“Considering how far I have gotten from a dozen professional detectives for the past two weeks, pursuit by ordinary citizens drinking in a hotel bar holds few terrors for me. But surely you can guess that I did not lure you here to shoot you, which I could have done late last night as you walked home from this hotel to your club on 44th Street.”

Bell returned a grim smile. “My congratulations to the Black Ocean Society for teaching their spies the art of invisibility.”

“I accept the compliment,” Yamamoto smiled back. “In the name of the Empire of Japan.”

“Why does a patriot of the Empire of Japan become the instrument of an English spy’s revenge?”

“Don’t be put out with Abbington-Westlake. You hurt his pride, which is a dangerous thing to do to an Englishman.”

“Next time I see him, I won’t hurt his pride.”

Yamamoto smiled again. “That is between you and him. Let us remember that you and I are not enemies.”

“You murdered Arthur Langner in the Gun Factory,” Bell shot back coldly. “That makes us enemies.”

“I did not kill Arthur Langner. Someone else did. An overzealous subordinate. I’ve taken appropriate measures with him.”

Bell nodded. He saw no profit in challenging that cold-eyed lie until he learned Yamamoto’s intention. “If you didn’t murder Langner and we are not enemies, why are you pointing a gun under the table at my belly?”

“To hold your attention while I explain what is going on and what I can do to help you.”

“Why would you want to help me?”

“Because you can help me.”

“You are offering to deal.”

“I am offering to trade.”

“Trade what?”

“The spy who arranged Langner’s murder and the murder of Lakewood, the fire-control expert, and the murder of the turbine expert, MacDonald, and the murder of Gordon, the armorer in Bethlehem, and the attempt to sabotage the launch of the Michigan, which you so ably thwarted.”

“Trade for what?”

“Time for me to disappear.”

Isaac Bell shook his head emphatically. “That makes no sense. You’ve demonstrated that you could disappear already.”

“It is more complicated than simply disappearing. I have my own responsibilities—responsibilities to my country—which have nothing to do with you because we are not enemies. I need to get clean away and leave no tracks to haunt me or embarrass my country.”

Bell thought hard. Yamamoto was confirming what he had suspected—that a spy other than he was the mastermind who had recruited not only the Japanese murderer but the German saboteur and who knew how many others.

Yamamoto spoke urgently. “Discretion is survival. Defeats, and victories, should be observed quietly, after the fact, at a distance.”

To save his own skin—and who knew for what other motives—Yamamoto would betray the mastermind. As the treacherous Abbington-Westlake had put it so cynically at this same table, “Welcome to the world of espionage, Mr. Bell.”