The Spy (Isaac Bell 3)

The ceremony was scheduled to start exactly at eleven. Captain Falconer had warned Bell that they would launch on time. In less than an hour the dreadnought would either slide uneventfully down the ways or the German saboteur would attack, wreaking a terrible toll on the innocent.

A Marine brass band started playing a Sousa medley, and the launching stand got crowded with hundreds of special guests invited to stand close enough to actually see the champagne bottle crack on

the bow. Bell spotted the Secretary of the Interior, three senators, the governor of Michigan, and several members of President Roosevelt’s vigorous “Tennis Cabinet.”

The top bosses of New York Ship trooped up the steps in close company with Admiral Capps, the chief naval constructor. Capps seemed less interested in talking to shipbuilders than to Lady Fiona Abbington-Westlake, the wife of the British Naval Attaché, a beautiful woman with a shiny mane of chestnut hair. Isaac Bell observed her discreetly. The Van Dorn researchers assigned to the Hull 44 spy case had reported that Lady Fiona spent beyond her husband’s means. Worse, she was paying blackmail to a Frenchman named Raymond Colbert. No one knew what Colbert had on her, or whether it involved her husband’s purloining of French naval secrets.

The German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was represented by a saber-scarred military attaché, Lieutenant Julian Von Stroem, recently returned from German East Africa, who was married to an American friend of Dorothy Langner. Suddenly Dorothy herself parted the crowd in her dark mourning clothes. The bright-eyed redheaded girl he had noticed at the Willard Hotel was at her elbow. Katherine Dee, Research had reported, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who had moved back to Ireland after making his fortune building Catholic schools in Baltimore. Orphaned soon after, Katherine had been convent-educated in Switzerland.

The handsome Ted Whitmark trailed behind them, shaking hands and slapping backs and declaring in a voice that carried to the glass roof, “Michigan is going to be one of Uncle Sam’s best fighting units.” While Whitmark occasionally played the fool in his private life, gambling and drinking, at least before he met Dorothy, Research had made it clear that he was extremely adept at the business of snagging government contracts.

Typical of the incestuous relationships in the crowd of industrialists, politicians, and diplomats that swirled around the “New Navy,” he and Dorothy Langner had met at a clambake hosted by Captain Falconer. As Grady Forrer of Van Dorn Research had remarked cynically, “The easy part was discovering who’s in bed with whom; the hard part is calculating why, seeing as how ‘why’ can run the gamut from profit to promotion to espionage to just plain raising hell.”

Bell saw a small smile part Dorothy’s lips. He glanced in the direction she was looking and saw the naval architect Farley Kent nod back. Then Kent threw an arm around his guest-Lieutenant Yourkevitch, the Czar’s dreadnought architect-and plunged into the crowd as if to get out of the path of Ted and Dorothy. Oblivious, Ted seized an elderly admiral’s hand and bellowed, “Great day for the Navy, sir. Great day for the Navy.”

Dorothy’s eyes wheeled Bell’s way and locked with his. Bell returned her gaze appraisingly. He had not seen her since the day he had called on her in Washington, though he had, at Van Dorn’s urging, reported to her by long-distance telephone that there was strong reason to hope that her father’s name would soon be cleared. She had thanked him warmly and said that she hoped she would see him in Camden at the luncheon that would follow the launching. It occurred to Bell that neither Ted Whitmark nor Farley Kent would be pleased by the look she was giving him now.

A warm breath whispered in his ear. “That’s quite a smile for a lady dressed in mourning black.”

Marion Morgan glided behind him and made a beeline for Captain Falconer. He looked heroically splendid in his full-dress white uniform, she thought, or splendidly heroic, his handsome head erect in a high-standing collar, medals arrayed across his broad chest, sword at his trim waist.

“GOOD MORNING, MISS MORGAN,” Lowell Falconer greeted Marion Morgan heartily. “Are you enjoying yourself?”

She and Isaac had dined aboard Falconer’s yacht the night before. When Bell promised him that Arthur Langner would be completely vindicated of accepting bribes, her pride in her fiancé had spoken legions for her love. Still, Falconer admitted ruefully, he had not been disappointed when Bell had to excuse himself early to oversee another inspection of the ways beneath the ship. After the detective left, their conversation had flowed seamlessly from dreadnought design to moving pictures to naval warfare to the paintings of Henry Reutendahl to Washington politics and Falconer’s career. He realized in retrospect that he had told her more about himself than he had intended to.

The Hero of Santiago knew himself well enough to acknowledge that he had fallen half in love with her. But he was completely unaware that the beautiful Miss Morgan was using him for cover as she tracked the head-bowing, hat-tipping passage through the crowd of an elegantly dressed Japanese.

“Why,” she asked Falconer, filling time, “is the shipbuilder called New York Ship when it’s in Camden, New Jersey?”

“That confuses everyone,” Falconer explained with his warmest smile and a devilish glint in his eye. “Originally, Mr. Morse intended to build his yard on Staten Island, but Camden offered better rail facilities and access to Philadelphia’s experienced shipyard workers. Why are you smiling that way, Miss Morgan?”

She said, “The way you’re looking at me, it’s a good thing that Isaac is nearby and armed.”

“Well, he ought to be,” Falconer retorted gruffly. “Anyway, Camden, New Jersey, has the most modern shipyard in the world. When it comes to building dreadnoughts, it is second only to our most important facility at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.”

“And why is that, Captain?” Her quarry was drawing near.

“They embrace a thoroughly modern system. Major parts are prefabricated. Overhead cranes move them around the yard as easily as you’d assemble the ingredients to bake a cake. These sheds cover the ways so bad weather doesn’t delay production.”

“They remind me of the glass studios we use to film indoors, though ours are much smaller.”

“Fittings that used to be mounted after launch are applied in the comfort of those covered ways. She’ll be launched with her guns already in place.”

“Fascinating.” The man she was watching had stopped to peer through a break in the scaffolding that revealed the ship’s long armor belt. “Captain Falconer? How many men will crew the Michigan?”

“Fifty officers. Eight hundred fifty enlisted.”

She uttered a thought so grim that it shadowed her face. “That is a terrible number of sailors in one small space if the worst happens and the ship sinks.”

“Modern warships are armored coffins,” Falconer answered far more bluntly than he would with a civilian, but their conversations last night had established an easy trust between them and left him in no doubt of her superior intelligence. “I saw Russians drown by the thousands fighting the Japs in the Tsushima Strait. Battleships went down in minutes. All but the spotters in the fighting tops and a few men on the bridge were trapped belowdecks.”

“Can I assume that our goal is to build warships that will sink slowly and give men time to get off?”

“The goal for battleships is to keep fighting. That means protecting men, machinery, and guns within a citadel of armor while keeping the ship afloat. The sailors who win stay alive.”

“So today is a happy day, launching such a modern ship.”

Captain Falconer glowered at Marion under his heavy eyebrows. “Between you and me, miss, thanks to Congress limiting her to 16,000 tons, Michigan has eight feet less freeboard aft then the old Connecticut. She’ll be wetter than a whale, and if she ever makes eighteen knots in heavy seas, I’ll eat my hat.”