The quarter inch of tea at the bottom of his cup was long cold when the van came back.

King watched as the driver of the van got out of the cab, casually looked around, and then crossed the pavement to the already opening front door, where he went straight inside.

“Here we go,” King said softly, and the old lady on the floor, who was by now lying on her side, grunted in agreement.

THE VAN DRIVER stood in front of Ma Price in the back room of the house, the snow on his feet barely melting in the chill.

“Sterling says the kid claims she was held by two Yanks. They were trying to make her dad do something.”

“So this one upstairs is telling the truth?” Ma Price had to peer up at the driver, who was holding his cap in front of his chest.

“Looks like it.”

Ma Price turned and stared at the empty fireplace as everyone else in the room remained silent, waiting for her decision, watching her back as she paced a few steps.

Not many men interrupted Ma Price when she was thinking. Not many men interrupted Ma Price ever. She was a woman to be reckoned with, respected, listened to, and most definitely not interrupted. She had once run a crime family that covered most of the East End of London, but then along came a war that had taken half of her boys away.

And then along came the occupation, which took nearly the other half.

Hitler had interrupted Ma Price, and she hadn’t liked it.

She had never made a concrete decision to join the resistance; she couldn’t put her finger on when it had happened. If pushed, she would guess, it would have been around the time she bought a job lot of stolen dynamite from a quarry in Cornwall. One thing had led to another, and then it had suddenly seemed obvious to her to blow up a railway line to stop a goods train.

At first she’d wanted to steal what was on board.

When the bomb went off, it turned out the cargo was humans in the wagons, humans who had hugged her and held her hand in thanks, calling her a hero as they had stumbled out into the night. Ma Price became a freedom fighter, whether she meant to or not.

She hadn’t totally given up crime, of course; a woman had to make a living.

She’d made some money and opened up channels with ­people who “knew ­people.” The resistance liked doing business with her, and she liked doing business with them. They paid well and didn’t mess her around. When they gave her a wireless and a code book, it had seemed a natural extension of their dealings together.

Over time, crime had increasingly given way to resistance warfare, and she had found the two lives weren’t that far apart in their nature. They were both about power, power built on money and violence. Price had often thought that politicians were just criminals who knew what fork to use in a restaurant, and being a freedom fighter had only deepened that conviction.

She wasn’t happy, though, because she had realized one important thing: her time was running out.

Back when she was a kid with no shoes except on Sunday, she had known she was different. Her life had been no more or no less miserable than everyone else’s had, in the shithole tenement she lived in. She used the same outside toilet, wore the same rags, slept with the same bedbugs, coughed the same rattling cough, with the same damp half-­dead lungs everyone else had.

But she was different.

­People in that tenement dreamed of a better life, but Ma Price was the only one with the balls to go and get it.

She had nothing to lose. She didn’t care if she died trying because if she failed, she didn’t want to carry on living.

So she started grifting and grafting, ducking and diving, buying and selling, and then lifting and loaning. She got some cash, a little; she fought men; she fought women; and she was their worst enemy because she didn’t care.

They had it all to lose.

She had nothing.

She earned her place; she earned respect, and she got it wherever she went.

Ma Price wasn’t scared of anything and anyone then, but that was then and this was now. Ma Price was clever enough to know things never lasted forever. She’d seen ­people come and go over the years, some dead, some in prison, some just wiped off the face of the earth.

She’d watched the changes carefully, seen how they came and went, learned from them, and second-­guessed them. She’d done that because she was different, because she had always been different.

And now, after all this time, Ma Price knew the clock was ticking down for her. All good things must come to an end, and she knew they were coming to an end sooner rather than later. She knew because she was tired; she knew because she was scared for the first time in her life, and she knew she couldn’t afford to be scared.

Not now she had something to lose.

Back in the day, if the law caught you up, you’d go to prison, do your “bird,” ride the ride and come out the other side. You’d maybe have a bit of money salted away, you’d maybe start again or maybe take a backseat, let someone else come up, take your place so you could walk away.

Those were the rules. Prison didn’t scare her.

Rivals didn’t scare her. They knew better than to attract her attention, let alone cause her concern.

The one thing that scared her, the one thing that made her think twice, the one thing that caused her to furrow her brow and bury her head?

The Nazis, because just like her, the Nazis didn’t care about anything.

They didn’t have rules, they didn’t play by the book, they didn’t worry about consequences, they had nobody to answer to and nobody to worry about.

And that scared Ma Price, because an enemy with a million men and nothing to lose can’t be beaten.

Ma Price had started thinking about a future, something else, and that was when she realized all her hard work had given her something to lose, which meant it was time to get out.

Deep down, deep, deep down, when she dared to dream, Ma Price wondered if there might be a way out of England. A passage to somewhere where she could spend some of her money and finally relax, kick off her boots, stare at the sunset, breathe out.

Live.

One day, but not yet, because now, right at that minute, she was stuck in London, in a dreary house with a confused American who was presenting her with a situation she needed to figure out.

“We could just let him go.” The old man in the black suit bobbed his head as he spoke, as if expecting a slap around the ear.

Somewhere nearby a train whistled and the sound of clattering tracks carried across the snow-­covered rooftops. It died away as the train traveled on, leaving the room seemingly quieter than before.

Ma Price stared at the empty hearth, not moving, chin in her hand, deep in thought, until she finally looked up at the van driver.

“What else did Sterling say?”

“He says he wants us to give him the Yank upstairs.”

She frowned and returned to staring at the hearth. She was worried.

She could walk away, hand over the Yank, wash her hands, and leave Sterling and the Germans to their games.

She could, but she wouldn’t, because if she did, she would look weak. She wasn’t worried about the boys in the room seeing that weakness; she was worried about the boys outside the room, around London, in pubs, warehouses, taxis, and cafés seeing that weakness.

It didn’t do to look weak, not in her line of work.

“He’s our Yank.” Ma Price scratched her head. “If Sterling wants him, he can either pay for him or try to take him. Sterling has the girl, she fell into his lap.