“You were on a battleship?”

“Oh, sure. I go out on them all the time.”

“Really?”

“On the Atlantic Firing Range. Just last week the gunnery officer said to me, ‘The new dreadnoughts could hit Yonkers from here.’ ”

Katherine’s pretty eyes grew enormous. “Yonkers? I don’t know about that. I mean the last time I sailed into New York on the Lusitania it was a clear day, but I couldn’t see Yonkers from the ocean.”

The Lusitania? thought Lakewood. Not only is she pretty but she’s rich.

“Well, it’s hard to see Yonkers, but at sea you can spot a ship that far. The trick is, hitting it.” They resumed walking, shoulders bumping on the narrow path, as he told her how the invention of smokeless powder allowed the spotters to see farther because the ship was less shrouded in gun smoke.

“The spotters range with the guns. They judge by the splashes of shot whether they’ve fallen short or overshot. You’ve probably read in the newspaper that’s the reason for all big-guns ships-all the guns the same caliber-so firing one in fact aims all.” She seemed much more interested than he would expect of a pretty girl and listened wide-eyed, pausing repeatedly to stop walking and gaze at him as if mesmerized.

Lakewood kept talking.

Nothing secret, he told himself. Nothing about the latest range-finding gyros providing “continuous aim” to “hunt the roll.” Nothing about fire control that she couldn’t read in the papers. He did boast that he got interested in rock climbing while scrambling up a hundred-foot “cage mast” the Navy was developing to spot shell splashes at greater distances. But he did not say that the mast builders were experimenting with coiled lightweight steel tubing to make them immune to shell hits. He did not reveal that cage masts were also intended as platforms for the latest range-finding machines. Nor did he mention the hydraulic engines coupled to the gyro for elevating turret guns. And certainly not a word about Hull 44.

“I’m confused,” she said with a warm smile. “Maybe you can help me understand. A man told me that ocean liners are much bigger than dreadnoughts. He said that Lusitania and Mauritania are 44,000 tons, but the Navy’s Michigan will be only 16,000.”

“Liners are floating hotels,” Lakewood answered, dismissively. “Dreadnoughts are fortresses.”

“But the Lusitania and Mauritania steam faster than dreadnoughts. He called them ‘greyhounds.’ ”

“Well, if you think of Lusitania and Mauritania as greyhounds, imagine a dreadnought as a wolf.”

She laughed. “Now I understand. And your job is to give it teeth.” “My job,” Lakewood corrected proudly, “is to sharpen its teeth.” Again she laughed. And touched his arm. “Then what is Captain Falconer’s job?”

Grover Lakewood considered carefully before he answered. Anyone could read the official truth. Articles were devoted daily to every aspect of the dreadnought race, from the expense to the national glory to gala launchings to flat-footed foreign spies nosing around the Brooklyn Navy Yard claiming to be newspapermen.

“Captain Falconer is the Navy’s Special Inspector of Target Practice. He became a gunnery expert after the battle of Santiago. Even though we sank every Spanish ship in Cuba, our guns scored only two percent hits. Captain Falconer vowed to improve that.”

The steeply sloped face of Agar Mountain loomed ahead. “Oh, look,” said Katherine. “We have it all to ourselves. No one’s here but us.” They stopped at the foot of the cliff. “Wasn’t that crazy man who killed himself blowing up his piano involved with battleships?”

“How did you hear about that?” asked Lakewood. The Navy had kept the tragedy out of the papers, admitting only that there had been an explosion at the Gun Factory.

“Everyone in Washington was talking about it,” said Katherine.

“Is that where you live?”

“I was visiting a friend. Did you know the man?”

“Yes, he was a fine man,” answered Lakewood, staring up the rocks, surveying a route. “In fact, he was on the captain’s yacht for the clambake.”

“I don’t believe I met him.”

“It was a darned sad thing… Terrible loss.”

Katherine Dee turned out to be a strong climber. Lakewood could barely keep up. He was new to the sport, and noticed that her fingers were so strong that she would raise her entire weight by the grip of one hand. When she did, she was able to swing her body to reach high for the next grip.

“You climb like a monkey.”

“That’s not a very nice compliment.” She pretended to pout as she waited for him to catch up with her. “Who wants to look like a monkey?”

Lakewood figured he better save his breath. When they were eighty feet off the ground and the tops of the trees looked like feathers far below, she suddenly pulled farther ahead of him.

“Say, where’d you learn to climb like that?”

“The nuns at my convent school took us climbing on the Matterhorn.”

At that moment, Grover Lakewood’s hands were spread wide, gripping crevices to either side, as he felt for his next toehold. Katherine Dee had reached a position fifteen feet directly above him. She smiled.

“Oh, Mr. Lakewood?”

He craned his neck to see her. It looked like she was holding a giant turtle in her strong white hands. Except it couldn’t be a turtle this early in the year. It was a large rock.

“Careful with that,” he called.

Too late.

It slipped from her hands. No it didn’t! She opened her hands.

LANGNER’S SUICIDE NOTE KEPT TICKLING THE BACK OF Isaac Bell’s mind.

He used his pass from the Navy Secretary to reenter the Gun Factory, opened the Polhem padlock on the design-loft door again, and searched Langner’s desk. A stack of special hand-laid stock that Langner apparently reserved for important correspondence matched the paper on which the suicide note was written. Beside it was a Waterman fountain pen.

Bell pocketed the pen, and stopped at the chemist’s laboratory where Van Dorn maintained an account. Then he took a streetcar up Capitol Hill to Lincoln Park, a neighborhood that was flourishing as Washingtonians moved up the Hill from the congested swampy areas around the Potomac River, which turned foul in the summer heat.

Bell found the Langner home directly across the street from the park. It was a two-story brick row house with green shutters and a wrought-iron fence around a small front yard. The Van Dorn auditor investigating Arthur Langner’s financial affairs had uncovered no evidence of a private income. Langner would have had to purchase this new house on his Gun Factory salary, which, the auditor had noted, equaled that of top managers in private industry.

The house looked newly built-as did all but a handful of old wooden structures on the side streets-and boasted tall windows. The brickwork was typically ornate, flaring skyward to an elaborate dentated cornice. But inside, Bell noted in a glance, the house was anything but typical. It was decorated in a spare, modern manner, with built-in cabinets and bookshelves, electric lamps, and ceiling fans. The furniture was up-to-date, too, and very expensive-airy yet strong pieces made by the Glaswegian Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Where, Bell had to ask, did Langner get the money to pay for Mackintosh furniture?

Dorothy was no longer dressed in black but in a silvery gray color that complemented her eyes and her raven hair. A man trailed her into the foyer. She introduced him as “My friend Ted Whitmark.”

Bell pegged Whitmark as a hail-fellow-well-met salesman sort. He looked the picture of success, with a bright smile on his handsome face, an expensive suit of clothes, and a crimson necktie speckled with Harvard College’s insignia.

“More than a friend, I’d say,” Whitmark boomed as he shook Bell’s hand with a hearty grip. “Closer to a fiancé, if you get my drift,” he added, tightening his grip emphatically.