Once again, Colonel Derrick Albrecht found himself in a situation where he had to decide what to do with Victoria Grayson, now proven to be a foreign undercover agent he was almost certain worked for the OSS. He had not made contact with her since the night of the premiere almost a week before. She must be wondering what he was up to, what he had in mind for her attentions beyond their Sunday bouts. It was now Friday, November 13, a date on the calendar purported by much of the world to be an unlucky day. Bad things happened when Friday fell on the thirteenth of the month. His mother never put a foot outside the door on that day. She claimed personal experience to support the belief that it was the most dangerous twenty-four hours on the calendar. Derrick wondered if Victoria believed in the superstition. He would predict she’d scoff it off as nonsense.
He should get up and go, he thought, release Karl to his own Friday evening diversions and call it a night, as his long-ago Harvard friends would have said. He had nothing he wanted to do and nowhere he particularly desired to be, although that was not exactly true. He had canceled his evening with Celeste. They were to meet her friends at a popular cabaret, but he was in no mood for the frenzied atmosphere of a smoke-filled dance hall loud with people desperate to forget that the war was happening. Celeste’s cronies were a brittle-witted, caustic-tongued assortment of artists, writers, musicians, and film people as shallow as their talents, and they had begun to bore him.
Thus he remained in his office enveloped in the fragrant smoke of a Montecristo swirling under the light of a single desk lamp. He could think most clearly and dispassionately about the duties of his job here in his cold, impersonal office rather than in his hotel quarters, where familiar objects made him long for home and family. Somehow his brief acquaintanceship with Victoria Grayson had unlatched the door to the memories of the untroubled boy he had been in those days, so in contrast to the man of his later years.
But then, in those days, Germany was not at war.
Glorious Victoria…Whatever should I do with you, my beauty? It had taken him almost a week to decide while he fought the temptation to call on her. His immediate thought upon discovering the cyanide pill had been to get her out of France before someone else got onto her and her luck ran out. He would return her unmasked but unharmed to whatever American mastermind had thought to plant the perfect woman in his path. And what a brilliant scheme it was!
Known for his own brilliance at the manipulation game, Derrick was amazed at the subtlety of it. Victoria’s controller had inserted a fencer of foil at L’Ecole d’Escrime Français with the belief that her skill with the blade would reach the ears of Colonel Derrick Albrecht, Germany’s own champion of the sport. Curiosity and the thrill of challenge would have lured him to take a look and test her mettle, and after that first Sunday…whoever was pulling the strings had simply allowed Colonel Albrecht’s natural inclination toward a woman of Victoria’s beauty and breeding to take its course. One thing would lead to another, and she would end up by the colonel’s side at Nazi functions and eventually in his bed while collecting intelligence like daisies in a field.
But how could the man in control of the wires not have expected the mark’s trained ear to detect his marionette’s American accent? Had he counted on Derrick Albrecht turning a blind eye to her nationality out of fondness for America and his respect and fascination for a beautiful woman? The bald assumption of it and the arrogant disregard for his operative’s life angered him, and Derrick thought that if he ever got his hands on the orchestrator, he’d rip his throat out. What if the plan had failed? What if the puppeteer had misjudged the colonel’s attraction to his plant once she was exposed? She would have already been before a firing squad.
There was also another part of the plan that Derrick could not reconcile to the woman he had come to know. Victoria had no intention of sharing his bed. She had given no indication that she shared even a mite-sized attraction for him. In the vetting process, how could her controller not have discerned that a woman like her would never agree to seduce a man she found contemptible? He was, as far as the OSS knew, a key player in the greatest evil ever perpetrated against mankind. His country had initiated a war that had killed the love of her life.
So in reexamining his first perceptions, he had come to believe that Victoria Grayson had not been placed to capture his eye, and he might have given her controller too much credit. Colonel Derrick Albrecht had not figured into the OSS plan at all. He was simply an unexpected intruder onto the playing field of Victoria Grayson’s mission at the fencing school.
Thus he had reconsidered his plan of action. More was at stake than his feelings for her. He must think of his country and do what he could to get it out of this insane war, and he had decided to allow her to proceed with her mission, believing herself still undetected. Like Konrad’s two spies, unaware that they were playing into his hands, he would use Victoria Grayson as a funnel to channel top secret information to assist the Allies in bringing Hitler to his knees.
But he had to be even more careful to protect his position that in turn would protect Victoria. Derrick had pursued this intent since September 1, 1939, when the Waffen SS massacred two hundred Jews at Będzin, Poland, along with some members of the nobility who were lifelong friends of his family, including Derrick’s beloved godfather. Derrick’s father, disgusted by his son’s misguided but patriotic decision to join the Waffen SS, had declared, “The Nazi Party’s establishment of a thousand-year reign is the delusion of a raving lunatic. The Third Reich is nothing but a castle built on sand within sight of the oncoming tide. Germany is doomed unless something can be done to stop that madman.”
Derrick, highly decorated, awarded the Knight’s Cross by Hitler himself, and well regarded within military circles, had come to agree with his father’s view, but it was too late to withdraw from the Waffen SS without raising suspicion of his loyalty to the Führer. Not only would he be arrested for treason, but Himmler would go after members of his family, their titles unable to save them.
Originally, Derrick had hardly thought about his decision to join. The SS was formed to save the German people from its enemies. It was the elite organization of the Nazi regime. Reared in a world of elitism, it was only natural that he take his proper place in the highest echelons of the German military.
How naïve he had been! Plucked from the regular army of the Wehrmacht before he barely had time to serve, he had not been indoctrinated into the mind-set of the SS. He had been spared having to attend Bad Tolz, the SS officers’ training school that required Hitler’s paramilitary “elite” to renounce belief in God, kill their parents if required, desensitize themselves to human suffering, and overcome every moral inhibition.
But he had played his part with the worst of them, and he, too, would burn in hell for the atrocities in which he had participated, even if the laws of men did not catch up with him first.
By 1940, Derrick was eager to atone for his crimes and willing to take on the clandestine task of rescuing German military officers, political figures, and clergymen suspected of treason against the Third Reich from torture, imprisonment, and death. This he accomplished by spiriting them out of the interrogation cells of the Abwehr and SD to purported graves, bogus interrogation sites, concentration camps, and firing squads. The deliverance of these men involved nerve-racking, dangerous machinations. The slightest false move could result in the undoing of Colonel Derrick Albrecht, his family, Major General Konrad March, and the two men of his SD staff loyal to the cause of freeing Germany from Hitler’s stranglehold.
The latest candidate for rescue that Konrad had sent over from Abwehr headquarters, a Wehrmacht major, was a case in point. Already suspected of treason by the SS, he had agreed to be the scapegoat for the leak of the German agents. He was arrested, “interrogated,” and his “corpse” transported out of Paris. The man had made a slight noise in the wooden box used to transport him from his cell to the “disposal sites” where he would be deposited into friendly hands. A lance corporal on his staff exclaimed, “Wait! I thought I heard a sound coming from inside the coffin. Should we open the lid to see if the traitor is still alive?”
“Too bad if he is,” Derrick said coldly. “He’ll find it much more pleasant being buried dead than alive.”
The corporal had laughed. “Jawohl, Herr Colonel!”
Derrick took a final draw of his cigar before extinguishing it thoughtfully in the brass ashtray bearing his family’s coat of arms. Victoria Grayson… He knew, of course, exactly what his plans were for her, but first he had to obtain irrefutable proof that she was a spy. This he would accomplish on Sunday at the fencing school.