“I’ll do it. Next time someone walks in unexpected, assume he’s trouble until you learn otherwise.”

Bell strode across the big loft past rows of drawing boards that were usually occupied by the naval architects testing the cage mast. The man in the Russian officer’s uniform was so engrossed in Farley Kent’s drawing that he gave a startled jump and dropped the rolls he had tucked under his arm when Bell said, “Good morning, sir.”

“Oh! I do not hear approach,” he said in a heavy Russian accent, scrambling to pick them up.

“May I have your name, please?”

“I am Second Lieutenant Vladimir Ivanovich Yourkevitch of His Majesty Czar Nicolas’s Imperial Russian Navy. And to whom do I have the honor—”

“Have you an appointment here, Lieutenant Yourkevitch?” The Russian, who looked barely old enough to shave, bowed his head. “Sadly, no. I am hoping to meet with Mr. Farley Kent.”

“Does Mr. Kent know you?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“Then how did you get in here?”

Yourkevitch smiled, disarmingly. “With entitled demeanor, impeccable uniform, and crisp salute.”

Isaac Bell did not smile back. “That might get you past the Marines guarding the gate. But where did you get the password to go to Kent’s drawing loft?”

“In bar outside gates, I meet Marine officer. He tells me password.”

Bell beckoned the Protection Services operative.

“Lieutenant Yourkevitch will sit on that stool, away from this drawing board, until I return.” To Lieutenant Yourkevitch he said, “This gentleman is fully capable of knocking you to the floor. Do as he tells you.”

Then Bell crossed the loft and pushed open the door to the test chamber.

A dozen of Kent’s staff were circled around a ten-foot-tall model of an experimental battleship cage mast. The young naval architects held wire snips, micrometers, slide rules, notepaper, and tape measures. The round, freestanding structure, which stood on a dolly, was made of stiff wires that spiraled from base to top in a counterclockwise twist and were braced at intervals by horizontal rings. It represented, in miniature, a one-hundred-twenty-foot-high mast made of lightweight tubing and was correct in every detail down to the mesh platforms within some of the rings, electric leads and voice pipes running from the spotters’ top to the fire director’s tower, and tiny ladders angling up the interior.

Two of Kent’s architects held ropes attached to opposite sides of the round base. A tape measure strung between the walls passed next to the top. An architect on a stepladder watched the tape closely. Farley Kent said, “Portside salvo. Fire!”

The architect on the left side jerked his rope, and the man watching the tape called out how much the tower had swayed. “Six inches!” was recorded.

“At twelve-to-one, that’s six feet!” said Kent. “The spotters on top better hold on tight when the ship fires her main turrets. On the other hand, a tripod mast will weigh one hundred tons, while our cage of redundant members will weight less than twenty—a huge savings. O.K., let’s measure how she sways after being hit by several shells.” Wielding a wire snips, he severed at random two of the spiraled uprights and one of the rings.