Omega

FORTY

Owain was finishing off a gristly sausage sandwich when Giselle entered the canteen. A leather-gloved warrant officer lingered in the doorway as she walked straight to the table, nothing in her face, and said, “It’s time.”

We took the lift up to street level, no one speaking. The warrant officer kept tugging at his gloves and scissoring his fingers for a snug fit. Stradling, a fellow-countryman, though from North Wales. Rhyl or thereabouts. A man renowned for his taciturnity and apparent lack of fellow feeling for any other human being. But efficient and an excellent driver. His uncle’s favourite chauffeur.

A trio of identical black Daimlers was waiting in the car park, their engines running. Land Rovers, APCs and triple-wheeled motorbikes flanked them. The air was heady with their exhausts.

Owain was directed to get into the driver’s seat next to Stradling. Giselle climbed in after him, leaving nothing in the way of elbowroom. The Daimlers were built to accommodate up to six people including the driver, but it was always a snug fit. A mirrored window with a sliding partition obscured the rear seats.

The heating was turned up full, the car practically tropical. We sat in silence for several minutes, Owain watching the rest of the vehicles manoeuvre into formation. The motorbikes were triple-wheeled Triumph Tridents, the rear men sitting back-to-back with the front rider on swivel pillions that gave them a traverse of over a hundred and eighty degrees for machine-gun fire and an elevation of close to ninety. Six surface-to-air missiles were mounted on their flanks. Despite their bulk, they were fast and manoeuvrable machines.

The rear doors of the car opened, and I felt the suspension react to the entry of one, two people. So, not quite a full house. Owain glanced at Giselle, but she was taking a mouthful of drink from a white plastic bottle. It smelt like lime juice. She didn’t look at him, gave every impression that she preferred to pretend he wasn’t there.

Some of the motorbike riders were forming up at the head of the exit ramp. The APCs and the other Daimlers began to tuck themselves in behind one another. Stradling moved off and they took their place in the column. The hatch behind Owain slid open.

“You been behaving yourself?”

It was his uncle, speaking in Welsh. He sounded curious rather than irate.

Owain twisted around. Sir Gruffydd was sitting in one corner, with Henry Knowlton next to him in a big black overcoat.

“The Secretary of State for Inland Security picked me up for questioning this morning,” Owain said.

“So I gather. And what did you tell him?”

His uncle looked quite hearty, showing no hint of his rect illness.

“Nothing,” Owain replied. “I was a bit worse for drink the night before. Couldn’t remember a thing.”

There was a silent instant before his uncle burst out with laughter, in which Knowlton loyally joined, despite the fact they were still speaking in Welsh.

“That’s the spirit,” his uncle said. “Kept the bugger guessing, did you?”

“He was very interested in Rhys.”

“That a fact? And how did you enlighten him?”

“I pleaded my usual ignorance. Told him I never discussed family matters with strangers.”

Owain was aware that this was something of a loose paraphrase of his actual conversation with Legister, but the essence was true. Sir Gruffydd nodded, eyeing him all the while.

“Where is Rhys?” Owain asked.

“Fill you in later. Have lunch, did you?”

Owain nodded.

“Then sit back and enjoy the ride. All will be revealed.”

The old man leaned forward and slid the hatch shut.

We made swift progress on the South Circular before hitting a tailback at Wandsworth Common. I was doing everything I could to suppress my agitation, but I felt under siege. It wasn’t just a question of what was going on with Owain; developments here were just as challenging in their way.

I didn’t have any appetite for seeing my father. The last time I’d visited I’d found him sitting on the balcony, apparently doing the Times crossword. He looked quite normal and lucid until I sat down next to him and he asked me if I’d come to read the electricity meter. When I told him that I was his eldest son he’d reacted angrily. Of course, he’d retorted, as if I was a moron. Who the devil else did I think I was?

The anger subsided as swiftly as it had come and he asked me if I’d brought any chocolates, producing an empty Minstrels packet. His hands were so busy making fidgety movements I wondered how he’d managed to get the chocolates out of the bag and into his mouth. And yet he was evidently still able to use a pen: the crossword was half-completed in spidery red capitals. It quickly became apparent, though, that he was fitting in words at random, many of them obscure or misspelled.

All this was so different from the fastidious, precise man of letters he had once been. The dementia had assailed him in quantum leaps of increasing severity. Mrs Bayliss would phone to say that he’d spent the day in his pyjamas, had put his wallet in the refrigerator, had been found paddling in the stream at the bottof the garden in his slippers. By now the house in Bishopston had been sold and he was living exclusively in Oxford; but he kept muddling both places, looking for the bathroom in the wrong place, demanding to know why the Western Mail hadn’t been delivered.

To begin with these episodes did little to interrupt his work. He’d retired from lecturing and was writing what he described as a work of autobiographical historiography that would combine an account of his life and times with up-to-date reflections on the essence of his profession. To my surprise he was reading advanced texts on everything from cosmology to genetics. In his book, he told me, he intended to show how the insights of modern science could shed light on the interpretation of historical processes.

For a while I remained in denial about the growing eccentricities of his behaviour until finally there was an incident with a bus driver who my father had demanded should take him to Mumbles. Despite the diagnosis of dementia that followed, my father remained feverishly attached to his work, still spending hours in his study each day reading, researching, writing.

We employed a full-time nurse to assist the ever-stalwart Mrs Bayliss, but each time I visited I found that the waters lapping the shores of his rationality were growing ever more turbulent. Though Rees occasionally accompanied me, I preferred to see him on my own. My father often regarded my visits as unwelcome intrusions, as if I’d come to spy on him, was a busybody who wouldn’t leave well alone.

“Are you with me?” Tanya asked.

The traffic was moving sporadically again, the car lurching and weaving as Tanya negotiated speed bumps and pavement extensions.

“You don’t deserve this,” I said.

“What?”

“This—mess.”

She thought about it for an instant and shrugged. “If we can get through Wimbledon we’ll be fine.”

A hole appeared in the windscreen. Stradling slumped forward on to the wheel, the car swerving off the road, smashing at speed into the trees.

An explosion flung the Centaur in front of them into the air, sending it spiralling up and over in a slow-motion cartwheel, plunging down on to the Daimler.

Stradling pulled a gun and shot Owain and Giselle in the chest. Dead, pinafored with blood, they stared helplessly while the traitor chauffeur flipped open the hatch and began pumping shots into the rear of the car.

London had dwindled away and we were heading north-east along the motorway through a snowy wasteland interspersed with dark forestry plantations. Vast acreages had been planted over the last twenty years on abandoned land, but only birch and pine flourished in the harsh winters and summer droughts. The landscape resembled the forbidding expanses of the eastern terrur flis.

The road had plainly been cleared of all non-essential traffic, giving the convoy unhindered passage. Stradling was rock-solid behind the wheel, staring straight ahead with remorseless concentration. On the other side of Owain, Giselle Vigoroux kept tapping buttons on her hand device, the information on its screen not visible to him.

“Communication problems?” I made him say.

She didn’t reply, or look up.

“Where are we headed?”

“You’ll find out soon enough.”

“Why didn’t we take the Ironside?”

The armoured train out of Liverpool Street. It ran through a custom-built tunnel on the old Underground Line track as far as Stratford. Easier for slipping out unnoticed.

“It’s already left.”

The cold shoulder was positively Siberian. Well, perhaps it was understandable, although for once he could have done with a little mindless conversation. Without being able to explain why, he had become obsessed with the conviction that the convoy was going to suffer attack. Probably from the air, where they were least well defended, a strafing by hostile fighters or the swift obliteration of a bomb. Or perhaps a missile strike from insurgents waiting in the woodlands. Maybe the train had already gone ahead as a decoy.

“Why didn’t we take a Shrike or a helicopter?” he asked bluntly. “This is like advertising a target.”

“Do you think we’re the only column?”

They probably had several going off in all directions, just to confuse things. Maybe the cars were populated with doubles of his uncle and other senior commanders. The Russians had a word for it: Maskirovka. Deception.

“Who’s looking after your husband?” he persisted.

“He’s being taken care of.”

She switched off the device and put it in her pocket. Resolutely refused to give him a glance.

“Any news about Marisa?”

This made her face him. But she wasn’t going to say anything. It couldn’t have been possible to get more contempt into a single look.

FORTY-ONE

“How did he sound?” I asked, meaning Rees.

“The usual. Frustrated we’re not where he expects us to be. You’re sure you didn’t arrange to meet him there?”

“Honest to God. I’m not exactly up for hobnobbing with my father.”

We were on the A3, Tanya scrupulously observing the fifty-mile-an-hour speed limit; there were cameras at regular intervals. She knew the route well, had friends in Guildford.

“How did he get there?” I asked.

“He didn’t say. Drove, I imagine.”

Rees had an old Astra that he seldom used, and when he did so he drove like an octogenarian. I could imagine him pootling at thirty miles an hour down this stretch, impatient Surrey speed merchants piling up behind him.

“I wonder if he’ll wait,” Tanya remarked.

“Probably not. I just hope he doesn’t get the old man agitated.”

“We should have phoned and warned them.”

“Too late for that now.”

“We could still ring.” Tanya indicated her mobile.

I shook my head. Part of me didn’t want to know what he was up to.

“Do you want me to do it?”

“No,” I said firmly. “Let’s just get there.”

Seconds later there was a flash of blinding light. At first I thought we’d had an accident before I realised I was somewhere else entirely. Walking through the glass doors of a hotel into the suffocating heat. I was in shorts, T-shirt and sandals, carrying two drinks out to the pool.

Tanya sat at one of the tables in the shade of a palm, wearing a black vest top and a patterned sarong tied at her waist. The paleness of her skin contrasted with my tan. I’d been here a fortnight, combining location work with a holiday. Cairo, the pyramids visible from the window of my hotel room. Only yesterday I’d come back from a visit to Tobruk. Tanya had arrived that very morning.

I set the drinks down and took a seat opposite her. Hers was an orange and soda, mine a vodka and tonic.

“So what did he say?” I heard myself asking, and I knew I meant Geoff. This was last summer, when Tanya had finally told him about our clandestine meetings.

Abruptly I was back in the Yaris. Tanya hadn’t noticed anything. It was she who’d brought matters to a head after telling me she couldn’t pretend any more. She had told Geoff she was moving out, intended to live alone; but he’d persuaded her to stay,n if they were no longer to share a bed.

He had guessed that she had been seeing me periodically. He’d even accepted her assurances that we weren’t having an affair. It had all been reasonably amicable given the circumstances. He’d always suspected that she and I were still drawn to one another. Lyneth had too. They’d talked about it occasionally on the telephone.

I went cold on hearing this. Tanya hadn’t expected any equivalent action from me, particularly since I had children. But I knew that Lyneth would find out and be far less accommodating than Geoff. So I phoned her from the hotel that evening. There was no answer. When I finally got through next day Lyneth informed me that she’d already made arrangements to fly herself and the girls to Australia. Nothing I could say would dissuade her. They were going to stay for a year. Her sister would help her place the girls in local schools. She had told them I would be away filming.

Tanya and I flew back from Egypt together. We had stayed in separate rooms at the hotel, been more scrupulous than ever in our friendship. But by the time I arrived home Lyneth and the girls were already gone.

Air traffic had thickened overhead, helicopters and fat Behemoth transporter planes orbiting. The sky was coated with a wash of high altitude cloud, the sun just a silvery smear. The weather forecast had predicted no precipitation for the next few days, with light winds and good visibility.

Owain had never visited the Mildenhall-Lakenheath complex. It was extensive, with a network of tunnels and overpasses that converged on roundabouts before forking again, bypassing angular clusters of buildings with squat towers and a panoply of aerial instrumentation. Mobile security units patrolled the hard shoulders of approach roads, armoured cars and riot wagons were parked outside main entrances, missile batteries and little phalanxes of Citadel tanks guarded runaway perimeters.

All roadblocks were opened up long before we reached them. A small formation of Buzzard scout helicopters was flying ahead as though guiding us in.

We descended a long underpass, the tunnel barely lit, cat’s eyes blinking on and off at their headlights. Stradling looked cadaverous in the instrument panel’s glow, while Giselle had her eyes closed. No sounds from the rear of the car.

We emerged, and when Owain’s eyes had readjusted we saw that the convoy was drawing up in front of a line of enormous concrete hangars camouflaged with turf. Two of the hangar doors were open and inside each of them stood a white Nimbus, identical to the one we had glimpsed at Northolt.

