He stared at her while she continued typing the text into her phone.  Together, sentence by sentence, they both sat listening as the article described a horrific geological event off the coast of Peru, one that caused a mountain in the Yungay province to destabilize, triggering a massive avalanche cascading down the range in a slide of rock, ice and snow, destroying and burying two towns at over a hundred miles per hour under an estimated 80 million cubic meters of matter and debris.

The cataclysm killed over 60,000 people and injured 150,000 others in mere minutes—on May 31, 1970.  And the single Xeroxed picture they continued to stare at portrayed an entire field of destruction extending for miles into the distance.

When the last mechanical word sounded from Mona’s phone, the two finally looked back up at each other.

“How did Saad know?” whispered Mona.

All Omar could do was shake his head.

“You don’t think he–”

“What?”

“Had something to do with it.”

He frowned.  “You mean as in caused it?  How in the world do you cause an earthquake?”

“I didn’t mean cause it,” she snapped.  “I meant in some other way.”

“What other way?”

“I don’t know!  I’m just asking.”

Omar eased back in his seat and stared through the windshield at the empty road before them.  “How else could you know?”

“Maybe someone else knew it was coming.  Maybe a group of people.”

“Like scientists?”

“Maybe.  Maybe there was some instrumentation, and they saw it building up?”

“Maybe.  But a month in advance?  You can’t predict the timing of something like that.  Especially back then.”

“So, then Saad was just lucky with his timing?”

“And location.”

“Then if it couldn’t be caused, what about triggered?”

“Triggered how?”

“I don’t know.  Maybe by a drilling company.  Isn’t fracking supposed to weaken things in the ground?  The substructure or something.”

Omar shook.  “Fracking is new.  And that article said the epicenter was off the coast, in the ocean.”

“Fine, then you tell me.  How did Mido Saad know?”

He shook his head helplessly.  “I don’t know.”

Mona looked out the window with him before remembering something and returning to the back of her folder.  “My sister said he did this with other companies, too.”  She raised the small stack of newspaper articles and began going through them again.

The rest of the articles dispelled both possibilities.  Mido Saad was neither lucky nor a conspirator because each of the events was different both in type and location.  In Bangladesh, it was a tornado killing 681.  Then another earthquake in Tehran followed years later by a volcanic eruption in Colombia.

Yet each time, Saad was there.  Each time he had a new company, and it would turn around less than two years later and shutter its doors—undoubtedly, when its government contract had paid.