“If everything’s already secure, then it won’t take you long to do a quick double check, will it?”

  “No, but what if someone important needs to get in?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “You do your rounds. Be quick about it. Ron and I will stay here at the entrance and won’t let anyone in. If they seem important, we’ll come up with a story to hold them until you return.”

  “I don’t know,” said Devon. “You don’t have training for this.”

  “You’re right, Devon, but I know how to handle myself, and I know how to stop someone from walking in a door. Ron and I won’t go inside either. Unless you’ve got a better idea?”

  He paused, offered me a definitive nod, and dashed off around the building.

  I wasn’t sure how long it would take to run a lap around the arena without stopping, but Devon couldn’t have been much short of the record. He came sprinting at us from the opposite direction within a few minutes, and even when he saw us standing there alone, he didn’t stop running hard until he reached his post.

  “Everything okay?” he asked, puffing lightly.

  “Everything is peachy,” I said. “No one in or out.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. Now if you don’t mind, we need to go and find out what’s going on inside.”

  “Sure, no problem.” He gestured toward the entrance then suddenly stopped. “Did you sign in?”

  Ron held up two visitor tags. On one he had written Ron, and on the other, Mr. Jones. “All signed in and accounted for.”

  Devon stood tall, and for a moment, I thought he was going to salute us. “Remember, Mr. Gelphert isn’t on-site.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “He’s not the one I need to see. Do you know where the facility manager is right now?”

  Devon jumped on his radio and, after a couple of garbled squawks, reported that he had checked all perimeter entry and exit points and that the facility was on lockdown. Then he asked where Francisco Monaro was.

  “Why?” asked the voice.

  Devon glanced at me. “A car alarm went off in the parking lot. Maybe it was just the wind or something, but I think it was Mr. Monaro’s car. Just wanted to let him know.” The radio voice offered a short response that I didn’t quite catch, except for the word out. Then Devon clipped his radio back on his hip.

  “He’s in the control room.”

  Chapter Ten

  We found Francisco Monaro in a room that from the outside looked like every other room around the maintenance concourse. The simple door had a small plaque that read Control Room. I knocked, stepped inside, and found Monaro and one other guy looking at their laptops. I guess in my mind’s eye I saw something more akin to mission control at Houston than two guys with laptops and a table that could have come from IKEA. Perhaps it was a testament to the fact that computing power had come so far that you could almost run a major sporting facility from your living room, sitting in your jammies.

  I was reminded of a guy that I had met at a bar who had worked his entire life up the road at Cape Canaveral. He said there was more computing power in my cell phone than was available to all of NASA during the Apollo 11 mission. Was I more impressed that people were able to land astronauts on a celestial body using such limited computers, or that we could now pack so much into such a tight little glass-and-aluminum container? The guy clarified that NASA’s machines made the calculations slowly compared to today’s computers, but those machines were backed by the finest minds on the planet, whereas the average lightning-fast cell phone was often operated by some moron whose intelligence extended to screaming down I-95, no hands on the wheel, with the phone plastered to his ear.

  When Francisco Monaro saw me, he simply shook his head.

  “You see,” he said, “it is a curse.”

  “What’s up now?”

  “The power’s been cut,” he said.

  I surveyed the small room. “So how are the lights still on?”

  “Different system. I’m talking about the system that powers the floor heat.”

  “Floor heat? Why on earth does anyone in Florida need underfloor heating?”

  Monaro looked at me like I was the dullest tool in the shed. “It’s not for the fans. It’s for the ice rink.”

  “Okay, now you’ve lost me completely.”

  “It doesn’t seem that hard,” said Monaro. He asked the other guy with the laptop to check some numbers.

  “Seriously,” I said. “Did you say a heating system for the ice?”

  “I did. Look, the ice for the rink is built on top of a concrete slab that sits on a base layer of gravel, and underneath that is earth. The heating system sits under that concrete slab to prevent the freezing temperatures above it from damaging the substructure. If we crack the ground down there, we can crack the concrete, and the whole thing would have to be ripped out.”

  “Doesn’t that melt the ice?”

  “No, it doesn’t heat up that much. Just enough. But now, for some reason, we can’t get the backup power to kick in. And if we can’t get that going, then we can’t get the heating system restarted. We’ll have to turn off the cooling system for the ice, or it might crack the ground and cause a lot of damage.”

  “What sort of damage?”

  “A million dollars’ worth of damage.”

  Their laptop screens showed various graphs and numbers but no flashing red warnings or sirens going off. I had seen more panic when the internet went down at Starbucks.

  “What happens if you turn off the cooling system?” I asked.

  Monaro’s stress was written across his face. “A big thaw.”

  That didn’t sound good. Then a radio on the table between them squawked, and a voice told Monaro to get down to Machine Room 2.

  Monaro was standing before he picked up the radio and asked what the situation was.

  The voice simply said, “It’s bad.”

