“As a matter of fact, it is.” Ann scanned a travel brochure she picked up at the airport. “In the early days of World War Two, the Navy established an inland base here after it was feared the Japanese would bomb the West Coast. The Farragut Naval Training Station was indeed named for David Farragut, hero of the Battle of Mobile Bay and the first full admiral in the U.S. Navy. Nearly fifty thousand men were stationed here at one point. After the war, the base closed down, and the land was conveyed to Idaho, which turned it into a state park.”

“There’s some trivia to fling at your next Pentagon cocktail hour,” Pitt said.

The road exited the park and corkscrewed down a hill into Bayview. The hamlet was at the tip of a narrow inlet on the large glacial lake of Pend Oreille. Pitt had to squeeze past some road construction equipment before dropping down to the main waterfront drive. Several marinas filled with bass boats, day cruisers, and a large number of houseboats occupied the northern half of the bay. The Navy Acoustic Research Detachment controlled the southern shore.

“There’s the lab’s entrance,” Ann said, pointing to a gated entry.

Pitt pulled into the visitors’ lot and parked next to the guard station. After they signed in with the guard, a uniformed escort arrived and chauffeured them into the facility in a gray sedan. As they drove along the waterfront, Pitt noticed an oddly shaped submarine with the designation Sea Jet tied up at dock.

The driver stopped at a towering beige-and-teal metal building built over the water, then escorted Ann and Pitt to the door. An animated man with bright red hair and dancing blue eyes greeted them.

“Chuck Nichols, assistant lab director,” he said in a rapid-fire voice. “Please, follow me.”

He waved off the driver and led Ann and Pitt to a small office crowded with papers and technical journals. He cleared off a pair of chairs overflowing with binders so they could sit down.

“We were all pretty shocked to hear about Carl and Manny’s accident,” Nichols said. “Have you figured out what happened?”

“Not entirely,” Ann said, “but we don’t believe it was an accident. We have reason to believe they were killed during a failed attempt by a foreign party to obtain the model prototype they were testing.”

Nichols’s lips tightened. “Yeah, Slippery Mumm. He was pretty secret about that one. I can’t believe anybody would have known about it.”

“Slippery Mumm?”

“He always had a pet name for his models. He called his last hull model Pig Ghost. He gave us lots of grief over naming our test boat Sea Jet.”

“Any significance to the name?” Pitt asked.