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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 re 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 coht away?” he asked

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

“I’ve got so 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 fro to land creature always cas 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 ston

At the front door of the former library, he punched the entry code into a keypad and stepped into thelevel 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 ashed 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 base with his Corvette

Austin descended the stairs to the brightly lit workshop Zavala had utilized every square inch of the for collection of lathes, drills, andmachines Odd-shapedfros of old engines