Broadoaks Court was a 1920s redbrick mansion at the end of a wooded drive. We parked in one of the side bays and walked around to the front, my heart beginning to pump a little faster as we mounted the steps. There was no sign of Rees’s car.

I still couldn’t fathom why Lyneth hadn’t been in touch since the accident. Surely someone must have contacted her by now? Had she taken the girls on holiday somewhere further afield—Indonesia or the Pacific Islands? Perhaps they hadn̻t been able to track her down. But surely she would have phoned over Christmas, at least had the girls leave a message. It might be on the answer phone at home. Strange that Tanya hadn’t mentioned it. I was certain it wasn’t something I would have forgotten.

“All right?” Tanya asked.

“Fine.”

“Liar.”

I couldn’t ask her about it now. Too much else to contend with. How could Geoff tolerate my presence in his house, knowing what he knew? And not only tolerate it but also actively try to assist me in my recovery. Where was he sleeping? In the locked bedroom? I couldn’t recall. It just wouldn’t come.

We rang the bell. It was answered by a middle-aged nurse in a green plastic apron.

Inside, the lobby had the air of a down-at-heels hotel, a threadbare carpet over mulberry-coloured tiles, a scruffy sofa against one wall. Plug-in deodorisers in the wall sockets failed to mask the smell of stale urine and cold boiled potatoes.

The nurse made a phone call. I remembered that the place wasn’t strictly a nursing home but an outlier of the local hospital where patients with age-related illnesses had agreed to undergo clinical trials of new drugs and therapies. So far nothing that had been tried on my father had worked.

Shortly a middle-aged man in tortoiseshell spectacles came down the stairs. Rees and a black woman in her twenties were close behind.

Rees made a beeline for me. By his standards he was smartly dressed in jeans and a putty-coloured jacket over a black top.

“He’s been asking after you,” he said. “We played draughts.”

“Oh?” I replied. “Did you win?”

“This is Keisha.”

She came forward. Good-looking, buried under an outdoors jacket in burnt orange. Her hair was drawn back in a loose ponytail that had the effect of giving her a sober, professional air. We shook hands.

“Pleased to meet you,” she said.

“Likewise,” I told her. “Has he been behaving himself?”

She rolled her eyes in a long-suffering way. “Does he ever?”

Rees had already gone over to talk to Tanya. The spectacled man was Dr Pearce, I recalled, the unit’s manager.

“Rees told me about you,” I said to Keisha. “To be honest, I thought he was making you up.”

“The last time I looked I was real.”

I tried to choose my words carefully. “I hope you don’t mind me asking—but are you really his girlfriend?”

“Well, today I feel more like his chauffeur.”

Tanya and Dr Pearce came over. Rees was talking animatedly to the nurse, who looked a little taken aback by the ardour of his attentions.

“How is he?” I asked Dr Pearce.

I was asking about my father but my eyes were still on Rees.

“He’s been fine,” the doctor said, obviously with reference to my brother, whose case history he knew. “How are you?”

“Bearing up. We didn’t know he was coming.”

“So I gather. No harm done. Professor Meredith was quite taken with Miss Rutherford here.”

“He kept asking if I’d give him a blanket bath,” Keisha said. “My role in life.”

Her tone was fatalistic. It was far more good-natured than my father deserved. He had always had a contradictory attitude towards non-whites, being a severe critic of colonialism while at the same time seeing in the eclipse of the white-owned corner shop a microcosm of national decline. He abhorred what he called tribalism as manifested in everything from team sports to civil wars but was prone to making irritable denunciations of “Rastafarian music” or the inability of “minorities” to adapt themselves to the prevailing culture of the country where they lived.

“Is he lucid at all?” I asked Pearce.

“It’s unpredictable. Your brother certainly kept him stimulated.”

“Until I dragged him out of there,” Keisha volunteered.

“Where is he?”

“In the recreation room,” Pearce said. “He hasn’t been out today. Perhaps you’d like to take him out for some air?”

Pearce was already moving towards the corridor, drawing Tanya along.

“What about Rees?” I said. He was talking avidly to the nurse about golf, a game I was certain he’d never played.

“I’ll keep him out of your hair,” Keisha reassured me.

FORTY-TWO

Thwoman wore RAF blue but her uniform resembled that of an air stewardess of old. She was offering hot drinks from a trolley. I wondered if this was intended as a grim joke, though it was hard to imagine that we were inside an aeroplane in the first place. Owain was sitting in a spacious wood-panelled cabin that could have been a terrestrial office except for the diminutive oval windows, giving vistas of wing and sky beyond them.

They had taken off ten minutes before, by which time Giselle had escorted him to the cabin and ordered him to wait there. It was equipped with a wall-mounted screen and a workstation, neither of them switched on. Armchairs and coffee tables were arranged around its periphery, bolted to the floor. There was even a wastepaper bin.

Every time the plane banked, I could see that we were flying low over snowy fields and angular expanses of woodland. At one point I spotted the dark tentacular mass of what was probably a deserted town, suspended like a spider in a web of roads. A recent report had estimated that less than a quarter of a million people now lived in East Anglia. Thirty per cent were military personnel.

The stewardess was attractive and perfectly proportioned, dark hair tucked up under a cadet’s cap. Her pale skin had a silken sheen. In her early thirties, Owain guessed, accustomed to her surroundings yet with the detached air of someone performing an irksome duty. Her trolley held savoury snacks and biscuits along with miniatures and a selection of cigarettes that included Lucky Strikes. He asked for a coffee but declined anything to eat.

She was Icelandic, she told him, had been in overnight quarters at Speer Airport when the Americans occupied her island ten years before. She’d been working the Frankfurt-Paris-London axis for Concordair, ferrying diplomats and industrialists around. Owain knew it was the only remaining airline that offered some of the comforts of civilian flight, though the pilots, most of them women, were all air-force trained.

“So what did you do?” he asked her.

She gave him a candid look. “Made the best it.”

Owain asked her to spoon sugar into his coffee. Her fingernails were manicured, painted coral pink, as perfect as her make-up. She looked absurdly flawless under the circumstances, with blemish-free skin and arctic-blue eyes. Two gold stars on the shoulders of her tunic told him she was technically a first lieutenant: a brevet rank, he was certain, and another dismaying example of the recent tendency to award them whenever the occasion demanded it, and to civilians as well as non-commissioned officers. Frequently it was done in the face of manpower shortages, sometimes for rather more private reasons. He was pretty certain she would be the mistress of one of the senior staff, who always looked after their own.

I could feel his growing, wilful urge to seduce her. At the same time he’d become convinced that he must have murdered Marisa, though the memory of it still refused to emerge. Both Giselle and his uncle knew, he felt certain, but Sir Gruffydd would continue to protect him. Even Legister would be kept at bay. If he took this woman now, even against her will, who would make him answerable? His uncle outranked everyone in the country.

I made him raise his coffee to his lips, did my utmost to quell his instincts and persuade him that he was letting her leave in a generous spirit of self-denial.

“Christ Almighty,” I blurted.

“What?” Tanya said.

She’d come into the recreation room with me. We were facing my father who, in tweeds and a dark woollen cardigan, was sitting in a wheelchair at the French windows, his nose so close to the pane that his breathing misted the glass.

“Nothing,” I murmured.

This wasn’t the time to be discussing Owain, as disturbed as he was, though it occurred to me that if he intended a permanent escape from his world by usurping me he might commit any act there, confident that he wouldn’t be called to account. If I were thrust permanently into his identity in reverse, it would be me who would shoulder the consequences.

I couldn’t allow it to happen. I wanted to be back in his world so that I could keep watch on him. But transitions never came to order, and I couldn’t muster one now.

Tanya nudged me. From one state of anxiety to another.

“Hello, dad,” I managed to say to my father.

He turned towards me. His long face had deflated a little more since I’d last seen him and his grey eyes looked duller, their light inexorably waning.

“Owen,” he said, “isn’t it?”

A cautious tone midway between query and affirmation. I nodded.

“Your lovely wife,” he remarked, looking at Tanya. “Where are the children?”

She smiled and, effortlessly accommodating him, said gently: “They’ll be along later, Alwyn.”

It was always a surprise to hear his name. I had never called him anything but “Father”, the very word often capitalised in my head. Alwyn—an Anglo-Saxon name, he liked to point out—was reserved for my father’s contemporaries, a form of familiarity I could never countenance. To hear Tanya saying it now was a measure of her autonomy. She must have met him before, though I couldn’t think when.

“How old are they now? Shouldn’t they be at school?”

My eyes filled up and I couldn’t speak. I hadn’t told him that Lyneth and the girls had gone to Australia. Even if Rees had mentioned it earlier, he was unlikely to have retained it. Blissful ignorance. There was something to be said for it on occasions.

“Is it Christmas?” he said abruptly. ÜIt looks cold out there.”

“It’s been and gone,” I told him.

“I could do with some new socks. Thermals. And a decent pair of slippers. Can’t ever get my feet warm here. Where’s Mrs Bayliss?”

“You’re not in Oxford, dad.”

He puzzled at this, squinting around him suspiciously. The room was mostly empty, a squat woman in a housecoat dozing in one corner, the television showing an afternoon soap to another woman who sat so still and upright it was as if the glow from the screen had turned her to stone. A male nurse sat in one corner, texting on his mobile.

“Who did you say you were again?” my father asked.

I wasn’t convinced that these little seesaws of memory were the real thing as opposed to a deliberately alienating device, designed to keep me at bay and retain a semblance of control. There were times when I’d catch a look in his eyes like that of a cornered animal, conscious of his plight, both fearful and angry at his dependency. He’d never really needed anyone until now,

“So how are the children?” he said to Tanya.

“They’re fine,” she told him. “They send their love.”

Did he know? Was he being deliberately cruel? I wanted to shake him, to tell him to stop. To hug him until I squeezed the madness out.

“We thought we’d take you out for a walk,” Tanya said.

He looked insulted at the notion. “Can’t go walking in slippers.”

“We’ll take your chair,” I said.

“What about an overcoat?”

“It’s in your room, dad.”

He squinted out the window as though inspecting the weather. The sun had come out, oblique shadows lying stark across the lawns and flowerbeds.

“Dr Pearce said you could do with the fresh air,” I remarked.

My father glared at me. “Who the devil’s he when he’s at home?”

FORTY-THREE

The cabin door was unlocked, and Sir Gruffydd and Giselle came in.

They took seats opposite, the field marshal asking Owain if he was comfortable. His uncle was carrying his walking stick. He was also in fulservice dress, even down to his red-banded hat.

“Can’t stay long,” he informed Owain, “but I thought I’d better come and fill you in. I take it you know why we’re here?”

What was he supposed to say to this? He had been told nothing. “Are the Americans going to attack?”

Sir Gruffydd gave an affirmative grunt. “We’re anticipating a strike on our command centres using DPMs.”

Deep Penetration Munitions. The field marshal squinted quizzically at him. Owain nodded to signal he understood.

“With the reduction of AEGIS and our remote-sensing systems we’re not in a position to have adequate warning of an attack. Just one of those little darlings could make a hole big enough to drop Wembley Stadium into.”

With a perverse distraction, Owain tried to remember when he had last watched a football match. Games were now played between May and September, when the pitches were fit. Competition for places was fierce since it meant extended leave-of-absence from military duties. Crowds were bigger than ever.

“So you’re taking evasive action,” he said.

His uncle opened his mouth and closed it again. He looked restless, eager to be getting on.

“Show him the task force,” he said to Giselle.

She pointed a control panel at the screen. Face like a sphinx.

The picture quality was grainy, but the skies were a little lighter than those outside the aircraft. Ships were ploughing through a swelling sea: cruisers, destroyers and the unmistakable outline of a big aircraft carrier.

The picture kept shifting, giving different perspectives, including one from altitude that gave a suggestion of their numbers—scores of them. The footage was being relayed from drones, he guessed, some flying low over the ocean, others higher up. Helicopters and interceptors from the carrier were buzzing them—veteran Arapahos and F-7 Firestorms, by the look of them, firing off Cloudburst missiles and dandelion puffs of chaff to incapacitate those they could. A mini aerial battle with no human casualties, conveyed without sound so that it had the air of a simulation. Like the Alliance, the Americans had been forced to restore to active service craft that were not dependent on sophisticated satellite navigation and computer control. But the fleet looked formidable.

