Omega

Rhys leaned across the table, red-faced, intense, all pretence of detachment gone now. “Anyway, the site was shut down, sealed off from the rest of the complex. But the loop’s still there. It’s almost run down but we still get the occasional belches. Aftershocks, if you like. We send the dispersal teams in straight afterwards to clear up the place. Have to get the stuff away to stop it piling up. When you were in the vicinity, there wasn’t anything scheduled. That’s why the road was open. Our best thinking is that somehow your very presence actually triggered a backflash.”

Owain had understood very little of this. His brother’s growing intensity was in inverse proportion to his lucidity.

“You were on the very edge of the excision on the front,” he said. “We think that somehow you were still carrying a residual charge of what I can best describe as spatial entropy. A bit like a bare live wire, or one end of a bar magnet. Bring it up close to another pole, and—whammo!”

An insane grin was on Rhys’s face now. As if he had just delivered a message of apocalyptic good cheer.

“Whatever happened, you must have discharged yourself. We know you returned there, and that nothing happened the second time. You’re safe now. You don’t know how lucky you are.”

He lolloped more wine into his glass. Slurped half of it down.

“What happened to my driver?” Owain asked. “Did you get rid of him?”

Rhys tried to pretend puzzlement; then relented.

“Wasn’t he transferred overseas?”

“That’s the official story. What’s the truth?”

“I don’t understand. Are you asking me if he was a security risk? If so, the answer’s no. He just saw a flash. From his point of view it was just an old incendiary going off. No reason to suspect otherwise.”

“So why get rid of him?”

“Personnel are transferred all the time. There’s nothing unusual in that.”

“Isn’t there? He was happy in London. He didn’t say anything about wanting a transfer. Why are you lying to me, Rhys?”

Rhys looked around. Owain’s voice had been rsed. A few heads had turned in their direction. Rhys waited until they resumed their own conversations.

“Owain,” he said quietly, “I’m trying to help you. We couldn’t be sure what you might remember after the backflash. Or what you might say. Safer to get people out of the way. They could be tainted by knowledge you might inadvertently share with them.”

“Really?” Owain said, insulted at the notion.

“There are holes in your memory. False echoes. We’ve been trying to give you leeway, let you come to your senses, but it can’t go on indefinitely.”

Owain couldn’t contain his anger any longer. “There’s only one person at this table who’s fantasising! What sort of game is this, Rhys? What do you really want? “

Again he’d raised his voice. I could do nothing to calm him. We were beginning to attract dedicated attention.

“You’ll have to excuse me for a few minutes,” Rhys said, rising from his seat and dropping his napkin on it. He veered between tables before disappearing down a corridor signposted to the men’s room.

The pulse at Owain’s temple was racing. A couple of people were still peering in his direction. He stared them down. His mind was a swirl of outrage and incredulity.

The sheer preposterousness of it all astounded him. Yet Rhys did have inside knowledge and had been able to answer Owain’s objections—at least in the sense of maintaining a self-consistent story. So self-consistent that it smacked of the most intricate fabrication. Or perhaps he truly believed it. Perhaps it was a paranoid delusion, designed to bolster his own sense of status.

I was fascinated, quite in thrall to his turbulent feelings and the frantic thoughts they engendered. Rhys had been in Geneva. Maybe it had been on recuperative leave. Maybe he’d cracked up again, had spent his time ferreting out facts that he could fit into his fantasy. And clever that he’d made the idea of an Omega weapon central to it. Designing a tale that he hoped would have maximum allure for its intended audience. Everything made sense except for the fact that it beggared belief. But was it just madness or did he have a more calculated aim?

He saw Rhys’s approaching reflection in the windowpane as he returned to the table. Except that it wasn’t Rhys at all.

“Where were you?” van Oost said angrily. “Why are you here?”

The top of his naked head was a mass of gore. Blood fringed it like a ragged inverted crown. He wore no snowsuit but rather a winter-camouflage uniform that was caked with mud. He reeked of cordite and burnt flesh.

“We’re still waiting,” the major said, putting his blackened hands palms-down on the table, fingers splayed. “When are you coming?”

His grimy blood-splattered face was filled with the fierceness of his demand, a dead man’s summons that made Owain go rigid.

“When are you coming?” he repeated with even greater urgency, and it was not clear whether he was demanding rescue or insisting that Owain share his fate.