Omega

“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.”