By the time she’d called off the reinforcements to Wewelsburg, the guards were pounding at the door to the radio room. “One bloody minute,” she muttered to herself. Her fingers flew over the radio dial as her eyes scanned the map of Europe to her right. A clear path. Simone and her friends needed a clear path north, toward Drieborg in the occupied Netherlands—and they needed an RAF pickup once they got there. And all of this was assuming they survived whatever chaos they were facing right now in Wewelsburg itself. From the wild, frantic reports she’d heard on the radio—everything from explosions and fire to monsters and spies—she was sure she didn’t want to know.

“STAND DOWN, COMMAND POST DRIEBORG,” she ordered in her best German, across the encrypted Wehrmacht lines. “Reports from Wewelsburg are part of an Allied disinformation plot aimed at sowing chaos. They want you to fire on your own men as they head into port.”

“Who is this?” the operator at Drieborg answered. “What is your operating code?”

“Great question,” Evangeline muttered to herself as she prodded one of the dead Gestapo radio operators with her foot. She dug around in his breast pocket and pulled out his codebook. “K-2496, Paris Headquarters.”

“And you claim the reports of an attack on Wewelsburg are fabricated?”

Evangeline growled. “We did not spend the last three days torturing the details of this plot out of Resistance members here in Paris for you to not believe us, but if you want to fire on our own Gestapo operatives as they pass through Drieborg, then I suppose that is your prerogative.”

A lengthy pause. “Understood, Paris Headquarters. We will allow them to pass.”

Another thump on the door. She wrenched a sidearm free from one of the bodies, checked its ammunition, then tucked it into her belt. Just in case. Just two more calls to make before it was back into the ventilation shafts with her.

She dialed the frequency in and jotted a few quick notes to remind herself of the correct encryption scheme for the next call, then pressed the transmitter button.

“Alliance House, over,” a pert secretary answered. A benign enough name for the headquarters of the Free French in London.

She took a deep breath. “This is the operator known as Magpie. And I have a sizable favor to ask.”

DANIEL

A gale rolled over the mountain ridge like an avalanche, too far away to hear, but its devastating power was all too apparent. The rush of wind was enough to tear his skin right off. But he was facing it: he surrendered control, surrendered the very notion that he could ever cross a final name from his list, because the list would never stop growing. He had to choose that today—today could be a start.

And what a glorious new melody the wind was.