It was Friday, October 30, thirty-seven days into the operation. Alistair’s design to protect each member of Dragonfly by keeping them ignorant of one another’s identities, cover names, addresses, and missions, their paths never to cross but in the natural flow of foot traffic in the Latin Quarter, had blown up in his face. His notion to assign the team the same dead drop and collection point hadn’t been so sterling, either—sheer idiocy, in fact. According to his man in Paris, the mural was drawing so much attention that a French policeman with fascist leanings had been assigned to guard it. The situation had put Bridgette under his constant eye and increased the likelihood of the man noticing the same four faces passing regularly by the mail drop.

Bloody hell!

Alistair told himself that he could not have anticipated these latest developments. There were always cock-ups. The unexpected was the bane of every mission. But in this case, he couldn’t help but blame himself, irrational though his thinking may be. He’d been delusional to think that a team of young, inexperienced, marginally trained, sheltered Americans set in a foreign country blatantly cooperative with their Nazi occupiers could escape detection. Dragonflies got eaten all the time.

That is, if they were caught.

So there was only one solution. He must get them out of Paris.

*  *  *

“Alistair, are you crazy?” Wild Bill Donovan exploded with rare anger at his top spymaster when Alistair called to state his proposal. “You will not jerk Dragonfly out of Paris on a notion that they are in imminent danger. So what? Every agent we send behind enemy lines is in imminent danger. Those kids are in prime locations to keep feeding us invaluable intel. My God, what more could we wish for? Lodestar hobnobbing with the Abwehr in the boardinghouse and Liverwort with the head of the CI division in Paris, Lapwing tutoring the son of the head of the Abwehr in France, Limpet the man’s fly-fishing guide, and Labrador in a position to transmit it all back! They’re in the perfect spots you trained and sent them to Paris for! Rather than flagellating yourself, you ought to be patting yourself on the back. You’ve managed one of the biggest coups in intelligence history, just based on their results so far. Why in hell would you want to bring them home?”

“Because their arrest is inevitable, Bill.”

“How do you know? Nothing may come of these new revelations the kids have stumbled onto. Give them credit for the courage and resourcefulness to deal with them. They don’t seem the type to turn tail and run at the first sign of trouble anyway.”

That was what Alistair was afraid of. “I thought we agreed that at the first sign of danger to any of them, the decision was mine about when and if to exfiltrate them,” he said.