Within an hour after Fourcade’s arrival at the farmhouse, she and the des Isnards family were gone. Putting two-year-old Catherine on the back of her bicycle, the pregnant Marie-Solange cycled about twenty miles to a château owned by members of her husband’s family north of Aix-en-Provence, where she and Catherine stayed for the rest of the war. Helen des Isnards, meanwhile, whisked Fourcade off to a hideout he shared with other local resistance groups in the hills near Aix.
According to an Alliance operative who brought her a change of clothes, the Germans were rampaging through Aix in a door-to-door search for her and des Isnards, but thus far his headquarters had not been touched and all his agents were in hiding. Des Isnards’s radio operator, Michel Lévêque, brought his transmitter to the hideout, where Fourcade and des Isnards would stay a day or two to give her a little time to recover from her ordeal. Then they would move on to a maquis camp in the foothills of Mount Victoire, the limestone peak overlooking Aix.
After what she’d been through, Fourcade couldn’t bear the thought of being confined indoors, and she insisted on sleeping outside. Lookouts were posted, with machine guns at the ready, and Fourcade, overcome with exhaustion, slept in the garden until dawn.
MARIE-MADELEINE FOURCADE AFTER HER ESCAPE FROM JAIL. NOTE THE ABRASIONS AND BRUISES ON HER FACE AND NECK.
Later that day, Lévêque set up his radio outside, hitching his aerial to a cypress tree. Among the messages he transmitted to London were an account by Fourcade of her arrest and escape and an appeal from her for an immediate parachute drop for des Isnards, his agents, and the maquis. As Lévêque worked, a stream of operatives came and went, bringing food, supplies, and news of the manhunt for the two fugitives. It was too dangerous to remain where they were, des Isnards decided. Even though Fourcade’s lacerated feet were still raw, he, she, and another agent would hike that night to the maquis camp, some twelve miles away.
Over the previous few months, the maquis had become a major force in the French resistance. Most of them were young Frenchmen who had left their homes and gone underground to avoid being sent to Germany as forced laborers. But the maquis with whom des Isnards cooperated were mostly Spaniards who had fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and had fled to France after General Franco’s fascist forces took control of the country in 1939.
Late that evening, Fourcade and her two companions, carrying bags and weapons, set out for the camp. For her, the hike, which was uphill and took all night, was both painful and terrifying. At the slightest sound, the three took cover in the underbrush bordering the rock-strewn road. Such interruptions were frequent, as a seemingly endless parade of German patrol vehicles passed by. Fourcade found it increasingly difficult to walk, and des Isnards and the other agent had to help carry her.
As they approached the camp at daybreak, she collapsed, and a mule-driven cart was summoned to take her the rest of the way. The camp was well protected: Sentries stood guard in a stand of juniper trees on a small bluff overlooking the road, and the camp itself was tucked away in a clearing surrounded by dense thickets of underbrush. Thanks to des Isnards and Alliance, the maquis, as well as other resistance groups in the area, were well supplied with weapons, other military gear, and food.
In a corner of the clearing, Lévêque set up his battery-powered transmitter, with its aerial wrapped around a pine tree. Fourcade immediately set to work encoding the messages that continued flooding in from Alliance sectors around the country, containing intelligence about subjects ranging from the movement of German units on the Normandy front to the results of Allied bombing raids.
Fourcade loved everything about her days at the maquis camp, particularly the experience of working and sleeping outdoors in the cool, drier air of La Victoire’s foothills. At night, she lay on her back in the clearing and gazed up at the stars in the brilliantly clear sky, remembering how, as a child in China, she and her father had done the same thing—she with her head on his chest as he pointed out the various constellations.
She particularly enjoyed the camaraderie of the maquis, and one night she joined several of them around a small brushwood fire. A member of the group asked about her escape and how she came up with the idea of slipping through the bars of her cell. She told them about the example of the Indochinese robbers and noted how surprised she was that one of the gaps between the bars was actually wide enough for her to force her head through.
One of the maquis laughed. He was a mason, he said, and, having installed bars in many prison cells, he knew how she was able to escape. While the cement was still wet and after prison officials had checked the gap between the bars, he would push one of them an inch or two to widen the gap. That was the bar that allowed her head to go through, he said. He and his fellow masons called it “the bar of freedom.”
