“And, of course, he would have kept in mind the danger to himself if he’d tried to blackmail the colonel,” Maurice pointed out. “No, if he in fact did visit Colonel Albrecht that day, he had another reason in mind.”

The junior officer looked at him in surprise. “You think the colonel is lying?”

“I think the colonel is protecting Mademoiselle Veronique Colbert.”

*  *  *

While the new week of November 23 turned freezing under gray-metal skies, the team of Dragonfly enjoyed the relative calm that had come into their lives. Aware that their peace had been bought at the elimination of their nemeses, Bridgette, Bucky, Chris, and Victoria went about their jobs and clandestine activities feeling the release of the liberated, if the guilt of the culpable. The intel flowed, amplifying the wartime rationale “for the greater good” to justify the casualties. Brad succeeded in learning the details of the shipment of tungsten that allowed the RAF to blow it out of the water, creating for the Nazis an untold delay in their weapons manufacture that their regime could ill afford. One day the virulent-tongued Madame Richter, wife of the notorious commander of the Drancy transit camp in Paris, let fly before the ears of Bridgette the news that her husband would be accompanying a truck convoy loaded with Zyklon B pellets to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Bridgette, kneeling on the floor to pin the hem of the woman’s latest frock, invisible as usual to Madame Richter, listened as she explained that the pellets—“the very best thing for exterminating Jews”—converted to lethal gas when exposed to air.

“The guards throw the pellets through the vent holes, and the Jews are dead in twenty minutes,” she said, speaking to the equally despicable wife of another high-ranking German officer. Within minutes of the woman’s departure, a sick taste in her mouth, Bridgette took off for the convent to transmit the information to the major. Two nights later, he transmitted back: Truck convoy hijacked. Diverted off course.

Stephane Beaulieu had become so trusted and well-liked at his consulting firm that the German engineer in charge of the “Mountain Project” invited him to make a tour of the facility in the French Alps, where they were constructing projectiles to annihilate the coast of Great Britain. Bucky committed the location and details to memory and drew blueprints of his own to slip to an OSS cutout.

By accident, Victoria learned the name of a mole working for the Nazis inside the American Embassy in Bern, and Chris was able to pass on a military strategy the Germans were planning to defend the coast of France against invasion.