Trout told Austin that Gamay had left for Bonefish Key the day before. He had received a voice mail confirming her arrival but had yet to talk to her.

Austin then gave Trout a condensed version of his report of the attacks on the bathysphere.

“Now I know why you told Gamay that the dive was memorable, ” Trout said. “Where do we go from here?”

“I’m hopeful Gamay will turn up something on Doc Kane. He’s our major lead right now. Joe and I will compare notes and figure out our next move.”

Austin said he would keep Trout posted, and then he thawed out another bagel to make a tuna-fish sandwich. He ate the sandwich in his kitchen, wistfully reminiscing about the wonderful meals he had eaten in the world’s capitals, when the phone trilled.

He checked the caller ID. Then he pushed the SPEAKER button, and said, “Hello, Joe, I was just about to call you.”

Zavala got right to the point.

“Can you come over right away?” he asked.

“The Zavala black book has more women listed in it than the D.C. directory, so I know you’re not lonely. What’s going on?”

“I’ve got something I want to show you.”

Austin couldn’t miss the unmistakable note of excitement in Zavala’s soft-spoken voice.

“I’ll be over in an hour,” Austin said.

At sea, Austin’s typical work outfit was a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and sandals. The switch from oceangoing to land creature always came as a shock. Shoes felt like vises attached to his feet, legs seemed imprisoned in tan cotton slacks, the collar of his blue dress shirt chafed. While he would slip on his navy blue linen blazer, he refused to wear a tie. It felt like a noose around his muscular neck.

Unlike Dirk Pitt, who collected cars and seemed to have one for every occasion, Austin put his passion into his antique dueling pistols and instead drove a turquoise-colored Jeep Cherokee from the NUMA motor pool.

Suburban traffic was piling up, but Austin knew the short-cuts, and slightly less than an hour after Joe’s call he pulled up in front of a small building in Arlington.

At the front door of the former library, he punched the entry code into a keypad and stepped into the main living level. The space, which once had housed stacks, now looked like the interior of an adobe building in Santa Fe. The floors were dark red Mexican tile, the doorways arched, and niches in the whitewashed walls displayed colorful folk art that Zavala had collected on trips to his ancestral home in Morales. His father, a skilled carpenter, had made the beautifully carved furniture.

Austin called out Zavala’s name.

“I’m down in Frankenstein’s lab,” Zavala yelled up from his basement, where he spent his spare time when he wasn’t tinkering with his Corvette.