After more than a week in this idyllic setting, Marie-Madeleine decided that with her feet almost completely healed, it was time to move on to Paris. She dyed her hair yet again and had a new photograph taken. Armed with a new name and forged identity papers, she left the camp on July 29, riding pillion on a motorcycle behind one of the maquis, her arms clasped tightly around his leather-jacketed middle.
He took her to Marseille, where she was met by Georges Lamarque and some of his Druids. They gave her a disguise for the next part of her journey—a full set of mourning regalia, including a black dress and woolen coat, hat with a black crepe veil, black stockings, and patent leather shoes. Even though the idea of wearing heavy black clothing in the July heat was unappealing, to put it mildly, Marie-Madeleine accepted the role of grieving widow and played it to the hilt when she boarded the train to Paris that night. Accompanying her were Lamarque and another of her regional chiefs, Henri Battu.
As a result of frequent air raid alerts, the tortuous journey took two days. A few miles outside Paris, the tracks had been destroyed by an Allied air raid and the train could go no farther. Lamarque and Battu flagged down a truck loaded with sacks of charcoal to take them the rest of the way. Marie-Madeleine was sitting atop the charcoal sacks when she caught her first glimpse of Paris, after more than a year away.
It was early August 1944, and Paris was gripped by a feverish energy. Allied troops, after a long, bloody summer of slogging across Normandy’s hedgerow country, had finally broken through and were now slicing through the heart of France. Rumors had it that they were closing in on Paris, with liberation only a matter of days away.
After being taken to an apartment near the Eiffel Tower, Fourcade began recovering her former self. There were no more drab, dour disguises: If she was going to live in Paris, she had to look the part of a chic Parisienne. After having her hair newly colored and styled at a proper salon, she bought an elegant beige Hermès suit and a large rectangular shoulder bag that was currently in fashion.
Within days of her return, Fourcade tracked down Jean Sainteny, who was hiding out in an apartment in the middle of the city. She told him that he was still in danger and that MI6 wanted him in London as soon as possible. She offered to have him evacuated by sea or Lysander. Sainteny suggested another possibility—crossing enemy lines to join the Allied forces closing in on Paris, who would then help him get to Britain.
JEAN SAINTENY
When she asked him how he planned to do that, he replied, “By motorcycle.” His friend Bernard de Billy—the owner of a popular bar near the Arc de Triomphe and a part-time Alliance operative—had offered to take him. But he did not want to travel empty-handed; he would carry with him the most vital of the latest Alliance intelligence reports from around the country, as well as information for the Allies regarding German activity and positions in Paris itself.
Under Fourcade’s direction, Alliance operatives in and around the city put together reports about the German presence there. Contrary to rumors that the Germans were preparing for a last-ditch stand, it appeared that the defensive measures they were taking were meant only as a maneuver to allow a massive retreat by their troops from north and central France. For days, entire Wehrmacht units had marched through or near Paris on their way east, requisitioning every kind of vehicle they could lay their hands on, from trucks to farm wagons to bicycles.
On August 16, the intrepid Sainteny set out on the back of Bernard de Billy’s motorcycle, its saddlebags stuffed with material about the headlong German flight from Paris as well as a raft of other intelligence. Disguised as telephone engineers, the two made it to Le Mans, 130 miles to the southwest of Paris, where General George Patton’s Third Army had established its temporary headquarters. There Sainteny turned over to Patton’s intelligence chief the information that Alliance agents had collected, as well as his own observations about the state of German defenses between the capital and Le Mans. At Sainteny’s request, the radio operator at Patton’s headquarters passed on Fourcade’s other intelligence reports to MI6.
Believing that Sainteny was now safely ensconced in London, Fourcade was startled when he called her from a Paris café two days later. Why was he back in the capital? Didn’t he know how dangerous that was? Interrupting her scolding, Sainteny said the Americans had been so impressed with the intelligence he had brought that they wanted additional information, as detailed and specific as possible. They particularly needed to know which, if any, of Paris’s bridges had been mined and more about German troop concentrations in the Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes.
Once again, Alliance agents set to work to gather the details. Only the day before, most high-level German civilian officials, including the chiefs of the SD and Gestapo, had fled the city, along with a bevy of monocled generals. The bulk of the German forces stationed in and around Paris pulled out, too. Fourcade was informed that General Dietrich von Choltitz, the German commander of Paris, had pledged to the Swedish consul Raoul Nordling that he would do everything possible to save it from damage and destruction.
