Projekt Saucer: Inception Part 72

'Same difference,' Joan said.

Surrounded by the pink walls and Moorish tiles of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, they had c.o.c.ktails with Admiral Paris and his wife, Marisa, the former a silvery-haired, pink-faced, world-weary handsome man, the latter a raven-haired, good-humoured woman whose features, though formed over fifty years, were those of a carefree woman ten years younger.

'I hope you like that villa we found for you,' Marisa Paris said as she stirred her exotic c.o.c.ktail with a straw. 'Are you happy up there?'

'Blissful,' Joan replied. 'The villa's lovely and the view is stupendous.'

Marisa sighed melodramatically. 'Gee,' she said, 'I'm glad. I get so nervous finding places for friends of friends. You just never know, right?'

'Right,' Bradley said. 'But you picked right, so stop worrying.'

'Taylor told us to take care of you,' Admiral Paris said. 'He described you as two very rare birds friends worth any effort. You've obviously warmed his cold heart.'

Bradley chuckled at that. 'I've never seen his cold heart.'

'Taylor isn't cold, but he's tough and a good judge of people. A man like that I can trust.'

'You've known him a long time?'

'Yep. We've conducted a friendly rivalry for years: Army against Navy. I claim to sail the high seas, where the air is fresh and healthy, and I tell him he's just a dog-soldier, a kind of policeman, his nose rubbed in intelligence muck.'

'It's necessary,' Bradley said with a nervous glance at Joan.

'Sure it is,' Paris replied. 'I know that. I just josh him to score the odd point. He isn't bothered at all. In fact, right now he's setting up a kind of centralized intelligence bureau. I'm not sure exactly what kind, but that's his latest obsession.'

'Marisa,' Joan said to Paris's wife, 'are you going to sit here and let them both talk about their work?'

'No way,' Marisa said, placing her empty gla.s.s on the table and looking melodramatically determined. 'I'm going to insist we leave right this minute and have us some fun.'

'Right!' Joan said.

'Right!' Bradley added.

Yet when they left the hotel and drove back to Honolulu, he could not help but feel bitter disappointment at learning that a centralized intelligence agency was being set up and he, who had pushed so strongly for its formation, had not been called. Of course he understood why he'd told Taylor that he wanted out but he still felt obscurely betrayed, as if, in some part of his subconscious, he had wanted Taylor to insist that he come in.

Dammit, he thought, I'm such a hypocrite. I should learn to grow up...

And yet, as they entered the Naval Officers Club in Pearl Harbour, he looked at Joan's flushed face, saw the radiance of her smile, and realized that in every possible way he had done the right thing.

'Let's have the time of our lives,' he said.

The dance began late in the evening and went on until the early hours of the morning when the white-jacketed officers and women in flowing ballgowns, most more flushed than they had been six hours before, started drifting away, either back to their quarters on the base or, as the cacophony of revving cars indicated, to their homes in the lushly tropical hills above Waikiki and Diamond Head.

Because they had been drinking, Bradley and Joan, at the invitation of Admiral Paris, returned to their home in the officers' quarters, where they had a few hours' sleep. The next morning, after showering and changing into the less formal clothes they had brought with them, they joined Paris and Marisa for breakfast in their modest kitchen. Outside, in the base and in Honolulu, the church bells were ringing.

'I still feel drunk,' Marisa said.

'Go to church and confess,' her husband said.

'You look surprisingly fresh,' Bradley complimented her. 'It must

all be in the mind.'

'It's in my mind,' Joan retorted. 'Or at least in my head. My head

feels like it's stuffed in cotton wool. What on earth did we drink last

night?'

Admiral Paris laughed and placed his coffee cup back on its saucer. 'Just a few little c.o.c.ktails,' he said. 'The ones with flags sticking out of

them.'

Then his cup rattled in its saucer and the coffee slopped out. 'What the h.e.l.l... ?'

The table shook again as Paris stared down at his cup. The other

cups and saucers also rattled, then, even as Bradley heard a distant