the Spy (2010) by Cussler Clive (early readers .txt) 📕

Five miles downriver, he disembarked in Alexandria, Virginia.

He waited for the boat to depart the wooden pier. Then he hurried along the waterfront and entered a dark warehouse that was crammed with obsolete naval gear deep in dust and spiderwebs.

A younger man whom Yamamoto had labeled, scornfully, The Spy was waiting for him in a dimly lit back room that served as an office. He was twenty years Yamamoto's junior and ordinary-looking to the point of being nondescript. His office, too, held the outdated paraphernalia of earlier wars: crossed cutlasses on the walls; a Civil War-era Dahlgren cast-iron, muzzle-loading cannon, which was causing the floor to sag; and an old 24-inch-diameter carbon arc battleship searchlight propped behind his desk. Yamamoto saw his own face mirrored in its dusty eye.

He reported that he had accomplished his mission. Then, while the spy took notes, he related in precise detail everything that he had seen at the Gun Factory. Much of it, he said in conclusion, looks worn out.

Hardly a surprise.

Overworked and underfunded, the Gun Factory had produced everything from ammunition hoists to torpedo tubes to send the Great White Fleet to sea. After the warships sailed, it forwarded train-loads of replacement parts, sights, firing locks, breech plugs, and gun mounts to San Francisco. In another month the fleet would recuperate there from its fourteen-thousand-mile voyage around South America's Cape Horn and refit at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard to cross the Pacific.

I would not underestimate them, Yamamoto retorted gloomily. Worn-out machines are replaceable.

If they have the nerve.

From what I saw, they have the nerve. And the imagination. They are merely catching their breath.

The man behind the desk felt that Yamamoto Kenta was possessed-if not unhinged-by his fear of the American Navy. He had heard this rant before and knew how to change the subject by derailing the Jap with lavish praise.

I have never doubted your acute powers of observation. But I am awed by the range and breadth of your skills: chemistry, engineering, forgery. In one fell swoop you have impeded the development of American gunnery and sent their Congress a message that the Navy is corrupt.

He watched Yamamoto preen. Even the most capable operative had his Achilles' heel. Yamamoto's was a self-blinding vanity.

I've played this game a long time, Yamamoto agreed with false modesty.

In fact, thought the man behind the desk, the chemistry for the nitrogen iodide detonator was a simple formula found in The Young Folks Cyclopaedia of Games and Sports. Which was not to take away from Yamamoto's other skills, nor his broad and deep knowledge of naval warfare.

Having softened him up, he prepared to put the Jap to the test. Last week aboard the Lusitania, he said, I bumped into a British attachE. You know the sort. Thinks of himself as a gentleman spy.'

He had an astonishing gift for accents, and he mimicked, faultlessly, an English aristocratic drawl. The Japanese,' this Englishman proclaimed to all in the smoking room, display a natural aptitude for espionage, and a cunning and self-control not found in the West.'

Yamamoto laughed. That sounds like Commander Abbington-Westlake of the Admiralty's Naval Intelligence Department, Foreign Division, who was spotted last summer painting a watercolor of the Long Island Sound that just happened to contain America's latest Viper Class submarine. Do you suppose the windbag meant it as a compliment?

The French Navy he penetrated so successfully last month would hardly call Abbington-Westlake a windbag. Did you keep the money?

I beg your pardon?

The money you were supposed to put in Arthur Langner's desk. Did you keep it for yourself?

The Jap stiffened. Of course not. I put it in his desk.

The Navy's enemies in Congress must believe that their star designer, their so-called Gunner, was guilty of taking a bribe. That money was vital to our message to the Congress to make them wonder what else is rotten in the Navy. Did you keep the money?

I should not be surprised that you would ask such a degrading question of a loyal associate. With the heart of a thief you assume that everyone is a thief.

Did you keep the money? the spy repeated. A physical habit of maintaining utter stillness masked the steely power of his compact frame.

For the last time, I did not keep the money. Would you feel more secure if I swore on the memory of my old friend-your father?

Do it!

Yamamoto looked him full in the face with undisguised hatred. I swear on the memory of my old friend, your father.

I think I believe you.

Your father was a patriot, Yamamoto replied coldly. You are a mercenary.

You're on my payroll, came the even colder retort. And when you report to your government the valuable information you picked up in the Washington Navy Yard's Gun Factory-while working for me-your government will pay you again.

I do not spy for the money. I spy for the Empire of Japan.

And for me.

GOOD SUNDAY MORNING TO all who prefer their music minus the sermon, Arthur Langner greeted his friends at the Gun Factory.

Rumpled in a baggy sack suit, his thick hair tousled and bright eyes inquisitive, the Naval Ordnance Bureau's star designer grinned like a man who found interest in all he saw and liked the strange bits most of all. The Gunner was a vegetarian, an outspoken agnostic, and devoted to the theories of the unconscious mind put forth by the Viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud.

He held patents for an invention he named the Electrical Vacuum Cleaning Machine, having hitched his fertile imagination to a heartfelt notion that science-based domestic engineering could free women from the isolation of housework. He also believed that women should have the right to vote, work outside the home, and even practice birth control. Gossips smirked that his beautiful daughter, who ran with the fast set in Washington and New York, would be a prime beneficiary.

A one-man lunatic fringe, complained the commandant of the navy yard.

But the chief of Naval Ordnance, having observed Langner's latest 12-inch/.50 caliber gun shoot up