She told Sainteny that the Germans apparently had only one aim—to retreat to the Rhine and save what they could. The German troops crossing the capital needed the Paris bridges because those farther downstream had been destroyed. The Allies could use them to enter Paris. But, she added, they must do so as quickly as possible because Communist members of the resistance, who had become the chief rivals of de Gaulle in the ongoing struggle for postwar control of France, had set in motion an uprising against German forces still in the city. Its purpose was to cement the Communists’ authority and power before de Gaulle could return to Paris.
In mid-August, a series of Communist-inspired strikes had been launched in the capital; railway men, police officers, and postal and telegraph workers, among others, walked off their jobs. On the day Sainteny called Fourcade from the café, small bands of resistance fighters throughout Paris, most of them Communists, had begun to attack German patrols.
Fearful that internal French political divisions would result in an unnecessary bloodbath, Fourcade urged Sainteny to impress on Patton and his generals the importance of immediate action to liberate Paris. On August 20, he set off through enemy lines, again on the back of Bernard de Billy’s motorcycle.
This trip, however, was considerably more eventful than the first. Some forty miles from the capital, four gun-carrying German sentries standing at the side of the road ordered Billy to stop. After he did so, he and Sainteny were led to a small house that doubled as a sentry post. The two men showed their papers and explained that they were telephone engineers who’d been sent to repair phone lines damaged in a recent battle. Apparently unsure what to do with them, the Germans rummaged through their bags, missing an intelligence report hidden in the pocket of a pair of Sainteny’s trousers. Then the soldiers locked the two in the house while they went to confer with senior officers. The motorcycle was left outside. As soon as the four were out of sight, Sainteny and Billy broke a window, scrambled through it, and hopped on the motorcycle. By early evening, they were back at Patton’s headquarters.
On August 25, the Second French Armored Division, part of Patton’s Third Army, entered Paris.
MARIE-MADELEINE FOURCADE WAS NOT in the capital for the delirious celebrations that followed. A few days earlier, MI6 had asked her to send patrols to northeastern France to scout out information about German positions for the Third Army as it continued its dash toward the German border. Its next major objective was to liberate the eastern French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which had been claimed by the Reich as German territory at the beginning of the war.
In early August, Marie-Madeleine had rejected an appeal from Kenneth Cohen to return to London by Lysander during the next full moon. She would not leave France until it had been fully liberated, she told him. Now she decided to take personal charge of the final patrols. With Paris and much of western France now free, she did not think it right to assign operatives who had gambled with their lives for years to this new mission. She would send only those who volunteered, herself among them.
Marie-Madeleine had another, more personal reason for assuming responsibility for these last reconnaissance operations: The more intelligence she and her agents could supply to the Allied forces, the sooner the troops could cross the German border and, with any luck, save the lives of Faye, Rodriguez, and the hundreds of other captured Alliance operatives who she hoped were still alive in German prisons and concentration camps.
Georges Lamarque volunteered to take charge of the area around Nancy, the capital of Lorraine, while Marie-Madeleine headed toward Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace. As her deputy, she chose Pierre Noal, a young doctor who, although a fairly recent recruit, had already distinguished himself with his toughness and daring.
Carrying a new identity card as a secretary/nurse named Marie-Suzanne Imbert, Marie-Madeleine and Noal borrowed a Red Cross ambulance and, with a radio transmitter hidden under blankets in the back, drove it east through German roadblocks. At every stop, they told the guards that they were French collaborators traveling with the fleeing troops to aid the wounded—a story that won them plaudits and permission to continue.
MARIE-MADELEINE FOURCADE’S FALSE IDENTITY CARD AS MARIE-SUZANNE IMBERT
Their first stop was Verdun, the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the Great War, located less than eighty miles from the German border. When they arrived at the house of the chief of Alliance’s sector there, he informed them that the top leaders of the Paris Gestapo had just taken up temporary residence in the hotel across the street. Marie-Madeleine and Noal quickly returned to the ambulance and pushed on a few more miles to the little village of Brabant-au-Argonne.
Unable to make contact with London by radio, the two sent one of Alliance’s local agents, who owned a motorcycle, to make contact with the Third Army, which having helped liberate Paris was swiftly advancing from the west. The agent carried intelligence reports on enemy activity, which alerted Patton and his men to mined roads and possible ambushes by German troops while also making clear that Verdun and the surrounding area were only lightly defended and could be taken with little trouble.
