Once re-bound and in the chair under the harsh ceiling light, the colonel dismissed the corporal and locked the door behind her. His glance fell on her cut, still-bleeding lip, and Victoria, glaring at him, expected him to produce another white handkerchief, but he walked around her chair. She flinched, expecting a blow to her head, but he merely checked her bonds. He then pulled up a chair directly in front of her and leaned close. “Listen to me very carefully, Victoria. I know you are an OSS spy. I suspected you were when I found that cyanide capsule in the lining of your coat, and I knew it for sure the day of our picnic when you swallowed the major’s report hook, line, and sinker, to borrow a phrase from American slang. I know about your cellmates in the van, the dead-letter box, the artist. Your cover is blown. The SS shoots enemy spies. So now you must do exactly as you’re told, you understand? Your execution is scheduled for the day after tomorrow, and I must prepare you for it.” He opened the black box.

*  *  *

After giving Henri instructions to clear out the house with the mail slot of any evidence identifying it as a dead-letter box, Alistair informed his decryption clerk of Labrador’s compromised transmission signal. Any information coming in from that quarter was to be discounted. He was to be informed when the first false transmission came in, proof that his radio operator had been taken and made to talk. Alistair returned to his desk with his head ready to explode. The glass of water he reached for shook in his hand, and the dribble he swallowed passed over his tobacco-coated tongue like acid and burned his throat going down. Bridgette had been arrested by the French Gestapo, the most barbarous of the Nazi police organizations. It would be only a matter of time before they broke her, that kitten with the heart of a lion. The others would be snagged at the letter drop unless their facilitators could get word to them quickly enough to save them. Alistair sat down heavily at his desk, put his hands together, and squeezed shut his eyes. He was not a spiritual man for all his love of liturgical music, but he commenced doing the only thing he knew now to do. He prayed.

*  *  *

“Well, Mademoiselle Dufor, it would seem that you are not as guiltless as you sound and certainly not as innocent as you look. A wireless transmitter was found in a hidden cupboard in your room at the Convent of the Sisters of Charity.”