Zavala pushed his empty plate away. “As they say back home, the best time to fish is when the fish are hungry.”
“I happen to know you grew up in the desert, amigo,” Austin said, rising. “But I agree with what you’re saying. Let’s go fishing.”
From Ensenada they got back on the highway and headed south. As in Tijuana, the commercial sprawl thinned out and vanished and the highway went down to two lanes. They turned off the highway past Maneadero and followed back roads past agricultural fields, scattered farm houses, and old missions, eventually coming into rugged, lonely country with fog-shrouded rolling hills that dropped down to the sea. Zavala, who was navigating, checked the map.
“We’re almost there. Just around the corner,” he said.
Austin didn’t know what he was expecting. Even so he was surprised when they rounded the curve and he saw a neatly lettered sign in Spanish and English announcing they were at the home of the Baja Tortilla Company. He pulled over to the side of the road. The sign was at the beginning of a long, clay drive bordered with planted trees. They could see a large building at the end of the driveway.
Austin leaned on the steering wheel and pushed his Foster Grants up onto his forehead. “You’re sure this is the right spot?”
Zavala handed the map over for Austin’s examination. “This is the place,” he said.
“Looks like we drove all this way for nothing.”
“Maybe not,” Zavala said. “The huevos rancheros were excellent, and I’ve got a new Hussong’s Cantina T-shirt.”
Austin’s eyes narrowed. “Coincidence makes me suspicious. The sign says ‘Visitors Welcome.’ As long as we’re here, let’s take them at their word.”
He turned the truck off the highway and drove a few hundred yards to a neatly tended gravel parking lot marked with spaces for visitors. Several cars with California plates and a couple of tour buses were parked in front of the building, a corrugated aluminum structure with a portaled adobe façade and tiled roof in the Spanish style. The smell of baking corn wafted through the pickup’s open windows.
“Diabolically clever disguise,” Zavala said.
“I hardly expected to see a neon sign that said, ‘Welcome from the guys who killed the whales.’ ”
“I wish we were toting our guns,” Zavala said with mock gravity. “You never know when a wild tortilla will attack you. I once heard about someone being mauled by a burrito in Nogales—”
“Save it for the drive back.” Austin got out of the car and led the way to the ornately carved front door of dark wood.
They stepped into a whitewashed reception area. A smiling young Mexican woman greeted them from behind a desk. “Buenos días,” she said. “You are in luck. The tour of the tortilla factory is just starting. You’re not with a group from a cruise boat?”
Austin suppressed a smile. “We’re on our own. We were driving by and saw the sign.”
She smiled again and asked them to join a group of senior citizens, mostly Americans and mostly from the Midwest from the sounds of their accents. The receptionist, who also acted as guide, ushered them into the bakery.
“Corn was life in Mexico, and tortillas have been the staple food in Mexico for centuries with both the Indians and the Spanish settlers.” She led the way past where sacks of corn were being emptied into grinding machines. “For many years people made their tortillas at home. The corn was ground into meal, mixed with water to produce masa, then rolled, cut, pressed, and baked by hand. With the growth of demand in Mexico and especially in the United States, the tortilla industry has become more centralized. This has allowed us to modernize our production facilities providing for more efficient and sanitary operation.”
Speaking in low tones as they trailed behind the others, Austin said, “If the market for Mexican flapjacks is in the U.S., why isn’t this place closer to the border? Why make them down here and ship them up the highway?”
“Good question,” Zavala said. “The tortilla business in Mexico is a tightly held monopoly run by guys with close government connections. It’s a billion-dollar industry. Even if you did have a good reason to locate this far south, why build overlooking the ocean? Nice place for a luxury hotel, but an operation like this?”
The tour went past the dough mixers which fed into machines that produced hundreds of tortillas a minute, the thin flat pies coming out on conveyor belts, all tended by workers in laundry-white coats and plastic caps. The guide was ushering the group to the packaging and shipping department when Austin spied a door with words written in Spanish on it.
