London, 1969

Newkirk's flat had a spare room for guests, with a single bed. His own room had a double bed… presumably, also for guests. Hashing out the sleeping arrangements was not easy. Neither LeBeau nor Hogan really liked the idea of sleeping in Newkirk's bed, (any more than they had liked swapping bunks back in Barracks Two,) but since it was the more comfortable of the two, both of them sounded quite selfless when each insisted that the other one should take it. They finally settled the matter by flipping a coin.

It wasn't until Hogan was pulling Newkirk's duvet up to his chin that it occurred to him that LeBeau had had nearly thirty years, and quite literally every opportunity, to learn about slight of hand and rigged coin tosses from an acknowledged master of the art form. Hogan had been snookered, and he could almost see Newkirk grinning at him.

For all that he was genuinely exhausted, though, sleep proved elusive, and it wasn't because of a ghostly bedmate. After an hour or so of ceiling-staring, pillow-flipping, sheep-counting, and all the other time-honored attempts at getting some much-needed rest, Hogan gave up. Kicking off the blankets, he got up, went back out to the main room. Judging by the soft snores coming from the spare room, LeBeau was not having the same trouble sleeping, so Hogan felt safe in flipping on a light.

He scanned the bookcase again, looking for something calming to read. Shirer's 'Rise and Fall of the Third Reich' was certainly not that, although the fact that it was sandwiched between 'Tropic of Cancer' and a manual on bicycle repair was at least somewhat intriguing. Hogan didn't see any particular order to the books, but there was always the chance that there was some recondite system he just wasn't seeing. Even if there wasn't, if asked, Newkirk might well have pretended that there was.

A tattered volume of Kipling's poetry was at eye level. Good enough. Hogan pulled it off the shelf, settled down in the overstuffed chair, and opened it. Newkirk's personality all but leapt off the page. He obviously did not believe in leaving books pristine for the next owners; he'd improved the larger part of the volume, underlining or bracketing verses that had struck his fancy, commenting on some poems, and illustrating others with thumbnail sketches in the margins. So many of the poems were about soldiers facing a war that didn't care what became of them, then going home to a country that didn't care, either. So many of the verses were in that familiar dialect, so full of dropped Hs and rough city tones, that it was almost hard to differentiate what they were saying from the way they were saying it.

Hogan flipped through the book, looking mostly at the underlined passages. O thirty million English that babble of England's might; behold there are twenty heroes who lack their food tonight. More than twenty. Stand up and meet the war, the Hun is at the gate. Nothing ever changed, did it? In spite of being broken, Or because of being broken, Rise up and build anew. Good advice, if hard, and Newkirk had followed it every day of his life. We haven't had any tea for a week; the bottom is out of the universe! Heh. How often had Hogan heard variations on that complaint? I was a shepherd to fools… Yet they escaped. For I stayed. Oh, God. Damn it, Newkirk…

He stopped at a page entitled 'Epitaphs of the War.' It wasn't one poem, but a number of short verses or couplets. One of them had been enclosed in a neat box, with a rather good sketch of a USAAF crush cap alongside.

Body and Spirit I surrendered whole, To harsh Instructors—and received a soul…

If mortal man could change me through and through, From all I was—what may The God not do?

The page dimmed for a moment as Hogan fought to keep his composure. Newkirk had never understood that the Unsung Heroes operation hadn't given him any virtues that he hadn't already possessed in abundance. Hogan had done nothing except to offer him an opportunity to get killed and then let Newkirk be the sort of man he was meant to be, and had reaped the rewards of that offer a hundredfold; how could that possibly have merited such misplaced gratitude?

He flicked a few more pages, stopped at one called 'Helen All Alone.' He'd never heard of it. Judging from the amount of embellishment, though, Newkirk had given this one a great deal of thought. Most of the margin was taken up with a sketch of a huge locked gate, with two indistinct silhouettes slipping through the bars, and roughly three quarters of the poem was underlined. Hogan read the first verse; it was about an escape. A man and a woman, damned, doomed, and desperate… but together, they ran towards freedom.

When the Horror passing speech Hunted us along,

Each laid hold on each, and each Found the other strong.

Hogan looked more carefully at the illustration, and a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. One figure, he assumed, represented Newkirk himself; the other was smaller and slighter, with long, pencil-dark hair, and their hands were firmly clasped. Newkirk had always been a romantic.

He read the next verse, and his smile faded. When the narrator had made it to safety, Helen had abandoned him without a word or an explanation. And he had been glad of it; the darkness of their imprisoned past was not something he wanted to share. The last verse began Let her go and find a mate, As I will find a bride, Knowing naught of Limbo Gate, Or Who are penned inside.

