an “involuntary vascular reaction,” she had not been able to tell him to “stop that.”
He held her hand as they returned to the table.
Jimmy picked up his glass and, smiling, looked over the rim of it at Greg.
“I have been thinking, Ronald Reagan—” he began.
“I saw the furrowed brow,” Hammersmith interrupted, “and it’s ‘Greg Hammer.’ Ronny Reagan is the one they call the ‘Errol Flynn of the B movies.’ ”
“Right,” Whittaker said. “Hammer, as in the baking soda.”
“Now you’ve got it,” Hammersmith said. “What have you been thinking, O worthy leader?”
“That despite my initial unflattering impression of you, you may be reasonably trustworthy after all.”
“Oh, thank you, Sir.”
“To the point where I would feel comfortable in leaving you in sole charge of Radioman Garvey while I escort the lady to her hotel.”
“I can get to the hotel by myself,” Cynthia protested.
They ignored her.
“So that you can protect our girl from the unwanted attentions of sailors in the Mark Hopkins?”
“Correct,” Whittaker said. “I have heard all sorts of tales about sex-starved naval officers making indecent proposals to unaccompanied young ladies such as Miss Chenowith, right in the lobby of the Mark Hopkins.”
“We couldn’t have that, could we?” Greg replied. “You sneaky sonofabitch.”
The two men, pleased with their own wit, smiled at each other, which infuriated Cynthia.
“I don’t need an escort,” Cynthia said.
“The way she says that,” Whittaker replied, “you’d think she thinks I have designs on her body, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t think you’re funny, Jimmy,” she said.
“Let’s go,” he said. “We have an early day tomorrow.”
He took her arm when he put her into the Navy car, but as soon as Greg had gotten out at the hangar, he slid away from her on the seat, so that their hips were no longer pressing together. And he did not try to hold her hand, put his arm around her, or kiss her on the way to the hotel.
He did speak to the driver:
“How are we going to get Miss Chenowith back out to Mare Island in the morning?”
“My orders are to stick with you, Sir, until you get on the plane.”
“All night?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Well, you go get yourself some sleep,” Whittaker ordered. “Be at the hotel at 0400. I’ll catch a cab back out there tonight.”
“Why don’t you go back out with him?” Cynthia asked.
Whittaker ignored her for a moment, then somewhat lamely said, “I want to check in with Ellis. I’d rather do that from your room than try to get a long-distance authorization at Mare Island or feed quarters to a pay phone.”
He might, indeed, actually call Ellis from the Theodore Roosevelt Suite, once he gets there, Cynthia thought, but he obviously just thought up that excuse to get into the room.
There was also a good chance that the moment he got her behind the closed doors of the Theodore Roosevelt Suite, he would make a play for her, she thought. She really didn’t want that. But she didn’t want to make an issue of it now. If it happened, she could handle him.
When they got to the suite, he went directly to the telephone on the table in front of the couch and put in a call to Chief Ellis in Washington.
He seemed genuinely disappointed that Ellis was not immediately available.
“I’m in Miss Chenowith’s room in the Mark Hopkins,” he said to the telephone. “I’ll wait here for his call.”
He put the telephone in its cradle.
“Not there? That’s surprising,” Cynthia said.
“He would have been there if I had called when I was supposed to,” he said. “I didn’t even think of calling him until I needed an excuse to be alone with you.”
She smiled at him.
That should have been my cue, she thought, to say something cutting—“Don’t get any ideas, Jimmy,” something like that. I wonder why I didn’t?
It was, she decided, because his honesty disarmed her. And then she realized there was more than that. She had tried to force the thought from her mind whenever it had appeared. But that had been hard, and it kept reappearing, as it was doing now.
The thought was that the clock was running down, like the clock at a basketball game. Very soon, Jimmy and Greg—and maybe even Garvey, whom she thought of as “the boy in the sailor suit”—would get on the submarine and try to establish contact with this man Fertig and his guerrillas in the Philippines. There was a very good chance that they would be caught, and if they