  We jumped in Monaro’s golf cart and zoomed along the maintenance concourse around the arena until we reached a set of double doors, each twice the width of a regular door. A small truck or large forklift could have easily passed through had the doors been open.

  The brakes on golf carts are always surprisingly good, and when Monaro hit them, I had to brace myself to ensure I didn’t go flying out the front of the cart. He slipped out and pulled open one of the doors. Ron and I followed him inside.

  The room was much larger than the doors suggested—a massive space with a vaulted ceiling that ran upward, like upside-down steps—and I realized I was probably looking at the underside of the stands.

  The room was stuffed full of hulking machines and snaking pipes and guys standing around looking like the losing team on election night.

  One of the men, his hands and arms covered in black goop, turned to Monaro: “The backup generator still hasn’t fired.”

  “Why not?” asked Monaro.

  “Looks like it’s full of sludge.” The guy held up his dirty arms to illustrate the point.

  Monaro shook his head.

  “How can it be full of sludge?” I asked. “I thought everything was new.”

  The guy looked at me. “It is new.”

  “What does it run on?”

  “Diesel oil.”

  “Could the oil be dirty?”

  “Not this dirty.”

  “Can you clean it?” I asked.

  “Like I say, it’s diesel oil. We need a tanker to get it out before we can clean anything,” said Monaro, not taking his eyes off the large drum that must have held the diesel. It looked like one of those massive steel containers industrial wineries use to hold their cheap wine before they throw in the wood chips that imitate the taste of an oak barrel.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means there’s no power to the heat systems.” Monaro was looking in my general direction, but his gaze seemed a million miles away.

  Then he took off out of the room like a keg-shaped greyhound.

  Chapter Eleven

  Monaro jumped into his golf cart and hit the gas, or the battery for want of a better term. I barely managed to grab a bar on the rear-facing seat and drag myself up into it.

  Monaro whizzed around the constant bend. He turned savagely, almost pulling a Tokyo drift as the rubber wheels skidded across the concrete, and we sped out of the dim maintenance concourse into the bright lights of the arena floor.

  Monaro hit the brakes hard again, but this time I was merely pressed into the seat back. I made a note to use that seat in the future.

  I jumped out and followed him down the concrete path to the edge of the playing surface. No sign of ice. Half the surface was black rubber, and the other half a basketball court, the large pieces fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle.

  Monaro called one of the guys over and, before he got halfway to us, yelled, “Get it up, get it all up.”

  The guy coming toward us held his palms to the ceiling as if to say, What the—?

  Monaro yelled loud enough for anyone on the floor to hear. “The boards. Get them all up, get them off the ice.”

  The guys laying the basketball court looked like a pretty unflappable bunch. There was a shrugging of shoulders, then they set about removing the large, heavy pieces of wood and placing them back on the trolley racks from which they came. A man in a forklift truck who was delivering the racks full of wood pieces simply turned on a dime to return the boards.

  As we watched them dismantle the jigsaw, I asked Monaro why he wanted it pulled up.

  “We have an underlay between the ice and the boards,” he said. “That does protect the wood from the ice, but it’s more about stability and soundproofing than anything. It’s not a water barrier. If the ice melts, it will destroy the basketball overlay, and that’s worth a couple hundred thousand dollars.”

  “So you don’t take the ice out after each game?”

  “No. It would cost more to do that, but the important factor is time. See, for these arenas to be profitable—hell, even for them to not take a loss—they need to be multipurpose. You can see it here. We host hockey at the same time of year we host basketball. But we also have concerts and other large events on the slate. We need to move fast to change the configuration from day to day. In any given week we could have a hockey game on Monday, a basketball game on Tuesday, a down day on Wednesday, a concert on Thursday, and then another hockey game on Friday. Melting the ice takes too long, and refreezing it even longer. If you want good-quality ice, that is.”

  “So how on earth do you keep the ice frozen under there?”

  “There’s a series of pipes in the concrete base underneath. We use an indirect cooling system to make the ice. It’s less efficient, but, hey. We basically run a calcium chloride brine through the pipes, below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit. The brine doesn’t freeze, but the water on top does. Then the brine flows into another machine room where we have the cooling system.”

  “You say it’s less efficient? I thought this arena was supposed to be superefficient.”

  “It is, but like everything in life, there’s a trade-off. It would be better to run the refrigerant itself through the pipes, in the same way as your household refrigerator. Problem is, with a system this large, that’s a lot of refrigerant, and the refrigerant is both highly toxic and bad as far as greenhouse emissions are concerned. So it’s safer and more environmentally friendly to keep it contained to one small area and use less of it.”

  We stood for a moment watching the men removing the basketball court. It was a much more manual job than I thought it would be. But they had a system and appeared to know it well. I figured it would only take them several hours to complete the job.

  “How does this happen?”

  “What do you mean?” said Monaro. “You’re looking at it.”

  “A blockage in a new generator, I mean. Was it secondhand?”

  “No. It was nine months old.”

  “So how?”

  Monaro glanced at me with his typically serious-looking face.

