“Most of it’s national park property. The few that are there are visitor centers, guard shacks, or wayside points for hikers. None big enough to let trucks of substance in, and the rest are way too populated to use unless at night. So far, we’ve seen nothing coming in late evenings, and the trail cams I’ve hacked into show only ranger jeeps traversing the fire lanes.”
“Maybe they don’t have tunnels,” TB chimed in.
“They’ve got to,” Steel insisted. A sudden thought occurred to him. “Midas. Run your drones across the cliffside.”
“How do you drive a truck over water?”
“You don’t,” Demon said, his eye trained on Steel. “But you can drive a boat.”
TB picked up a surveillance photo and threw it in front of the medic.
“It’s a sheer face. What are you suggesting? Drive a boat to the cliff edge and then climb somewhere? You could maybe move drugs that way, but not very fast.”
“But if there were an underground cave system…”
“Puma Cove.”
All eyes went to Daleyza.
God pulled the map closer to him so the lake portion was in the center of the table. “I don’t see anything on the map. What’s Puma Cove?”
“It’s man-made, and not on the map. If you’re in the water, you can only see it if you’re at the exact angle. There’s a sliver of space between a rock formation that rises from the water and the cliff itself. From up top, there’s a flat surface about three feet wide that connects the two, so no one seems to know it’s there. A small boat could get through the space at a very slow speed.”
“Midas!”
“Drone footage to the northern tip. Got it.”
“There’s a small beach there, and I overheard one of my brothers mention a cave he explored. He used to threaten to take me there and leave me. The beach portion is very small. Maybe ten, fifteen feet from cliff to water. Depends on the lake level, I’m sure.”
“Is there a way down there from the top of the cliff?” Steel asked.
“At one time, there was a beach ladder from up top, but they took it down. My father claimed he was worried we would try to use it and fall to our deaths. Now? I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t want anyone there, afraid they’d see what he was up to.”
“That cave has got to connect to a tunnel system. They probably have golf carts with long flatbeds to move the drugs from the warehouse to the cave entrance.”
“We saw those atBananato del Sole.They were moving medical equipment with it in the underground warehouse,” Demon said.
“I’m thinking the warehouse up top is only an unloading zone forsupplies coming in. There’s probably an elevator or a staircase to where the real work is done. When they’re ready to move the product, they load it onto the golf carts, take it to the mouth of the cave, transfer it to speedboats, then run the boats to a pickup point.”
“There’s a security turret connected to a portion of the warehouse.” Daleyza pointed to where the quadrangle met the turret, and the warehouse extended past the building. “It already has a spiral staircase for the security to get to the top for their shifts. They could have put an elevator there, or even continued the stairs there.”
Steel beamed at her. “Clever girl.”
“Not really. Just knowledge of the space.” She turned to face God. “Which may be horrifically inaccurate, given the amount of time I’ve been gone.”
“I don’t think you’re wrong. Not one little bit,” he assured her. “Midas, I want that drone footage as soon as possible.”
“Cerberus is manning it now, boss.”
“Excellent. How are we doing on our mystery man?”
Steel walked over to the computer monitor closest to him and leaned down to get a better look at the photograph Midas had put up.
“Big fat zero on that one. This guy is good.”
A soft gasp came from somewhere in front of him, and he lifted his head to see who had reacted, but everyone’s faces appeared blank or irritated. Nothing that warranted a gasp of surprise. Maybe he’d imagined it.
Shaking his head, he leaned back down, one palm flat on the table, the other on the back of the empty chair. Frustration began to take hold of him. Why couldn’t they find this fucker? He walked through an entire tourist site that had cameras to the hilt, not to mention an entire town with modern conveniences. Midas should have been able to catch a full front view of his face somewhere.
