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picked up something small off the desk and rolled it in his palm. It appeared to be a bit of ornamental glass.
    “Gentlemen,” he began, “time is short and the matter at hand grave. So I’ll be brief. The Nazis”—he pronounced the word Narzis, with a slur that managed to simultaneously convey both contempt and menace—“are up to their old tricks again. And some new ones as well. At the very moment when the tide seems to be turning irrevocably in our favor—I daresay on the very cusp of invasion—the Hun has sunk to new depths of frightfulness. He has apparently decided that no scientific abomination is too ghastly to use in his quest to stave off disaster.”
    Though well-accustomed by now to Churchill’s flamboyant rhetoric, Eisenhower listened intently. He had only just arrived from North Africa via Washington, and any hint of new information about the European theater tantalized him.
    Churchill rolled the piece of glass in his hand. “Before I proceed, I feel I must restate that this meeting, for official purposes, never occurred. No entries should be made in private diaries to record it. I am even breaking my own inviolate rule. No one will be asked to sign the guest book when they leave.”
    Eisenhower could stand no more buildup. “What the devil are you talking about, Mr. Prime Minister?”
    Churchill held up the piece of glass he’d been fidgeting with. It was a tiny ampule. “Gentlemen, if I were to shatter this vial, every man-jack of us would be dead within a minute.”
    This was vintage Churchill, the dramatic prop, the verbal bombshell. “What the hell is it?” Eisenhower asked.
    The prime minister bit down on his cigar and lowered his round head in a posture of challenge. “ Gas, ” he said.
    Eisenhower squinted his eyes. “Poison gas?”
    The prime minister nodded slowly, deliberately, then pulled the cigar from his mouth. “And not the kitchen stuff we choked on during the last war, though God knows that was bad enough. This is something entirely new, something absolutely monstrous. ”
    Eisenhower noted that Churchill had used the word “we” in reference to suffering poison gas attacks. He wondered if this was a veiled allusion to the fact that he had not seen combat in the First World War, having served those years training tank troops in Pennsylvania. If Churchill was probing for a sore spot, he had found it. “Well,” he said curtly, “what kind of gas is it?”
    “They call it Sarin. And it’s a bloody miracle we’ve even found out about it. We can all thank Duff Smith for that.” Churchill looked at the one-armed SOE chief, willing him to his feet. “Brigadier?”
    Duff Smith, a seasoned veteran of the Cameron Highlanders regiment, stood with quiet confidence. “Thirty days ago,” he said with a vestigial Highland lilt, “we learned that our worst suspicions about the German chemical effort were accurate. Not only have they been pursuing weapons research at breakneck speed since before the war, but they’ve also been producing new gases and stockpiling them all over the country.”
    “Just a minute,” Eisenhower broke in. “We’ve been doing the same thing, haven’t we?”
    “Yes and no, General. Our programs didn’t really get cracking until we realized how much Germany had accomplished between the wars. And, quite frankly, we’ve never managed to catch up.”
    “Are we talking about nerve agents?” asked the American major of intelligence, speaking for the first time. “We’ve known about Tabun for some time.”
    “Something of quite another magnitude,” Smith said a bit testily. “The clearest indication of danger is that the Nazis have resumed testing these gases on human victims, mostly at SS-run concentration camps in Germany and Poland. These experiments have resulted in death for the exposed inmates in one hundred percent of the cases. We believe the Germans are setting up to deploy nerve gas against our invasion troops.”
    Eisenhower cut his