“Employees only?” he asked Zavala.
Joe nodded.
“I’ve learned all I want to know about burritos and enchiladas.” Austin stepped aside and tried the door. It was unlocked. “I’m going to look around.”
Eyeing Austin’s imposing physique and blazing white hair, Zavala said, “With due respect for your talents as a snoop, you don’t exactly blend in with the people working around here. I might be less conspicuous than a giant gringo stalking the hallways.”
Zavala had a good point. “Okay, snoop away. Be careful. I’ll meet you at the end of the tour. If the guide asks, I’ll say you had to go to the restroom.”
Zavala winked and slipped through the door. He was confident he could charm his way out of practically any situation and had already prepared a story saying he’d become lost looking for the baño. He found himself in a long hallway with no windows or other openings except for a steel door at the far end. He walked the length of the hallway and put his ear against the door. Not hearing anything, he tried the knob. The door was locked.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a modified Swiss Army knife that would have got him arrested in places where possession of burglar tools is illegal. The standard attachments such as scissors, nail file, and can opener had been replaced with picks for the most common locks. On the fourth try he heard the latch click open. Behind the door another corridor slanted down. Unlike the first, this passage had several doors. All were locked except one that opened into a locker room.
The lockers were secure, and he could have opened them with his picks if he had time. He glanced at his watch. The tour would wind up soon. On the opposite wall were shelves piled with neatly folded white coats. He found one that fit and slipped it on. In a supply cabinet he discovered a clipboard. He stepped out into the corridor and continued on to yet a third door. This, too, was locked, but he managed to open it after a few tries.
The door opened onto an elevated platform that overlooked a big room. The platform led to a series of walkways that crossed through a web of linking horizontal and vertical pipes. The low hum of machinery seemed to come from everywhere, and he couldn’t trace its source. He descended a set of stairs. The pipes came out of the floor, then disappeared at right angles into the wall. Plumbing for the tortilla factory, he surmised. At one end of the room was another door. It was unlocked. When he cautiously opened it, a cool ocean breeze hit him in the face.
He gasped with surprise. He was standing on a small platform perched high on the side of a cliff, facing out onto a lagoon about two hundred feet below him. It was a beautiful vista, and again he wondered why somebody hadn’t built a hotel rather than a factory there. He assumed the factory was behind the edge of the cliff, but he couldn’t see it from his angle. He looked down again. The water washed up against the jagged rocks along the shore in foamy ripples. The platform had a gate at one end that led to empty space with no steps going down or up. Odd. A few feet from the gate a metal rail ran down the side of the cliff and disappeared into the water.
He followed the rail down to the lagoon with his eye. A section of water appeared to be darker than that surrounding it. It might have been kelp and other seaweed washing against the rocks. As he watched, there was an intense bubbling at the base of the cliff, and a large, shiny, egg-shaped object suddenly appeared from the water and began its climb up the side of the cliff. Of course! The rail was for an elevator.
The egg rose steadily up the track. It would be there within seconds. Zavala ducked back into the big room with the pipes, keeping the door open a crack.
The egg, made of a dark tinted glass or plastic that blended in with the side of the cliff, came to a stop at the platform. A door opened, and two men in white smocks stepped out. Zavala dashed for the stairs. Within seconds he was back at the storeroom. He tore his coat off, folded it as neatly as possible, and quickly walked along the corridors to the bakery. Nobody saw him step back into the area open to the public. He hurried along in the direction Austin and the tour group had taken. The guide saw him approach and gave him a quizzical and not altogether pleased look.
“I was looking for the baño.”
She blushed and said, “Oh, yes. I will show you.” She clapped her hands for attention. “The tour is about over.” She handed everyone a sample package of tortillas and conducted them back to the reception area. As the cars and tour buses left, Austin and Zavala compared notes.
“From the look on your face I’d guess your little exploration was successful.”
