Chapter 2 - The Demands of the BillionaireOnce the luxury crowd dispersed, Jake from apartment 2A rushed over, his face flushed with anxiety.
“Maya! Are you okay?” Jake asked, looking at the slashed tent fabric lying in the mud. “I mean... did someone really cut your lines? That’s crazy! Why would anyone do that?”
“I don’t know yet, Jake,” Maya murmured, her hands still resting protectively over her camera bag.
Daniel placed a gentle hand on her shoulder, feeling the faint, lingering tremors in her muscles. “Come inside my tent. Let’s get you out of the cold and take a look at what you shot last night.”
They unzipped the heavy canvas door and ducked inside. The interior was warm, dry, and smelled faintly of cedar and rain-soaked canvas.
Maya sat down on the dry foam sleeping pad, unzipping her camera bag with methodical precision. She pulled out her weather-sealed DSLR camera, its black body slightly damp but untouched by the storm.
“When the storm started around nine,” Maya explained, her fingers navigating the camera buttons, “I set up my tripod near the eastern ridge overlook. I wanted a long-exposure shot of the lightning striking behind Caldwell’s new proposed resort boundary.”
“The area he’s claiming is a pristine conservation sanctuary?” Daniel asked, leaning in close beside her.
“Exactly,” Maya said. She powered on the view screen. “Caldwell announced yesterday that his foundation purchased twelve hundred acres of old-growth forest along the ridge to protect it from commercial logging.”
She zoomed in on a series of rapid burst shots captured at 9:45 p.m.
The first photo showed a flash of lightning illuminating the valley below the cliff face. In the foreground sat two heavy construction bulldozers and a commercial drilling rig, completely unmarked, hidden deep inside the protected forestry boundary.
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The second photo, zoomed closer using her telephoto lens, showed Julian Caldwell standing beside a man wearing a yellow hardhat, reviewing a set of industrial blueprints stamped with the logo Apex Mineral Extraction Corp.
Daniel leaned closer, his jaw tightening as he read the high-resolution text on the blueprint visible in the photo. “That’s not a conservation sanctuary. That’s an open-pit lithium mining survey.”
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