His taste buds watering, Dirk swung his legs to the floor and clasped his head in his hands. His decision to cut ties with America to join the German Army was the worst mistake he would ever make in his life, if he survived long enough to have a life. What in God’s name had he been thinking to chuck his family, home, country, and friends to live in a miserably cold, paranoid, unfriendly country run by a crazed dictator like Adolf Hitler? It hadn’t taken Dirk but a month of Abwehr training in Berlin to realize that he was first, foremost, and would ever be an American, fractionally a German, but never a Nazi. Obviously, the members of his intelligence unit believed the same about him. Rather than welcome him with open arms as Dirk had expected (he’d figured that an American would be quite a catch for the Abwehr), he was shunned by the other enlistees and treated with near contempt by the officers. They did not trust him. Disloyalty to a man’s country, even a foe’s, was foreign to the German chromosome system.

But to stay alive, he had borne his disillusionment with Hitler, the Abwehr, the government’s anti-Semitism policies, and the diabolical goals of the Third Reich without giving away the bitter regret of his decision and revulsion for his job. He had even risen to the grade of sergeant and been posted to the plum location of Paris, but he had no doubt that he would have already been transferred to the Russian front had he not possessed a special skill needed by the intelligence-gathering branch of the German Army. The Abwehr needed him as an English interpreter.

That job he could have tolerated. The Abwehr respected the rules of the Geneva Convention and treated the enemy and suspicious persons with relatively decent human conduct during interrogations. But no sooner had he arrived in Paris than he was loaned out part-time to the anti-Jewish section of the Gestapo. They were short of English-speaking staff.