Anna reached up and touched Dietrich's head. She closed her eyes. The scene made Matt think of a blessing, of the laying-on-of-hands used by syncretic Christians in the Burmese hills of Matt's youth: youth conferring some of its grace upon old age. A green glow spread across the German's brow. Swiftly, like a newsreel playing in reverse, Dietrich's wound knit itself shut.
Whereupon Dietrich shrieked in German - Matt caught a few words about corruption, but otherwise lost the thread pretty quickly - stared at himself in the mirror, clawed at his own forehead, and sucked down a long draft of liquor. Matt quietly moved to place himself between Dietrich and Anna. Outside, the sirens were a persistent, escalating wail.
Enough. Matt spun on his heel. He could think of worse outcomes than Dietrich Haegler spending the night in a London drunk tank. The Minuteman cast a glance around. Anna was slipping out of the pub. The French and Poles were beginning, somewhat shamefacedly, to right the scattered furniture. Only Matt and Dietrich remained.
Matt turned on his heel, and left the bar, and walked quickly across the street to SHADOCOM's headquarters. A persistent, nauseating odor of whiskey told him that the German defector had followed.
In Fleming's office, the team was already settling in. Clark, his uniform soiled by the brawl, had stripped to his undershirt and was puffing on a cigar. Jannie and Willow glared disapprovingly. For his part, Matt had grown up in a place where most men worked bare-chested. He was unperturbed. Besides, his attention was elsewhere. Matt saw letters - words - names - densely tattooed on Clark's arm. Many of the names were Spanish. Matt knew that Clark had fought in Spain, and understood, and felt his stomach tighten.
Matt had never lost a man in combat. Matt knew that his good fortune could not last.
Behind his desk, Fleming was chewing on a cigar of his own. There were dark half-moons beneath the man's eyes; his face was drawn and grim. "Take a seat," Fleming said, "and be careful not fling it at the nearest person."
It was a weak joke. No one laughed. Matt felt like he had seen Fleming naked: sympathy, and shame. He squeezed himself into a too-small chair, and looked at his too-large boots.
Fleming introduced a women who stood next to him: young, dark hair, bright and focused eyes. She interrupted Fleming to complete her own introduction. She was Violette Szabo. Dietrich glared drunkenly at her. Matt assumed that he was angry that Violette had interrupted a superior officer. Matt didn't mind. People interrupted Matt not infrequently. The Minuteman studied a luminous streak in Violette's brown hair, and wondered what it meant.
Then: a flash of light, of pure white flame. Abe flung up a hand to shield his eyes. Dietrich leaped to his feet, and hefted his whiskey bottle. Carmen and Jannie both flinched, in obvious pain, and Matt thought: sunlight. He did not rise. His instinct said that he was not under threat, and a glance at Fleming and Violette confirmed his hunch: they squinted, still and stoic.
The flame died, and left blurry afterimages dancing in Matt's retinas. In its place stood a young woman with long white hair and strange yellow eyes. She introduced herself: she was Iridelle de l'Arc-en-Ciel - Iridelle of the Rainbow, Matt thought. She was a French mage, an inquisitor, whose light-controlling craft had its roots in Persian mythology. Apparently, she had been in the room all along, concealed from view. The word she used was cloaked. Matt thought of Persian myth, and of the ancient Near East, and of Joseph's many-colored cloak. Iridelle of the Rainbow.
Iridelle's posture was aloof, mannered, aristocratic. Matt thought of some of the Boston Brahmins' sons whom he had known at Harvard. Her tone was bored, and she didn't seem troubled by the pain that she'd caused Carmen and Jannie. She talked of hunting down threats to France, threats hidden in the midst of her community. An inquisitor. Matt decided that he didn't like Iridelle, and then reluctantly promised himself that he would try to ignore that fact.
