“I’m pulling together a dive team now. We can be on site in forty-eight hours.”

“Good work. We’ll go over the details tomorrow.”

The two men hung up after some unrelated chitchat.

The call had been made earlier that day. Adriano read the notes he’d written down. He checked out of his motel room and drove to a storage unit, one of several he maintained near Washington. The unit contained weapons and ammunition, money, changes of clothing and identity, and, for his immediate purposes, a complete set of scuba gear, which he loaded into the trunk of his car.

The next morning his car was bumping along the dirt road into St. Anthony’s Wilderness. He parked at the edge of the lake, got into a wet suit, and slipped into his buoyancy compensator and tank. Adriano was an accomplished diver, having learned his skills from the SEALs who’d been on Baltazar’s payroll.

He swam to a buoy floating in the lake, glanced at the reading on his portable GPS, and dove down to the hotel with powerful flutter kicks. He made his way to the kitchen and found the shaft. He dove into the opening without hesitating. Even if he hadn’t been anxious to get to the mine, it was doubtful he would have noticed the block-shaped plastic objects buried in the rubble within a few feet of the shaft opening.

When Adriano got to the bottom of the shaft, he was surprised to see a waterproof slate with an arrow drawn on it and the words: THIS WAY.

He followed the direction the arrow was pointing and came to another slate indicating a tunnel off the main cave. He followed it to an intersection. Another slate, another arrow. He came to the end of the tunnel. A fourth arrow pointed the way into the large mine chamber with the dais.

AS ADRIANO followed the arrow on the slate, two figures slipped quietly from the woods and made their way to the water’s edge. Austin checked his watch. “It’s been thirty minutes,” he said.

“That would put him down the shaft and into the mine,” Zavala said.

The phony telephone conversation had been set up as bait. Time to spring the trap. Austin waded into the water up to his waist. He was holding a transmitter protected in a waterproof case. He waited a few minutes, then lowered the transmitter into the water and pressed a button. Seconds later, multiple mounds of foam disturbed the surface of the lake.

Austin watched, tight-lipped, until the expanding ripples washed against his chest.

Then he turned and sloshed his way back to shore.

He was met by a grim-faced Zavala, who gave him a folder he’d found in Adriano’s car. The folder was marked NUMA.

FAR BELOW THE SURFACE of the lake, Adriano heard the explosions as a series of thuds.