“They’re presently about two hundred kilometres off the western coast of Ireland,” Sir Gruffydd said. “And ignoring all our warnings not to infringe our territorial waters.” He paused to squint at a close-up of the aircraft carrier with its herringbone ranks of Firestorms on the deck. “Of course the Enterprise is just the peacock. There’s at least a dozen submarines accompanying them, packed to the gills with missiles. They’re the aces in the .”

There was a pause, and I thought that Sir Gruffydd was about to suggest refreshments. Instead he changed tack.

“You remember Operation Anvil?”

It came to him for the first time: this was the code name given to their Minsk mission. The fact that it had been given operational status was a measure of its importance.

“I was there,” he said pointedly.

“But you still don’t recall exactly what it was about, am I correct?”

There was a hint of a query in the assertion. Or was it just suspicion?

“Only what I said in my debriefings.” But already he sensed the loose weave of his memory beginning to tauten under the pull of circumstance.

“Rhys,” he said. “He talked about Omega.”

Sir Gruffydd waited, showing no surprise. Had the old man instructed Rhys to speak to him?

“Where is he?” Owain asked.

“Don’t worry about him. What did you think? Ring any bells, did it?”

“I thought he was raving.”

“And now?”

“I’m starting to remember.”

His uncle couldn’t wait. “You were sent into the field to test it. I briefed you myself.”

It was all coming back to him. As Rhys had claimed, Vassall was an operations man from Orford Ness, shipped in to oversee the technical side of things in the guise of a soldier so that none of the others apart from van Oost would suspect the ulterior purpose of the mission. Owain had had months of preparation for it. And the major had been ordered to defer to him in matters concerning the weapon.

“You didn’t expect me to come back,” he said.

“What I didn’t expect was that we’d have you back with your brain so scrambled you couldn’t remember a damn thing about it.”

Hence the posting home, to his uncle’s staff, where they could keep an eye on him.

“Why didn’t you just tell me?”

His uncle shook his head. “Specialists advised against it. Sleeping dogs and all that.”

That was why they’d sent him to Brazil, to keep him occupied. Carmela, the interpreter, had seldom left his side. No doubt they’d instructed her to sleep with him if necessary. Anything to keep him in the fold.

“Then there was this dalliance with Legister’s wife,” his uncle continued. “It was pretty much on the cards that Legister would be keeping himself posted on your little tête-à-têtes—rather to our convenience, as it turned out.”

“Was Marisa his spy?”

His uncle didn’t pick up on the fact that he had used the past tense. “It wouldn’t have mattered either way. Easy for one of his people to get into your place when no one was at home.”

“He had my rooms wired?”

“We operated on that assumption when we put in our own devices.”

He hadn’t expected this. “Cameras and sound?”

“Just microphones, Owain. We’re not bloody voyeurs.”

Owain shifted his gaze to the screen. An angled, medium-altitude panorama showed the task force still steaming across the steely Atlantic, each ship like a slow-moving missile propelled by the chalky stream of its wake.

Possessed with a powerful sense of his privacy having been chimerical, his intimate habits laid bare, he couldn’t bring himself to ask what they’d actually learned, particularly over the last twenty-four hours. How would they have interpreted Marisa’s pleas for him to stop? And later, had he manhandled her out of there, or gulled her into letting him accompany her to her car? There was still a void in his memory. But evidence enough, he was sure, from recordings of that evening to convict him of a crime.

In the middle of all this, I was helping Owain to ask the right questions, insistently urging him on. Everything was unfolding in front of me. Soon I would have to take action or be trapped here forever.

“So Legister doesn’t know about Omega?”

“Of course he knows,” Sir Gruffydd replied. “He’s a member of the Council. Impossible to keep him out of the loop. But we’ve had our suspicions that he’s had his own agenda for some time. That why we didn’t discourage your fraternisation with his wife. It gave us a way of keeping tabs on him while making sure you weren’t doing or saying anything you shouldn’t.”

“We?”

“The JGC. Who else do you think is running things?”

“But he’s a member of it.”

“He’s a politician.” His uncle instilled the word with his deepest contempt. “We have to have a few on hand for appearances. They brought us to this pass in the first place. Never forget that, Owain. We’ve given Legister the space to cultivate his little empire, but only if he keeps it in his own sphere. They’ve sticky hands, my boy. We have to be careful where they touch.”

He’d been so naive to imagine that his liaison with Marisa wouldn’t attract more than passive attention. Naive in not even considering the possibility that both Legister and his uncle would know about it from the start and take appropriate precautionary action.

An insight came to me. “Legister wants peace with the Americans.”

Sir Gruffydd nodded. “Yak, yak, not flak, flak.”

“Is he a spy for them?”

I thought the old man wasn’t going to answer, but he said, “We’d have had him shot by now. His view is that the Americans are merely taking defensive measures against the collapse of their satellite systems.”

“They didn’t cause it?”

“That was our doing.” His tone carried no hint of apology. “Do you have any idea how much power the Omega orbiters transmit each time they’re activated? Like putting a three-bar fire in a circuit of Christmas-tree lights. Blew the whole lot.”

“Do the Americans know?”

“Well, they know something’s up. Can’t keep that sort of thing hidden indefinitely, especially when we’re field-testing it. That’s why they’ve been bringing stuff out of mothballs and helping the Russians salvage what they could. They knew their advanced systems were down for good.”

“Is that what was happening at the Minsk base?”

“Well, they probably wanted to provoke an attack. To see what we have.”

“So now they’re in the picture?”

“They’re not clear about exactly what it is. Not yet.”

“If they know we have a new weapon, why haven’t they already launched retaliatory strikes?”

The field marshal looked as if he was enjoying himself. “Hard to say without being a member of their Supreme Command, isn’t it? But I’ll tell you this—I’d rather be in our place than theirs.”

They were going to attack. Sir Gruffydd would have no truck with truces or negotiations. Something else occurred to Owain.

“Generaloberst Blaskowitz?”

“A first-rate commander,” his uncle replied without hesitation. “A man of the utmost integrity.”

“He was killed?”

The field marshal held his stare. “No way of putting a gloss on it. Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.”

“But he didn’t know about Omega.”

“He had his suspicions. That’s why something had to be done. He wouldn’t have taken kindly to it.”

Owain couldn’t make himself speak. I said, “I don’t get it.”

“He was wedded to the notion of manpower determining military outcomes,” Sir Gruffydd said, for once sounding eager to assuage. “Remember, Omega is a remote system. Its effectiveness doesn’t depend on the resourcefulness of field commanders. To a degree, it renders them redundant. The generaloberst wouldn’t have looked on such developments favourably. There was a long tradition of service. Notions of honour among combatants.”

“Is that so wrong?” I made Owain say.

“Wrongness doesn’t come into it. It’s a question of what must be done to save ourselves.”

Sir Gruffydd had a steely look in his eyes. Owain had seen it before. He cultivated a public persona of bluff bonhomie, but he hadn’t become head of the JGC by being soft-centred.

There was a muffled electronic bleeping. Giselle extracted her pager from her tunic and switched it off.

“You’re needed,” she told Sir Gruffydd.

The field marshal rose stiffly, both hands on his stick. He murmured something to Giselle as she made to shepherd him towards the door.

She handed Owain the TV control panel without expression.

“So now you know,” his uncle told him. He gripped Owain’s arm. “You’ve done us great service, Owain, never forget that. Soon we’ll see the fruits of all our labours.”

FORTY-FOUR

Parks and public gardens. You reached a time in your life when they occupied a larger space in it, when your parents were growing old and your children merely growing. So you were increasingly drawn to these soothing green spaces, with their tranquil arbours for the elderly, their ponds and playgrounds for the active offspring, promising fresh air and nature in its neatest municipal form. Your episodic presence signified nothing but passing time, a message reinforced by everything from the ritual sequence of flowerbed plantings to the names of former patrons inscribed on the benches.

I was thinking of Lyneth and how we had often bundled the girls into the car on a wet Saturday afternoon and hauled them around the grounds of places like Chartwell, the rain beading their lavender plastic macs while they stamped in puddles and pleaded for crisps. She could pack a bag with all the necessities for such occasions in a matter of minutes. She would have made someone the perfect wife.

I stopped myself, bewildered that I had the capacity or the inclination for such reflections, given everything that was going on with Owain. Then it occurred to me that he might well have been triggering all these episodes of intense recollection, trawling my memories as I had plundered his. He would need to know as much about me as possible if he intended to usurp me.

How was I to sever the link? Could I shut him out simply by making myself aware of his intrusions, by insisting on my own prior occupancy? For all I knew he might be controlling the transitions between our worlds, though I had found nothing in his thoughts to suggest this. In fact, I’d still found nothing to suggest he was actually aware—

“O?”

Tanya calling me. There was something important here, but I was trailing behind her and my father. She was wheeling him down the twisting path. I caught up, drawing alongside my father, saying somewhat pathetically: “It’s nice in the sun.”

“Squirrels,” my father said. “They’re vermin, you know.”

I could see none in evidence, but my father generally objected to things in principle, the intellectual equivalent of getting your retaliation in first. It was a policy he had adopted throughout his life. He saw the world as a series of antagonisms, and people as weak, foolish or venal unless there was outstanding evidence to the contrary. There was no one he admired unreservedly, and he disdained almost all organisations, including charities, as tainted by the compromises of bureaucracy. His favourite maxim was Thoreau’s “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes”. He was a professional dissenter who’d often swum against the intellectual currents of his age. Admirable in his way; but a hard act to follow.

I took over from Tanya, turning the chair down towards a sunken garden.

“What are your views on gun control?” he said to me.

He was staring straight ahead, his prominent nose pointing the way, as though he were a human bloodhound on the scent of something interesting.

“Here, or in America?” I asked.

“Makes no difference.”

“Dad, I didn’t come to see you to talk about gun control.”

“Surely you have a view?”

“Does it matter?” I asked.

“Of course it matters,” he replied with an irritable growl. “You’re my brother, aren’t you?”

We looped around a damp fountain. My father’s elder brother, Arthur, had been a bomber crewman shot down over Essen in the last months of the war. Nineteen years old, by all accounts, my father himself too young to serve. Another thread of the web. It was as if I couldn’t escape it.

I noticed that Tanya was hiding a grin behind her gloved hand. I mouthed a “What?” at her, but she merely shrugged in a manner suggesting she didn’t know, or that it wasn’t important.

Perhaps it was the best way to take it. To see it as funny, although without disrespect. Tanya had often chided me that I always portrayed my father as an ogre, whereas she was plainly not daunted by him in the slightest. But she hadn’t grown up in his shadow.

My father was humming to himself, something rather jaunty. I’d never heard him sing or whistle or make any sort of joyful noise before. I recognised the melody: “Shall we Dance?” from The King and I.

Where among the mists of his memories was he? Tanya took his hands and raised him out of his seat. My father did a sterling job of keeping up with her as she gently waltzed him around. Then he started crying. Or rather silent tears were trickling down his cheeks.

“What is it?” I asked anxiously.

“Things lost,” I thought I heard him say as he fixed me with an intense stare. “Nothing unusual to report.”

He was relieving himself. Urine was running off his turn-ups, puddling around his feet.

Owain played with the TV control. The picture shifted from the Atlantic to a big military installation in the desert; a launch complex surrounded by rainforest; an army formation spread out on a treeless plain; a coastal town; a pale island covered with an untidy weave of aeroplanes. Were these all targets for Omega?

“They might be.”

Somehow Rhys had insinuated himself into the cabin. He was sitting in an armchair opposite, in a brindled charcoal suit and a white silk shirt.

“A question of keeping one’s options open. You didn’t believe me, did you?”

Sitting laxly in the chair as though this was any ordinary domestic occasion, he both looked and sounded smug.

“The hotel,” Owain said. “You saw me coming?”

Rhys nodded.

ont size="3">“Why did you run away?”

Rhys gave the impression that this was a stupid question. “Why do you think? You’re a loose cannon, Owain. Who knows what you might do?”

Owain had doused the overhead lights earlier so there was only the glow from the screen. Rhys crossed his legs. Pale, sheer socks sheathed his slender ankles. His black shoes gleamed.

“Bit of a risk coming in here on your own in that case,” Owain said in Welsh.

“What are you going to do?” Rhys replied in English. “Strangle me? Shoot me? What purpose would it serve? To vent a hate that has no rational basis?”

“I don’t hate you.”

“Well, you certainly despise me.” His brother gave the impression it no longer concerned him. “I couldn’t be the same as you, Owain. It just wasn’t in my nature. We can’t all be frontline heroes.”

“I’m no hero.”

“Father would have been proud of you.”