  “And don’t give me that voodoo-curse business,” I said. “I mean seriously, is it a maintenance thing?”

  “No,” said Monaro tersely.

  “So you test everything?”

  “When we’re allowed.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Look, the county wanted this place to be green. Like everything has to be super environmentally friendly these days, whatever that means. So there’s all kinds of new technology in the building. They pushed pretty hard for the backup power systems to be an electric UPS, like the kind of thing you might attach to a computer server.”

  I had no idea what someone might attach to a computer server, but I had seen electric-battery backup systems before.

  “Problem is, an electric UPS and melting ice don’t mix. So after a lot of arguments, they went with diesel, but they don’t ever want it really running because it’s bad press. So ordinarily you test the backup system on a regular maintenance schedule, maybe every two weeks, monthly tops.”

  “And how often do you test it now?”

  “We were allowed to test it when it was put in, but we haven’t done it since. Five months.”

  “But if it’s never been used and it doesn’t get tested, how does it get clogged?”

  “Search me. Even if you weren’t testing, you’d want to turn over the oil periodically, just to keep it fresh. But this stuff has just been sitting there.”

  “So either it’s always been faulty, or someone cut the power and then sabotaged the backup.”

  Monaro frowned. “Sabotage?”

  “Are there any cameras in the machine room where the generator is?”

  “Not in the machine rooms, but there are in the maintenance concourse.”

  “So you would know who’s been in and out of that room today?”

  Monaro looked to the maintenance concourse. “You assume if it happened that way, that it happened today. But like I said, it never gets used, so if someone wanted to tinker with it, they could’ve done it months ago.”

  He had a point. But that point would have meant some serious planning. Sabotaging the backup ahead of time and hoping that it wouldn’t get checked or tested and then cutting the power later meant considerable forethought. But something about this whole thing felt more ad hoc.

  “So where did the power go out?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re talking here about the backup system, but the backup is only relevant if the actual power goes out. I’m asking, where was it cut?”

  Monaro shrugged. “Could have been anywhere. Somewhere between our electrical panel and the power station.”

  “So somewhere on the grid?”

  “I guess.”

  “But all the lights are still on, and your computers are working. You said something about a separate system?”

  “Yes. We have a zero-carbon system for things like lighting and power outlets. That all comes from a solar panel array on the roof, via a bank of batteries in a room on the other side of the arena. But that’s separate from the ice-making system. A solar system simply can’t generate the power we need to create ice in South Florida. We need as much as two million kilowatts a year.”

  I barely even looked at my power bill. Rightly or wrongly, I just assumed they got it right. So I didn’t know a kilowatt-hour from a mile per hour. But two million still sounded like a lot.

  Monaro pointed back in the direction of the concourse. “We have a dedicated power service for the rink. It comes directly from the local substation.”

  “So you called Florida Power & Light?”

  “The boss man did.” Monaro nodded in the general direction of the CEO’s office upstairs.

  “How? He’s not here.”

  “Before he left.”

  “He called in a power emergency and then left the building?”

  Monaro shrugged. The movement again made me think of Lenny Cox, and of all the sergeants in all the military units in all the world who had shrugged their shoulders at decisions made or not made by their superior officers.

  “What time did all this happen?”

  “The power went out at eight fifty-five in the morning. The boss left about ten minutes after that.”

  “So where are they? The FPL guys?”

  “Somewhere between here and the power station.”

  “Can you narrow it down?”

  “The substation?”

  “Do you know where the substation is?”

  Chapter Twelve

  I caught Ron on the way out, telling him to stay put and let me know if things escalated. As I ran out toward the parking lot, he called to me.

  “You want these?” he said, dangling his car keys.

  I jumped in Ron’s car and followed the directions to the electrical substation that Monaro had given me.

  It wasn’t more than a few minutes’ walk from the back of the arena, but to drive there took a good ten. I cut back down Forty-Fifth Street to Australian Avenue then had to wind my way through surface streets back toward the train line on the other side of the tracks.

  Located on a street corner in a light industrial section of town—lots of outlets for truck parts and factory supplies—the substation itself was surrounded by a high cinder-block wall whose dull taupe color had faded and peeled in sections, leaving it a mottled tan and gray, like a sick leopard. There was a tight mesh gate, the kind of thing even a monkey would struggle to climb, with a decent coil of razor wire running the entire perimeter.

  The level of security designed for a nuclear silo suggested this was a priority facility, but I suspected it was just cheaper to install a mile of barbed wire than it was to keep a guard on duty.

  I pulled into a gas station on the opposite corner. One of the international petroleum companies had owned the place, but that was a long time ago. Signage had either been painted over, covered by silver duct tape, or wrapped in canvas. If some Hollywood hotshot wanted to film a scene for an apocalypse movie, where our hero finds the last drops of gasoline available on the planet, they could do worse than scouting this location. A reasonable person would question how such a place stayed in business, but reasonable people were not so well acquainted with money laundering.