Medusa (NUMA Files 8)

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 reminiscing 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 come over right away?” he asked.

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

“I’ve got something 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 from oceangoing to land creature always came as a shock. Shoes felt like vises attached to his feet, legs 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 small building in Arlington.

At the front door of the former library, he punched the entry code into a keypad and stepped into the main living level. 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 whitewashed 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 basement, where he spent his spare time when he wasn’t tinkering with his Corvette.

Austin descended the stairs to the brightly lit workshop. Zavala had utilized every square inch of the former book-storage room for his gleaming collection of lathes, drills, and milling machines. Odd-shaped metal parts whose functions were known only to Zavala hung from the walls next to black-and-white poster engravings of old engines.

Mounted in glass cases were scale models of the cutting-edge underwater vehicles Zavala had designed for NUMA. A Stuart model steam engine he was restoring sat on a table. Zavala never hesitated to get his hands greasy when it came to tinkering with mechanical contrivances or creating new ones, but today he was facing a computer screen with his back to Austin.

Austin glanced around at the bewildering shrine Zavala had established to moving parts.

“Ever think of continuing where Dr. Frankenstein left off?” he asked.

Zavala spun in his chair, his lips cracked in their usual slight smile.

“Making monsters out of junk parts is ancient history, Kurt. Robotics is where it’s at. Isn’t that right, Juri?”

A Tyrannosaurus rex, around ten inches high, with plastic skin the color and texture of an avocado, stood next to the computer. It waggled its head, shuffled its feet, rolled its eyes, opened its toothy mouth, and said, “Si, Senor Zavala.”

Austin pulled up a stool.

“Who’s your green friend?”

“Juri, short for Jurassic Park. Got the little guy over the Internet. He’s programmed for about twenty functions. I tinkered with his innards to make him speak Spanish.”

“A bilingual T-Rex,” Austin said. “I’m impressed.”

“It wasn’t that difficult,” Zavala said. “His circuits are relatively simple. He can move and bite, and he can respond to external stimuli. Give him a little more muscle, bigger teeth, optical sensors, put him in a waterproof jacket, and you have something like the mechanical shark that thought an Austinburger would make a tasty snack.”

Zavala wheeled his chair aside to give Austin a clear view of his monitor. Floating in a slow rotation against a black background was a three-dimensional neon-blue image of the manta-ray AUV that had cut the bathysphere cable and attacked Austin.

Austin let out a low whistle.

“That’s it. Where did you find this thing?”

“I went back to the original video from the Hardsuit camera.”