Coming from anyone else, Owain would have taken this as the best of compliments; but from Rhys it was devalued.

There were still holes in his memory: a lot he couldn’t remember.

“So you were assigned to this Omega project,” he said. “When?”

Rhys hesitated before replying, as if he wasn’t sure whether Owain was testing him.

“It’s been going on for years,” he finally said. ‘I was drafted in to help with the satellite systems. We had to build them like tanks—none of this featherweight stuff. Cabling as thick as your arm, transformers the size of Cougar turbines.”

Owain had no interest in the engineering details, or his brother’s boasting. But obviously the weapon had undergone extensive testing.

“It’s not clear to me,” he said, “what happens to all the terrain after it’s been excised.”

His brother looked impressed that he had remembered the terminology. He asked Owain for the control panel. Owain tossed it towards him at head height. Rhys managed to bring his hands up just in time, deflecting it down into his lap.

“Take a look out of the window,” Rhys said to him. “Tell me what you see.”

Owain craned his head, but in the end he was forced to stand up to get a good look out.

The sky was beginning to darken, but they were flying low enough that he could see a strip of coastline with the grey sea beyond. In fact it looked like an island, long and thin at either end, hugging the marshy coastline, a coiling river running between it and the sea.

“Orford Ness,” Owain said, knowing that it was linked to the coast by the slenderest spit of land at its northern tip.

“Fount of all secrets,” Rhys replied theatrically, pointing to the screen.

The screen at first showed a perspective from on high before the camera zoomed and began panning across the site.

Apart from its shingle shores, the Ness was largely buried under expanses of concrete and tarmac. There were airstrips, missile ranges, and two squat roofed structures that I knew from my own world were called The Pagodas, built for dummy atom bomb testing in the 1950s. Arrays of radar antennae and clusters of bunkers dotted the bleak snow-covered landscape. The place had been used by the military for the best part of a century. There was scarcely an acre of it that did not bear the imprint of their activities.

“They put us on the site of an old POW camp,” Rhys told him, the picture focusing on a modern-looking installation of overarching girders supporting a ribbed concrete dome. “Everything had to be rebuilt from scratch, most of it underground.”

From a distance it looked absurdly like an unfurled umbrella top. The usual missile batteries ringed it and there was a long landing strip close by, a few planes and helicopters parked around the control building.

“The project’s been running for over twenty years,” Rhys told him. “Dungeness was the first time we knew it might work, though no one anticipated that it would be at the expense of obliterating the entire site.

So the story about an old bomb going off had just been a cover. A bigger version of the lie they’d told him about what had happened in Regent Street.

“Then there were the problems with venting that you already know about. It’s only in the last eighteen months that we’ve had systems robust enough to control it.”

“Venting?”

“Backflash, remember? What goes out, must come in again.”

The picture switched abruptly, showing what at first Owain thought was a huge earthen wall that extended right across the field of vision like a latter-day Offa’s Dyke. It was a moment before he recognised it as a serpentine stretch of the Ness upon which were piled the jumbled remains of military vehicles—tanks, assault guns, artillery pieces—poking out of mounds of boulders, dark earth and broken trees. It was as if everything had been fed into an enormous hopper and dropped from a great height.

“Easier to dump it in our own back yard,” Rhys said. “least at first.”

“It’s displaced terrain?”

Rhys nodded. “Some of it from thousands of miles away.”

The materiel was so battered and buckled as to be unrecognisable. But it was easy to imagine that he could detect the contours of a T-92 or Tiger-X among the morass, easy to assume they were the very same tanks he had excised from the base near Minsk, sent twisting through some unimaginable rift in the fabric of the world to be deposited here in a prodigious topological belch.

“Of course we couldn’t go on fouling our doorstep indefinitely,” Rhys said with all the fervour of the sanctified. “Which is why the latest satellites incorporate re-routing facilities.”

Owain had no idea how it was actually done, but he guessed what Rhys was driving at. “So you can vent wherever you want.”

His brother nodded vigorously. “And where better than another enemy site?”

Owain felt surprisingly clear-headed. The world had once again contracted, this time to the dim confines of the cabin. For the moment only he and Rhys existed.

“That’s what makes it positively ingenious,” Rhys told him. “You not only use TEE to take out a threat, you target the venting behind enemy lines where it will cause maximum damage. Drop ten hectares of desert on a harbour packed with warships. Dump a mountain fortress on a missile silo or germ-warfare site. Bury the fuckers under it for good. Two strikes for the price of one, primary and secondary targets inseparable from one another. Could there be a better weapon?”

There was something brittle and excessively zealous about his brother’s advocacy. Owain wanted to shatter it.

“What about enemy attacks?” he said. “Missiles, for example. Could you take them out in flight?”

“Using Omega? Probably not. It would have to be a reasonably static target so we could insert the loop. And not too high up. It’s a geodynamic thing, linked to the earth’s magnetic field.”

“So they could retaliate?”

“If we didn’t get them first, yes.”

“We’d have to defend ourselves by conventional means.”

Rhys didn’t deny it.

“There could be major destruction on both sides.”

“The risk is considered acceptable,” Rhys said. “Remember, they have no means of defending themselves against Omega attacks.”

“They could take out the site here.”

“Do you really think we’d proceed with only one?”

No, of course he didn’t; he’d just wanted to know.

“We needed you up close at Minsk because the relay satellite was new and the only power source was here. You were there for triangulation, though we built in a little leeway so you wouldn’t get swallowed.”

They’d told him of the dangers when he’d volunteered. No better than a fifty-fifty chance of survival. He hadn’t hesitated.

“Now we have global coverage and control centres on mobile platforms. They can go almost anywhere.”

“How many?”

“Eight, ten, a dozen. Enough.”

He didn’t know for sure. Doubtless they would be scattered all across Alliance territory, and perhaps points beyond. There was an abundance of targets.

Rhys switched the channel to BBC-24. A newsreader was detailing recent instances of American aggression. There were pictures of new fortifications on the western Irish coast—teardrop-shaped domes of a pale concrete that blended in well with the snow-covered landscape. A new front line, he was being told, against any threat from the west.

Rhys turned the sound up loud. Now he came and sat down beside Owain.

“There’s only one problem,” he said softly.

“What?”

“You take out the terrain, but you’ve made a permanent alteration in the underlying geology. Remember it’s a three-dimensional loop, larger below than above. The bigger the excision, the deeper it goes.”

“Earth tremors,” Owain said, remembering Blaskowitz’s conversation with his uncle.

“That’s the least of it. Inevitable if the area’s extensive enough. Now imagine doing a big excision over a hot spot or plate boundary. You might get more than that: open up a hole in the crust or take out a chunk of a subduction zone. You’d end up with some pretty impressive firework displays, or get an event that’s right off the Richter scale.”

The heightened volume on the TV meant that they had to lean close to hear one another, a proximity Owain didn’t relish. He was tiring of words, of not knowing what others wanted from him.

“So what’s your point?” he said.

For once Rhys looked unctain.

“Are you having second thoughts?” Owain asked.

“I’m wondering what you think.”

“About what?”

Rhys smiled. There was something patronising about it, as though he considered Owain a hopeless case.

FORTY-FIVE

“This hasn’t happened before,” Dr Pearce said with some anxiety, rather less concerned with the actual incident than that we might consider him professionally negligent by not having warned us.

“I think I over-excited him,” Tanya confessed. “We were dancing.”

“Did he know he was doing it?” Pearce asked.

“Dancing or relieving himself?” I said.

“Relieving himself.”

“He knew.”

Rees gave a little chuckle. Keisha scowled at him and he subsided.

We all were in my father’s room, waiting for him to return. The room held a small wardrobe and a bedside table in addition to the single bed. A modern desk had been crammed into a space beside the door, but its beech-veneer surface was conspicuously free of books or writing equipment.

I knew that the wardrobe held no more than a few changes of clothing. No ties, though he’d always worn one, even when working at home. Another way in which his autonomy had been stripped from him. Everything was pared down to the essentials of easy maintenance. I’d brought him family photographs in the past, but they were nowhere in evidence.

It felt safe in the room—at least far safer than with Owain. Safe but dead, my father sealed in behind a window that couldn’t be opened without a key, behind a door whose lock was on the outside. Nocturnal wandering, Dr Pearce once told me, was a frequent symptom of someone in my father’s condition, though he’d hastened to add that a night nurse was always sent to the room of any patient showing signs of agitation. I liked the fact he called them “patients” rather than the euphemisms of “residents” or even “guests”.

“How long do you think he has?” Rees asked the doctor.

“Sorry?”

“Will he die before he goes completely gaga?”

Pearce looked mortified, as though Rees had sworn in church.

“Well,” he said awkwardly, “physically he’s in a reasonable condition for a man of his age. And new treatments are always coming on line.”

“It’s all right,” I said, rescuing him. “We know the score.”

Death was never mentioned here. Rees didn’t press it. I saw Keisha squeeze his hand in a manner I thought was both sympathetic and cautionary. She looked calm and self-possessed, given that she was surrounded by strangers in a difficult emotional situation.

“Is he still writing?” Tanya asked.

“No,” Pearce said with what sounded like genuine regret. “That stopped some months ago.”

I must have told Tanya about it, though I couldn’t remember the occasion. When I first discussed with my father the possibility of going into a nursing home he had agreed without qualm but insisted that he wanted to continue to work. He was aware of his mental decline but clearly felt that his lapses were mere periods of indisposition, a hindrance but not a bar to the continued pursuit of his profession. He compiled a list of essential reference books that he wished to take with him, along with notebooks and a range of coloured roller ball pens that he intended to use.

It wasn’t until he had been at Broadoaks for the best part of a year that I actually took a look at what he was writing. At first he guarded his notebooks from all external attention, but as his condition worsened so did his dominion over them. One afternoon Pearce left me alone with them while my father was undergoing neurological tests.

His working title was Chaos and Order in History, and what surprised me was the depth of his reading in such esoteric fields as non-linear systems and game theory. Three of his notebooks were completely filled with a jumbled collection of references, observations and commentaries obviously drawn directly from his reading. They were scribbled down in alternating blocks of red, green and purple that suggested a colour coding I was never able to fathom. Other notebooks held more extended passages in sober black and navy which were plainly a draft of the work itself.

Enough of the draft was coherent for me to grasp that he was attempting to apply two main ideas from science to the study of history. The first was that as macroscopic certainty emerged from innumerable fuzzy and probabilistic interactions in the sub-atomic world, so historical process, as he termed it, arose out of the equally innumerable and often random interactions of individuals. The second was that as ordered behaviour could spontaneously arise in systems that were far from thermodynamic equilibrium, like a whirlpool vortex in bath water draining down a plug hole, so historical pattern only emerged during periods of flux.

I read through the notebooks with a mixture of awe, confusion and, ultimately, a dismaying sense of the sterility of the enterprise. It was sterile not because I knew it would never be finished but rather because it expended a mountain of intellectual effort to scale a crumbling anthill. To say that historical process was the summation of individual actions was surely just to state the obvious. To assert that patterns in history only became evident at times of upheaval was unenlightening without a proper definition of what constituted such times. My father also implied that such patterns were visible contemporaneously, a notion at odds with another of his favourite axioms: History is a dish best served cold. While I knew that what I was reading was only a draft, filled with obscurities, non-sequiturs and half-developed ideas, it nevertheless conveyed the impression of a fixation so obsessive that he wanted to shoehorn the whole of history into it. He had succumbed to the tyranny of analogy.

“Where are his notebooks?” I asked Pearce.

The doctor looked puzzled. “You asked us to remove them the last time you were here.”

I remembered. He’d begun to deface them. Scribbling over them, tearing out their pages, perhaps driven by despair because the besieged rational part of him knew the game was up.

And here he was at last, being wheeled into the room by one of the nurses: freshly laundered, wrapped in his black-watch tartan dressing gown, looking both puzzled and disgruntled to find us all waiting for him. He was only seventy-four, but he looked ten years older, defeated by the very status to which he had always aspired.

“How you feeling, dad?” Rees asked cheerily.

His gaze had settled on Keisha.

“Who’re you?” he said to her.

“She’s with me,” Rhys interjected, and I could tell he was disappointed that he had already forgotten.

He looked at me. “Is it a party? Or am I dying?”

“No, dad,” I said, trying to sound amused. “Nothing like that. We’re just visiting. Though I think it’s time for us to be on our way.”

Rees was rummaging in his canvas shoulder bag. He produced a disposable camera.

