The door opened, and in stepped the odd threesome. Lange came in first and looked at the table. He grimaced when he saw that the sheet of paper lay unsigned. He shared the expression with Strasser and Hillen-Ziegfeld, who in turn looked at the paper. Lange breathed out slowly. Lockhart sat looking at the floor, preparing for the inevitable chastisement. Strasser walked over to the window, his hands clasped behind his back.

“So,” Strasser began, slowly, deliberately, “you are refusing to sign the paper.”

“I am,” said Lockhart.

“May I ask why?”

“Because I don’t wish to be a traitor to my King and Country. I would have thought that was pretty obvious.”

“But if it was that obvious, then you would never have got as far as this, would you?”

“What?”

“Well, you have certainly been flirting with the idea of helping us. So why stop now?”

“Because I’m not a traitor.”

“So you’d rather your no doubt pretty wife died? You’d put your King above your wife? Yes? Is that right?”

“It’s not that simple and you know it.”

“No, Captain Lockhart, I do not.”

“Of course you do. Especially you, with your SS oath to your Führer. I thought you lot were more than happy to put your leader before your family.”

The room went silent. Hillen-Ziegfeld cleared his throat to speak, but after a fierce look from Strasser, he thought better of it and looked back down.

Strasser turned around to address his compatriots.

“This has been a waste of time. Lock him up overnight and let’s shoot him in the morning. In fact, I’ll do it myself. After that, send orders for his wife to be executed.”

The others nodded as Strasser turned to Lockhart.

“I’m not going to allow you the luxury of dying with your wife. But you will be able to spend the night imagining her being taken from the line-up tomorrow. One of my SS comrades will inform her that you have been shot. I expect she will cry and pull her hair—that’s what they normally seem to do. But she won’t have any hair, will she? It will have been shaved off! And then—well, I don’t know how—she too will be killed, perhaps with a shot to the back of the head. The bullet will come out the front of her face, taking her brains and maybe one of her eyes with it…”

Lockhart could take no more. He jumped up and grabbed Strasser by the throat, trying to squeeze the life out of the murdering bastard. He felt hands unsuccessfully trying to tear him away, but he had been seized by a ferocious energy. As his thumbs dug deeper into Strasser’s windpipe, the two men crashed around the room, knocking over the desk and chairs, colliding with the furnace. And then everything went black, as the handle of Lange’s pistol connected with the back of Lockhart’s head.

Lange brought Strasser a brandy after the unconscious Lockhart had been dragged away.