Ans nodded. “The newspaper is calling for active resistance, so I know there are people who feel the same way I do, people who want to fight back. I assume you have contacts in the Resistance. Can you put me in touch with them?”

The woman glanced around as if afraid they’d already talked for too long. “I’m just a link in the chain. I don’t know the answer. But I’ll convey your message.”

As the days passed, Ans longed to see Erik and explain her faith. They’d spoken on the telephone a few times, but he still worked at night and slept during the day, and she wanted to be with him in person when she shared her faith with him. “I love you, Ans,” he said each time. She loved him, too, and needed him to understand why she made the choices she did.

After Ans’s next meeting with her contact from the newspaper, she found this message inside the bag: “Go to the Hortus Botanicus on Sunday at one o’clock. Look at the plants. Someone will find you.”

The enormous glass greenhouse at the botanical gardens was almost unbearably hot on the July afternoon when Ans arrived. She wandered around, gazing at the tropical plants, until a middle-aged man with wire-rimmed glasses approached her. He had fair hair and a bushy blond mustache and appeared unremarkable —an ordinary schoolteacher or bank clerk —and not at all how she pictured a Resistance fighter.

“Hello, my dear cousin!” he said, spreading his arms. “So wonderful to see you again!” He kissed both of her cheeks. “Now walk beside me,” he said in a low voice. “We’re admiring the plants. Call me Havik.”

Ans’s heart thudded in her chest as if trying to escape. She could see how his hawklike nose and alert eyes had earned him the code name Hawk. He strolled by her side for a few moments, giving her time to calm down. “I understand you’re dating a policeman,” he said at last. “A member of the NSB.”

She halted, frightened by his knowledge of her private life. “How . . . how do you know that?”

“It’s our business to know. That’s why you deliver your articles to a contact and not to the newspaper. It’s why you don’t know where the printing press is.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“Spare me your outrage. Lives are at stake. They can’t torture you into revealing our whereabouts if you don’t know where we are. Or who we are. Keep walking.” He tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow.