Page 53 of Winter’s End

Not for the first time, Mila wondered where he slept at night.

She wondered, too, at the deep roots of the Resistance, how extensive their reach, how much they knew or could guess from their network of informants all over the continent.

She looked at Pieter with new respect. “If money will help…a ransom…”

Pieter shook his head. “We have banker friends who quietly subsidize our mission,” he said. “And funds come, too, from a couple of Dutch brewing companies making piles of money from all these beer-soaked Germans.”

He drummed his fingers on the desk. “Unfortunately, we do not yet know where they are holding Daan.” His voice was bitter. “But it is well past time to do something about de Boer.”

EVI

It was precisely noon when she rang the doorbell at the Beekhof farmhouse. Otto, tail wagging, trotted alongside her, uttering a few half-hearted woofs.

Evi felt an odd sense of satisfaction that he no longer barked wildly at her approach. Instead, he nudged against her until she scratched behind his ears, his pink tongue conveying his pleasure.

The door was answered by a wiry, gray-haired woman wrapped in a bulky brown sweater –MevrouwBeekhof, Evi surmised – who peered at her through the half-open door. “You are looking for Jacob?”

Evi nodded. “Ja,I am Evi Strobel.”

The door opened wider, and Evi entered the now-familiar room.

“Klara Beekhof,” she said. “Jacob has talked of you…Follow me,behagen. The men are in the back acres.”

In the cold, clear afternoon, the Beekhof acreage seemed to stretch on forever, much of it already plowed over. A swath of a pathway had been carved through what might once have been a cornfield, but she could see no further than that.

An iron triangle hung from a rope just outside the back door.MevrouwBeekhof struck it firmly with a short length of pipe, and before long, Jacob Reese emerged from the choppy brush. His beard was gone. Evi stared.

“Dank u, Mam Beekhof.. I am here,” he said.

The woman nodded and slipped back inside. Jacob turned his attention to Evi.

“Hallo,” she murmured, suddenly shy.

He looked at her, a bemused expression on his handsome face. “You really want to do this, eh?”

She nodded firmly, and watched his smile widen.

“Well, then,” he said. “Let’s get to it.”

He led her to a clearing out of sight of the house. It had been prepared for target practice, she saw, a flat board placed on top of a felled tree trunk with an assortment of old tins and bric-a-brac neatly stacked on the ground beneath it.

From the jacket of his coat, Jacob brought out a pistol, which looked larger and blacker and far more menacing close-up than it had when she had seen one from a distance. Evi studied it.

“This is a forty-five caliber Colt M-1911,” Jacob said, holding the pistol out in front of her. “It’s standard issue in the U.S. military.”

Evi leaned in for a closer look.

“It isn’t loaded, because you will not be doing any shooting today. Today, you will learn every part of this device. You will take it apart and put it back together, again and again, until you know it by heart, and then you will hold it, handle it, and work with it until it feels like an extension of your hand.”

Evi took the pistol, startled at how heavy it was, and studied it from every angle.

Jacob watched her. “This is the grip,” he said, pointing.

Magazine… Rear sight…Trigger guard… Trigger… Muzzle… Slide stop… Front sight.In her wildest dreams, Evi would not have believed the weapon could have so many parts.Take down lever…Take-down notch…Barrel…Chamber…Hammer…

Again and again, Jacob quizzed her, making her recite the name of each part and describe its function.

“Next time, you’ll disassemble this thing and put it back together,” he told her. “It’s more information than you’ll ever need, but I want you to know this pistol like the back of your hand before you go out there intending to use it.”