“I thought we should have a few photographs,” he said. “For old time’s sake.”

“Makes no difference to me. Where’s Madga?”

For an instant it was as if someone had taken all the air out of the room.

“She’s dead,” I said.

“Don’t you think I don’t know that?” he replied. “The photograph. What have you done with it?”

The nurse, obviously practised in such situations, lifted the pillow on his bed. It was a 6×4 in a cut-price pine frame I had bought for it.

With the light fadoutside, we decided that the most suitable place for the photographs was in front of the window. At this point I glimpsed a cluster of figures in the garden beyond—five children and a woman. They were standing amongst clumps of ornamental grasses some distance away, waving at me.

I couldn’t clearly discern their features. The woman was noticeably tall and slim, dressed in a neat navy coat, blonde-haired, a flower-patterned scarf tied at her neck. There were three girls and two boys, all of them young. Two of the girls particularly caught my attention. One wore a silver puff jacket with stripy leggings, her slightly elder sister a red zippered top and jeans. They might have been Sara and Bethany.

A fierce compulsion propelled me away from the window, along with a determined conviction that they couldn’t possibly be waving at me, that there were other windows on this side of the building, balconies even, so it was highly likely they were greeting someone else.

It was essential to believe this, not to allow any futile hope to blossom. At the same time I was certain I had seen the woman before. It wasn’t Lyneth, I knew that. Suddenly it came to me: the park. Was it the same woman I had seen in there, the day I fell out of the wheelchair? With the two children who reminded me most of my own? How was that possible?

I made myself look again. They were gone. There was no one in sight.

“Owen?”

I looked around. Tanya, and everyone else, was waiting for me.

I steadied myself, summoning a smile, certain that it had been no apparition. My father, as if sensing my distress, salvaged me. As we arranged ourselves around him for the photograph, he caught my eye and did something astonishing. It was enough to make me swell with all sorts of emotions as the camera flashed and he sat rigid, my hand on his shoulder, staring straight ahead with a fixed grin like a child under orders. Sentimentally I had imagined that he was going to raise Mother’s photograph to the camera so that her image would be incorporated into the picture, but he had either forgotten or preferred to let her rest where she lay in his lap. Meanwhile I was seized with the certainty that this was the last time I was going to see him alive; and he knew it too, which was why in that private instant he had been able to look at me and, straight-faced, give me a quick knowing wink.

FORTY-SIX

Owain stood at the cabin window with Rhys, staring down at the diminishing outlines of Orford Ness as we flew away into the gathering dark.

The door opened, and two MPs came into the cabin, escorting Carl Legister and Marisa.

Legister was either under arrest or protective custody. Marisa looked guardedly at Owain, but neither she nor her husband said anything as they were seated on the sofa. Both MPs remained, flanking the doorway, submachine guns in their hands. The weapons could be used with near impunity: the Nimbus was triple-skinned, its fuselage reinforced with arched trusses like massive ribs, its deep-set. The entire craft was designed to withstand damage from anything short of an armour-piercing shell.

Legister looked both calm and implacable, staring unemotionally at TV footage of a Befreiungtag parade, held in Breslau each spring to commemorate the final extinction of the Nazi state. Marisa had perched herself at his side, but there was a space between them and they did not touch. She continued to look down into her folded hands. The usual strident music accompanied the footage, though Rhys had reduced the sound to normal levels.

Within a minute of their arrival, Giselle Vigoroux entered. She crouched down next to Marisa and they began a whispered sisterly exchange. It came to me that Marisa must have fled to Giselle after leaving Owain’s quarters. I saw Marisa listen before shaking her head. Giselle nodded and straightened.

“Are we all being confined here?” Rhys asked her with a degree of puzzled umbrage.

“We’ll let you out soon,” Giselle told him.

She exited as briskly as she had come.

Legister and Marisa sat like mannequins. Rhys, sensing the polluted atmosphere, came up close.

“She the one you were seeing?” he murmured, though he obviously knew.

I nodded.

“Pretty.”

“She’s lucky to be alive,” I made Owain say. “For a while I thought I’d murdered her.”

Involuntarily he moved back a little. “You’re joking.”

I shook his head. “I’ve been getting these violent urges. You were right to run away.”

Both of us were keeping our voices low, our backs turned to Marisa and Legister. But I knew they were watching us.

“You had a rough time,” Rhys said sympathetically. “Battlefield trauma’s a real syndrome, even if the military won’t admit it.”

“I’m possessed.”

This was Owain. It was the first time he had actually acknowledged that his thoughts and actions were not always his own; and yet he would not accept my presence as something distinct from himself. How could this be, if he knew of my life?

The door opened again and one of Sir Gruffydd’s staff entered.

“You’re needed,” he told Rhys.

“We’ll talk more later,” Rhys whispered, but it was clear he wanteut. When the door closed behind him Owain felt abandoned.

He made the mistake of catching Carl Legister’s eye.

“Sit down, major,” he said, indicating one of the armchairs opposite.

Owain didn’t move.

“Please.” He made the word sound like an order. “I want to talk to you.”

Rhys had thrust the TV control into Owain’s hand on leaving. I was tempted to turn up the volume again, to drown him out. Marisa was still looking into her lap.

“I’m so sorry,” I said softly to her.

“I want to talk about your father,” Legister said.

“What?”

“I think it’s time you knew the whole truth about what happened to him.”

I could feel Owain growing fiercely defensive. “I know what happened to him.”

“The full story, major. You’ve only ever been told the official version. It’s somewhat, shall we say, restricted.”

He wasn’t concerned about Marisa. It was as if she was no use to him in the present situation and could be discounted

“Come,” Legister insisted, indicating the armchair opposite him.

Owain took a step back.

“What are you afraid of, major?” Legister said with weary disdain. “I’m unarmed. We’re guarded. Aren’t you a seeker after truth?”

“I wouldn’t expect to hear it from you.”

“You have no interest in your father’s fate?”

“My father died while doing his duty.”

“Along with millions of others. I take it you were told the attack was launched by renegade militia making use of devices acquired after raids on abandoned missile facilities.”

Owain didn’t say anything, but neither did he turn away.

“Did you know your father was a member of the so-called Pazis?”

Angrily Owain said, “My father was no pacifist!”

Legister mimed surprise. “Of cour he wasn’t. Not at least in the popular sense of being a coward or a conscientious objector. But that’s not how the term is applied in official circles. Rather, it refers to a loose association of officers and civilians throughout our territories who favour negotiated settlements rather than continuing escalation. Most desire a permanent end to hostilities. A few even have as their ultimate aim the restoration of civilian, even democratic, rule.”

Legister’s sneering tone made it sound like a ridiculously idealistic aspiration.

“Are you suggesting my father was a subversive? A traitor?”

“My dear major,” he said emolliently, “I’m not suggesting that he was in any way deficient in his duties. But his record also indicates that he was a humane man who did not believe in unnecessary sacrifice.”

Was this a compliment or merely a means of winning Owain’s consideration?

“Colonel-General Blaskowitz was a more recent member of the fraternity. No doubt you’re aware of what happened to him.”

As usual he was giving nothing away but words. Then it came to me: Legister himself had similar sympathies. He’d been trying to negotiate with the Americans, and had been kept in the dark about the plan for using Omega.

“Ever since we began this entire enterprise,” he went on, “the bane of our existence has been our inability to stabilise our borders. And, of course, the problem of trying to meld the many constituent tribes of the Alliance into one harmonious whole against all the xenophobic instincts of our species. A utopian project, perhaps. Certainly a Herculean one.”

All this was remote from Owain’s own experience. It also sounded like a politician’s gloss on what had been military necessities.

“The Middle East presented a particularly intractable problem. Sixty years ago it was believed that the Jewish Question had been settled humanely by the mass evacuations to their ancestral homeland. But it bred equally virulent forms of domestic nationalism within the federated territories. In the Slavic lands we have a convenient wasteland for demarcation, in North Africa the desert expanses. But not in Palestine and Mesopotamia, despite our best efforts at homeland creation.”

His tone was that of a wearily exasperated parent, of someone whose boundless charity had been spurned.

“A festering wound on a sensitive frontier, Jews and Muslims and Christians in bitter unending conflict, even amongst themselves. Even with occupying armies. Too many symbols of religious and nationalist pride, too much history of strife. It became clear it was never going to go away. But the example of the east, how the very devastation of its territories was creating a cordon sanitaire, proved an inspiration to our strategic planners. Why don’t you sit down, major?”

Already I was beginning to anticipates gloss on might say. I made Owain sit. Marisa, whose head was still down, looked like she wished she were anywhere but here.

“The nuclear attack on Palestine was orchestrated by senior figures within the Alliance,” Legister stated. “It was they who supplied the weaponry, they who selected the targets. A means of reducing troublesome provinces to a radioactive desert that could more easily be policed while bolstering their own authority in the inevitable outrage that would follow.”

Sixteen years ago. Sir Gruffydd wasn’t C-in-C in those days, but as Vice-Chief of the General Staff his would still have been an important voice on the JGC. He would have known about such a decision, been party to it.

“You’re saying my father was deliberately sacrificed.”

“It had to look convincingly like an attack from outside.”

“No,” Owain retorted. “My uncle would never have agreed to it. He wouldn’t let his only surviving brother die.”

“Wouldn’t he?” Legister’s tone was laced with scepticism. “Perhaps he preferred to become the guardian of two impressionable boys rather than allow them to grow up under the tutelage of a father he considered a potential danger to the cause.”

“My father spent most of his time overseas. My uncle was already our guardian in all but name.”

“But he was a prolific letter-writer, busily expounding his humanitarian views to the two of you at every opportunity, is that not true? Views that your uncle would have considered dangerously at variance with sound military doctrine.”

“He loved my father, too.”

“That may well be so. But what of his duty to the greater cause? Do you think he would ever have retained his eminence without being able to take whatever action was necessary to preserve it?”

“This is his family. All he had.”

Legister gave him a pitying look. “You would find, if you were able to examine the records, that in the months preceding the attack there was an unusually high level of transfers and repostings to and from Army Group Middle East. A disproportionate number of the new arrivals were personnel whose files are stamped F. For Fraglich. Of questionable sympathies. It’s used to signify moral or ideological rather than military qualms.”

Marisa’s head was up, but she was looking at her husband, not me. It appeared that she was hearing all this for the first time.

“Your father had carried that classification for more than a decade. He was conveniently in place. Had your uncle wanted to get him out, he certainly had the authority to do so. He was meant to be there, major. He was intended to die.”< ><p>

A split-screen shot on the television showed a Muslim cleric leading prayers with a group of senior Alliance officers, and a Free Orthodox ceremony in a church with a black-bearded archbishop. It dissolved into the deck of a warship, where Pope Clement was bestowing benedictions in his brisk fashion on the assembled ranks of the crew. On the continent the Ecumenical Church had more of a Catholic flavour.

“A studio backdrop,” Legister observed wryly. “They’ve rather overdone the seagulls, don’t you think?”

“And me?” Owain said angrily. “What classification do I have?”

Legister didn’t even hesitate. “Verdächtig” he said.

It meant “Under Suspicion”. I was scarcely surprised.

The cabin door opened again, and this time a quartet of Sir Gruffydd’s personal guard entered. The pick of the commando squadrons. We were escorted along the corridor to the front of the aircraft.

A large cabin directly behind the flight deck was crowded with personnel from MPs to braided officers in grey khaki, navy and slate blue. It had an atmosphere that I could only think of as festive. People stood talking in small groups, holding glasses of wine as if at a party. Almost half of them were women, including a high proportion of non-combatants who wore military style jackets and leggings as though to blend in.

Owain’s uncle was perched on a collapsible stool next to one of the truss arches, talking to Henry Knowlton, who was wearing his old air marshal’s uniform. Stradling, Giselle and Rhys surrounded him, all with drinks in their hands. Rhys looked especially animated as he conducted a one-way conversation with Giselle.

“It would appear,” Legister said beside me, “that we’ve been invited to the première.”

FORTY-SEVEN

Above the door to the flight deck were mounted three screens, showing similar scenes to those we had seen earlier. No one was paying them particular attention. One of Sir Gruffydd’s guards detached Owain from Legister and Marisa and ushered us through the crowd. I glanced back, certain that Owain would have no further opportunity to speak to Marisa. Another of the guards was speaking to her. She looked frightened.

“Owain!” my uncle said heartily on our approach, rising from his stool. He reached out to grasp Owain’s epaulette and draw him properly into his circle.

