Her recently deceased French grandmother, an emigrant from France, had reared her and supported them as a much-in-demand seamstress. Angelique Duvalier had lived from girlhood through her young adult years in Berlin and preferred to converse in French and German, rather than English, with her granddaughter. Alistair had gathered that the woman had a fear of intruders, stemming from her and her husband’s arrest in Berlin at the beginning of the Great War when they were charged with spying for the French government. Her husband was executed and Angelique tortured, a never-forgotten ordeal that had left her crippled and harboring an abiding hatred for police organizations. Bridgette’s mother was fifteen years old at the time. Relatives spirited her out of Germany back to Paris, where she remained until after the war when Angelique was released and joined her there. Bridgette never lived in France. Her American father brought her mother to Maryland in 1920, the year Bridgette was born. It was a difficult delivery, and Bridgette’s mother died of complications four months later. Her father sent for Angelique to care for the baby, but he was never able to forgive the child for the death of his wife and took to traveling extensively on behalf of his company. On one such business trip in 1924, he was among thirty passengers killed when a passenger train fell through a bridge washaway near Glenrock, Wyoming. The will provided for Bridgette a small trust fund and a modest house in Traverse City, Michigan.

In one of her Station S interviews, Bridgette was asked if she remembered her father, and the psychologist wrote in his assessment report that “a shadow crossed her face. His memory was painful to her. The candidate may have an innate distrust of men.”

During their five-day session at Station S, Alistair observed that the candidates were already drawn together as if by a magnetic pull, clearly feeling a kinship even without a clue of his plans to bring them together as an intelligence-gathering team. Birds of a feather, no doubt—bright, emotionally stable, positive, confident, easily the best of the bunch. It was no surprise to him that they passed each phase of the tests with hardly a negative comment on the candidate rating board.

But it was petite Bridgette, most unlikely of all the assembly, who scored the highest points on all the tests, especially the stress interview, the make-or-break segment of the elimination process. This part of the program simulated a Gestapo interrogation, a trial to gauge a candidate’s capacity to tolerate severe emotional and intellectual strain. With amazing aplomb, sitting on a hard chair with hands bound for hours in an airless room under a blazing light, she concocted a plausible story that successfully fielded her interrogators’ demand that she explain what she was doing going through secret papers in a government office building in the middle of the night.