On Monday, listening to the latest news from his man in Paris, Alistair’s hope for Dragonfly sank. The team was lost. His facilitators had reported in—Madame Dupree, Jules Garnier, Jacques Vogel at the fencing school, and Captain Ballard. Bucky had not been seen at the boardinghouse since Wednesday. Chris had not shown up at the academy nor Brad on the captain’s fishing boat. Rumors were that Victoria might have already been executed, and Bridgette would be shot once they’d wrung her dry. So far, at least, the little spitfire had not given up her call signal. Her radio remained silent. Fighting down a surge of biliousness at the cost of her stubbornness, Alistair placed a call to Wild Bill Donovan.
* * *
The rest of Sunday the three prisoners were treated with the same solicitousness as the other days of their confinement, but in their grief over Liverwort they could neither eat or sleep, so they were already awake at dawn on Monday when their cell door suddenly flew open, and they were yanked from their warm nests to their feet by four Abwehr guards. Before they could catch their breath, their hands were tied behind their backs and black hoods were pulled over their heads.
“What’s happening?” Chris asked in German. “Where are you taking us?”
“Sprich nicht!”
“To the post in the courtyard, where else?” Bucky said.
“What? Before the first act?” Brad said.
“Sprich nicht!”
They were pushed roughly out of the room and building, the hoods keeping them blind to their surroundings, and nudged forward by rifle barrels past the courtyard, still smelling of cordite, on a long, stumbling trek until they were ordered to halt in a place strong with the odor of automotive fuel. One by one, with the assistance of a man stationed inside, they were lifted up into a conveyance they soon realized was a prison van. Once plunked down on a row of seats, they heard him jump out, the door slam closed, locked, and smacked to alert the driver of the all clear, and they were off to God knew where.
Bucky had an idea but did not venture it. He would bet this trip was a “night and fog” operation, devised as a way to get rid of people with no questions asked. They would be taken to a deep ditch already dug in some remote, unknown location and instructed to kneel by its edge so that after being shot in the back of the head, they would pitch forward, and their burials would be a simple matter of throwing dirt over their bodies. Nice German efficiency. No report would be filed of their names and deaths. He and the others would disappear from the face of the earth like a vertebrate species gone extinct. His family in Oklahoma and his French father and the families of his fellow dragonflies would be left always to wonder where they were and what had happened to them.
“Why do you suppose they treated us so well if they’re going to kill us?” Brad asked.
“Another form of torture like Lodestar suggested about our good treatment. Butter us up before putting us under the broiler,” Chris said.
“They wanted us to witness the execution,” Bucky said quietly. “That was part of the torture, too.”
“Then why didn’t they interrogate us afterward?” Chris asked.
“Because they’d already gotten all they needed from Liverwort. Why waste time on us? The cell of Dragonfly was defused and no longer a danger to them,” Brad said.
Chris moaned. “Oh, God, that means they got Labrador, too. So where are we going now?”
“Take a stab,” Bucky said.
Following a moment’s silence, Brad nodded. “Right.”
After what seemed an endless drive, perspiration running into their eyes under the hoods, the clangor of pedestrian and vehicle traffic signaled they were entering a large city. Bucky was surprised. He had been listening for country sounds like farm machinery and cowbells and flowing creek water. Perhaps they could simply be passing through Paris on the way to their final destination, but then eventually the van turned away from urban noise into a quieter area disturbed only by children’s voices and laughter and the strike of a rubber ball that indicated a soccer game was being played.
“Where in the bejebus are we?” Brad asked.
Soon the vehicle stopped. The prisoners’ pulse rates soared as the door to the van opened and fresh air flowed in. A man got on and handed them down to two other pairs of hands that helped to steady them on solid ground. “Quickly now,” one of them said, and still shackled and hooded, they were hurriedly steered up a flight of steps to a stoop. They heard the ring of a house bell and the sound of a door opening. “Step inside,” they were ordered, and behind their hoods, Brad and Chris sniffed a familiar smell. Heavy footsteps approached.
“Gentlemen,” Major General Konrad March said quietly. “You may remove their hoods and release their hands now.”