A man sat behind the desk talking on the phone in Chinese. He waved Zavala to a chair, continued chatting a minute, then ended the conversation and set the receiver back in its cradle. Popping up like a jack-in-the-box, he shook Zavala’s hand as if trying to coax water from a reluctant pump, then settled back in his chair.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said. “I’m Charlie Yoo.” He flashed a friendly smile. “Please, no jokes about the last name. I’ve heard enough ‘Yoo-hoo’ and ‘How’s by Yoo’ around here to last a lifetime.”

Yoo was a pencil-thin man in his mid-thirties. He wore a stylishly cut shiny gray suit with a cobalt blue shirt and blue-and-red striped tie, a sartorial style more in keeping with a cocktail hour at the Willard Hotel than the bowels of the FBI, where conservative navy blue suits were the norm. Yoo spoke English with a New York accent, the sentences coming like bursts of photon energy.

“Nice to meet you, Agent Yoo. I’m Caitlin’s friend, Joe Zavala.”

“The man from NUMA . . . great organization, Joe. Please call me Charlie. Caitlin’s a fantastic woman and a terrific cop. She said you were looking into the Pyramid Triad.”

“That’s right. She thought you might be able to help.”

Yoo sat back in his chair and tented his fingers.

“Excuse me for asking, Joe, but NUMA is an underwater outfit, from what I’ve heard. Why would a guy from NUMA be interested in Chinese organized crime?”

“We wouldn’t be, ordinarily. But someone tried to sabotage a NUMA operation, and we have circumstantial evidence that the seafood subsidiary of Pyramid Trading may have been involved.”

Yoo hiked his eyebrows like Groucho Marx.

“Excuse me for being skeptical, Joe, but that doesn’t seem like Pyramid’s m.o. What’s your evidence?”

“Let me fill in the background. A few days ago, NUMA launched the Bathysphere 3, a replica of a historical diving bell, in waters off Bermuda. The dive was broadcast all over the world . . . You may have seen it on television . . .”

Yoo spread his hands apart, his empty palms signifying no. “I’ve been pretty busy, Joe. Haven’t watched much TV. Is this the op that Pyramid supposedly tried to sabotage?”

Zavala nodded.

“I designed the diving bell,” he said, “and Kurt Austin, my partner at NUMA, was the project leader. The most interesting part of the dive wasn’t transmitted because an underwater robot cut the bathysphere’s cable.”

“Whoa!” Yoo said, a wide grin on his boyish face. “An underwater robot. That’s pretty wild stuff, Joe.”

“I thought so at the time. When the cable let go, the sphere was buried a half mile down in muck.”

Yoo leaned forward across the desk. His grin had disappeared.

“You’re not kidding, are you? That’s an incredible story! How’d you get out of a situation like that?”