Hogan stared at the page for a moment. The second line was not underlined; it was struck through. Newkirk had not been emphasizing the possibility of love; he had been denying it. Helen had gotten him to safety, and then left him alone on the shore, and he thought that was the way things were supposed to be. Kay isn't Helen, Hogan thought, sickened. I am.

He stood up, put the book back on the shelf. Then he set his teeth and reached for the book he really wanted to see, the one he knew perfectly well he'd intended all along to reexamine. Julia Child's weighty masterpiece slid into his hand as if it had been waiting for him, and he opened it. The cash was an irrelevance, the keys were a mystery. The cap and identity tags were heartbreaking. The gun was… pragmatic. There had to be something more than this. There had to be.

A lot of Newkirk's choices had been made for him, whether he liked them or not, and Hogan knew that he was responsible for at least some of them. He wished there was some way of making it right.

He thought about Moore's stiff nonanswers, his dismissive comments to the effect that Newkirk was better off dead, and, worst of all, his smirking epitaph, 'more a brigand than a hero.'

Sure, they had their trap all planned out. It was clever. It would work.

Hogan almost didn't want it to work. He didn't want to play out the scenario—opening, move, countermove, and endgame. He just wanted to end it. Now. Tonight. He wanted justice. He wanted revenge. And maybe he wanted forgiveness for the part he'd played in all of it.

*.*.*.*.*.*

London, 1946

"You know, you remind me very much of myself at your age," said Stephens, after a moment. "And I mean that as a compliment."

Newkirk looked mildly affronted. "Perhaps you do. I'm not taking it as one."

"Your prerogative. Newkirk, let me level with you. The Goldilocks operation was successful beyond our wildest dreams, and there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that without you and your associates, the war would have gone much differently."

"You're right about that."

"Yes. There is also no doubt that it will all have been for nothing if we don't keep at it. There are still certain… elements that we need to find and neutralize," Stephens said. "We didn't capture every Nazi leader; several of the worst are still out there. And that isn't even taking into consideration the ones we don't know we need to find; the sympathizers, the deep cover agents, or simply the disaffected and angry. There is still a pro-fascist element, and they are here. We need to find them. We need to catch them. And we need to know what they're planning to do before they can plunge us all back into yet another war."

Newkirk's eyes narrowed, but he didn't say anything.

"We haven't had much luck infiltrating their ranks, I'm afraid. They're suspicious. They're careful." Stephens met his eyes. "But they'll talk to a traitor."

Newkirk held his gaze for a long moment. When he finally spoke, there was no more anger in his voice. Just a sort of sad, disappointed comprehension.

"So that's what it was really about. I'd wondered. The arrest, the show trial, the publicity, making me out to be some sort of cross between Guy Fawkes and Judas Iscariot… even that sad, sad story of how the Krauts beat me into submission, setting the stage for a dramatic last-minute gesture of mercy that only added contempt to the hatred. This is what it was all for, then, is it? You set all this up, just so you'd have the right bait to help you flush out the last few bad 'uns?" It wasn't even an accusation, just a summation. His voice didn't crack, although it was a close-run thing. "That's why you did this to me? Just for that?"

"No. No, Newkirk, I didn't. I didn't. This wasn't some Machiavellian plot; I never meant any of this to happen. But since it did, well, I'm just trying to…"

"—To take up the broken pieces and put what's left of me to good use. Waste not, want not."

Stephens didn't flinch at an unpleasant truth. "Yes," he said evenly. "And to give you one last chance at a more meaningful life than you're otherwise going to be offered. To be blunt, Newkirk, you don't have all that many other options."

"No. You saw to that, right enough," said Newkirk, looking intently at something about two feet above and to the left of Stephens' head. In a conversational tone, not looking away from whatever it was up there he found so fascinating, he said, "You know, a day or two ago, I had a roof and a job. Not much else, I'll grant you, but I'd managed at least that much for myself. Today, I certainly don't have the roof anymore, and not showing up for work means I probably don't have the job, either. When I said that there wasn't anything more for you to take from me, you really weren't meant to take it as a challenge."

Stephens looked away.

Newkirk wasn't done. "And we both know that if I were to walk out of here like you say I can, with or without that lovely new identity, if I were to try, yet again, to claw out some sort of life for myself, all that's ever going to happen is that you, or someone just like you, will send the goon squad right back out to feel my collar inside of a month. You're never going to let me go, are you? Valuable commodity that I am, and all? Prisoner or slave. Those are my choices, aren't they? Can you at least bloody well do me the courtesy of being honest about it?"