“I found something. I just don’t know what it is.” Zavala laid out a quick summary of his findings.
“The fact that they hid something underwater indicates that they don’t want anyone to know what they are doing,” Austin said. “Let’s take a walk.”
They strolled around the side of the factory but only got a short distance toward the water before they encountered a high mesh fence topped with razor wire a few hundred feet short of where the cliff dropped off.
“So much for an ocean view,” Zavala said.
“Let’s see if we can get around to the other side of the cove.”
The two men returned to the pickup and drove back onto the road. Several tracks led down to the sea, but the fence blocked each potential access. They were just about to give up when they saw a man with a fishing pole and a basket full of fish coming from a path that led toward the water. Zavala called him over and asked if they could get to the water. The man was wary at first, apparently thinking they had something to do with the tortilla place. When Zavala extracted a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet, the man’s face lit up, and he said yes, there was a fence, but there was a place to crawl under it.
He led them on a narrow path through the shoulder-high bushes, pointed to a section of chain-link fence, and left clutching his windfall. A section of fence was bent back from the ground and a hole scooped out underneath. Zavala easily slithered under to the other side, then held the fence for Austin. They followed the overgrown path until they came to the edge of a cliff. They were near the tip of the southernmost promontory enclosing the lagoon.
A trail that must have been worn by the feet of fishermen descended down the less steep side of the point. The NUMA men were more interested in the unimpeded view across the cove. From this angle the dark metal structure looked like a sinister redoubt out of a Conan movie. Austin scanned the building through his binoculars, then pointed them at the side of the cliff. Sunlight glinted off metal about where Zavala had described the elevator track. He let his eyes sweep out to the wide entrance of the lagoon where surf broke on the rocks, then back to the factory.
“Ingenious,” Austin said with a chuckle. “If you stuck a big facility out here in the boonies, everyone, like our fisherman friend back there, would talk about it. But put it in plain sight, invite the public to come tramping in and out every day, and you’ve got an unbeatable cover for some kind of clandestine operation.”
Zavala borrowed the binoculars and scanned the opposite cliff. “Why a waterproof elevator?”
“I don’t have an answer,” Austin said with a shake of his head. “I think we’ve seen all we’re going to see.”
Hoping to detect signs of activity around the building or cliff, they lingered a few more minutes, but the only movement they saw was the soaring sea birds. They headed away from the sea and minutes later were crawling under the fence. Zavala would have liked to ask the fisherman if he knew about the elevator or whether he had seen anything unusual in the lagoon, but the man had taken his money and run. They got back into the pickup and headed north.
Austin drove without talking. Zavala knew from past experience that his partner was chewing over a plan and when he had it fully formulated he would spill the details. Just beyond Ensenada, Austin said, “Is NUMA still running those field tests off San Diego?”
“As far as I know. I was planning to check in after the race to see how things were going.”
Austin nodded. During the drive back they exchanged small talk, trading war stories about past adventures and youthful indiscretions in Mexico. The long line of traffic at the border crossing was moving at a snail’s pace. They flashed their NUMA IDs to save time and were whisked through customs. Back in San Diego they headed toward the bay until they came to a sprawling municipal marina. They parked and made their way along a pier past dozens of sail- and powerboats. At the end of a dock reserved for larger craft they found a stubby, wide-beamed vessel about eighty-five feet long. Painted in white on the greenish-blue hull were the letters “NUMA.”
They stepped across the catwalk and asked one of the crewmen puttering on the deck if the captain were aboard. He led the way to the bridge, where a slim, olive-skinned man was going over some charts. Jim Contos was considered one of the best skippers in the NUMA fleet. The son of a Tarpon Springs sponge fisherman, he had been on boats since he was able to walk.
“Kurt. Joe,” Contos said with a wide grin. “What a nice surprise! I heard you were in the neighborhood, but I never suspected you’d honor the Sea Robin with a visit. What are you up to?” He glanced at Zavala. “Well, I always know what you’ve been up to.”
