He stared at her for one beat and then another. “I don’t see how you can do it,” he said. She held her breath, waiting to be told no, to be turned away as she had been so many times these past months and years. “But I’m out of other options. Not now,” he said slowly. “Turning up in the middle of the night will attract too much attention. We’ll leave at five in the morning. We need to be there before the transport comes to take him to Nuremberg.” She wanted to see Kriegler now. But she nodded, knowing it was better not to push.

Mick led her into another building and down a hall. It had been freshly painted since the war, she could tell, cleaned to make it suitable for the Allied officers to stay, to erase the awful things that had happened here. He opened a door to a narrow room with a bed and washstand. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he said before closing the door.

Eleanor did not sleep in the cold, sterile barracks, but waited for the hours to pass. She lay awake, imagining her girls arriving at the camp as the laborer’s testimony had described. She took small comfort in the fact that several of them had come together. How had they found one another? It seemed unlikely they had been arrested in the same place. Eleanor wondered over and over: What would have happened if they had received word sooner that the radio had been compromised and it was a trap? They might have split up and gone to ground. Instead, they were arrested and, in most cases, killed. It was her fault. She could have pursued her doubts, forced the Director or someone above him to listen sooner. But she hadn’t—and her girls had paid the price.

When at last the sky began to pinken over the pine-capped Bavarian hills, Eleanor washed as well as she could and changed her dress. She started outside. The air was crisp with a hint of dampness, as though it might snow again, but not right away.

Mick was waiting for her in the predawn stillness, the smoke from his cigarette curling upward as he opened the door to a jeep. Eleanor fought the urge to ask him for one. They climbed into the jeep, letting him drive again, and he navigated to the gate where she’d arrived the previous day. Neither spoke as they passed through.

He parked the jeep and stepped out. She followed, the edges of her skirt pulling from her boots where she had tucked them. They were inside the camp now. He led her wordlessly through the arch in the guard house, only the crunching of their boots against the snow breaking the silence. She looked for the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei sign over the entranceway, but it was gone. Inside the gate, there were rows and rows of barracks. She stared as though one of the girls might walk from one of the buildings at any moment. Where are you?

“Show me,” she said to Mick. Though it would tell her nothing, she needed to see where the girls had died. “Show me everything.”

He traced a line in front of them from left to right. “Arrivals came down this road, through the entrance with the railway station by the SS barracks.” Eleanor imagined her girls, exhausted and dazed, being forced to march down the path. The girls would have walked with heads high as they had been trained, showing no fear.

Mick led her down the semicircle of barracks, stopping at the final one. “This is the interrogation block where they would have been questioned and killed.” His voice was factual, emotionless. “There’s a crematorium out the back where the bodies were taken.” Eleanor had asked for everything and he would spare her none. She touched the bricks in horror.

“Is that it?” She gestured to a low building with a telltale chimney stack.

“The crematorium. Yes. The prisoners referred to it as ‘the shortest escape.’”

“I want to see.” She walked around to see the twisted, charred metal then knelt in the earth, sifting the gravel through her fingers.

“Come,” he said finally, helping her to her feet. “We only have a little time before they will take Kriegler for questioning. No one can know that I’ve let you in.”

He led her to the right, where a section of barracks had been cordoned off with barbed wire. “This is where we keep him and the other prisoners awaiting trial.”

“Not in the interrogation cell then?” she asked. It would have seemed fitting.

“If only. We need to preserve that for evidence.”

The soldier guarding the barracks eyed them uneasily. “It’s all right,” Mick said, flashing credentials at him. The guard stepped aside. Mick turned to her. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

She crossed her arms. “Whatever do you mean?”

“I’ve been at this a long time and it’s been one heartbreak after another. The truth,” he added darkly, “is sometimes the very opposite from what you expect it to be.”

And once out, Eleanor thought silently, you can’t put it back any more than returning a mist of perfume to a bottle once it has been sprayed. She could walk away now. But she thought about Marie, who with her endless questions had always wanted to know the truth, about where the agents would be going, what they would be doing. About why. “I’m ready.”

“Come then.” Eleanor squared her shoulders. Inside the barracks, the floor was dirt and a rotten smell came off the stone walls. He led her from the room and down the hall, stopping in front of a closed door. “This is it.” It was different from the others, reinforced with steel and a peephole in the middle.

