn’t familiar to him. He wasn’t one of the local employees or part of the private security team that protected access to the mine. No, he was the guy above it all. Who drove in, his car windows tinted too dark for anyone to catch more than a glimpse.

He was the guy who managed security, the one everyone was so afraid of. Who worked everyone to death and who no one dared to cross.