Follow the Dotted Line by Nancy Hersage

someone like this recently, an historic figure, who I think will interest you. And teach you about the vagaries of human behavior and the intimacy of geopolitical conflict. It’s a true story about a young woman once married to an Austrian baron—and the amazing and ultimately tragic things she did for love.”
    The room was entranced. Harley had nearly stopped breathing. As Andy listened, she remembered Sam telling her that she had stumbled onto the woman’s story while reading the unpublished autobiography of an English mechanical engineer. During World War II, the man joined the British military to design innovative ways to camouflage Ally tanks and aircraft fighting in North Africa. In his manuscript, the engineer described meeting the young woman at the British Intelligence office in Cairo. Her name was Emma Linde. Only twenty-four, she was already a legend among her peers. According to both the legend and the engineer, Emma was strikingly beautiful. She had been married at age twenty to a young Austrian baron. Two years after the wedding, her new husband had been captured and killed by the Germans. Emma was fluent in three languages. And by the time the mechanical engineer met her, she had survived seven separate missions into Germany as a spy for the Allies. Here, Sam told Andy, was where the real story began. Unfortunately, this was also where Sam was due at a faculty meeting, so Andy never heard the rest. As a consequence, she now found herself as invested in Sam’s lecture as everyone else.
    In the lecture hall, Sam arrived at the point in her narrative where Emma was taking her eighth, and what would become her penultimate, assignment. The young spy was sent undercover to work as a barmaid at a tavern in a small town in Bavaria, where she would help smuggle Jewish refugees out of the country.
    “This Emma does for six months with enormous success,” Sam explained to her audience. “And then she makes a mistake. A critical mistake that not only affects her mission but the rest of her life. She lets the two small children, who she has been hiding in her room over the bar, look out the window. For only a moment, but it’s long enough for a neighbor to see them. Because Emma never mentioned having children, the villager immediately suspects they must be Jewish, and he reports both the barmaid and the children to German authorities. Suspicion spreads, and Emma knows she must move and move fast. She grabs the children and literally rides out of town on the back of a beer wagon, leaving everything behind—including her identification papers.”
    In screenwriting parlance, this was the twenty-minute plot point. Andy couldn’t help but admire her daughter’s pacing. She watched as Sam paused, just long enough for the fade into the next transition.
    “I won’t keep you in suspense,” Sam resumed. “Emma successfully gets the two children to safety in Sweden. Then, she returns to her handlers in Cairo. And all of this she manages without her passport, which you will remember is now in German hands. So although Emma has made it back safely, the enemy has learned her identity. For the first time, her photo begins to appear on wanted posters throughout Germany and across the occupied countries.”
    Sam freed herself from the podium and her notes, stepping nearer to her listeners. “If history teaches us anything,” she said, reminding them why they were there, “it’s that life is often the result of coincidence, the confluence of two unrelated phenomena. And so it is with Emma’s story. The first occurrence is the dissemination of Emma’s passport photo by the Nazi regime. That event now makes it impossible for her to return to Germany. Her career working as an undercover agent in the field is over.” Sam let the idea linger momentarily so that her students could examine it more closely. “The second is equally life changing. Because at almost the same time, British authorities learn that Emma’s husband,