Eleanor peered through. At the sight of Hans Kriegler, she gasped with recognition, recoiling. The face she had seen so many times in reports and photographs was now just a few meters away. He looked the same, perhaps a little thinner, wearing khaki prison garb. She’d heard stories about Allied troops exacting their revenge on prisoners. But, except for a pinkish scar across his left cheek, Kriegler looked no worse for the wear. And he was so ordinary, like a bookseller or merchant one might see on the streets of Paris or Berlin before the war. Hardly the monster she’d imagined in her mind.

Mick gestured with his head. “You can go in.”

Eleanor stopped, unexpectedly frozen in her tracks. She stared at the one man who might have all of the answers she had been searching for. For the first time, there was some part of her that didn’t want to know the truth. She could go back, tell some of the families at least that she had found where and how the girls died. That much was true and for most of them it would be enough. But then she saw the girls’ parents, the agony in their eyes when they asked why. She had sworn to herself that she would find out what had happened and why. Nothing less would do.

The cell was a barracks room, small and rectangular. There was a bed with a blanket, a small lamp. A coffeepot sat on the corner. “This is how we house prisoners?”

“It’s the Geneva Convention, Ellie. These are high-ranking officers. We’re trying to keep it clean, no allegations of mistreatment.”

She shook her head. “Surely my girls received no such consideration.”

“You’d best go in,” Mick urged her. He looked uneasily over his shoulder. “We don’t have long.”

Eleanor took a deep breath and started through the door. “Herr Kriegler,” she said, addressing him as a civilian, refusing to use the title he did not deserve. He turned to her, his expression neutral. “I’m Eleanor Trigg.”

“I know who you are.” He stood politely, as though they were in a café and had arranged to meet for coffee. “So nice to finally meet you.” His tone was familiar, unafraid and almost cordial.

“You know who I am?” She could not help but sound off guard.

“Of course. We know everything.” She noticed his use of the present tense. He gestured toward the coffeepot. “If you would like some, I can ask for another cup.”

I’d sooner drink poison than have coffee with you, she wanted to say. Instead, she shook her head. He took a sip, then grimaced. “Nothing like the coffee back home in Vienna. My daughter and I loved to go to this little café off Stefansplatz and have Sacher torte and coffee,” he remarked.

“How old is your daughter?”

“She’s eleven now. I haven’t seen her in four years. But you didn’t come to talk about children or coffee. You want to ask me about the girls.”

It was as if he had been expecting her, and it made her uneasy. “The female agents,” she corrected. “The ones who never came home. I know that they are dead,” she added, not wanting to hear him say the words. “I want to know how they died—and how they were captured.”

“Gas or gunshot, here or another camp, does it matter?” She blanched at his dispassionate tone. “They were spies.”

“They weren’t spies.” She bristled.

“Well, what would you call them?” he shot back. “They were dressed in civilian clothes, operating in occupied territory. They were captured and killed.”

“I know that,” she said, recovering. “But how were they captured?” He looked away, still recalcitrant. “You know those women had children themselves, daughters like yours. Those children will never see their mothers again.”

She saw it then—something shifted in his eyes, a flicker of fear breaking through. “I won’t see mine again either. I’m going to hang for what I’ve done,” he said.

If there is a just God. “You don’t know that for sure. If you cooperate, perhaps you might get a life sentence. So why not tell me the truth?” she pressed. “The things I want to know have nothing to do with the prosecution,” she added, forgetting for a moment her promise to Mick that she would help him. “You’ve got nothing to fear from your own side anymore. All of the others are arrested or dead.”

“Because there are some secrets one must carry to the grave.” Which secrets? she wondered. And why would a man who was at the end of his days choose to remain silent?

She decided to take another tack. She reached into her bag and pulled out the photos. She handed them to Kriegler and he flipped through them one by one. Then he paused and held up one of the photos.

“Marie,” the man said with a glint of recognition in his eye. He pointed to his face, a poorly healed scar. “She fought with her nails, here and here.” Leaving him a mark he could never erase. “But ultimately she did what we asked. Not to save her own life, but his.”

“Vesper?”

He nodded. “I shot him anyway.” Kriegler seemed emboldened now. “It wasn’t personal,” he added, his voice dispassionate. “I had no more use for him…or her either.”

“And Marie?” she asked, dreading the answer.

“She was put on a transport from Fresnes with other women.”

“When?”

“Late May.” Right after Julian had returned from London. So much sooner than Eleanor had imagined.

“So you had the radio by then?” He nodded. “But we were still receiving messages.” And transmitting them, she added silently. Every fear she’d had during the war was true.

