At his desk in Bern, enveloped in a thick cloud of smoke from the dozen Lucky Strikes he’d chain-lit since receiving Bridgette’s coded messages from Paris, Major Alistair Renault was the picture of despair. Information from the OSS’s investigation into Colonel Derrick Albrecht, born a duke in Bavaria, had come in. The man in brown already had some knowledge of him, but only who he was and what he did as the chief of the SS counterintelligence division in Paris. He had not known that the man was one of Germany’s former champions of foil and that he had studied a year at Harvard. Those details had not been in the file.

Dirk Drechsler was from New Braunfels, Texas, which happened to be the fleet-footed Chris Brandt’s hometown, and lived in the same boardinghouse as Sam Barton, otherwise known as Dragonfly’s Lodestar. Chris was now tutoring the son of the head of the Abwehr in France, who lived next door to his Dragonfly teammate, the fly-fishing Brad Hudson, who had become friendly with the same lad, the general’s son. Could there be a greater muddle of his carefully laid plans to keep his operatives separate and safe?

Within the week had come other encrypted messages that threatened to produce the cardiac stroke his boss had predicted for him for years. Victoria had stumbled across Sam at his boardinghouse when she somehow tracked down Gabrielle Dupree for information about her missing fiancé, shot down in a bombing raid over a target near Paris. How Victoria had come by word that the proprietor had sheltered him—Alistair’s sources had not identified the RAF pilots—might never come to light, but her visit explained her ulterior motive for joining the OSS. Madame Dupree was able to confirm her fiancé’s death—this learned from his man in Paris after Gabrielle contacted him, not from Victoria or Sam, who had yet to inform Labrador of the chance encounter. Alistair would bet those two had decided to sit on that information because they knew he’d pull them out. The accidental meeting had put Gabrielle in danger and Sam in double jeopardy, first from the American traitor living under the same roof and the other from Victoria, now privy to his address.