“Good-bye, George.”

“Good-bye.”

“God bless and keep you,” said Greg, and he walked away.

• • •

Early Friday morning George went to the White House Situation Room.

President Kennedy had created this suite in the West Wing basement where previously there had been a bowling alley. Its ostensible purpose was to speed communications in a crisis. The truth was that Kennedy believed the military had kept information from him during the Bay of Pigs crisis, and he wanted to make sure they never got another chance to do that.

This morning the walls were covered with large-scale maps of Cuba and its sea approaches. The teletype machines chattered like cicadas on a warm night. Pentagon telegrams were copied here. The president could listen in to military communications. The quarantine operation was being run from a room in the Pentagon known as Navy Flag Plot, but radio conversations between that room and the ships could be overheard here.

The military hated the Situation Room.

George sat on an uncomfortable modern chair at a cheap dining table and listened. He was still mulling over last night’s conversation with Greg. Had Greg expected George to throw his arms around him and cry: “Daddy!” Probably not. Greg seemed comfortable with his avuncular role. George had no wish to change that. At the age of twenty-six he could not suddenly start treating Greg like a regular father. All the same, George was kind of happy about what Greg had said. My father loves me, he thought; that can’t be bad.

The USS Joseph P. Kennedy hailed the Marucla at dawn.

The Kennedy was a twenty-four-hundred-ton destroyer armed with eight missiles, an antisubmarine rocket launcher, six torpedo tubes, and twin five-inch gun mounts. It also had nuclear depth charge capability.

The Marucla immediately cut its engines, and George breathed easier.

The Kennedy lowered a boat and six men crossed to the Marucla. The sea was rough, but the crew of the Marucla obligingly threw a rope ladder over the side. All the same, the chop made it difficult to board. The officer in charge did not want to look ridiculous by falling in the water, but eventually he took a chance, leaped for the ladder, and boarded the ship. His men followed.

The Greek crew offered them coffee.

They were delighted to open the hatches for the Americans to inspect their cargo, which was pretty much what they had said. There was a tense moment when the Americans insisted on opening a crate labeled SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTS, but it turned out to contain laboratory equipment no more sophisticated than what might be found in a high school.

The Americans left and the Marucla resumed course for Havana.

George reported the good news to Bobby Kennedy by phone, then hopped a cab.

He told the driver to take him to the corner of Fifth and K Streets, in one of the city’s worst slum neighborhoods. Here, above a car showroom, was the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center. George wanted to understand this art and had asked for a special briefing, and since he worked for Bobby, he got it. He picked his way across a sidewalk littered with beer bottles, entered the building, and passed through a security turnstile; then he was escorted to the fourth floor.