“All clear, is it now, my boy?”

This last was spoken in Welsh. Had he anticipated what Legister was going to say? Had he been eavesdropping?

I let Owain nod and said, “The fog has lifte.”

Doubtless he’d guessed the likely outcome of putting Legister into the same room but hadn’t bothered to listen in. Too busy with more important matters. Didn’t view it as troublesome now that Owain was restored to his senses.

“Have to face up to the grim realities,” Sir Gruffydd said, this time in English. “Only way for it, eh? No matter how painful.”

So he had known. Had perhaps deliberately arranged it. As another test of Owain’s mettle.

Owain stifled an urge to salute. “Sir.”

“Here,” Sir Gruffydd said, lifting a wineglass from the tray of a passing waitress and thrusting it at us. “Take a drink. And for God’s sake don’t tell me you’ve sworn off alcohol again. Down your gullet. You’ve earned it.”

It was the same stewardess who’d come to the cabin earlier. She barely paused in her stride. Knowlton stared after her approvingly.

“The gang’s all here!” Rhys said with a brittle schoolboy enthusiasm. He raised his glass. “Happy centenary, uncle!”

“You cheeky devil!” the field marshal replied jovially, giving him a pantomime swipe that he easily dodged.

Rhys didn’t know the true story about their father’s death. Or he had been told and didn’t care. Everyone else was grinning, though Giselle had turned a shoulder away.

“The real balloon’11 be going up soon enough,” the field marshal said, subsiding back on to his stool. “Fortunate to have everyone on hand.”

He plainly meant his family. The three of us. Possibly Giselle as well, even though she was no blood relation.

It occurred to Owain that they might prove to be the last of his line. Rhys was only ever likely to become a father by making a donation to a Future Youth clinic, while Owain saw no prospect of having a family life again. His uncle might have his victory, but his bloodline would become extinct.

Across the room Legister and Marisa had been seated against the corridor wall near the door, still under discreet guard. No one was speaking to them, though the minister must have known most people in the room. Legister still looked quite contained, almost serene, given that his own hopes had also been thwarted: but he never showed great emotion. Marisa’s face was hidden behind the crooked arm of a rear-admiral, one of the navy representatives on the JGC. Other Council members would doubtless be aboard different aircraft to spread the risk, more or less immune to retaliatory missile attacks. And elsewhere across the skies of Europe, perhaps scores of aircraft would be keeping continental leaders aloft.

What would happen, I began to wonder, if the Americans had a miracle weapon ir own? A giant laser or ray that could make all the craft drop from the sky under the rapid sweep of its beam? Sending the entire upper echelon of the Alliance command crashing to earth? What then? It was a measure of the surreal atmosphere that I was able to contemplate such abstractions without finding them in any way fanciful.

I became aware that the conversations in the cabin had grown gradually more muted. There was a tinkling sound of metal on glass.

It was Sir Gruffydd, who had risen again and was tapping a teaspoon against an empty champagne flute.

“Officers and gentlemen and those of uncertain pedigree,” he began, pausing when the predictable spate of laughter ensued. “We are gathered here today to witness—no, damn it, I’m reading from the wrong script again.”

He tossed an imaginary sheet of paper aside to more laughter. It came easily enough, like a collective release of tension, and subsided just as swiftly.

The field marshal now studiously composed himself, his face taking on a solemn air.

“I want to tell you of the grave and pressing dangers we confront,” he began. “The United States and its subject dominions have been pursuing a vigorous campaign of territorial encroachment along our borders and spheres of influence. Protracted high-level negotiations have failed to resolve these issues—indeed, they’ve served only to buy more time to intensify their operations. All our appeals for moderation and plain talking have fallen on unreceptive ears.

He paused and motioned to Giselle, who promptly passed him his walking stick. He leaned on it with both hands but remained straight-backed, conveying a sense of someone physically burdened but not bowed by the weight of his responsibilities.

“The Americans have recently developed what they term ECO—Earth Cleaving Ordnance, better known to us as DPMs. These missiles, launched from submarines or high altitude bombers, can deliver nuclear charges at sufficient depth to underground sites to destroy them completely. They are instruments of an offensive war, intended to destroy our subterranean command-and-control complexes both at home and on the continent. Which is why, ladies and gentlemen, we’re presently up here and not down there.”

There was the merest flurry of laughter, another exhalation of relief. Sir Gruffydd conspicuously showed no humour.

“We pointed out to the Americans that these weapons are in breach of our most recent arms restriction treaty, which forbids development of any new nuclear devices. I have to tell you that they were implacable, claiming that the weapons were not new but merely a refinement of existing technology. This is not a view we were able to share. It is essential we take measures to protect ourselves.”

He took a TV control from Giselle and pointed it at the screens. The picture on the central one changed from an airfield to the fleet in the Atlantic we had been shown earlier.

Owain stared numbly at it. He was hollow, without volition. I lunged, determined to take control. He teetered, and then I couldn’t sense him at all.

I heard Sir Gruffydd explain that the fleet was entering Alliance waters, and that a second task force largely composed of munitions ships and landing craft was heading north-east from the Azores. The Americans plainly intended a first strike on Alliance centres of operation, followed by landings on the west coast of Ireland and a rapid drive across the country to take Dublin and Belfast.

None of the other screens gave evidence of this: they were showing footage of Alliance mobilisation.

I steadied myself, expecting at any moment a resurgence of Owain. It didn’t come.

I contemplated Ireland and Sir Gruffydd’s assertions. To me it didn’t make strategic sense. An American invasion force there would be faced with supply lines so long and subject to disruption that it defied military logic. I stole a look at Carl Legister and saw that he was gazing at the screen with stony incredulity. And he, as much as anyone else, would surely have been well placed in the preceding months to anticipate US intentions.

“This is not the only threat we face,” my uncle continued. “In several of our frontier territories offensive enemy operations are about to be undertaken. Action to neutralise these dangers will naturally be the responsibility of our continental forces. It is the one to the British Isles that we must counter. And for that, the most radical measures are necessary.”

Now the audience plainly sensed the approach to the payoff. My uncle looked more sober than ever.

“Omega,” he said, not quite savouring the word. “I think most of us have heard of it.”

There was no laughter this time: they were merely eager to know.

“Some of you may have thought it was legendary, the expression of sublime hope. Well, it exists, and we possess it. And because we have no alternative we intend to use it to avoid our own destruction.”

My uncle glanced at a clock on the wall: it was almost four pm. Though the portholes I could see that daylight was rapidly fading.

“Observe the main screen,” Sir Gruffydd said, using the control. “Watch carefully.”

The picture on the central screen was still of the US fleet, but those on the two that flanked it had changed. One, captioned W. Eire, showed the new coastal fortifications I’d seen earlier; the other an extensive military installation ringed with airfields and missile silos. It was captioned Omaha, Nebraska, USA.

My uncle had timed his oration to near perfection. You might have looked away for a few moments and missed it. The central screen showed a high-level view of the fleet as slender pale bullet shapes arrned a mottled iron-grey field. Abruptly they vanished, leaving for the merest flicker of time two seamless ocean edges with utter darkness between them that flashed into one another, colliding with such force that they raised an enormous crest of white water that split the ocean like a bloodless wound.

Within seconds one of the flanking screens showed a flurry of movement as the Omaha installation vanished beneath a watery turmoil in whose explosive turbulence were fleeting glimpses of what must have been capital ships—great vessels of tens of thousands of tonnes, hoisted and upended, thrust through netherspace, voided onto one of the nerve centres of the American military in the heartland of their territory.

There was no sound. This made it only more awesome, something that transcended nature itself. But it was easy, and indeed essential, to imagine it: an oceanic thundering, accompanied by a cacophony of crashing, mangled metal. Easy to be transported into grandiose realms of patriotic imagery, to envisage the storm god Thor repeatedly striking his enemies with a celestial hammer, relentless and irresistible. These were Owain’s sentiments, I thought fleetingly; not mine. But I couldn’t escape his sense of awful thrill: I felt it myself. Didn’t all of us who were drawn to military exploits secretly yearn for it in the most shadowy and tremulous chambers of the heart? The pain-free catharsis of an apocalypse?

No one moved or spoke. The Omaha maelstrom slowly began to abate, leaving a strewn mass of naval wreckage that sloughed off torrents of water. I could imagine it gushing down ventilation shafts and escape hatches, inundating everyone below.

It was hard to know where to look, and whether to keep looking. On the central screen the white crest had begun to resolve itself into a pair of tsunamis already racing away from one another, swamping the hapless ships that had escaped the earlier swallowing. If the excision had gone deep enough to take a section out of the ocean bed, surely other waves would follow in their wake as the crust readjusted. Or would the sea in the vicinity boil as magma welled out?

Only the screen showing the teardrop coastal emplacements remained unchanged, looking exquisitely tranquil in comparison. It dawned on me that they had indeed been purpose-built to withstand a sea-borne invasion, not of men and arms but rather of the great waves that my uncle and other senior commanders knew would be thrown up by the use of Omega on the ocean.

How much longer did they have, the personnel inside them, before the first wave struck? Minutes? Hours? It was unlikely they would have been told much more than to hold fast if something struck them from outside. Don’t poke your heads outside under any circumstances, until you receive further orders. There would probably be monitoring devices, sophisticated stress and pressure gauges to measure the effect of the impact, operatives secretly assigned to the tasks. As much useful information would be garnered as possible. As a basis for future provision.

The decision to deploy the weapon in the Atlantic had obviously been made many months before. What action had been taken to draw the American fleet into a suitable target area? It had probably required some ongoing provocation: overt submarine activity, zealous shadowing of American vessels, the bellicose rhetoric of which both sides had become masteld ver the past half century.

Stewardesses were moving around the cabin, filling glasses from bottles of vintage champagne. Henry Knowlton was actually slapping my uncle on the back as if he personally had created the weapon. The two of them stood at the back of the crowd exchanging incredulous grins like criminals who had pulled off a particularly spectacular robbery. And in a sense they had: it was the most audacious grab-and-smash in history.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” my uncle said above the continuing sounds of awe and naked enthusiasm. He waited until heads reluctantly began to turn.

“Please raise your glasses to Omega,” he said. “I hope and pray that it will be the salvation of us all!”

The cabin filled with the clinking of glasses and baritone reverberations of the toast. What happened next was confused and may owe as much to reconstruction as actual experience.

I thought I heard a dull metallic thud, and imagined that something had fallen over—my uncle’s stool, perhaps, but no, he was standing and it was still upright at his side. I became aware of a little commotion near the flight deck corridor, as if a scuffle had broken out. A thin mist was rising from the floor, carrying a faint menthol-like odour. I scrambled for my handkerchief and pressed it to my nose.

It was nepenthe.

FORTY-EIGHT

Instants later I was grabbed from behind and spun around. A dark figure with a bulging snout pushed some kind of leathery hood over the lower part of my face.

Rhys, wearing a respirator.

“Don’t take it off!” he warned, and I realised he had put a similar mask on me. He attached the straps and pushed me towards a corner of the cabin. I collided with a table, scattering bottles and champagne flutes, setting off a brief crescendo of shattering glass. Rhys thrust something into my hand before disappearing into the haze.

The mist was thickening everywhere, and already people were stumbling around, colliding with one another, falling. A small group surged towards the door, and there was a burst of firing. All were cut down.

Through the fog I heard more shouts and screams. Cradling the pistol Rhys had pressed into my hand, I glimpsed figures flailing around, some already on their knees, crawling, clutching at others’ legs or the necks of their own clothing. I was totally occupying Owain’s body, and felt that I should do something. But what? There was also the inescapable realisation that if I was utterly here, Owain might have become the person I was in my own world. Action and reaction. I had a flash of him walking out of Broadoaks with Tanya, though whether this was real or a willed figment I had no means of knowing.

Staccato bursts of firing continued for a while, diminishing as the movement of people in the cabin subsided. Most were ="0enmoving heaps on the floor. I could still hear voices, calling to one another, yelling queries and instructions. The Nimbus lurched wildly, throwing me out from under the table, its engine sound switching from a drone to something far more strident.

Already the vapour was beginning to clear. I saw that no one on the floor was actually unconscious: they lay there with their eyes open, immobilised, making little gagging sounds, helplessly imploring.

“Where is he?” I heard someone shout. A few figures still were darting about, though there was no more shooting or mass movement.

Someone grabbed me by the arm and hauled me to my feet.

“Well, major,” Carl Legister said from behind his mask, “the game’s not quite up yet—though you are extremely fortunate to survive this latest skirmish. If it weren’t for your brother I’d be inclined to shoot you.”