In mid-August, Georges Lamarque made an unexpected visit to Marie-Madeleine’s base in Brabant-au-Argonne. He and his radio operator had made it to Nancy and set up a post there. Now, he told her, he wanted to continue his advance, heading for the Rhine and then entering Germany, with the aim of establishing an intelligence operation in the Reich itself.
His sense of urgency, he made clear, was fueled by a deep feeling of guilt over the arrests of several young women agents, particularly Jeannie Rousseau, whom he had recruited. Marie-Madeleine felt the same urgency and guilt, but she cautioned him not to push into Germany on his own. He didn’t respond. When she begged him to stay another day or two, he declined, bidding her farewell with a cheery, “See you soon.”
In the last days of August, so many German troops were seeking temporary shelter in Brabant-au-Argonne that Marie-Madeleine and Noal moved their base again, this time to a newly established maquis camp in a dense forest a few miles away. Most of its occupants were young resistance fighters from Verdun and the surrounding area.
Soon after they arrived, an Alliance courier told them that the Third Army had received the intelligence they had sent and had changed its route as a result of their warnings about possible ambushes. Now army intelligence officers wanted more information about German defenses in the nearby Argonne forest. The Allies, the courier added, were less than a day’s march away.
After Marie-Madeleine and Noal ferreted out the status of the Argonne defenses, they dispatched another courier to Patton’s forces. The next evening, they heard a dull roar coming from the west, and at daybreak, Noal left to find out what was going on. He returned an hour later, his face pale and his voice trembling. He told her Patton’s troops had liberated Verdun.
That afternoon, she and Noal drove their ambulance to the nearby village of Recicourt, whose residents, gone mad with joy, were drinking, laughing, dancing, and singing. When they caught sight of the ambulance, they pulled Marie-Madeleine and Noal out, embraced and kissed them, and handed them glasses of wine. As the celebration continued around her, Marie-Madeleine couldn’t hold back her tears. After Noal made a toast to victory, she shot back that “victory” was a meaningless word, when so many of those who had won it were still missing.
AS IT HAPPENED, a final Allied victory was still more than eight months away. There was no doubt, however, that after four terrifying years, the Germans had finally relinquished their iron grip on most of France. After a seemingly endless time suffused with secrecy and fear, it seemed surreal to see uniformed soldiers on the streets and know that they were liberators rather than persecutors. At first, Fourcade didn’t know how to react. How long would it take, she wondered, before she felt comfortable using her real name instead of a false one? Or to realize that a knock on the door was not the Gestapo but the postman delivering mail? One of the first steps she took to emerge from the shadows was to attach a sign to the front door of the house of Alliance’s Verdun sector leader that openly proclaimed the various intelligence organizations that she and her agents represented: ALLIANCE—BCRA—INTELLIGENCE SERVICE.
In early September, she briefly returned to Paris, which was filled to bursting with its Allied liberators. The Allies had taken over hundreds of hotels for their own use, and the city’s best restaurants, which had served members of the Wehrmacht and Gestapo just two weeks before, were now welcoming the hordes of American and British officers and journalists who flocked to them.
Alliance set up an office in a building on the Champs Élysées, and dozens of agents streamed in from around the country to celebrate their network’s survival, as well as their own. There were joyous reunions of old friends and first-time introductions to colleagues previously known only by their code names. As Fourcade put it, “the animals of Noah’s Ark were becoming people again.”
Soon after her arrival in Paris, she had a happy reunion of her own with Kenneth Cohen, who had come to the French capital with a specific purpose in mind. On a beautiful early fall day, he and a throng of British military and diplomatic officials—some, like Cohen, in naval uniform, some in RAF blue, and others in army khaki—arrived at the Alliance office to pay tribute to the extraordinary achievements of the network and its leader. Surrounded by his compatriots and Alliance agents, Cohen called Fourcade to his side and presented her with the Order of the British Empire, one of his government’s high honors for acts of gallantry and meritorious service.
She tried to respond but was so overcome with emotion that she couldn’t utter a word until the champagne reception that followed, when Cohen asked her what else MI6 could do for her. She requested two immediate parachute drops, one at Verdun and the other at what Fourcade learned was Georges Lamarque’s latest headquarters—near the village of Luze, about twenty-five miles from the German border. And then she asked him to get her children back from Switzerland.
