Amara looked at his chest. There was no bulge in the shirt pocket. No brick.
"Good morning," Bradley said. He shook Lin's hand, and Fang's, and Zhou's. Then he turned to Amara, and hesitated, and held out his hand to her too, and she shook it. "Thank you for coming."
"Is Mr. Herrera here?" asked Lin.
"He's inside. At the line." Bradley hesitated. "I called him last night. At home. Around nine." He looked at the ground for a moment. "I told him what I said at the table yesterday. About the ovens. About two years ago. All of it." He paused. "He didn't say anything for a long time. I thought he'd hung up. Then he said, Seven o'clock, and hung up."
* * *
The factory floor was enormous.
It went on and on under rows of hard white lights, a vast gray concrete plain crossed by yellow painted lines, with machines standing on it at intervals like islands, some running, most silent. The air smelled of solvent and hot metal and floor wax, and under all of it something faintly sweet and chemical that Amara would later learn was the slurry. It was very loud in some places and strangely quiet in others. And it was nearly empty. A building made for a thousand people, Amara thought, with a hundred people in it.
The centerpiece of the floor, running almost a third of its length, was the electrode coating line.
It was three hundred feet long. At one end, a giant roll of thin metal foil, a yard wide and shining like a mirror, fed off a spindle into the machine. The foil ran through a coating head where a thick black paste, the lithium iron phosphate slurry, was spread across it in a precise, even layer, thinner than a sheet of paper. Then the coated foil ran on into a long, low, humming tunnel, the drying ovens, where it was baked until the paste set hard. At the far end it came out and was wound onto another roll, a dark shining ribbon, ready to be cut and stacked into cells.
Defects were only discovered at the very end. By then it was too late. Roughly one cell in nine was scrap.
At the head of the line, by the mixing tanks, a man was standing with his arms folded, watching them come.
Tomás Herrera was fifty-eight, short and broad, built like a fire hydrant, with thick forearms and a heavy gray mustache and a pair of reading glasses pushed up on his forehead that he had clearly forgotten were there. He had grown up in Guadalajara and studied chemical engineering at the University of Guadalajara on a scholarship. He had spent twenty-two years on battery lines in Monterrey and Kentucky and Nevada, and five years ago Bradley Kincaid had flown down to Reno and taken him to dinner and given him a signing bonus and promised him the chance to run the best coating line in America.
He watched the group come across the concrete toward him the way a farmer watches weather moving across a field.
Lin reached him first. He held out his hand and said, in English, "Mr. Herrera. Lin Weiguo. Thank you for coming in so early."
Tomás shook it. He looked at Lin, and then at Fang with her safety glasses and her boots, and then at Zhou with his notebook. Then he looked at Bradley, at the creased new polo and the work boots and the hard hat in his hand, for a long moment, and something passed across his face that was not quite a smile and not quite anything else. He looked like a man who had been waiting a very long time for something and was not sure, now that it had arrived, whether it was what he had ordered.
Then he looked at Amara.
"And who are you?" he asked.
"I'm the interpreter," Amara said.
Tomás looked her up and down, frankly, from her pinned hair to her sneakers. "Interpreter," he said. "For Chinese."
"Yes."
"You speak Chinese."
"I do."
Tomás Herrera looked at her for a second longer. Then his mustache twitched, and something wry and dry came into his eyes, and he said something under his breath in Spanish, quick and low, in which Amara caught the word jefe. And then, in English, deadpan, to the whole group:
"Good. Because the only Chinese I know, I got from a fortune cookie."
Behind Amara, Bradley made a small sound, something between a cough and a wince.
Amara did not look at him. She kept her eyes on Tomás, and let one corner of her mouth move, very slightly, and Tomás saw it, and his mustache twitched again. Something in the air between the six of them loosened by a notch.
"Then we should get started," said Lin.
* * *
At Middlebury, Amara had studied technical vocabulary the way other people studied for the bar. Before the Pacific Bridge assessment she had made flashcards, nearly two thousand of them, English on one side and Chinese on the other, for every term in battery chemistry she could find in every paper and patent and trade journal she could get her hands on. Cathode. Anode. Separator. Electrolyte. Binder. Calendering. Slitting. Formation. She had drilled them on the bus and in the walk-in fridge and in bed with the foghorn going until she could flip a card and say the other side before she had finished reading the first.
Within ten minutes on the factory floor in Fremont, she understood that the flashcards had been the alphabet, and that what was happening in front of her now was poetry.
Fang Lihua did not want the tour.
Bradley had prepared one. Amara could see him holding it in his head, the route along the line, the talking points at each station. Fang walked straight past the first station without looking at it and stopped in front of the mixing tanks at the head of the line, where the slurry was made, and turned to Tomás, and began to ask questions.