"Name please!" asked the snippy young thing at the Navy Department Reception Desk. "R. L. Grant," I told her. "To see Admiral Ballister. By appointment," I added. "Have you any identification, Mr. Grant?" she inquired. "Of course not. Tell the Admiral that Z-2 has no identification. He will understand." She looked at me very dubiously but dialed a telephone and muttered into it. Suddenly she cackled, "You don't say? Sure! I'll send him right up." She beamed at me. "The Admiral is expecting you, sir," she said. "Here's your badge. Will you please sign this form?" She thrust a blue-and-white celluloid saucer at me, with a number on it, and passed a mimeographed form, which I duly signed "Robert E. Lee, C.S.A.," and which she duly accepted and filed. A Marine sergeant appeared out of the shadows and led me up a flight of stairs and along several unevenly paved concrete floors to an office where a battery of Waves and Junior Lieutenants promptly took me in charge. Admiral Ballister was a civilian's dream of a Navy Officer--"every other inch a sailor," as we used to say in the Pacific--with a ruddy face tanned by ocean winds or rye whisky, grizzled hair, incipient jowls, a "gruff old sea-dog" manner and a hearty hand-clasp. "Glad to see you Grant," he told me. "I've been checking up on Z-2 since McIntosh called. You boys have been doing one hell of a swell job on your security. There's not a word about you in our files." "Z-2, Admiral," I replied modestly, "is forbidden by the terms of the Executive Order setting us up to put itself on record. We have no identification, we get no glory, but a Z-2 agent was in the Jap squadron that attacked Pearl Harbor and one of our men was military secretary to Rommel in North Africa. At least two of our agents hold the rank of General in the Red Army. As you know, sir, we report directly to the President, and always verbally. Nothing on paper." "I know, I know," the Admiral agreed wistfully. "McIntosh is usually all wet"--he paused for me to register a flash of strictly subordinate glee at his meteorological witticism--"but he gave me a fill-in on the fine job you did on the Alaska case." "I'm afraid I worried your O.N.I. group in New York, sir!"--in addressing an Admiral, the "sir!" should not be slurred but should come out with a touch of whip-crack, if you wish promotion in the U.S. Navy--"They almost penetrated my cover as W. S. Tompkins, a Bedford Hills stock-broker with offices in Wall Street, and reported me to the F.B.I." "Oh!" Ballister seemed relieved. "So _you_ are Tompkins. No wonder Church Street was worried. Of course, they didn't know you were Z-2." "Naturally I couldn't tell them, sir!" I confided. "I was due to report to President Roosevelt at Warm Springs next Monday but since his death, I have to report to you, according to previous White House instructions. The new President hasn't had time to get orientated on Z-2 operations and this Alaska business can't wait, sir!"