Alistair immediately put in a call to Wild Bill Donovan, who was “unavailable.” That meant that he was on a secret mission somewhere. “Tell him to get in touch with me as soon as possible,” he ordered.

Drawing heavily on a cigarette, Alistair roamed his office. Nothing in the report said anything about Admiral Canaris being arrested or the reason for his dismissal. His removal smelled of the manipulation of Heinrich Himmler, who for some time had been suspicious of Canaris and had pushed to put the Abwehr under the control of the SS. If Canaris was discovered to be playing a double game, which he was, then his arrest was certain and where would that leave the admiral’s close friend, Konrad March?

Alistair had never been sure that the two were in the game together or separately, but early on, he had suspected the major general of using Brad and Chris to channel information, always genuine, to the OSS. Surely he shared the same conviction as the admiral’s that Hitler was a madman sending Germany on the road to destruction. What else could explain the consistent flow of classified information to the ears and cameras of his fishing guide and his son’s tutor?

If Alistair was right, with Canaris’s arrest, the general would be one of the next cards in the deck to fall, and Brad and Chris along with him. Ditto for the rest of the team. Alistair knew his boss would direct him to wait and see if his fears for Dragonfly materialized, and only then get Dragonfly out. To hell with that. Alistair would obey his orders only to a point. He would decide himself when to extract his team.

*  *  *

The SS’s takeover of the Abwehr in Paris was immediate and swift. No sooner had the admiral been informed that he would be relieved of his duties in Berlin than the commander of the SD, Derrick’s superior, marched into Konrad’s office in the Lutetia Hotel with his second-in-command by his side. While a contingent of SS personnel swooped through the rest of Abwehr headquarters taking possession of offices and desks, the SD commander proclaimed to Major General Konrad March that by decree of the Führer, the Department of German Military Intelligence in France was now officially abolished and its duties placed under the command of the Schutzstaffel. He would leave it to Colonel Derrick Albrecht, head of the counterintelligence section of the security service of the Reichsführer, to explain.