curls or smudge her makeup. She was genuinely excited to see him. She could get used to these fun meet-ups every few weeks, without obligation or surprise.
“So the British government itself betrayed the girls?” Mark asked.
Grace nodded. “They wanted the Germans to think that everything was fine and that the circuit was still active. So they kept broadcasting, as if everything was normal. They kept broadcasting and deploying agents and weapons. They wanted the radios in place so they could plant false information about the time and date of the invasion.”
“But that would mean that they sent the agents into a trap.”
“Yes.” Even confronted with absolute proof, it was still impossible to believe. Grace shuddered. The girls had been arrested and SOE had let them disappear, just as surely as the Nacht und Nebel program had intended. “That governments could do such things to their own people...” But of course that was the lesson of the war. People had scarcely believed the things the Germans had done to their own people. In the other countries, too, Austria and Hungary and such, people had turned on their Jewish neighbors who had lived beside them for centuries.
“Who’s to say that it stopped with the British?” Mark said. “The Americans had great stakes in misleading the Germans right before D-Day, too. They might have been in on the radio game as well somehow. We’ll probably never know.”
Or would they? Grace mused. If Raquel could get them back into the archive at the Pentagon... She pushed the thought from her mind. “Why didn’t the truth come out after the war?”
“No one wanted to think about the past. It all changed, you see, the players and the sides. The Russians were suddenly the Soviets. German scientists, who had helped kill people by the millions, were being brought to the US instead of prosecuted in order to work on the atomic bomb. The British government was happy to leave the whole thing buried.”
“Except Eleanor. She wouldn’t leave it alone. They had kept up the radio game intentionally, undermining everything she had built—Eleanor wanted the world to know.”
“What happened after you saw Marie?”
“When we realized the truth about what had happened and Eleanor’s innocence in the matter, I knew we needed to finish the job she’d set out to do—getting the real story into the proper hands. I helped Marie prepare a testimonial about what had happened during the war. Frankie used a contact of his to reach out to the British ambassador in Washington and get Marie’s statement to Parliament.” Grace had wondered if Marie would need to return to London to testify. She didn’t know if the poor woman would have what it took to return to the country she’d left behind. Fortunately, they’d received word that the statement would suffice. They had not known if it would do any good.
But just a few days earlier, Frankie received word. “The girls’ dispositions have been changed, too. From ‘missing, presumed dead’ to ‘killed in action.’” Three words that could mean so much. “Josie is going to be nominated for the George Cross.”
“And Eleanor?” he asked. Grace shook her head. She would remain a footnote in history, unknown but to a few. But of course that was what she had always wanted.
So much of the truth had died with Eleanor and would never be known. Of course, there was much they would never know. Who knew among the British? Was it MI6 that had made the calculated decision to sacrifice the agents or had SOE betrayed its very own?
But it was a reckoning, a start.
“Two champagnes, please,” Mark said to the waiter when they were seated in Stiles’ Tavern, a simple, unpretentious spot not far from Grand Central. “We have to celebrate.”
“Are you back in New York for a case?” she asked after their drinks had come. She lifted her glass.
“Not exactly. I’ve been offered a position with the War Crimes Tribunal. Not Nuremberg, but one of the satellites.”
“Oh, Mark, that’s wonderful!”
“I should thank you. Working with you on finding out the truth about Eleanor and the girls made me realize how much I missed that sort of work. I decided to try again.”
Grace raised her glass. “To your new position,” she offered.
“To second chances,” he said, a deeper note to his words. They clinked glasses. “I wanted to see you.”
To see her, Grace realized, before he left. Her hand hovered in midair. He was going back to Europe for good. She took a sip, the bubbles