In the Avallon’s first-floor luggage storage room, Agent Tucker Rye Minnick and Agent Hugh Calloway conduct searches of the detained Axis delegations’ baggage. Among women’s undergarments and neatly stacked cases beneath skylights and hunting-horse murals, they methodically confiscate questionable items for the hotel’s basement safe, including a calorie-counting booklet that Tucker suspects could hide code.

As they work, Hugh muses about the draft, a lucrative private security job offer he received, and dissatisfaction with Bureau leadership. Tucker, intensely loyal and “Bureau-minded,” recalls his commendation from J. Edgar Hoover and internally contrasts his disciplined ethos with Pony Harris’s improper behavior toward switchboard operators, which Tucker has already reprimanded.

The agents’ attention shifts to an unmarked green suitcase containing men’s clothes and toiletries. Cross-checking manifests and other German legation bags, Tucker summons Gestapo officer Lothar Liebe. Beneath a false panel, they find a snub-nosed MP40. Liebe casually claims responsibility, says the gun belongs to Friedrich Wolfe, and suggests Wolfe is honest and had not intended to bring it back, implying Wolfe did not expect to return to Germany. Liebe downplays the threat by noting there is no ammunition and then asks, in exchange, to speak with the Swiss before anyone else.

Tucker, uninterested in bartering and wary of Liebe’s attempt to make the discovery transactional, issues a receipt and ends the exchange. Hugh departs to the Glass Studio to continue staff interviews while Tucker moves to surveillance duties.

Tucker squeezes into a closet with a headset to monitor a recording device he placed to listen into the Portrait Gallery. He reflects on the Bureau’s wartime constraints: few agents, no language skills for German or other tongues, and reliance on improvised bugs, including a well-placed microphone under the pub bar. He plans to adjust the Portrait Gallery mic, as staff chatter in mixed German and English is indistinct.

Haunted by the Avallon’s pervasive sweetwater smell and an earlier panic near the pool stairs, Tucker hesitates to move around at night. While monitoring, after the Germans leave, he hears a sudden, warm, inclusive laugh directly into the hidden light-fixture microphone, with no accompanying footsteps or breathing. The sound repeats, unsettling him; he cannot tell if it is a laugh or a sob, recalling the dying sounds of a bank robber he once shot.

Startled, Tucker nearly overturns his chair but regains silence on instinct. He stops the recorder, removes the headset, and cautiously exits the closet into an empty sitting room. Overwhelmed by the hotel’s oppressive atmosphere and the sense of being perceived by the water, he resolves to stay focused: get in, get out, get the job done.