“Good morning,” said Lockhart, breezily, as if this was just another morning; as if his visitors were there to serve him a cooked breakfast rather than to shoot him. He thought he detected a slight awkwardness, especially in the face of the youngest private, who was unable to look him in the eye.

“Up!” said the rottenführer.

Lockhart stood, doing his best to conceal his shaking legs. He knew that he would be dead in fifteen minutes, his life extinguished, and Anna’s too. But that could be changed, that could be avoided. He could replace that dread silence, breathe some life back into their future by playing the game. And he didn’t have to play it just for his little family; he could play it for everybody else too. He could play the traitor, strut on the fragile boards of treachery, while all the time plotting against the enemy. If what Nicolas had told him about the sarin was true, then he had to follow it up, act upon it, and to do that, he had to stay alive. He could win too, he could bloody well win. He wasn’t going to lose, and he certainly wasn’t going to die. He was cleverer than them, more cunning. He had made mistakes up till now, bad mistakes, but now he was going to be faultless, put in a performance that would fool them all, until he emerged as the victor.

Sod Strasser and the rest of them. Let them think they had won, while all the time he drew up his plan. He wasn’t going to throw away his life now, just because he’d refused to sign a scrap of paper. The paper meant nothing—they could rule his body but not his mind. One day, when he had won, he would see Anna and Amy again, tell them what he had done for them, and what he had done for the country. And if he died, well, he would have put up a fight, not just been dragged out of here to be shot, watching his last breaths in the cold air. He owed it to everybody, especially Manoli, to continue the fight.

Strasser and Lange walked out into the morning air. Strasser breathed in deeply, savoring the sharp sensation of his lungs inflating with crisp coldness. Last night’s snow crunched under their feet as they made their way to the front gate. Against Strasser’s initial wishes, Lange had insisted that Lockhart should be shot outside the camp, in the woods, away from his “holiday-makers.” Strasser had capitulated, agreeing with Lange’s assertion that the POWs in Genshagen would hardly regard the place as a holiday camp if they witnessed one of their countrymen being executed.

The guards at the gate saluted them.

“Has the prisoner already been taken through?” Lange asked one of them.

“Yes, sir! About five minutes ago.”