“Like a mistress…a concubine if you will.” Neal put in with a sardonic smile. Madeline and James’ relationship was not the secret they thought it had been.

James tried to reestablish control over the conversation, “OK, guys, I know I am being paranoid here, but…”

“How about we say,” Madeline interrupted with feigned seriousness, “that I am one of the airline hostesses, and you just managed to bag me on the flight over?”

Neal and Madeline laughed, “You certainly dress like one…and that hair.” said Neal, and she threw her empty plastic water bottle across the aisle at him.

Dr. West, sitting with Neal on the other side of the aisle from the two lovebirds, laughed. Then, in a more serious tone said, “Really you two, we’ve been over this before, but it is important that you understand how serious this is. You are not officially here. James and I are under strict orders not to bring any other civilians on board. The crew of the boat, though they will seem motley, will be all navy.”

“So what are we doing here, then?” asked Neal, “Other than apparently joining the mile-high club with James, here?”

Ever the lady, Laurie moved smoothly past Neal’s last comment and addressed his first question, “We still may need you to help configure the probe once we get it out of the back of this plane.”

Through methods unbeknownst to the group, the large and cumbersome probe, and its larger wooden packing crate, had miraculously escaped inspection on the trip over. This was probably due to the pleasant, inconspicuous men who had somehow been waiting for them at each stop along the way, dispatched by the CIA to help ‘expedite’ their onward journey.

“Once we have the probe set up, with your subtle assistance, of course,” continued Laurie, “you will have to stay on shore. We have to do the rest ourselves. It’s one thing to get you on board while we’re still in port as ‘guests,’ but the Admiralty will no doubt get a detailed manifest of who is onboard when we sail, and it would not do to have you on it.”

“Now,” said James, “what I have managed to bring along is a set of closed loop Military A-B radios. You two will have one with you on the shore, we will have the other on board the King’s Transom. These things are precisely configured to each other; each has a matching quantum encryption algorithm that changes every tenth of a second in ways that only the twin machine can duplicate.”

Madeline looked at him. He had emphasized to her that he could not explain why he was allowed to go on the mission and she was not. He had tried to say it was because he was ex-navy, but she knew him better than that. As he explained the clearly covert tool, her suspicions became ever more certain.