“All he said was to decompress after our last assignment,” Zavala said.

“You make my case. Idle time is a dangerous thing in the hands of a collector.” Austin ripped the target off the tree and tucked it into his pocket. “What brings you to Virginia? Run out of women to date in Washington?”

Zavala’s quiet-spoken charm and dark good looks made him much in demand on the Washington dating scene. The corners of his mouth turned up slightly in his trademark smile.

“I won’t say I’ve been living a monk’s life because you’d never believe me. I stopped by to show you a project I started months ago.”

“Project S? You can fill me in while we work on a couple of beers,” Austin said.

He put the shooting gear in a bag, wrapped the pistol in a soft cloth, and led the way up a staircase to a wide deck that overlooked the river.

Austin had bought the boathouse near Langley when he was with a clandestine undersea unit of the CIA. The purchase was beyond his budget, but the panoramic view of the river had closed the deal, and he got the price down because the boathouse was a wreck. He had spent thousands of dollars and countless hours transforming it from a run-down repository for boats to a comfortable retreat from the demands of his job as director of the Special Assignments Team.

Austin got couple of cold Tecate beers from the refrigerator, went out to the deck and handed one to Zavala. They clinked bottles and took a swig of the Mexican brew. Zavala took a sheet of computer paper from his pocket, placed it on a table, and smoothed out the folds with his hand.

“What do you think of my new wet submersible?”

In a wet submersible, the pilot and passenger wore scuba gear and sat on the outside of the vehicle rather than inside an enclosed cockpit. Wet submersibles commonly echoed the shape of their dry counterparts, with propellers at one end of a torpedo-shaped vehicle, the pilot at the other end.

The vehicle that Zavala had designed had a long, sloping hood, tapering trunk, and a wraparound windshield. It had dual headlights, white, so-called cove panels on the side, and a two-toned interior. The submersible had four thrusters instead of wheels.

Austin cleared his throat. “If I didn’t know this was a submersible, I’d swear it looked like a 1961 Corvette. Your ’Vette, in fact.”

Zavala pinched his chin between his thumb and forefinger. “This is turquoise. My car is red.”

“She looks fast,” Austin said appraisingly.

“My car can do zero to sixty in about six seconds. This is a little slower. But she’ll move out on or under the water and handles the curves as if they weren’t there. She’ll do everything a car can do except peel rubber.”