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in Ireland.”
    “In Northern Ireland?”
    “Of course. Ulster.”
    “Of course.”
    I had always wondered if I’d make it to the old sod someday. Now I would but it wasn’t County Roscommon I’d be seeing. It was the northern counties, home of the Orangemen and the Red Hand of Ulster, where the Protestants still celebrated their victory over the Catholics at the Battle of the Boyne more than two hundred and fifty years ago. It had always seemed a dark, brutal, and bitter land of long, unforgiving memories. My childhood fear of the Orangeman welled up within me and I shivered. In my house, it wasn’t the bogeyman who would come get you if you were bad, it was the Orangeman. My grandfather used to tell us about their parades every July celebrating the Battle of the Boyne, how they’d march through Catholic neighborhoods with their English flags and orange banners, thrashing any Catholic boys they found on the street.
    It felt like I was being sent to hell itself.
    It was a shock when Cosgrove informed me that I had to leave in fifteen minutes.
    “Pack up your kit, Boyle. There will be a car out front waiting to drive you to the aerodrome at Lydda. Subaltern O’Brien will accompany you and provide further instructions. General Eisenhower will inform your Major Harding about this assignment but you are to discuss it with no one. You can expect spies and informers everywhere in Palestine with all the Arabs and Jews about. No time to waste, my boy. The RAF operates on a tight schedule.”
    With that, he shook my hand and heaved himself down the stairs to the main lobby. It was typical of the British to express dismay at so many of the local population in their occupied territories. It seemed to me the Brits never met a foreigner they liked or a foreign land they didn’t.

CHAPTER • FOUR
    I HAD FIFTEEN minutes to find Diana and tell her I was leaving. It wasn’t the best timing, in view of the fight we’d had. A few minutes was not going to be long enough to convince her to give up the SOE while I went off on a mission, but I had to think of a way to get through to her. I went over what Kay had said as I hurried to Diana’s room. Don’t let your pride kill what the two of you have. Don’t be a fool. But who was the fool here? Me, trying to keep Diana from death and torture? Or Kay, driving Uncle Ike around and clasping his secret scribbles to her breast? Or maybe it was Diana, risking death again after all she had been through and all she had lost.
    Diana had gone with the British Expeditionary Force to France in 1940 as a member of the FANY, working at headquarters as a switchboard operator. But the German Blitzkrieg had turned rear areas into front lines, and soon she was part of the retreat to Dunkirk and found herself caring for wounded soldiers crammed onto the deck of a British destroyer. When the Stukas came, dive-bombing and strafing the ship, she’d watched the stretcher cases slide into the cold channel waters as the destroyer capsized. Everywhere around her, men died, the waves cresting with corpses, while she survived, unhurt. She’d been rescued and made it back to England, visions of death haunting her dreams, driving the guilt deep inside her.
    Then she lost her sister, Daphne. Daphne had befriended me when I first showed up at U.S. Army headquarters in London, and had been killed when she’d gotten too close to the murderer of a Norwegian official. After that, Diana was determined to go to war as an SOE agent, telling everyone she had to do her duty. But I knew there was more to it; she had to tempt death, and find out if she truly deserved to live. When she was finally sent on a mission, it was betrayed before it began, and she was picked up in Algiers by the Vichy French police. Fascist police. It hadn’t been pretty. She’d been drugged, beaten, and raped. It wasn’t the clean confrontation with death that she had sought. It was dirty, sordid, horrible, painful, and demeaning. I couldn’t