They’d agreed to keep up their ruse for as long as they could—no sense pulling the entire compound down on their heads just yet. The moment someone challenged them, though, they were ready. Rebeka’s pistol was wrapped in the jacket she carried over one arm, barrel pointed forward, while Daniel kept his shooting arm loose, ready to snatch up his P38. Only Liam appeared completely unarmed, but Daniel knew better.

The main compound at Siegen was a stucco and wood Bavarian relic, badly outfitted with electric lighting that didn’t so much illuminate as suggest. With their uniforms and bowed heads, they didn’t attract a second glance in the dim and moldy corridor as they strode with purpose toward the archives. Wehrmacht and SS personnel crowded the halls, but there were also numerous civil servants—secretaries and accountants and maintenance workers and more.

It was the civilians whose presence tightened like a fist around Daniel’s throat. They weren’t career thugs like the soldiers; they were nobodies, just like the Eisenbergs’ neighbors back in Berlin. That bored-looking blond woman clutching a stack of folders could have been the shopkeeper he bought sheet music from, the one who complained to his face about Jews as if they were a parasitic vine coiled around Germany before hastily assuring him that he wasn’t like them. That boy, barely Rebeka’s age, pushing a cart of coffee and sandwiches—he’d been fed a steady, meaty diet of disdain, of an unswerving conviction of the German people’s greatness—and that if Germany were anything less, then it could only be the doing of the Bolsheviks, the Poles, the Jews. If their pay cannot stretch far enough, his mother once said, they’ll gladly blame anyone but the man who doles it out.

Daniel blinked, trying to clear the red-soaked rage from his sight. He would kill every last Nazi responsible for his family’s death. But he knew the Nazis alone were not to blame.

“Left,” Rebeka said under her breath, when they reached a junction in the corridor.

Liam nodded and turned.

“Stop.” A guard stepped toward them as they started down the new branch. “These rooms are forbidden to unauthorized personnel.”

“Ja, ja.” Liam patted at his uniform’s pockets as if searching for credentials. “Give me one minute . . .”

The first guard was twenty, tops, while the second had the sagging shoulders of a man in his forties trying to cling to a former glory he’d never truly possessed. Maybe they chose this, maybe they didn’t. Either way, they bore some responsibility: either way, they would pay.

“Ach. Here it is. In my pocket.” Liam smiled and slowly withdrew his hand from his breast pocket as he hummed a strange melody.

Daniel slid his sidearm free, but it turned out there was no need.