Rhys was over by our uncle’s upturned stool, a masked Marisa crouched beside him. Between them and us was a tangle of bodies covered in bloodstains and bits of broken glass. A victory party reduced to a human morass within minutes.

“Escape hatch,” Rhys said, indicating the open door in the truss arch. Inside it lay the body of Stradling. There was a pistol in his hand, but it looked as if he hadn’t had time to fire it before he was shot in the chest. Rhys dragged the body aside to reveal an oval hatch in the dimpled steel floor. “Bolted from below. We should have guessed.”

So Rhys and Legister were in collusion, both working to thwart my uncle. An alliance I would never have anticipated. Legister must have told Rhys about our father’s death some time before, probably trading on Rhys’s growing qualms about Omega.

I saw that Henry Knowlton was also sprawled lifelessly nearby, a bloody froth in his mouth. There was no sign of my uncle or Giselle. They must have fled to a lower deck before the nepenthe could incapacitate them. It looked as if Stradling had deliberately blocked the hatchway to facilitate their escape.

“We’ve little time,” Legister said, and he and Rhys promptly helped me across the cabin, paying scant heed to the bodies in our path. I trod on a thigh, an arm, the splayed blonde hair of a female naval officer whose face had the slackness of an opium addict’s. Below the engine noise I heard the cabin ventilation furiously working. Rhys lifted his respirator experimentally, but swiftly put it back in place.

Marisa was huddled in a corner beside the flight deck door, her eyes squeezed shut above her respirator. The two MPs, evidently loyal to Legister, were also masked. They were busy dragging limp bodies against the main corridor doorway, packing them together as if they were sandbags.

I was bundled down the aisle that led to the flight deck. The corpses of the original pilot and co-pilot had been dumped in a corner. Their splattered white flight helmets were now on the heads of two figures in RAF coveralls. The pilot was a young man, the co-ilot a woman whose face was hidden from me. Through the window I saw two Valkyries of the fighter escort flying lopsidedly abreast of us.

Rhys removed his respirator and started hauling parachute bundles out of hatches. I scrambled my own mask off, the air cool on my clammy cheeks but untainted with nepenthe. The cabin was under positive air pressure that had kept it unpolluted. Legister and Marisa also unmasked, Marisa cowering in a corner.

The woman in the co-pilot’s seat began talking into the radio, speaking English with a French accent, telling someone that the pilot had suffered a heart attack resulting in temporary loss of control. The situation was now stable but Field Marshal Mareddud had ordered a descent to five thousand feet as a precautionary measure. They were heading back towards the coast in case an emergency landing should prove necessary.

Though her voice didn’t sound quite right, I knew it was Giselle. The raucous reply to her radio message sounded questioning in tone. It appeared mollified when she added the information that Operation Niagara had been successfully executed and that they were going to resume radio silence as ordered.

I pushed my way forward past the two dead crewmen under the watchful eye of Carl Legister. He had his pistol trained on me.

“I didn’t know,” I said redundantly to Giselle.

She continued looking straight ahead.

“I thought you were loyal to him.”

“At the expense of bringing catastrophe to the entire planet? Everything has its limits.”

She spoke in a thick voice. The right side of her face was puffy from brow to cheekbone, already blackening.

“Sir Gruffydd did that?”

Her attempt at a smile was not successful. “He’s very useful with his stick. Quicker than you might imagine. He pushed his old friend in front of me so that he took the shot I had intended for him. And hacked me down.”

I was surprised that she could speak of it without emotion, given their long association. All the while she was scrutinising the instrument panel. The Nimbus was still descending, dropping down and down through the gathering darkness.

“Well, major,” Legister said to me. “What is your decision?”

He’d lowered his pistol. I realised I was still holding the one Rhys had given to me.

“You’re too late,” I said. “The weapon’s already been used.”

“What did you expect us to do?” Rhys interjected. “Nothing?”

“The Americans will already be retaliating.”

“Indeed,” said Legister. “Though whether the conflict escalates may depend on how successful we are here.”

“What do you mean?”

Legister looked impatient that he had to spell it out. “Sir Gruffydd represents the extreme of the warmongers among our chiefs of state. He has concentrated his supporters here in England over recent years. Many of them are aboard this aeroplane.”

“Are your men in control of it?”

“Only this forward section. But it will be sufficient for our purposes if we can hold out.”

“Really?” I said sceptically. “How? Are you going to crash the plane and kill everyone? That won’t stop the war. You heard what my uncle said. Other Omega attacks are being launched from continental sites.”

“Not yet they aren’t. Your uncle rather exaggerated on that score—exaggerated the extent of the enthusiasm on the European mainland for its indiscriminate use. Those in charge there do not share your uncle’s unbridled appetite for all-out war.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Put yourself in their position. The European landmass has suffered far more devastation than our islands. They’ve been in the front line for sixty years, seen their homelands reduced to cinders and rubble. They have every reason to be extremely cautious.”

Was this just another lie? I tried to recall the tenor of the Versailles meeting. There had been no sense that the participants had known anything about Omega. I said as much.

“Knowledge of its existence was severely restricted,” Legister admitted. “As you saw yourself on this very aeroplane. The translocation of the fleet is intended as a demonstration, a bargaining counter. This was the compromise arranged between the opposing factions in the high command. But, like all compromises, it’s neither fish nor fowl and will be unlikely to deter the Americans from wholesale retaliation. Unless we can supply them with stark evidence that there remains a significant tendency opposed to total war.”

Legister had a fondness for the orotund phrase and the circumlocution. He had known all about Omega and my uncle’s intentions when he interrogated me—presumably merely in order to gauge my loyalties or check the extent of my amnesia. It was absurd that we should even be discussing the potential outcome of its use on the flight deck of a hijacked aeroplane, surrounded by corpses and a croaking mass of nerve gas victims.

“Why should I believe any of this?” I said.

“We’re flying back to the main facility at Orford Nss,” Rhys told me. “The plane’s transmitting a homing signal tuned to the frequencies of a B-75 Stargrazer.”

A high-altitude bomber that could be armed, I knew, with nuclear missiles. This one, I was certain, would be carrying DPMs.

“They’ll never let you get near there,” I said. “They’ll shoot you down.”

“I don’t think so,” Rhys replied. “Consider the importance of the passengers on board. The chief of the JGC, no less! And the fact that Colonel Vigoroux can provide all the necessary security codes to ground control. We’ll tell them we need to make an emergency landing. There’s an airstrip close by.”

“And then what? Are we going to parachute out of here before the missile hits? Fly the plane into the building? It’s absurd!”

My incredulity was largely a function of my own private panic, a fear that I had trapped myself here while my true existence was stolen by a deranged upstart. There was something else, too—some significant exchange between Tanya and me that I simply couldn’t bring to mind in the frenetic circumstances of the present moment. The very effort made me giddy and disorientated.

“The parachutes are merely a precautionary measure,” Legister was saying. “At a prudent enough height we should survive any missile impact on the ground. You will recall that the earth penetrating devices are designed to focus their destructive power downwards rather than upwards. If we are lucky enough we’ll be able to spirit ourselves away, find a soft landing somewhere.”

It sounded ridiculously optimistic, though it was possible that, even now, he wasn’t telling me the whole story. Perhaps there were prior arrangements—a friendly ship waiting in the North Sea or an airfield specially secured for the purpose.

“And if not?” I asked.

Legister gave the impression that the question was not even worth considering.

Giselle had started to talk to ground control at the Ness. We couldn’t be more than minutes away. In the cabin beyond the two MPs remained on guard, one of them with his weapon trained on the bulkhead hatch, the other on the still-twitching bodies piled at the door to the main corridor.

Including myself, there were seven of us. Rhys looked fervent, Marisa merely wide-eyed with fright. Legister had probably compelled to her help him, and she wouldn’t have been able to refuse him. What she’d most wanted was distraction and a semblance of a normal life. She would never have it now.

“Thank you for saving me,” I said to Rhys in Welsh.

“What are brothers for?” he replied in the same tongue. “Who else do I have, Owain, but you?”

This was said with emotion but without self-pity. I squeezed his arm, something I was certain his real brother would never have done.

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” I said in English to Legister. “Why did you let it come to this in the first place? If you knew what was going to happen, wouldn’t it have been easier to have my uncle done away with in the first place? Or did you try to poison him and fail?”

Legister gave me a smile of withering condescension.

“My dear major,” he said softly, “that would have defeated an important objective of this entire enterprise. It still remained necessary to show the Americans the extent of the damage we can inflict on them. A suitable demonstration of our capabilities. One cannot negotiate from a position of perceived weakness: there would be nothing to negotiate except the extent of one’s capitulation.”

Absurd that I should ever have thought otherwise, his tone conveyed. And he was right: it was absurd. Absurd to imagine that even those who balked at full-scale war in this world had anything remotely resembling pacifist tendencies. It was merely a question of the degree of armed force that needed to be applied to achieve one’s strategic aims. Even for so-called politicians, diplomatic initiatives were the outcome rather than the determinant of military considerations. It was an attitude bred in the marrow of everyone in high office.

Horrified at what I was about to do, I raised the pistol and pointed it at the side of Giselle’s head.

“What if I ended it now?” I said.

Legister didn’t even blink: he merely radiated scorn.

I pulled the gun back and stuck the barrel into my mouth, gagging with terror. Squeezing my eyes shut, I pressed the trigger, jerked with the emphatic bolt action.

Nothing. Just the dull resonance of metal on metal.

The pistol wasn’t armed. How stupid of me to think they’d assume my conversion to their cause.

I opened my eyes. For an instant I was certain I had soiled myself, but somehow I had imagined to avoid this indignity. My hands were quivering as I pulled the pistol from my mouth and let it fall to the floor.

“I think,” Legister said with a measured air of exasperation, “the situation demands more than futile theatrics.”

There was the sound of gunfire. It came from outside, in the main corridor.

Legister and Rhys had to climb over the mound of parachute bundles in the aisle to get into the cabin. Marisa was holding a pistol, but she went into a quivering paroxysm of fear that made me embrace her protectively from behind. Immediately she began to struggle, forcing me to grab her hand to prevent her from turning the gun on me.

The plane lurched into a steeper dive. I managed to keep us upright, still restraining Marisa with one arm around her waist while the other tussled for possession of her firearm. It felt like we were engaged in some bizarre military dance.

Behind me Giselle was talking to a flight controller on the ground, demanding clearance for an emergency landing.

Legister, Rhys and the two MPs had arranged themselves around the cabin, huddling behind nepenthe victims, their weapons aimed at the door. The engine pitch began dropping while the voice traffic from the ground grew more fierce and urgent. There was a stunning bang that sent me reeling.

FORTY-NINE

I landed with Marisa on top of me. She lay limp, her hair in my face. I tried to push her up, but she rolled off me. I heard automatic fire, this time inside the cabin. Marisa’s eyes were closed, her neck slick and hot in my hand. It was blood.

There was a gash on the right side of her neck, shrapnel embedded there. It had severed the carotid artery, which was still weakly pulsing blood.

The air stank of scorched hair and plastic explosive. I tried to shake Marisa awake, but her eyes rolled under her lids and her body sagged. She was gone.

“We’re on target,” Giselle shouted breathlessly at me over the urgent radio noise from the ground. “Almost there. You must hold them!”

I recovered Marisa’s pistol and, because I knew there was nothing for it, hauled her upright, wedging her in the doorway, piling the parachute packs around her into a makeshift wall.

Several of my uncle’s security detachment were already inside the cabin. Some were already heaving dead bodies aside. At first I thought that everyone had been killed, but Rhys was hauled to his feet. Though bloodstained and groggy, he didn’t look seriously injured.

My uncle came through the mangled doorway, also toting a pistol, looking briskly impatient. He motioned to the guards to drag Rhys over and turned towards me.

“Step aside, Owain.”

I was cowering behind Marisa’s corpse and the parachute bundles. Rhys’s head lolled, his eyes barely open. Behind me ground control was sending strident messages but neither Giselle nor the pilot was answering. I didn’t know the pilot; he looked far too young to have been given such an important duty.

“Step aside,” my uncle said again.

He was keeping his distance but looked consumed with a violent urgency. It felt despicable to be hiding behind the corpse of an innocent woman whom Owain had misused; but there was nothing else I could do.

“I don’t believe you’re any part of this, my boy. We need to end it now.”

