"Discomfit me, then," McCoy mocked him. "Fuck up what otherwise has been a glorious day."

"My general thinks you should move into the BOQ," Pickering said.

"Oh, shit!" McCoy said. "What the fuck business is it of his, anyway?"

"He's a nice guy," Pickering said. "He and my father were corporals together, and he stayed in the Corps. He's trying to be nice."

"Sure," McCoy said. "Just a friendly word of advice, my boy. An officer is judged by the company he keeps. Disassociate yourself from that former enlisted man."

"Jesus Christ," Pick said without thinking. "You do have a runaway social inferiority complex, don't you?"

"Fuck you," McCoy said.

"It's not like that at all, goddamn your thick head. What he's worried about is getting you in trouble with Intelligence."

"What?" McCoy asked.

"I don't know if you know this or not," Pickering said. "But the Corps has intelligence agents, counterintelligence agents. What they do is look for security risks."

"No shit?" McCoy asked.

"Listen to me, goddamn you!" Pickering said. "What these guys do is look for something unusual. Like second lieutenants living in hotels like the Lafayette. Expensive hotels. They would start asking where you got the money to pay for the bill."

"Special agents of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, USMC, you mean?" McCoy asked, smiling broadly.

"You know about them, then? Goddamn it, Ken, it's not funny."

"It's the funniest thing I heard of all day," McCoy said. He took off his jacket, and then opened the briefcase.

"What the hell are you doing?" Pickering asked.

McCoy took a leather-and-rubber strap arrangement that only after a moment Pickering recognized as a shoulder holster. He slipped his arms in it, and then took a Colt 1911A1 from the briefcase and put it in the holster. Then he put his tunic back on.

"Goddamn you, you haven't listened to a word I've said," Pickering said.

"Well, I may be dumb," McCoy said. "But you're a Japanese spy if I ever saw one. Come with me, young man. If you cooperate, it will go easier on you."

It was some kind of joke, obviously, but Pickering didn't have any idea where the humor lay.

McCoy took a small leather folder from his hip pocket, opened it, and shoved it in Pickering's face.

"Special Agent McCoy," he announced triumphantly. "You're a dead man, you filthy Jap spy!"

"What the hell is that?" Pickering asked, snatching it out of his hand, and then looking at it carefully. "Is this for real? What is it?"

"It's for real," McCoy said. "And it's my ticket to sunny Hawaii and other spots in the romantic Orient." "It's for real?" Pickering repeated, in disbelief. "Well, not really real," McCoy said. "I mean it's genuine, but I'm not in counterintelligence. I'm an officer courier. They gave me that so no one will fuck with me on the swift completion of my appointed rounds."

Pickering demanded a more detailed explanation of what had gone on.

"But how did you get involved in intelligence in the first place?"

"That's what I did in China," McCoy said. It was the first time he had ever told anyone that. He remembered just before he'd boarded the Charles E. Whaley, Captain Banning ordering him not to tell anyone in or out of the Corps about it. But that order had been superceded by his most recent order, from Major J.J. Almond:

"You'll have to tell your roommate something, McCoy. You can say where you work, advising him that it is classified information. And what you do, because that in itself is not classified."

And with the 4th Marines gone from Shanghai, there didn't seem to be any point in pretending that he hadn't done what he had done. And it was nice to have an appreciative audience, an audience that had previously believed he had been a truck driver.

"The important thing," he said finally, when he realized that he was tooting his own horn too much, "is that my colonel doesn't want me in the BOQ. So where does that leave us?"

Pickering reached for the telephone.

"This is Malcolm Pickering," he said. "Will you get the resident manager on here, please?"

When the resident manager came on the line, Pickering told him there had been "another change in plans."

"I will need that suite," he said. "Lieutenant McCoy and I will be here for the indefinite future."

They went down to dinner. There Pickering talked about flight school.

"I'm going to take a flight physical Thursday afternoon," he said. "If I pass it, I think I'm going to go for it."

And then they began a lengthy, and ultimately futile, search for a couple of skirts to lift.

It did not dampen their spirits at all. There was always tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the week after that. There were supposed to be twice as many women as men in Washington…

Despite the legend, McCoy said, it had been his experience that a Marine uniform was a bar to getting laid. When he came back from Hawaii and Manila, they would do their pussy-chasing in civilian clothes.

(Four)

Security Intelligence Section

U.S. Naval Communications

Washington, D.C.

1540 Hours, Wednesday, 3 December 1941

The sign on the door said OP-20-G, and there was a little window in it, like a speak-easy. When McCoy rang the bell, a face appeared in it.

"Lieutenant McCoy to see Commander Kramer," McCoy announced

"I'll need to see your ID, Lieutenant," the face said.

McCoy held the little leather folder up to the window. The man took his sweet time examining it, but finally the door opened.

"The commander expected you five minutes ago," the face said. The face was now revealed as a chief radioman.

"The traffic was bad," McCoy said.

He followed the chief down a passageway, where the chief knocked at a door. When he announced who he was, there was the sound of a solenoid opening a bolt.

"Lieutenant McCoy, Commander," the chief said. "His ID checks."

"I'm sure he won't mind if I check it again," a somewhat nasal voice said.

Commander Kramer was a tall, thin officer with a pencil-line mustache. He looked at McCoy's credentials and then handed them back.

"I was about to say that we don't get many second lieutenants as couriers," Kramer said. "That is now changed to 'we don't get to see much identification like that.' "

"No, sir," McCoy said.

"Are you armed, Lieutenant?"

"Yes, sir."

"And you're leaving when?"

"At sixteen-thirty, sir."

"From Anacostia, you mean?"

"Yes, sir. Naval aircraft at least as far as San Francisco."

"You normally work for Colonel Rickabee, is that it?"

"Yes, sir."

"I heard that they had levied him for officer couriers," Kramer said. "I'm sorry you were caught in the net. But it wouldn't have been done if it wasn't necessary."

"I don't mind, sir," McCoy said, solemnly.

Instead of heading around the world by airplane, I would of course prefer to be here in Washington inventorying paper clips. Or better than that, at Camp LeJeune running around in the boondocks, practicing "the infantry platoon in the assault."

"Your briefcase is going to be stuffed," Kramer said. "She was sealing the envelopes just now. I'll have her bring them in."

He pushed a lever on an intercom.

"Mrs. Feller, the courier is here. Would you bring the material for Pearl Harbor in here, please?"

Mrs. Feller?

Ellen Feller backed into Commander Kramer's office with a ten-inch-thick stack of heavy manila envelopes held against her breast.

"Mrs. Feller, this is Lieutenant McCoy," Commander Kramer said.

"The lieutenant and I are old friends," Ellen said.

"Really?"

"We got to know one another rather well in China, didn't we, Ken?"

"You don't seem very surprised to see me," McCoy said.

"I knew you were here," she said. "I didn't expect to see you so soon, but I did hope to see you."