So you believe the team is ready for the next leg?” Colonel Bill Donovan asked his deputy as he tapped his club soda glass to the bartender to request a refill. The men sat in a shadowy corner of an out-of-the-way tavern in Washington, D.C., their private meeting place away from OSS headquarters. Overhead, a lazy ceiling fan minimally relieved the room’s trapped heat.

Both men were near teetotalers. The man in brown gloomily watched as their glasses were replenished and waited to answer until the bartender had gone back to his station. “Any further preparation from this end would be gilding the lily,” he said.

“Then what’s wrong, Alistair? I’ve never seen you like this before. You’re usually raring to go into the final round. This time you seem to be having second thoughts.”

“A midnight deluge of them, but never about this team’s abilities. Those five kids are the best I’ve ever hauled in, the smartest and brightest and…nicest.”

“Nicest? Since when has niceness ever been desirable for sending an agent into the field?”

“It isn’t. The least desirable quality, as a matter of fact.”

Colonel Donovan dropped a slice of lime into his glass and studied Alistair closely. He knew what was troubling his trusted right-hand man, but the acknowledgment had to come from him. It was not too late to send another case officer in his place. His spymaster extraordinaire had fallen into the trap that had led many a hard-core member of his trade to turn in his identification badge. Alistair Renault had come to care about his young spies. That chink in his armor could be disastrous for him, the team, and the mission. “Then what is it?” Wild Bill persisted.

Idly, Alistair, an inveterate doodler, drew an oblong shape on a cocktail napkin that metamorphosed into the body of an insect, the thorax larger than the abdomen, the head covered by broadly rounded eyes, the wings spread out flat to the sides of the figure. A dragonfly, his boss recognized, the code name of the team to be dispatched to England in the morning for the final round of training before they would be sent into France. They were the most disparate group of spies in the recorded history of espionage: a civil engineer, a fly-fisherman, a fencer, a dress designer, and a track-and-field coach.

“I have a bad feeling about this mission,” his deputy said.

“You have a bad feeling about all of them. What’s so different about this one?”