“Messages from us. We got the first radio from Marseille, you see. But since London already knew that circuit was blown, there was no point in transmitting from it. So we played around with the frequencies until we found one that the Vesper circuit used. We were able to impersonate the operator to get London to transmit information to us.”

The radio game, just as Henri had said in Paris. Eleanor recalled her suspicions, the ways in which some of Marie’s transmissions had sounded just fine, others not at all like her. The latter, as she suspected, were actually being broadcasted by German intelligence. Eleanor had kept her concerns silent at first, and later when she had spoken they’d been brushed aside by the Director. But here they were now laid out in front of her as plainly as a winning hand of cards splayed on a table. If only she had acted on her suspicions and pushed harder with the Director to find out what was happening.

There was no time for guilt, though; her precious moments to question Kriegler were rapidly ticking by. “But how? I learned in Paris that you had the radios and were able to play them back to London. You didn’t have the security checks. How did you manage?”

“We didn’t think it would work.” A smile crossed his face and she held her hands down so as not to reach across and slap him. “There were so many ways the British would have seen through it. At first we thought they were just careless, preoccupied. Only later did we realize that someone in London actually wanted us to get the messages.”

“Excuse me? How can you say that?”

“In mid-May 1944, I had occasion to be away from headquarters. One of my deputies, a real dummkopf, got cocky. He sent a message to London acknowledging that we were on the other end of the line. When I found out, I had him court-martialed for treason.”

“Who in London, exactly?” Eleanor had sent many messages herself. But she surely didn’t know about the radio game.

“I have no idea. Someone knew and kept transmitting anyway.”

Eleanor’s mind reeled back over the people who had access to broadcast to Vesper circuit. Herself, Jane, the Director. It was a very small group, none of whom, she felt certain, would have done it.

Before Eleanor could ask further, Mick knocked at the door, gesturing for her to come out. “Time’s up,” he said when she stepped into the hall reluctantly. “Did you get what you were looking for?”

“I suppose.” Eleanor’s mind reeled at Kriegler’s assertion that the Germans had told London they had the radio. That London knew. She was aghast—and puzzled. She had been there at headquarters for every single day of the operation, and she had never imagined—much less heard—of such a thing.

Mick was watching her expectantly, waiting for the information he needed. She had forgotten, in her distress about the girls, to ask Kriegler the questions she had promised for Mick. But it didn’t matter. She’d had the answers he needed all along. “He confessed to the murder of Julian Brookhouse. Said that he shot him personally at SD headquarters in Paris in May 1944.”

Mick’s eyes widened. “You got all that in ten minutes?”

She nodded. “If he denies it tell him that I was secretly recording the conversation. And that I am prepared to testify against him at trial.” The first part was a lie; the latter was not.

Mick turned toward the cell. “I need to go in there and speak with him now, before the transport comes. If you don’t want to wait for me, I’ll have one of the orderlies drive you back to base.”

“I’ll wait,” she said. She had nothing but time now.

A few minutes later, Mick came out of the cell. “Kriegler asked to see you once more.” Surprised, she walked in to once again face the most evil man she had ever encountered.

“I’m going to cooperate with the Americans.” His expression was somber now, and she knew Mick had confronted him with the evidence about killing Julian. “But before I do, I want to help you.” It was a lie, she knew. He wanted the truth about the girls to go with him to his grave. Only there was fear in his eyes now. “If I do, will you put in a good word for leniency for me?”

“Yes.” She would never forgive Kriegler or let him walk free again. But a long life alone with his crimes seemed more punishing.

The German’s eyes glinted. He slid something across the table. It fell to the ground and he kicked it toward her. It was a small key. How he had managed to hang on to it through his arrest and interrogation was beyond her. “Credit Suisse in Zurich,” he said. “Box 9127.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“An insurance policy, so to speak,” he said cryptically. “Documents that hold the answers you’ve been looking for.” Eleanor’s heartbeat quickened. “I’ll never walk free again, but I will give you the answers for Marie and the other four I sent—and their daughters.” It was, perhaps, the smallest act of contrition.

Then something about his words stuck. “Did you say that there were five girls?” He nodded. “Are you certain?”

“They all left Paris together. I signed the order myself. One died when the train car exploded.”

Four should have arrived. “But the witness’s report only spoke of three girls. What happened to the other?”

“Never accounted for. There were a dozen ways she could have died. But for all I know she might be alive.”

Eleanor leaped up and burst from the jail cell, starting past Mick in a run.