Then Selfer lurched, took a step back. His heel knocked at the plywood.

Lett had never seen Selfer taken aback. He looked as if molten solder and melting ice were surging through his veins at once, a horrid paradox of a surge. Lett thought the man might be sick. Selfer pressed his hands and back to the plywood.

“What? What is it?” Lett said.

Selfer looked down, as if to locate his feet there, like Lett had seen Joes do up on the line who had body parts blown off and searched the ground for them, picking them up before falling over dead. Selfer’s feet stepped and they moved him, but gently, mechanically; he picked up the paper on the floor, rolled it up, set it inside his briefcase; he pulled the chalkboard back across the map; he stood at the table and slung his briefcase.

“I’m leaving now,” he said. “You better, uh, return to your billet and wait for any . . . instructions.” From the doorway, Selfer stared at him one last moment. “Good Lord,” he muttered.

27.

As Lett watched Selfer back out of the briefing room, he saw a man so very different from the intelligence staff captain leading a certain premission briefing well rear of the front lines in a lush Belgian villa in ’44—the charmer in a pressed tunic who worked the room like a politician mingling with donors, shaking hands, smiling, offering cigarettes, thoroughly unruffled by the naked terror on the faces of these GIs he’d called up for his special mission.

What made Selfer freeze up like that, made him back out of that briefing room like . . . well, there wasn’t any other word for it—like he’d seen a ghost? Had he just realized something about the mission now at hand? Or had he realized something worse, something deep and dark? Maybe he sensed that horror that Lett always had, that was now returning full force—that incessant dread he had understood even when V-E Day and the so-called peace came. V-E Day was just a fine party for the rear and the home front. “For the duration” was finally over, they’d thought. But there was no duration. This was beyond death. This was eternity. The iron boot would grind them down eternally. The wearer might change, but he always had an aching and unquenchable lust for power and riches and they were the fodder and the fertilizer. He didn’t need an official war, or medals or even insignia on his chest, and he certainly didn’t need official orders. In secret was far better. Peacetime would do just fine. All the wearer needed was the money.