"You're wrong. Those aren't the only choices you have. There's a third choice, and it's the one I'm asking you to make. I don't want you as my captive; I want you as my comrade-in-arms. I'm asking you to take everything you've learned, everything you've become, and use it to serve your country."

"Do me a favor! I've just spent six months waiting for my country to put me to death. And then I got to spend two more being shown how much better off I'd've been if it had done." His gaze snapped downwards as abruptly as a searchlight or a bullet. "And at no point in those eight months did you, or anyone else, bother telling me what you had in mind."

"Espionage isn't the sort of thing you put to a debate, Newkirk. It isn't a democracy."

"It isn't supposed to be blackmail, either. You could have asked me to do this. I've been in one nick or another since 1939; I wasn't exactly hard to find. You could have come to my cell at any time and explained what you needed from me. If you didn't want to do that, you could have at least taken five minutes to tell me it was all right, that it wasn't just you deciding that three could keep a secret if two of them were dead. Which, just for the record, is what I assumed was happening, and I'd like to point out that I kept your damned secrets anyway. And if you had decided to play it safe, you could have had the simple decency to look me in the eye and say that you were sorry it had to be this way, right before you pulled the white hood over my head. You could have treated me like a man instead of a tool to be used and thrown aside." He shrugged slightly. "You could have. The Colonel would have. You didn't. There's not much more to say, is there?"

*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*

London, 1969

Hogan woke up to kitchen noises and the sort of glorious aromas that made staying in bed for a little extra sleep not merely foolish, but downright impossible. He walked into the kitchen; LeBeau was just plating an omelet that looked like a magazine illustration, and he'd poured out a mug of coffee that smelled like heaven.

"I have to admit it; I missed this kind of treatment after the war," Hogan said. "For the first couple of days I'd get up, walk to the mess, look at what they were serving, and wonder why I'd looked forward to being liberated."

LeBeau laughed. "I should have the food critics add that to my Michelin review," he said, sitting down. "I can see it now. 'Better than military rations.' Patrons will flock to my door."

"They do anyway," Hogan said, sugaring his coffee. "You whipped all this up just from what Newkirk had on hand?"

"Pfft. I was lucky that Newkirk had a frying pan," LeBeau said. "No, I stepped out early this morning and bought a few eggs and the rest of this. I never quite got out of the habit of rising at dawn and going to market for the freshest ingredients."

"Dawn? Really? There were days Schultz all but had to pry you out of your bunk."

"C'est vrai, but it turns out that it is far easier to wake up early when you have not been awake all night blowing up bridges."

"Good point," said Hogan. "But on that subject, are you ready to go back in there and blow up a rat?"

"Oh, yes, Colonel," LeBeau said, his eyes determined. "More than ready."

They took a cab back to MI6; when they got there Kinch and Carter were waiting in the lobby. They looked worried.

"What's up?" Hogan asked.

"We don't know," Kinch said. "But they won't let us in, and they won't call Stephens to let us in, either. I don't like this."

"Something's gone wrong," Carter agreed.

"Is there a problem, chaps?" Donnelly was just flashing his badge at the desk security, and he joined them.

"Seems like it," Hogan said. "Do you think you can get Stephens to talk to us?"

He hesitated for a moment, then nodded decisively. "Let's cut out the middleman. I'll bring you up myself." He turned back towards the guard, and gestured towards the heroes. "They're with me, and Stephens authorized them yesterday."

The MP looked dubious, but accepted that, and Donnelly led them back into the building. "Sorry about that. Can't be too careful where safety is concerned, I suppose, but I can't imagine that any of you have gone rogue since yesterday," he said, and laughed.

Brewer was just leaving the office as they approached, and sighed with relief. "Donnelly! Thank God you're all right. And you gents too," he tacked on as an afterthought.

"What's happened, then?" Donnelly asked, going from polite friendliness to high alert in an instant.

"Come and see," Brewer said, opening the door.

Stephens, under more rigid control than Hogan had ever seen him, nodded a stiff greeting. "General Hogan, I'm glad you're here. Your mission is hereby cancelled. It's over."

"What? Why?" Carter asked, irrepressible as ever.

"Because we already have our traitor," Stephens said, and pointed at his office.

Moore was inside, slumped limply at his own desk. The gun he must have used was still clutched in his cold hand. The codebook he must have used to communicate with his German contact was on his desk blotter. The congealing blood was everywhere.

Hogan studied the scene and didn't say a word.