Zavala’s lips turned up in his typical slight smile. “Kurt and I were in the offshore boat race yesterday.”
A dark cloud crossed his brow. “Hey, I heard about that thing with your boat. I’m really sorry about that.”
“Thanks,” Austin said. “Then you must know about the dead gray whales.”
“I do—a very strange story. Any idea what killed them?”
“We might be able to find out with your help.”
“Sure, anything I can do.”
“We’d like to borrow the Sea Robin and the mini and do a little diving south of the border.”
Contos laughed. “You weren’t kidding about a big favor.” He paused in thought, then shrugged. “Why not? We’re just about through with our field tests here. If you can get an oral authorization to work in Mexican waters, it’s fine with me.”
Austin nodded and immediately called NUMA. After a few minutes of conversation he passed the cell phone to Contos. He listened, nodded, asked a few questions, then clicked off. “Looks like we’re heading south. Gunn gave his okay.” Rudi Gunn was NUMA director of operations in Washington. “Two days at the most. He wants you and Joe back so he can put you to work again. One thing, though. He says he won’t have time to get clearance from the Mexican government on short notice.”
“If anyone asks, we can say we were lost,” Austin said with feigned innocence.
Contos gestured at the glittering array of lights and dials on the ship’s console. “That might be a tough story to sell with all the electronics this vessel carries. The Sea Robin may be ugly, but she sure knows what’s going on in the world. We’ll let the State Department iron out any problems if we’re boarded. When do you want to leave?”
“We’ll pick up our gear and get back as soon as possible. The rest is up to you.”
“I’ll schedule a seven A.M. departure for tomorrow,” he said, and turned away to give the crew its new orders.
As Austin was walking back to the car he asked Zavala what Contos meant when he said he knew what Joe had been up to.
“We dated the same woman a few times,” Zavala said with a shrug.
“Is there any female in the District of Columbia you haven’t dated?”
Zavala thought about it. “The first lady. A
s you know, I draw the line at married women.”
“Relieved to hear that,” Austin said, getting behind the wheel.
“But if she becomes divorced, well . . . . ”
They got into the car, and as Austin started the engine he said, “I think this would be a good time for you to tell me about the guy in Nogales who was mauled by a burrito.”
7
UNDER A CLOUDLESS western sky, the teal green McDonnell-Douglas helicopter cleared the rugged peaks of Squaw Mountain, dipped low over the alpine waters of Lake Tahoe, and darted like a startled dragonfly to the California shore. It hovered an instant, then dropped into a tall stand of Ponderosa pine, touching down on a concrete landing pad. As the rotors spun to a stop an elephantine Chevy Suburban lumbered alongside. The driver, who was wearing a uniform the same dark green as the helicopter and the SUV, got out to greet the rangy passenger who stepped from the chopper.
Taking an overnight bag from the passenger’s hand, he said, “Right this way, Congressman Kinkaid.”
They got into the vehicle, which headed along a blacktop drive through thick forest. Minutes later it pulled up in front of a complex of buildings that looked like a redwood version of the fabled Hearst castle of San Simeon. The late-afternoon sun threw the turrets, walls, and towers into fantastic silhouette. A whole forest of giant trees must have been leveled merely to provide the facing. The sprawling edifice was the ultimate log cabin, squared and cubed in size, a series of connecting outbuildings clustered around a three-story main house.
Congressman Kinkaid muttered, “This place is bigger than the Mormon Tabernacle.”
“Welcome to Valhalla,” the driver said noncommittally.
He parked the vehicle in front, took the congressman’s bag, and led him up a wide stairway to a deck as long as a bowling alley, then into a large foyer paneled and beamed in dark, almost black wood. They followed a series of passageways done in the same dark paneling, finally stopping at a set of high metal doors cast in relief and shaped in a Gothic arch.