Not a mark desecrated its plastic surface but for a single line in crayon drawn diagonally across the flat body of a liverwort, easily wiped off. Alistair and the four members of Dragonfly stood motionless before the code signal, then turned to stare in speechless wonder at one another. Finally, Bridgette said, “We’d better get a move on, boys. Liverwort is waiting for us.”

They found her facing the door in her usual seat in the café, the same look of expectancy and hope and fear on her beautiful face that she’d worn all those years ago when she’d thought they were lost to her.

“Hi, guys,” she said, rising, tears filling her eyes.

*  *  *

Saturday evening in New York City. The Westminster chimes of the Waterbury standing sentinel in the hall struck six o’clock as the September sun lowered over the treetops of Central Park. Sunday had just gone past the hour of midnight in Paris. The distinguished man sitting guard over the telephone in his Park Avenue apartment had been waiting for the instrument to ring all day, though he had known not to expect a call until after four o’clock in France. That was the time his wife was to keep an appointment in Paris at a tea shop with friends she’d not seen in eighteen years. She was to let him know if they’d shown up.

Or not.

It was the “or not” that most worried him, but at least his wife would have some form of answer to the question roiling around in her head for years: Were her friends from the war years still alive? He knew very little about the circumstances behind the question. Victoria had allowed him only a few glimpses into a two-year stretch in her past that otherwise was uncomplicated history. All he really knew was that in those two years, she and these particular friends, all Americans—three men and a woman—had served together in the OSS as a group working in Paris during the war. After all these years, she’d not been able to free herself from the hope that they had survived. He had accepted but not been able to understand her enduring devotion to four people whose real names she did not know, nor where they came from, what they did for a living, or a single detail about their backgrounds. “It is hard to explain,” she’d said.