Fleming moved on to the briefing. The Germans and Italians were massing in the Egyptian desert south of El Alamein, at an ancient oasis town called Siwa. They were excavating the temple of an oracle cult from millennia before the birth of Christ. Fleming said that Pathfinder, a threat calculation system, had warned that if the enemy found what they were looking for, then it would cause the immediate defeat of Allied forces in North Africa. Matt managed to avoid looking at Heim, like a bad poker player fighting to suppress a tell.
Dietrich said that Heim - Pathfinder - had to be wrong. He rambled drunkenly for a while about how no force could move fast enough to strike every Allied target in North Africa at once. "Unless this temple grants the Axis Powers the friendship of the sands of northern Africa," he declared, "and lets the Allied forces be swallowed by these very sands, I don't see it happening."
"Maybe the temple does just that." A year earlier, Dietrich's objections would have seemed reasonable to Matt. Now, the Minuteman smiled bleakly as he dismissed them. "More things in heaven and on Earth, Horatio."
Fleming continued. The team would be leyshifted - Matt assumed that the term referred to transportation by portal - to Cairo. From there, the Long Range Desert Group would take SHADOCOM to the Qattara Depression, near Siwa. Matt and his comrades would make their own way to the dig site from there, avoiding Axis patrols and the local Berber tribes, which were to be assumed hostile.
Clark asked what opposition the team would face, and Ariel took over the briefing. Carmilla, the vampire commander from Warsaw, was in Siwa. Matt blinked; he had assumed that Carmen had killed Countess Bathory when the Warsaw tower came down. From her expression of controlled fury, Carmen had assumed so too. Also present was a scarred SS officer and adventurer named Otto Skorzeny, whose name seemed unfamiliar to everyone in the room. And with them was a bevy of unidentified hardware, which Ariel thought included the panzerhunds that SHADOCOM had encountered in Warsaw - and worse.
Tooth marks in a small white leg, dark in the sewer's mire. Matt blinked away the image. He could not imagine anything worse than the panzerhunds.
Ariel went on. The Italians, it seemed, had brought their version of SHADOCOM to Siwa as well: a Roman-inspired werewolf cult, a vampire clan who claimed to be descended from the Borgias, and a coven of witches who were supposedly led by Catherine di Medici. Matt couldn't keep the smile off his face, half-incredulous and half-awestruck. O brave new world, that has such people in't! For one moment, in Ian Fleming's dimly-lit office, Matt cared less for the fact that he would have to kill these creatures than he did about the wondrous fact of their existence.
Ariel put paid to Matt's smile quickly. With the grim confidence of personal experience, she warned that the Tre Stelle were animals: barbarous and cruel. Matt's intellectual excitement dissolved, and left him back in his killer's body. The Minuteman pinched the bridge of his nose and nodded.
Fleming opened the briefing to questions. Carmen asked what use vampires could be under the desert sun. Willow, to Matt's slight surprise, echoed her. She's better trained, now, Matt realized. She thinks in terms of the team as a whole. Then Jannie shot Matt a glance, controlled panic boiling behind her eye, and she bit out a theory: Iridelle's light-magic would be used to protect the vampires from the sun. Matt could just imagine how Jannie would feel about that. He looked at Fleming. Maybe there's another plan. And if there's not, I'll just have to talk to Iridelle in person, and make sure she understands exactly how sensitive she needs to be.
At once, Matt recognized the hypocrisy in that plan. The Minuteman had not always been as sensitive toward Jannie as he should have been. Sometimes command doesn't allow for it, he thought, and the excuse sounded weak and selfish in his ears. Like something Dietrich would say.
There were other questions. Esther asked how she could make golems without water, given that the Nile was eternally tainted by the plagues. The plagues: he lifted up the rod, Matt thought, and smote the waters that were in the river, in the sight of Pharaoh, and in the sight of his servants; and all the waters that were in the river were turned to blood. Matt shook his head in wonder. Meanwhile, the three Asian newcomers to the unit chattered together about the modifications that they would need to make to their vehicle.
For his part, Matt realized, he had only one question: the simplest of all, but the most important. He cocked his head slightly, and studied Fleming's face, and softly asked: "What's in the temple?"