Fourcade already had been reunited with her fourteen-month-old son. Soon afterward, she had an emotional reunion with Christian, now fourteen, and Béatrice, twelve, whom she had not seen since the summer of 1943, when she had viewed them from the window in Lyon before they were smuggled out of the country. She did not know until months later that they had been forced to cross the border into Switzerland on their own and had ended up in a refugee camp. Thanks to an Alliance agent who had been tipped off about their presence there, they were taken to their grandmother’s chalet in the Swiss village of Villars-sur-Ollon, where they stayed until they were brought to Paris.
The two had been apart from their mother for almost all of the previous four years. The last time Fourcade had spent time with Béatrice was in the spring of 1942, after the little girl’s surgery in Toulouse. In her memoirs, Fourcade was extremely terse about her reunion with her children, saying only that they had “returned, miraculously unaffected, bigger, of course, but also above all enriched by a flame that would make them forever different from many others.” A reader might be forgiven, however, if he or she took this observation with a grain of salt. It’s difficult to believe that Fourcade’s offspring had not been greatly affected by their long separation from their mother, not to mention their traumatic escape. But Fourcade, who elsewhere in her memoir confessed to a sense of guilt about her failure to be with them, clearly did not want to deal any further with the issue, at least in public.
KENNETH COHEN LIVED UP to the other promise he’d made to Fourcade. On September 7, he came to Verdun to observe the parachute drop he’d arranged—and the first he’d ever witnessed. As dozens of parachutes floated down from RAF bombers, Alliance agents, joined by members of the nearby maquis group, hurled themselves on the containers as they landed. Fourcade helped unpack and distribute the containers’ contents, which included radios, food, Sten guns, grenades, and revolvers.
As she worked, she thought of Lamarque, who was due to get his parachute drop that night. The following day, however, she received terrible news from London: The pilots of the bombers dispatched to his drop zone had spotted a village in flames and aborted their mission. MI6 had also lost contact with Lamarque’s radio operator.
Fourcade never heard from Lamarque again. She later discovered that the SS had tracked down his radio transmissions and had captured him, along with his radio operator and adjutant. Lamarque had been tipped off about the raid but refused to flee for fear that the SS would take retribution against the residents of Luze. Several hours after his arrest, villagers had witnessed armed SS troops pushing him and his two colleagues toward a nearby orchard, where they were summarily executed. As it turned out, Lamarque’s act of self-sacrifice was not totally in vain. Although the SS set afire the homes and farms of the villagers, they spared their lives.
Once again, Fourcade mourned the loss of a key agent. But her grief for Lamarque was especially intense. His work had been crucial in reviving the network in its darkest days, and the intelligence contributions made by his Druids, particularly Jeannie Rousseau, had been inestimable. With his boundless energy and enthusiasm, not to mention his keen wit, he had endeared himself to Fourcade, and the thought that this brilliant young mathematician, who had so much to offer postwar France, had been struck down with the war drawing to a close was particularly painful.
Fourcade’s sorrow over his death was matched by her growing anxiety about the slowness of the Allied advance and the fate of Faye and her other imprisoned agents in Germany. After marching virtually unchecked across northern and central France, the Third Army had come to a sudden stop just thirty-five miles west of the Moselle River, near the German border.
This was not what Patton had had in mind. Determined to attack the Germans without letup, he was anxious to sweep across the border and smash into the German heartland. After liberating Verdun, he had immediately dispatched scouts to the Moselle, to prepare for its crossing by his troops.
But at that crucial moment, his army ran out of gasoline, as did other Allied forces making their way east. The port of Cherbourg in Normandy was the only source of gas and other supplies for the entire Allied Expeditionary Force, and the farther away Allied forces moved from Cherbourg, the more difficult it was to keep their supply lines open.
Fourcade was stunned when she was told the reason for Patton’s sudden halt. When she argued that the pause would allow the Germans to regroup in Lorrain, U.S. Army officials told her that the German troops were finished. In fact, she was correct: The Germans took advantage of the halt to move in infantry and panzer forces to defend the Moselle.
