Once he found the distribution center, Cooper drove around the perimeter of the place for a look around. It was a massive facility that made Cooper think suddenly of New Jersey-a vast, sprawling campus of one-story buildings equipped with loading docks, surrounded by what had to be ten square miles of parking lot. The place appeared to be accessible, from the road anyway, via two secure entrances, each equipped with a guard booth and gate. One was much bigger than the other, the larger serving as the egress point for tractor-trailers, Cooper losing count at 237 rigs being loaded or unloaded behind the sea of buildings. He saw a couple of the semis leave, and a couple others come in. The guards granting this access didn’t seem too diligent, but Cooper didn’t have an eighteen-wheeler on hand.
The second gate was your standard corporate-campus security booth, same in any country-swipe your pass card across the black panel on the post astride the guard booth and the gate would open to let you in. While Cooper watched, he saw the guard manning the booth wave to or otherwise greet every driver coming in. That was the nature of the second entrance-it was the administrative parking lot, all cars and no rigs, the autos lined up outside the only building on the lot that lacked loading docks.
This would be where Borrego kept his office.
Cooper had some trouble devising a painless way in, but on his ninth loop around the complex, he noticed the trains. There was a switching engine pulling container cars in and out of the facility, five or six at a time. Even Cooper, beach denizen though he was, could admire the intermodal transportation system Borrego had going: rail cars held the shipping containers today, but a truck or ship might hold them tomorrow. The switching locomotive was busy plucking select cars from a pair of mile-long trains parked on a set of spurs, set off to the side of the main rail thoroughfare. The tracks may well have served other facilities in the area, but the main stop appeared to be Borrego Industries.
Cooper ditched his rental car on a dusty shoulder between a roadside junkyard and a service station. Locking it with the remote, he strolled around the back of the service station as though headed for the restroom, but kept going until he hit the switching track behind. He doubled back a couple hundred yards so that he could hide behind the junkyard, then waited there until the switching engine came rumbling along, the rhythmic bong bong of its klaxon announcing its passage. The engineer had four of the container cars hooked up this time around.
He stayed hidden behind a stack of punctured tires until the locomotive passed-Cooper making sure the engineer couldn’t clock him-then stepped out and jogged alongside the slow-moving train until he found a good handle and pulled himself aboard. He clung to a ladder beneath two towering twin-stack shipping containers while the train pulled onto the property, waited for the hydraulic hiss of the train’s brakes, jumped off, walked around the side of the building, found his way to the sidewalk lining the administrative building, and strolled through the glass doors and into the main lobby.
Coming in, he saw it did not appear there was much pomp or circumstance here. Judging from the number of cars in the lot, there couldn’t have been more than twenty-five people working in the business wing to begin with-none of them, apparently, working in particularly luxurious digs.
He approached a stern-cheeked receptionist. She sat behind a fold-out desk that might have been a card table in another life.
“Afternoon,” he said, going with English for no particular reason.
There was little life in the look she shot back at him.
Cooper added, “I’m here to see the Polar Bear.”
“Pardona me?” she said, struggling even with the two-word foray into English.
“El Oso Blanco,” Cooper said, grinning as though he were a salesman here to hawk business-to-business long-distance telephone service. “Good old Ernie.”
Appearing mildly relieved by his use of Spanish, she returned to the comfort zone of her native tongue. “Security hadn’t told us-”
“Sí,” Cooper answered, “they were pretty busy up front.”
“I don’t have you on Mr. Borrego’s calendar.”
They were sticking with Spanish now. Cooper noted where her eyes went as she dropped Borrego’s name: the double doors at the end of the hallway to Cooper’s right. Not that he couldn’t have guessed which office belonged to the main man upon entering the otherwise Spartan complex.
Cooper said, “You mind if I just…” and, keeping the salesman’s smile plastered on his face, headed past the card table and on down the hall.
Standing, the receptionist pronounced her objections at great volume, then punched a button on her telephone console and began yelling something about “Seguridad!” into the phone. Cooper opened one of the double doors at the back of the short hallway, entered, then closed and locked the door behind him. He turned and encountered exactly what-or at least who-he had expected to find, only on a much larger scale than anticipated.
Seated before a tropical fish tank that looked about twenty feet long by eight tall-Cooper putting it at fifteen, twenty thousand gallons-was a man with one of the largest heads ever seen on a human being. Adorned with a wireless telephone headset, outfitted in an off-white three-piece suit that made Cooper think of Tom Wolfe, the man Cooper presumed to be Ernesto Borrego was digging in-big-time.
Cooper watched as the man called the Polar Bear, unfazed by his entrance, continued working from a tub the size of a deep sea charter’s bait bucket. He used a serving fork to stab a mound of the pasta within, wound it in a tight spiral with the aid of a ladle-size spoon, then lifted the fork-bound coil of semolina and sauce into his monstrous facial cavity.
Skin the color of the moon on the clearest of Caribbean nights, suit protected from the elements by a gigantic red-checked napkin, Borrego was working on a bottle of red too, a decanter’s worth resting on his big desk alongside the tub.
Eating the food the way he was, the man not the slightest bit disturbed by his entrance, it struck Cooper that Borrego looked about like…a polar bear.
Borrego shoveled another mouthful of noodles into his maw. When he’d chewed and swallowed, washing it down with a sip taken directly from the carafe, he wiped his mouth with the bib and said, “Who the fuck are you?”
As far as Cooper could tell, Borrego hadn’t yet looked up to examine him.
“May not resemble one,” Cooper said, “but I’m a canary.”
Borrego chewed a new spool of noodles. He looked to Cooper to be conducting two operations: the sensory function of enjoying the flavors of the pasta, and the intellectual act of solving the half-ass riddle. When he’d finished masticating, Borrego made a clicking sound somewhere in his huge mouth before returning for another backhoe-dig with the serving fork.
“Canary in a mine shaft, you mean,” he said. His English was clean-middle-America news-anchor clean.
Muted voices came from beyond the door Cooper had his back against. Somebody tried the knob; Cooper wrapped his hand around it just in case the lock hadn’t done the trick. There came more muted chitchat from the hall.
“More or less,” Cooper said. “I’m not expecting to pass into bird heaven anytime soon, but the fact remains that the people who’re currently considering offing me will probably come after you next. Or even first.”
Borrego looked at him while continuing to eat, seemingly observing him for the first time.
“So am I the canary,” he said, “or you?”
Cooper shrugged.
“How’d you get in here?” Borrego said.
“The guards in your booths don’t concern themselves with the trains.”
Borrego stopped chewing for a moment then started up again.
“Have to fix that,” he said.