Omega

He put my hand between his own, grasping it firmly, his eyes becoming a little glazed. A man of sentiment, despite his status. Protective of family members.

“I was worried we might have lost you,” he said. “A bad business, Owen. A bad business, indeed.”

He pronounced the name O-wine—the Welsh way, I realised. It was the language he was speaking. Presumably it would be written Owain. Yet I, born in Swansea but raised both there and in Oxford, had never learned it.

“Second time around,” I heard myself say, also in Welsh. “Someone up there must like me.”

The field marshal released my hand. “It’s no joking matter, my boy.”

I looked at him through Owain’s eyes with a certain degree of awe: Sir Gruffydd Maredudd, the commander-in-chief of the Alliance armed forces in the United Kingdom and head of the Joint Governing Council, the body that had superseded a defunct Parliament in the conduct of the nation’s affairs. At the same time I knew that in my own life I had never had an uncle by that name, let alone an ennobled senior military commander.

“What exactly was it?” Owain asked. “A missile?”

“What do you remember?”

Owain thought about it. His mind was empty.

“Take your time,” his uncle said firmly. “Tell me everything you remember.”

He made a renewed effort to recall the details. Slowly they began to come.

He had just flown back from a three-week information-gathering mission to South America. His clearest memory was of the snow-camouflaged Bentley that had been waiting for him at Northolt, its driver a talkative Jamaican émigré called Maurice who had fled the American occupation of the Caribbean in the late ’fifties. Cheerful and patriotic, he had served in the old Royal Navy for twenty years. He lived in the Docklands and was looking forward to a family gathering at Christmas.

There was little traffic in central London apart from the usual convoys and patrols. At Oxford Circus an enterprising Sikh trader was selling straggly Christmas trees to the checkpoint guards. Regent Street itself was closed to civilian vehicles, but staff cars were invariably allowed the benefit of the shortcut.

As the barrier was raised for them, Maurice asked Owain if he could pull over and buy a tree. Owain had no objections: he saw an opportunity to stretch his legs after twelve hours of being cooped in various forms of transport.

They drove through and parked in the middle of the empty road. Taking his briefcase, Owain wandered down the street while Maurice returned to the checkpoint to barter with the trader.

Around Owain there was nothing but silence and abandonment. He was surrounded by the shells of once-thriving commercial outlets. On the western side they had been emptied and bricked-up; on the eastern side only reduced façades remained like the half-ruined outer keep of a castle. The entire area of Soho beyond had long been off-limits to civilians, sealed off and plastered with biohazard signs after an anthrax attack thirty years before. His mother had brought him here as a six-year-old to see the Christmas lights and watch a special broadcast from the troops in Persia, where his father was serving. He’d searched the assembled faces in vain for a glimpse of him.

An almost subliminal hum was coming from somewhere. It grew in volume, like the approach of an insect.

“Major!”

He turned and saw Maurice hurrying back to the car, triumphantly flourishing a stunted and bedraggled tree. The hum rose in volume and frequency, ceasing an instant before a flood of white light surged through the gaping windows and balconies of the façade, swamping everything and sending him reeling.

“It was like a massive flare,” he told his uncle. “There was no noise.”

It felt like a confession, an admission of guilt.

“What possessed you to go down there in the first place?”

He thought that he’d already explained it. “I was thinking about mother.”

The field marshal gave a grunt of consideration and undisguised sadness. Owain’s mother had died with other family members when the water supply at their estate in Brecon was contaminated with cholera. Easter 1984. Owain and his brother Rhys only escaped because they were still in boarding school in Aberystwyth. It turned out that the well on the estate had been infected with chlorine-resistant bacteria by religious disarmamentarians who were subsequently shot for their pains.

Their father was serving overseas at the time, while his uncle, newly promoted, had been summoned to London because the Soviets had launched a new offensive in the east. To minimise the risk of infection, he and Rhys were only allowed to view the bodies from behind a glass screen before they were cremated. Now their father too was long gone, leaving just the three of them.

“The driver,” Owain said. “Is he dead?”

Sir Gruffydd shook his head. “Knocked over. Shaken up like you.”

“It came out of Soho,” he said.

“Derelict ground, fortunately.”

“What was it?”