Omega

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.