She copied. The stone wall, freshly cleaned and primed, still waiting for the first stroke of her brush, glowed in the afternoon sunlight when she set off for the meeting, an eye out for surveillance, but her nerves were so tightly strung after a week of worry that she could imagine shadows waltzing with lampposts. She was sure the major was as nerve-racked as she. It was no wonder then that when she approached the café—no red flag in the window—she thought she was hallucinating when she saw Limpet and Lapwing and Lodestar jump out smiling from behind a bell tower across the street, where they’d obviously been hiding. “Well, you’re a sight for sore eyes,” Chris said, sweeping her into a crushing hug. “We thought you’d been arrested!”

After each had had a turn at hugging her, Bridgette said with the annoyance of a mother overjoyed to be reunited with her lost chicks but angry enough to give them a good swat for wandering off, “What? Really? Well I thought the same of you!” She swiped the tears of relief from her eyes and said, “I thought you’d all been rounded up when I didn’t hear a peep from any of you. The major and I have been worried sick. You were supposed to let me know when you were in place.”

“I’m sorry, Labrador,” Brad said, “but we couldn’t contact you because the drop box has been compromised.”

“So we stayed out of sight until you turned up,” Bucky explained.

Bridgette stared at them. “You all think the drop box is compromised? Why?”

“We’ll tell you in the café,” Chris said. “Have you heard from Liverwort?”

“Not a word.”

But there she was when they walked in, looking like a hausfrau on washing day, plain as a scrub board, but she didn’t fool them. They would have recognized that profile anywhere. She stared at them as if they were genies materializing out of the room’s smoke, and Bridgette recognized that Liverwort, too, had spent the week thinking they’d all been blown.

After exuberant greetings, they pulled out chairs, drew close, and Victoria, speaking in a low tone that did not carry beyond the tearoom, recounted her story first. “I saw a Mercedes, a Gestapo car, parked in an alley up the street from the house with the mail slot the day I went to report to you. The car was pointed forward as if lying in wait to snag somebody, so I kept on walking. The next day, I circled back behind the passageway and found the same car parked there and the day afterward. I could only conclude that you’d been arrested, Labrador, and…well, you know…so I stayed away.”

Bucky said, “I saw the car you described the day I went to report in, too, and made the same deduction.”

Chris said, “And that goes for me, too.”