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"Why don't you go back out with him?" Cynthia asked.

Whittaker ignored her for a moment, then somewhat lamely said, "I want to check in with Ellis. I'd rather do that from your room than try to get a longdistance authorization at Mare Island or feed quarters to a pay phone."

He might, indeed, actually call Ellis from the Theodore Roosevelt Suite, once he gets there, Cynthia thought, but he obviously just thought up that excuse to get into the room.

There was also a good chance that the moment he got her behind the closed doors of the Theodore Roosevelt Suite, he would make a play for her, she thought. She really didn't want that. But she didn't want to make an issue of it now. If it happened, she could handle him.

When they got to the suite, he went directly to the telephone on the table in front of the couch and put in a call to Chief Ellis in Washington.

He seemed genuinely disappointed that Ellis was not immediately available.

"I'm in Miss Chenowith's room in the Mark Hopkins," he said to the telephone.

"I'll wait here for his call."

He put the telephone in its cradle.

"Not there? That's surprising," Cynthia said.

"He would have been there if I had called when I was supposed to," he said.

"I didn't even think of calling him until I needed an excuse to be alone with you."

She smiled at him.

That should have been my cue, she thought, to say something cutting-"Don't get any ideas, Jimmy," something like that. I wonder why I didn't?

It was, she decided, because his honesty disarmed her. And then she realized there was more than that. She had tried to force the thought from her mind whenever it had appeared. But that had been hard, and it kept reappearing, as it was doing now.

The thought was that the clock was running down, like the clock at a basketball game. Very soon, Jimmy and Greg--and maybe even Garvey, whom she thought of as "the boy in the sailor suit" --would get on the submarine and try to establish contact with this man Fertig and his guerrillas in the Philippines.

There was a very good chance that they would be caught, and if they were caught, they could count on being executed. Cynthia had seen photographs of Japanese executions of Americans. It was done ritually, according to the Japanese warriors' code of Bushido, which prescribed execution by beheading.

And this was followed by another thought, alarming in its implications:

There seemed to be little morally wrong with going to bed with a man who stood a very good chance of being executed by beheading in the very near future.

It seemed little enough to do for him.

But that presumed he would be executed. Jimmy, God bless him, seemed to have an incredible ability to stay alive. And if he stayed alive, he would be back. And he would interpret her taking him into her bed as a reciprocation of love. And he would want to marry her.

There were a number of reasons she couldn't marry Jimmy. For openers, she was convinced that the love she felt for him was not the sort of love a woman should have for the man she would marry, whose children she would bear. He was younger than she was. And she had been his uncle's mistress. She sometimes thought that she owed the love she felt for Jimmy simply to his likeness, in so many subtle ways, to Chesty Whittaker. Sometimes, when he looked at her, it was as if Chesty was behind the eyes.

And she didn't reciprocate Greg's affection, either. Greg said it jokingly, but she believed that he thought he loved her. And she didn't want to sleep with him, either.

It would be better all around if she were a slut, she thought every so often.

Not an absolute, four-star slut, but just a little bit of a slut, like Charity Hoche.

The situation Cynthia found herself in would pose no great problems for Charity.

If Charity believed that two men like these, both of them handsome and rich, and head and shoulders above most other men, thought they were in love with her, and if she was as fond of both of them as Cynthia was, Charity would sleep with both of them. One at a time, of course, but with both of them.

"I think we should talk about Joe Garvey," Cynthia said.

"Ellis will want to know when he calls back."

Whittaker nodded.