Thus began what Fourcade would later call the longest winter of the conflict for her and Alliance. Doing her best to hurry the Allied forces along, she ordered her agents to continue probing the terrain in eastern France and report back to Patton’s intelligence chief on the whereabouts of German forces. At one point during the winter, Alliance operatives alerted the Third Army to a planned attack by a German panzer division from Luxembourg, giving the Americans time to thwart the assault.
In early November, an Alliance patrol led by Pierre Noal clandestinely crossed the Moselle to scout out the territory behind German lines as far as the border. During their seven-week mission, Noal and his men sent fifty-four messages about enemy activity—reports that guided the late-December offensive launched by the Third Army and General Alexander Patch’s Seventh Army that finally pushed German troops out of eastern France and back into their own country.
In the south of France, meanwhile, Helen des Isnards and his agents provided vital intelligence for Operation Dragoon, the landing of Allied forces on the beaches of the Côte d’Azur in mid-August. After helping to liberate Aix on August 21, des Isnards joined American troops in their drive up the Rhône Valley toward the Alps.
By early January 1945, all of France had been liberated except for pockets of German resistance in La Rochelle, Saint-Nazaire, Lorient, and other coastal redoubts in Brittany. A new generation of Alliance agents, replacing those who had been swept up in the Gestapo dragnet, provided intelligence from those places until their German defenders finally surrendered in May 1945.
No other Allied spy network in France had lasted as long or supplied as much crucial intelligence over the course of the conflict. “By their work and sacrifice,” the historian and journalist David Schoenbrun later wrote, “the agents of Alliance saved thousands of Allied lives and speeded the victory over Hitler.”
DURING THE WANING MONTHS of the war, Fourcade was overjoyed when a scattering of Alliance agents, who had disappeared into the “night and fog” of German prisons and concentration camps, turned up alive. One night in late 1944, she walked into the Alliance office in Paris and saw what she thought was an apparition. Standing with his back to her was a short, slender, older man with close-cropped gray hair, who was examining a large wall map of eastern France bearing little flags that marked the whereabouts of Alliance agents and Allied troops.
“Colonel Bernis,” she murmured. He turned around. It was indeed Colonel Charles Bernis, the former Deuxième Bureau officer who had taught her the basics of intelligence gathering but who all the while seemed to doubt her ability as a woman to run a major spy network. She had never been sure she had had his approval. When he turned back to the map on the wall, her fears were finally allayed. “It’s my finest intelligence map, my dear,” he said. “Thank you.”
As Allied forces headed farther into Germany in early 1945, word came of others who had miraculously survived the hell of German captivity. Among them were several female agents who had been liberated from the infamous Ravensbrück women’s camp north of Berlin. They included Madeleine Crozet and Michèle Goldschmidt, who, before being sent there in the spring of 1943, had been personally tortured by Klaus Barbie, the infamous Gestapo commandant in Lyon.
Another survivor of Ravensbrück was Jeannie Rousseau, who owed her life to bureaucratic bungling by German officials. When Rousseau was arrested by the Gestapo, she was identified as Madeleine Chauffour, her code name. But when she arrived at the three camps in which she was incarcerated, she gave her real name to officials at each, none of whom ever made the connection between her and the official dossier, sent separately to all the camps, identifying her as Madeleine Chauffour, a dangerous Allied spy.
When Rousseau arrived at Torgau, a camp in Saxony attached to a munitions and explosives factory, she told the camp commander that she and the other Frenchwomen there were prisoners of war and under the Geneva Convention could not be forced to manufacture weapons. She was quickly dispatched to a punishment camp and then to Ravensbrück, where, weighing only seventy pounds and close to death, she was evacuated in the waning days of the war by the Swedish Red Cross.
Navarre came back, too. Almost two years after Georges Loustaunau-Lacau’s arrest in July 1941, the Vichy government had turned him over to the Gestapo. He was deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where the vast majority of inmates died in unspeakable conditions. When he was liberated by American troops, the emaciated Navarre weighed less than one hundred pounds.
There was yet another astonishing piece of good news. In late January 1945, Kenneth Cohen’s assistant called Fourcade to tell her that Magpie had just been released in a prisoner exchange. Marie-Madeleine’s heart skipped a beat. Ferdinand Rodriguez, otherwise known as Edward Rodney, was alive! The news nourished her still flickering hope about the fates of the man she loved and the hundreds of other missing Alliance agents. Could Léon Faye have cheated death, too?