Alistair Renault sat very still. Eerily coincidental that he should have read that chapter in The Greatest Ruses of World War II today, almost twenty years after he’d watched the most amazing team of covert operatives he’d ever trained take off in the predawn darkness from England into enemy territory. In three weeks the team was to have met in Paris for a twenty-year reunion. The date, long canceled, had been suggested, insisted upon, by the team’s missing member. Alistair wondered if September 23, 1962, was as stuck in the others’ minds as it was in his.

He turned to the author page to read again, but with more interest, the credentials of John Peterson that qualified him to write The Greatest Ruses of World War II, a subject on which few had greater knowledge and none more experience than the man in brown. Mr. Peterson’s sparse qualifications, the lack of footnotes and a bibliography, and the so-so writing, plus its publication by a little-known university press in 1952, would not have enticed a serious reader of WWII literature to give his war chronicles a try, but the title of the book, set on a low shelf in the local library, had caught Alistair’s eye. All through his reading, he had wondered about the validity of the man’s research. The acknowledgments page made no mention of persons from whom John Peterson had received assistance or the sources he had consulted. For all the reader knew, the author could have made up the dramatic content and labeled it nonfiction. Alistair did not recognize the names in the book’s cast of characters, but he knew that the chapter detailing the clandestine activities of a five-agent team code-named Dragonfly that had operated in Paris during the city’s darkest years was factual—at least up until the claim in the shocking climax. He should know: He was the man who’d run the operation. Whether the ruse the author had described at the chapter’s conclusion was bogus, he didn’t know. He suspected it was, against a flickering hope that it wasn’t. He intended to find out.

John Peterson, bald, bespectacled, lackluster, appeared from his photo to have been in his late fifties in 1952. He’d be pushing seventy today and, if still living, was probably retired. Madison, New Jersey, was a little over a four-hour drive away. Before requesting John Peterson’s telephone number in New Jersey, of which there must be a slew, he’d try Madison High School, where Peterson had been an American history teacher. Perhaps a talkative school clerk would give him all the information required for Alistair to locate him in Madison, and he would take a little motor trip to the Rose City to introduce himself to John Peterson.