“Listen,” said Nemo, “you only want one body to deal with, so let me help you out. Give me five minutes. Just five minutes to tell you some things and then if you still want to kill Patton, we won’t stop you.”

“We won’t?” said Jean.

“Fine,” said Bob. “Five minutes.”

“There’s a few things you should know about Patton,” said Nemo. “Do you want to know what her life has been like since Kandahar? Ten years of nightmares and insomnia. Constant flashbacks. Migraine headaches. Four suicide attempts. Patton suffers every day because of what happened in Kandahar, and I don’t mean, Ooh, she’s so sad about the bad thing she did. I mean serious suffering. You kill her now, and you’re doing her a favor. You really want to punish Patton Harcourt? Make sure she stays alive.”

Patton hadn’t spoken to Nemo about how the guilt of Kandahar weighed on her. Yes, she had occasional flashbacks and nightmares, but she never had migraines, and she certainly hadn’t attempted suicide. She just walked through every day oppressed by the burden of responsibility and guilt she would feel for the rest of her life. Nonetheless, she understood Nemo’s strategy, and she did her best to look sickly and miserable. She had expected to embrace the punishment meted out by the surviving members of the unit she had decimated, had expected to face the death she deserved calmly and with resignation. But she had just escaped from a death she was facing calmly and with resignation, and suddenly she had no interest in dying. So if Nemo could talk her way out of this, she wasn’t about to contradict him.

“That’s it,” said Bob. “That’s your big pitch? Patton will suffer more if she stays alive?”

“That’s half of it,” said Nemo. “The other half is this: You may be retired, but in your hearts—hell, in your souls—you are United States soldiers, aren’t you?”

“Damn right we are,” said Franklin.

“Right, so as American soldiers, you need to ask yourself this: Do you want to get revenge on a fellow soldier for a mistake that tortures her every day of her life, or do you want to help win the last battle of World War II?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” said Bob. “World War II has been over for seventy years.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” said Nemo.

“Me too,” said Jean. “I thought that until the past few days.”

“You keep out of this,” said Bob. “You want to explain what the hell you’re talking about?” he said to Nemo.

“OK,” said Nemo, “but this part might take more than five minutes.”

“I’ll give you six,” said Bob, never lowering his gun a millimeter.

But though Bob did not lower his gun, Ted and Franklin lowered theirs as Nemo reached the end of his story.