The line went dead. Furious, Alistair slammed the receiver into its cradle. Never in his career had he felt the urge to disobey orders until now. He didn’t give a damn about the consequences, but his boss was right. It was too much of a risk to the OSS and SOE for him to show up in France, and Dragonfly was even better placed now to feed them the most reliable and accurate intel they would ever get out of Paris. Resistance groups and the military had already acted upon information the team had provided. A Gestapo general had been disposed of—quietly, to avoid reprisals—because his mistress, in being fitted for a new gown, had made no secret of the private party she was to attend with her lover. The RAF had taken out a secret Nazi facility in Norway on word leaked in Sam’s engineering consulting firm that it contained a bomb under construction that could wipe out a small country. Sam had also managed to photograph blueprints of a Nazi laboratory under development to create chemicals of mass destruction and had made copies of drawings for a plant to produce gliders designed to carry a warhead capable of destroying a city.

Brad had reported information of a crucial store of naval mines hidden in a cove on Le Mont-Saint-Michel, an island commune off the northwestern coast of Normandy, to be buried along the region’s shoreline in anticipation of an Allied invasion. A party of Maquis had swum ashore under cover of night, overtaken the guards, dismantled the fuses, and dumped the whole lot into the Couesnon River. Acting on Brad’s intel, Norwegian partisans had successfully blown up a ship carrying armaments bound for the Russian front to relieve the German troops’ dwindling supply.

Chris, living and working in hotbeds of gossip, had passed on a tip of an officer in the German High Command who picked up bed partners in bars catering to his gender, a penchant the Third Reich considered punishable by death but which made him ripe for blackmailing into working for the Allies. And Victoria had put the major onto a high-ranking German official furious with Hitler for bungling the war on the Russian front that had led to his son’s death. When Alistair’s man in Paris had approached the father to betray his country, he had readily agreed. So far, Dragonfly’s intel had netted gold, and other nuggets had come in that might pan out.

Reluctantly, Alistair reached again for the phone. His man in Paris, Henri Burrell, was a longtime friend with whom he’d worked in the last war, a trusted associate of the French Vichy government with unlimited travel restrictions. Once contacted, his friend could be across the Swiss border into Bern and at their rendezvous point by lunchtime, then back in Paris by the dinner hour. Alistair would set up Henri’s meeting with Dragonfly tomorrow at the café.