The runners who reported to Bell on the platform were chosen for their youthful appearance. Bell had ordered them to be attired like innocuous college boys, in boaters, summer suits, rounded collars, and neckties, so as not to unnecessarily frighten the throng that had come out to greet the new ship.

He had argued strongly for a postponement, but there was no question of calling the ceremony off. Too much was riding on the launch, Captain Falconer had explained, and every party involved would protest. New York Ship was proud to put Michigan in the water just ahead of Cramp’s Shipyard’s South Carolina, which was only weeks behind. The Navy wanted the hull immediately afloat to finish fitting her out. And no one in his cabinet dared inform President Roosevelt of any delay.

The ceremony was scheduled to start exactly at eleven. Captain Falconer had warned Bell that they would launch on time. In less than an hour the dreadnought would either slide uneventfully down the ways or the German saboteur would attack, wreaking a terrible toll on the innocent.

A Marine brass band started playing a Sousa medley, and the launching stand got crowded with hundreds of special guests invited to stand close enough to actually see the champagne bottle crack on the bow. Bell spotted the Secretary of the Interior, three senators, the governor of Michigan, and several members of President Roosevelt’s vigorous “Tennis Cabinet.”

The top bosses of New York Ship trooped up the steps in close company with Admiral Capps, the chief naval constructor. Capps seemed less interested in talking to shipbuilders than to Lady Fiona Abbington-Westlake, the wife of the British Naval Attaché, a beautiful woman with a shiny mane of chestnut hair. Isaac Bell observed her discreetly. The Van Dorn researchers assigned to the Hull 44 spy case had reported that Lady Fiona spent beyond her husband’s means. Worse, she was paying blackmail to a Frenchman named Raymond Colbert. No one knew what Colbert had on her, or whether it involved her husband’s purloining of French naval secrets.

The German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was represented by a saber-scarred military attaché, Lieutenant Julian Von Stroem, recently returned from German East Africa, who was married to an American friend of Dorothy Langner. Suddenly Dorothy herself parted the crowd in her dark mourning clothes. The bright-eyed redheaded girl he had noticed at the Willard Hotel was at her elbow. Katherine Dee, Research had reported, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who had moved back to Ireland after making his fortune building Catholic schools in Baltimore. Orphaned soon after, Katherine had been convent-educated in Switzerland.