With the aide gone, Brad dressed hurriedly. The SS passes should convince Lodestar of Major General March’s trustworthiness. Yesterday when the hoods came off, and the general had greeted Barnard Wagner and Claus Bauer as old friends, he’d been puzzled. What was going on? Of course it hadn’t taken a minute for Brad and Lapwing to realize that the general had learned of their arrest and orchestrated their rescue. Lodestar had taken some convincing. “You can trust him,” Chris had assured him. “If and when we get out of this mess, you’ll be enlightened at our reunion in New York. Until then, the less you know about him, the safer he is.”

Last night over schnapps, the general offered no information on how they came to be sitting in his house rather than a Gestapo or SS cell, but Lodestar could not resist asking, “The woman your men executed—could you not have arranged for her escape, too?”

“She was one of you?” the general asked.

“Yes,” Lodestar said. “She was definitely one of us.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know. But I could not have helped her even so. Any assistance from me on her behalf would have aroused suspicion from the SS. The woman was the…special project of the SD officer in charge of her interrogation and…execution.”

Brad and the others exchanged a look. The SS colonel had to be the linguistics expert the major had feared would expose Liverwort. Their friend should have listened, and now it was too late.

The sun was up and curfew was only an hour away when Brad slipped down the stairs to await the general. Minutes later, he appeared at the head of the staircase and descended while buttoning the cuffs of his uniform shirtsleeves. “Did you sleep well?” he asked.

“As well as could be expected,” Brad answered.

“Let us go into my study,” Konrad said. “I have something I wish to give you and your comrades when they join us, a little parting gift to ensure your safe arrival at your destinations.”

A fire had been laid in the room, comfortable and familiar, but Brad would not be sorry to leave this place that he had come to regard as a tenuous harbor from the storm. The general handed him the pass, issued by the security service of the Reichsführer and signed by a Colonel Derrick Albrecht. Brad pretended surprise and said, “Now I have something to give you if you are willing to accept it, General. I know that you are not happy with the arrangements you’ve made for Wilhelm. Would you consider allowing me to take him to America with me until you can come for him?”

Konrad blinked as if he’d not heard Brad correctly. “You would do that—take Wilhelm with you to America?”

“Yes, if you agree.”