I didn’t say anything. My uncle pressed the barrel of his pistol against Rhys’s temple.

“It’s in your hands.”

Bizarrely, in that moment everything slid to a halt, all movement and noise dwindling, no more hectic darting and jostling, no more gunfire or engine roar or relentless radio squawk. Even the smell of cordite was gone, along with the sense of defilement of my bloodied hands and the frantic thumping of my heart. Stillness and silence descended for what must have been the merest of instants, yet it was enough to absorb the implacable determination in my uncle’s face. He would have his way no matter what.

“En plein dans le mille!” Giselle said behind me.

I heard the shot, glimpsed Rhys’s head recoil, even as I thrust my gun-hand out and fired two, three, four shots at my uncle’s head.

The parachute packs began collapsing on top of me. There was more gunfire, and I thought I’d been hit, but no pain came. The flight deck door was slammed shut, bolted.

Giselle was holding a compact revolver. She let it drop as I scrambled to my feet. A burgundy stain was spreading under her left collarbone.

Gently I drew her to me. The pilot was looking around. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen.

“Maman?” he said.

She shook her head at him, gently but without comfort. Her gaze went to the window.

“Say goodbye, Owain,” she said softly in English.

Directly below us a seething ball of fire was billowing up from the ground. In the seconds before it consumed us I was already in mental flight back to Broadoaks. The green Scenic was standing in the car park near to Tanya’s Yaris. I heard Tanya say: “Are we going to let them see him?” The tall woman with the five children appeared. I experienced a jolt of recognition even as the two youngest girls broke from the others and began running towards us, shouting: “Mum! Dad!”

FIFTY

The hardest task for the historian, my father liked to assert, is to consider the evidence without prejudice. We all have prior agendas and tend to find what we’re looking for while ignoring anything contrary to our expectations. So history, because it is a human pursuit, is always partial and prejudiced no less than our own interior lives: both are just a sum of contingent memories.

“You still with me?” Tanya asked.

“My father,” I said. “I was remembering something he used to say.”

“Oh?”

“Words. For him everything in the end had to be reduced to them.”

“Well,” she said on reflection, “it was his trade.”

“His life. He could always express things pithily but he found it harder to act. To do the ordinary things that make us human.”

She was sitting in the passenger seat of the Yaris while I drove; or rather while we waited at a red light.

“I’d say his illness was having the opposite effect.”

I understood what she meant. The last couple of times we had visited him he was more emotional, prone to fits of laughter or bouts of tears. He would grin or shake his head if either of us addressed him with a question he considered too problematical. He still erratically recognised both of us, though sometimes he would talk as if we were his siblings or friends from his youth. All this was normal, Dr Pearce had assured us, a typical pattern of decline.

“I think he may actually be happier,” Tanya said.

“You might be right,” I admitted. “He’s lost his suit of mental armour. It’s made him lighter on his feet.”

The lights changed and we drove on. We were returning from a lunch in Kingston to celebrate Geoff’s eldest children’s birthdays. They fell within a week of one another, and it was an opportunity to get together. We had made it an afternoon gathering in a child-friendly restaurant close to where Geoff lived. His wife, Candida, was a solicitor. They had known one another since childhood and had married the year after Tanya and I wed. Three children, all under seven: James, Charlotte, and Robin. We were godparents to Charlie, as she liked to be called, and frequent visitors to one another’s houses. Geoff had always remained one of our closest friends. They had both been immensely supportive in the difficult aftermath of my accident. For a while everyone was worried that I might have suffered some permanent form of brain damage.

“Hang a left,” Tanya said.

I managed to indicate and turn at the last moment.

“Sorry,” I told her. “Daydreaming.”

“As long as that’s all it was.”

Her tone was gently questioning. She liked to check that I wasn’t off with the fairies, by which she meant back in Owain’s world.

“Honest, guv,” I assured her. “It’s not on my vacation list any more.”

We didn’t talk about it much these days. It was over, done with. Everyone there was dead, the entire world extinguished for all I knew. I had flashed from the final explosion to find myself already back in the house that I finally knew was my home. The same house which we were now approaching.

“I gather Rachel nearly thumped Adrian,” Tanya remarked.

They had also been at the party, Rachel a week overdue and desperate for a distraction. She had taken umbrage when Adrian was overtly attentive to one of the waitresses.

“She dumped a trifle in his lap,” I told her.

“Really?”

Tanya hadn’t seen it because she had taken the children into the garden when their party packs proved to contain plastic recorders that were much more fun when their mouthpieces were removed so that they could be used as blowpipes for raisins.

“You didn’t hear Rees laughing, telling him she’d creamed his jeans? He had jelly coming out of his nose. Keisha had to stop him colouring in all the pictures in the children’s party packs. It was like a pantomime.”

“Serves him right. He’s a bloody fool sometimes.”

She meant Adrian. “He wants the baby.”

“And what about Rachel?”

Both Tanya and Keisha had been very touchy-feely with her, gently kneading her bulge, delighting in any hint of movement.

I had no answer for this, though I hoped as she did that there would be a happy ending. Adrian was gung-ho for the new series, and it was as much as I could do to restrain him. At present I was only going into the studios two days a week and spending the rest of the time ostensibly doing background research at home. This actually comprised a little internet surfing and a slow progression through my father’s entire corpus. I had decided it was time I thoroughly acquainted myself with his achievements while he was still with us.

I parked the car in the driveway. A gusty wind assailed us as we climbed out, the daffodils in the flowerbeds swaying. Tanya remarked that while jelly was always a staple at children’s parties she knew no actual child who ever ate it.

“Rees,” I said. “He had at least two helpings. Inhaled most of it, I think.”

“He looked like he was enjoying himself.”

“In his element. We want to use him again when the new series gets up and running. I hope Keisha sticks with it.”

“Fingers crossed.”

Tanya unlocked the front door. Moments later the Scenic arrived. Geoff helped Sarah and Beth out of the back. The girls had insisted on travelling with Geoff and Candida’s three.

“I’ll get the kettle on,” Tanya said to Geoff.

“I think we’re going to pass on tea,” he replied. “We need to get our lot home. They’re all high on sugar and E numbers.”

James had his face pressed to the window, making disgusting faces at the girls, who were reciprocating. Candida sat calmly in the driver’s seat, a benevolent smile on her face, serenely tolerant. She and Geoff had looked after Sarah and Beth when I came out of hospital. Tanya had even arranged a temporary placement in a local school while I was recuperating. My behaviour had been too disturbing for them—particularly after my display in the park, when I had simultaneously been raving while failing to recognise them as my own.

Abruptly it began to rain. We said our goodbyes. I shepherded the girls inside while Tanya exchanged final words with Candida.

“Dad,” Beth said to me the instant we crossed the threshold, “Sarah said I’m fat.”

“No, I didn’t,” replied her sister. “I said that if you eat Monster Munch and chocolate sandwiches all day you’d be like Humpty Dumpty.”

Beth thought about this. Pointedly she said: “Anyway, I’d rather be fat than skinny.”

Sarah gave her a look of lofty disdain that implied she wasn’t going to descend to swapping insults.

“I’d hate to have stick legs,” Beth persisted.

“Better than having a pot belly.”

“See?” Beth said to me as though vindicated.

“Enough,” I told them firmly. “Truce, otherwise there’ll be no stories tonight. Neither of you are fat or skinny, so stop being silly.”

“That’s a rhyme,” Beth said.

“I hope you two weren’t behaving like this in the car on the way back.”

I led them straight up the stairs, ignoring their pleas for a half an hour’s television, and started running a bath.

While it was filling, they sneaked off. I wandered into Tanya’s study, where framed photographs of all of us were in clear evidence. It was Geoff who had suggested that I must have blanked them out because they didn’t fit in with my fantasy world. We hadn’t told him anywhere near the full details of it, but he saw it as a clear case of displacement and what he called “compensatory abstraction”. It was an expression worthy of my father.

Tanya’s desk held neat stacks of books, magazines and papers. She was gathering material for a new book, as yet untitled, though she described it as “a sceptic’s guide to para-science”. Apparently I had inspired her to it after my flirtation with another realm of experience.

It was Tanya who had stimulated my father’s interest in science and pointed him towards the books and periodicals he needed for his research. She had never been daunted by him, holding her own at the many dinner-table conversations we had over the years when we visited him.

The girls were now playing peaceably in their bedroom. The one with the heart-shaped mirror on the back of the door, though the walls were coral pink rather than amethyst. Tanya had kept it locked because of my obvious agitation whenever she mentioned the girls. I simply refused to acknowledge any evidence of their presence.

From the window I saw the Scenic finally drive away, Tanya waving after it. A sense of vast tranquil relief suffused me. It had been doing so at regular intervals since my recovery. As I stepped back from the window something went snap under my foot.

“Dad,” Sarah said with weary fatalism. “You just killed Mr Saucepan Man.”

I picked up a broken Lego figure. As usual, pieces were scattered all over the floor around a bizarre tree-like assemblage that they were building.

“Bath-time,” I told them. “Last one in gets a raspberry on the belly.”

They squeaked and scampered off across the landing.

I tidied the pieces into one of their boxes and shouted to them to put their cast-off clothes in the laundry basket and go easy on the bubble bath.

“Everything all right up there?” Tanya called from the hallway.

“I’m a toy killer,” I called back.

At least the girls were as I remembered them,, even though it was Sarah with an h and Beth, as in Elizabeth. Why all the false memories? Particularly of Lyneth. She had indeed come to London to live with me but we had parted after a year when I finally admitted I wanted to be with Tanya. Prior to that I had got Lyneth pregnant, but she lost the baby and was left infertile as a result. She had gone to Australia to live and I’d had no contact with her since. I went to visit Tanya in California and persuaded her to come home with me. As soon as she became pregnant with Sarah, we’d married. Somehow I had muddled their stories, perhaps because I felt I had ruined Lyneth’s life.

That would be the conventional psychological explanation, at least; but it begged many questions. Why would I create such a bleak world as Owain’s as an expression of guilt? Easier to believe that Owain was real, that his invasive presence had skewed my memories. That was how I’d rationalised it at first. But I didn’t think so now.

There was another possibility. Perhaps the Omega device had opened links between a sequence of alternative worlds. As I had occupied Owain, so another counterpart from yet another time line could have manifested himself in me, bringing his own history, which had become confused and conflated with my own. Just as Owain had never directly sensed me, so I would have remained unaware of this other version of myself: but I would have experienced his influence.

I knew I would never know for sure, though Owain remained as real to me as ever. Alive or dead, he would never be a mere figment. I couldn’t explain to anyone how intensely I had lived in his world. My oscillation between existences must have been triggered by the backflash in Regent Street that had linked us, opening up complementary realities until the link was severed with Owain’s death. And the death of everyone instrumental in his story.

I checked that the girls were behaving themselves in the bath before going downstairs. I constantly had to resist the urge to make a fuss of them, to marvel at my sheer good fortune in their existence.

On the mantelpiece in the dining room was our wedding photograph, Tanya looking only slightly plump and absolutely gorgeous. Geoff had been best man. He came home from California the same time as Tanya, accepting his defeat with infinite grace and good humour.

“Tea’s up,” Tanya called from the kitchen.

I started thinking of Marisa, Owain and his uncle, but also, and above all, of my false idea of Lyneth and the girls. Perhaps in another reality things had panned out in just the way I had believed. Another me had married another Lyneth and had children. Who could say it wasn’t possible? Occasionally I would still wake in the depths of the night in terror at the notion that in making my final escape from Owain I had returned not quite to my starting point but to another place, had been shuffled along the infinite variety of potential worlds to find myself here. Then I would get up and go into the girls’ bedroom and just stand in the doorway, watching them sleeping until my faith in the true order of things was restored.

Sometimes I think that memory and belief are no more than feelings. My father, in his final writings, speculated that our certainties, our sense of consciousness even, arose out of a swirl of mental imponderables like the froth of the manifest world on an unfathomable quantum ocean. In which case, our mutual lives are based on a necessary consensus rather than any bedrock of reality. We live by articles of faith rather than reason.

In the kitchen Tanya was holding the ultimate existential comforter: a mug of tea. She had on jeans and a peach-coloured mohair roll-neck. I hugged her from behind, burrowing my face into the crook of the neck, inhaling her deeply until she wriggled and squirmed away.

“What was that for?” she asked with amusement.

“Just fancied a sniff,” I said.

I ducked her tea towel swipe and began pirouetting around her, up on my toes, prancing about like an idiot, like an angel dancing on the head of a pin.