Foster care had both ruined and given him his life. No one ever bothered to tell him what happened to his parents and he never asked. He could not remember a time before a new family every six months, a new school, a new set of problems. When the Gerrard family began to use the word “adoption,” he dared to allow himself to love Jack. Jack who might one day be his brother. Jack who had been through as many foster homes as he had, maybe more. Nemo had a name in those days. He didn’t know if it had been his original name or if one of his foster families had bestowed it on him, but he had loved hearing Jack call that name out, laughing as they played hide-and-seek or simply chased each other around the thin patch of dirt that passed for a yard.

“Dexter!”

He could still hear the joy in Jack’s voice over the thrum of the airplane. “Dexter!” And then had come the night when Jack called to him in a different voice. Not a voice of joy and wonder and delight. A voice a ten-year-old should never need to use. The voice of fear and confusion and pain.

Patton stared at the paper in front of her and did her best to ignore the man beside her. She had just wanted to make some nice pastries to take to Jasper and now here she was sitting in a first-class airline seat next to a cold-blooded killer trying to decrypt an Enigma message. She couldn’t believe her life had come to this. And she certainly couldn’t believe that the Nazis ever mastered alchemy.

april 1938

“I have served my time,” said the man as Helmut gripped his arm and dragged him into the street. “I served in the Columbia-Haus concentration camp for two years.”

“Perhaps the Reichsführer feels that two years is not enough,” said Helmut.

He threw the man into the back of the Kübelwagen, climbed in after him, and instructed the driver to proceed. As the man shrank from him, Helmut relaxed. It had been barely more than a year since he stood in the crowd listening to Himmler speak and already he had achieved his goal. He had not only met the Reichsführer but Himmler had accepted his offer of personal services. Helmut now had the honor to arrest this weasel in the name of the great Heinrich Himmler, his first mission for which his orders came directly from the Reichsführer himself.