“What it looks like.” Alistair made a motion to the sergeant to bring coffee and got up to move to one of the chairs reserved for visitors. “Good trip?”

“Tolerable, but enough about me,” Bill Donovan said. He tossed Alistair’s letter of resignation onto a table. “Let’s talk about this. I know what’s behind it. All your lambs didn’t make it home to the fold, and rather than look at your glass as half full because three of them did, you’d rather consider it half empty because two of them didn’t. Well, I don’t accept your resignation, not without you hearing me out first. After that, you might want to tear it up.”

Alistair sighed wearily. “I doubt it, but what’s on your mind?”

“Congratulations, that’s what, though I know my kudos will ping off you like BBs off a Sherman tank, but I’ll give them anyway. You’ve done one hell of a great job running this station, Alistair, and your genius has paid untold dividends. The president wishes me to express his gratitude.”

“Okay, accepted,” Alistair said. “Next.”

Wild Bill grunted as if that reaction was as expected. “I’ve come to offer you another job. German defenses of the entire Normandy front are collapsing even as we speak, and the Allies are steadily moving into France. It won’t be long before U.S. Army tanks will be rolling down Paris’s Champs Élysées. The Allied powers predict that France will be liberated by the end of August, so I accept that your job here is done. Now I want you to come home with me, Alistair—to Washington, D.C., that is. I will need you to help me administer the OSS when the war is over because it won’t be over, not by a long shot. Our next enemy will be Russia. You can bet Stalin will force the Nazi-occupied countries liberated by his armies to become Russian satellites. The countries of Eastern Europe will simply exchange one yoke for another, and there’s talk of even Berlin being divided into eastern and western sectors. The West and its allies will have to face another world-domination threat, and the OSS has to be reorganized to deal with it.”

“And you think I’m the man who can help you do it.”