Three days passed before the desk clerk to whom the stakeout man had entrusted his message happened to remember to give it to Colonel Derrick Albrecht on the morning of Friday, June 9. “For you, Herr Colonel,” he said. “It was delivered by some man off the street who said it was important. You were in a meeting, and I did not wish to disturb you.”

When Derrick read the message, the desk clerk, already a tangle of nerves, blanched when he saw the colonel’s jawline tighten and his eyes shoot flames when he looked up from the report. “When did this arrive?”

“Why, uh, Tuesday at noon, June sixth, I believe, Herr Colonel, and uh, another message came for you…yesterday…from Major Schultz at Gestapo headquarters. You were in a meeting then, too, with orders not to be disturbed.”

“You idiot!” his superior thundered. “I should have you shot!” He barked for Karl, who came running. “Get me to Gestapo headquarters quick!” Derrick ordered.

By then four members of Dragonfly had been arrested and taken to the dreaded address at 11 Rue de Saussaies in the eighth arrondissement, referred to by Resistance fighters as the “street of horrors.” The roundup of the team had begun on June 7. That evening the beggar was back at his site when Bridgette returned to the convent. What happened? she asked him. Where had he gone? She’d been concerned when she saw him missing and his cup and can and bag of nuts strewn on the street. The beggar spat into the gutter and replied that he’d been dragged away by the filthy Milice, who’d questioned his blindness and accused him of faking it to get money and food. They released him when they realized their mistake and even brought him back to collect his cane and cup. Somebody had made off with his bag of pine nuts.

The man did not point her out that day or the next to the aproned hireling sweeping the stoop of a shop a few storefronts down. He would save her for another police unit from which he would collect a bounty that, added to the Gestapo’s reward, would amount to more than what they would pay him for all five together.

The first to fall under the point of his cane was Victoria, the signal that brought three leather-coated, slouch-hatted men running from the shop like rats scuttling toward cheese. They approached her as she was studying her code mark, jerked her hands behind her, and bound them before she could pull the thread to her cyanide pill. Led away, she glanced at the sightless beggar, who was drawn up against the wall as if struggling to determine what the commotion was all about. It was you, Victoria thought, sickened at the team’s own blindness in not seeing that the man could be a Gestapo plant. It was only a matter of time before they were all rounded up.