“He’s not here, son. I’ll say good-bye for you. Now we must go downstairs.”

Taking Wilhelm’s hand, following Hans, father and son descended the wide staircase. At the door, Hans, struggling to hold back tears, said his good-byes before Konrad knelt and hugged his son close again. He pressed his lips to the boy’s forehead and said, “Auf wiedersehen, my son. God be with you, until we meet again.”

*  *  *

That night, uninvited, Brad rang the general’s doorbell. When Hans answered, Brad knew at once from his swollen eyes and drooping face that Wilhelm had gone. The major had come through. Hans, incapable of speech, merely nodded toward the study, where Brad found the general slumped in his fireside chair, the glowing embers highlighting his vacant, tear-streaked gaze and the empty bottle of schnapps on the table beside him.

“In my country, there is a saying that misery loves company,” Brad said. “Want mine?”

“Have a seat,” the general said.

*  *  *

The following day, February 24, Colonel Derrick Albrecht’s surveillance man called at the colonel’s quarters in the Crillon Hotel to deliver his latest reports. For more than a year, he and his relief crew had occupied the site of a closed bistro across the street from the Convent of the Sisters of Charity. There was a mural on the convent wall, a beautiful thing that would be a tragedy if it were defaced. Its protection was not part of his duty, but if the situation came to that, he would make its preservation his business to the perpetrators’ regret.

Though his job as a surveillance expert was occasionally boring, he had never tired of it. He was well paid for doing virtually nothing, and people watching was one of his favorite occupations, the reason he was so good at what he did. Nothing got by him. He enjoyed observing the pretty artist add touches to her painting, and he welcomed the opportunity to read and to teach himself French while making sure no movement on the street escaped his surveillance. The imagined consequences of missing something important that should be reported to the chief of the SD’s counterintelligence department in France allowed no room to fall down on his job.

Based on his surveillance experience, the sleights of hand with which three men and one woman regularly slipped messages into the correspondence chute of the house beside the convent, as well as the care taken to appear natural, confirmed beyond doubt that they were members of a subversive organization using it as their dead-letter box. In his reports, he referred to them as the seaman, the Greek god, the briefcase, and the Goddess. He expected Colonel Albrecht to have had them rounded up by now, but the colonel had ordered him and his relief to stay at their post and report at once any activity or person that appeared to be a threat to the group.

One had appeared today.