They paused to light cigarettes in the doorway.

Lotte stepped off the curb and started walking toward them; behind her the man took a step forward and then stopped. He rested a hand on the roof of the car, glancing toward the shop and then smiling.

“We’ll wait for you here.”

Lotte was already halfway across the road, Anja a few steps behind. Anja glanced back over her shoulder at the young man and smiled. He was handsome, tall, well built, and well dressed.

His smile was gone; he was now watching the German officers on the other side of the street, tugging at their collars and heading off toward the bright lights of Piccadilly Circus.

LOTTE KOEHLER WASN’T a normal officer’s wife.

Lotte Koehler had shot her first wolf when she was nine years old.

When she was eleven she and her father had tracked a wounded boar for two days. She had finally killed that same boar after it thundered out of the blackness of the forest and into their camp at midnight before goring her sleeping father as he lay next to their dwindling campfire.

Lotte Koehler knew how to fight, she knew how to look after herself, and she knew how to look after those whom she loved.

But most of all she knew when something felt wrong.

As she walked toward the tailor’s shop with Anja, watching the men in the Opel in the reflection of the shop window as she approached it, Lotte Koehler knew something was seriously wrong.

She knew that Ernst would have told her about a plainclothes security ser­vice. She also knew that while the young man spoke excellent German, really excellent German, it wasn’t his first language. It sounded like someone from the movies: perfect, too perfect, clipped and polished so that it was cut like glass.

Cut glass with a tiny trace of an American twang.

The other thing that wasn’t right was that they had said Ernst had sent them; it wasn’t right because Ernst didn’t know where they were.

She hadn’t told him she was shopping. It was her and Anja’s little secret, time to buy a present for their dearest Ernst before they left him to go back to Berlin.

Something was wrong, and she knew she had to do something about it, because if she and Anja were in danger, Ernst was in danger, and this lioness protected her pride.

THERE WAS A deep mahogany gloom inside the tailor’s shop. What light struggled through the windows seemed to be sucked up by the dark red carpet and the solemn tick-­tock of the old grandfather clock that was standing sentry by the door.

Only one member of staff was visible as Lotte pushed Anja ahead of her. Anja turned to look at her mother.

“What is it?” she asked, but Lotte looked back out through the door and didn’t reply.

Across the street she could see that both men were now standing on the pavement, talking and ignoring the snow that was bucketing down around them. They were staring at the shop, and neither seemed pleased with the way events were unfolding.

“May I help you, madam?” the shop assistant said slowly in English, speaking clearly, as if addressing a child.

“Sie verfügen über ein Telefon?” Lotte replied, still looking through the glass at the men outside.

The shopkeeper smiled, holding out his hands apologetically.

“I’m terribly sorry, madam. One doesn’t speak German; I normally have an assistant who does, but with the weather . . .” The tailor’s statement trailed off redundantly with a shrug.

“Do you have a telephone, please?” Anja translated for her mother into perfect English. Lotte breathed a sigh of relief that she and Ernst had chosen to employ a British nanny back in Germany.

“If you would like to step this way.”

Lotte and Anja followed the tailor to the back of the shop. They’d barely made it halfway when the door behind them opened and the two men from the car entered.

The first smiled at Lotte as he brushed some snow off his shoulders and then looked past her to the tailor. Behind him, the driver stared out through the door toward Regent Street, in the manner that Lotte had done a few moments earlier.

“Frau Koehler, really, we must insist you come with us now; your husband is waiting.” The same immaculate but not-­quite-­right German. He tapped his wrist and shrugged an apology.

“I need to make a telephone call,” Lotte replied, opening her handbag while still walking through the shop.

“Now, Frau Koehler. We need to go now.” The driver spoke for the first time, his German rougher around the edges, his hand resting on the handle of the door, the other held out, inviting Lotte to leave the shop.

She stopped, turned, then tilted her head. “I must also insist,” she said, an edge creeping in.

Lotte stared at the man before following a nervous Anja to the back of the shop. Light and sound from the street were virtually nonexistent as the shopkeeper finally reached the telephone. It sat on a glass display case that contained ties, handkerchiefs, and a selection of brightly colored socks.

Lotte was fumbling in her bag, looking for the number of Ernst’s private office, when the first man reached around her and rested his hand on top of the receiver.

“Now, if you please,” he said quietly, intimately, his lips a few inches from her ear.

Lotte paused, looking at the hand on the receiver in front of her. A second passed before she half turned and jabbed her silver Walther PPK pistol hard into his side.

“Get away from me and my child,” Lotte said quietly, pushing hard with the muzzle of the PPK, so hard he felt it dig right through his overcoat and separate two of his ribs a fraction.

He looked down and then back up into Lotte’s eyes.

“Frau Koehler, please . . .”

Behind him, the driver, confused by the quiet conversation between Lotte and his colleague, moved closer.

“She has a gun,” the first man said quietly in English, looking down at the pistol.

Nobody moved.

The tick of the clock was the only reminder that the earth still turned, until Lotte shouted.

“Go!” She looked at Anja. “Out the back, run!”

As Lotte shouted to Anja she remembered another time. Long ago, another life almost. She remembered opening her heavy eyes, seeing the smoldering campfire, and hearing her father screaming.

Lotte remembered the sound of the boar, the smell of it, the sparks kicking up from the fire, and the flecks of spittle as her father shouted one word.

One final word to save the life of his precious daughter before he was overcome.

“Run.”

Back then, all those years ago, Lotte hadn’t done as she was told, either.

Anja launched herself at the man next to her mother with all the fury a thirteen-­year-­old girl could muster. She gripped his coat collar with one hand and pushed as hard as she could. Clawing at his face with her other hand, she gritted her teeth and felt her nails dragging across his skin.

She was screaming, slapping, kicking, and pulling now, her words just animal sounds and fury.

ERIC COOK’S DAY was going from bad to worse.

He tried to ignore Anja and her fingernails ripping at his cheeks. He tried to focus on the gun as the blows rained down on him; he flicked his head, this way and that, shoving with his shoulder, but still Anja fought, and still Lotte twisted the pistol, trying to pull it free from his hands. He’d managed to grab the top slide of the pistol, jamming the webbing of his thumb under the hammer to stop it from falling.

Anja was like a dervish as she slapped and scraped at his face. He felt a finger in his eye and then his eyelid stretching under the drag of its nail.

He shook his head, squeezing his eyes tight as he called for help.

“For God’s sake, King, help me here!”

The second he shouted he knew he’d done wrong. He knew there was no going back, no escape, no denial, and no doubt that he had made the biggest mistake of his life.

Eric Cook had called for help in a broad American accent, and Eric Cook had used a name.

Frank King winced.

They’d blown it.

King stepped forward and attempted to drag Anja away from his partner.