When the meeting finally ended and she left the office, her legs carried her down the hall almost on their own. She made it back to her room, shut the door, sat down on the bed, and only then let herself cry.
He was alive. Whatever he had done, whatever he had become, he was alive. The church on the edge of town had been badly damaged back in 1941 when the front rolled through. All that remained were blackened walls and half a bell tower.
The tower stuck up into the gray sky like a broken finger. Local people avoided the place. They said it was cursed.
The occupiers avoided it too. For a clandestine meeting, it was ideal. Anna arrived at a quarter to six.
She took a long, indirect route through side streets, checking carefully to make sure no one was following her. Her instructors had drilled that into her: never go straight to a meeting point. Always double back. Always check reflections in windows. Always look for the same face twice.
She saw no sign of surveillance, at least none she could detect. She entered the ruined church through a side opening where a heavy wooden door had once stood. Inside, the air smelled of old smoke, dampness, and rot.
Snow that had drifted in over the winter had mostly melted, leaving mud underfoot. Anna stopped and let her eyes adjust to the gloom. “You came,” a voice said quietly from above.
She looked up and saw him standing on what remained of the choir loft, hands resting on the burned railing. He was no longer in a general’s uniform but in a dark civilian coat, bareheaded.
The wind had tousled his dark hair. For a moment he looked almost exactly as he had before the war, coming home tired after a night flight. He came down the broken stairs with practiced ease, as if he had used this route before.
He stopped a few feet from her. Between them lay two years of silence. “Anya,” he said softly, and there was so much strain in his voice it was hard to hear.
She said nothing. She simply looked at his face. She didn’t know what to say. Part of her wanted to throw her arms around him and make sure he was real. Another part wanted to step back and run.
This man wore the enemy’s uniform. This man had officially been dead for two years. “Say something,” he said. “Please.”
“You’re alive,” she managed at last.
Her voice sounded rough and strange to her own ears. “How?” He let out a breath and leaned against the wall.
“In that fight, my plane was hit,” he said slowly, as if every word cost him something. “But not the way the official report said. I got out with a parachute.”
“I landed in deep snow in the woods and thought our lines were close. They weren’t. I was in enemy territory. They tracked me with dogs and captured me within an hour.”
He stopped for a moment, staring toward the dark opening of a window. Anna waited. “I spent one week in a POW camp,” he continued.
“Then men from enemy counterintelligence came for me. In their files they had found something interesting.” “What?” she asked quietly.
“My face. It turned out I was almost an exact match for an important Wehrmacht officer who had died a month earlier. His name was Kurt von Riedel.”
“He came from a family of German settlers in the eastern provinces. His parents had taken him back to Germany when he was young. He had built a strong military career there.”
“Then he died in a car crash outside the Reich capital. The body was badly burned and identified mainly by documents. Few senior officers had seen him up close in recent years because he had been posted far from the center.”
Anna, trained as she was, immediately understood the outline of the scheme. And that understanding frightened her even more. “So they offered to turn you into him?” she asked.
“They didn’t offer,” he said with a bitter half-smile. “They gave me a choice. Become von Riedel and work for them, or get shot in the camp yard. I had ten minutes to decide.”
He looked at her directly, and there was such bleakness in his eyes that she almost looked away. “So I chose a third option, Anya.”
“I pretended to break. I agreed. But not to work for them. I agreed to survive and work against them from the inside.”
She shook her head slightly. It was too large, too complicated, too improbable. It sounded almost too neat, the kind of story a coward might tell to dress up betrayal.
“But how? How could you have been working for our intelligence all this time if everyone officially believed you were dead? If even I knew nothing?”….
