“We were field-testing it?”
After a moment Rhys nodded slowly. “Are you telling me you still don’t remember?”
Owain was too incredulous to be angry. He was being asked to deny the validity of his own experience, to bolt on a memory and submit himself to a fantastical truth that carried no more weight of evidence than his private certainties. And who better to demand this leap of faith than his own brother?
“The larger the area taken out,” Rhys was telling him, “the deeper the cut, so you have to be prudent.” He gave a conspiratorial chuckle. “We thought of suggesting that the code for activation should be Time for TEE’ but it was decided that our continental cousins wouldn’t get the joke.”
You smug provincial bastard, Owain thought.
“We?”
“Well, the team who developed it. A mongrel bunch, but a lot of them Brits. Not surprising, given that the whole thing evolved here.”
Brits. That smarmy, good-or-nothing appellation. Was Rhys doing it deliberately to enrage him?
He forced himself to drink some water. “And you were in the thick of it?”
Rhys smoothed out the menu card and set it aside.
“More an administrator than a boffin,” he said. “But, yes, I played my part.”
To Owain he now looked bloated with his own fatuous sense of self-importance. Deluded beyond measure.
“A phenomenal amount of power must be needed.”
“You don’t know the half of it. And it isn’t like shutting a door. What goes out must come in again.”
“Meaning?”
“Backflash. Like the exhaust from an engine. Action and reaction. You take the topography out, you have to accommodate it somewhere else, otherwise it’s going to coming squirting out where you least want it. Like a big fart at a formal dinner.”
His laugh invited Owain to do the same. Owain remained stony-faced.
“That proved the biggest problem,” Rhys went on. “Finding a way of channelling it. Apart from anything else, uncontrolled emissions would have made it too obvious to everyone else what we have.”
Their main courses arrived, along with a fresh bottle of wine for Rhys. Owain was almost tempted to risk a glass himself, or ask the waiter for a vodka. It was years since he’d had one. But it was vital he remained clear-headed.
“So,” he said very carefully, taking the sprig of parsley off his creamed potatoes, “was our mission successful?”
“The results were most impressive. Of course we knew they would be. We’d already done our own domestic test-runs. But nothing like seeing its effect at a distance, under real combat conditions. Very convenient, too, that almost no one survived.”
Owain looked up. “We were all meant to die?”
“It wasn’t planned that way. But you’d be so close to the enfolding zone we had no means of predicting the outcome. There are those who take the view that it might have been better if none of you came back. From their perspective, the fewer people who know about it, the better. Wouldn’t want loose tongues flapping, would we?”
Rhys was speaking in a sober fashion, but the very fluency of his words made Owain’s rage boil up again. Only someone who had never experienced battle could discuss death so abstractly. To people like Rhys soldiers’ lives had only a tactical or strategic value: they had no human dimension.
">Their ize="3">I willed him to remain calm. His emotions were more volatile than ever.
“None of this explains what happened to me in Regent Street,” he said.
His brother forked a diminutive kidney into his mouth, chewed, swallowed, swabbed.
“That,” he said at last, “is a little more difficult. Or perhaps I should say speculative.” He looked out the window, down into the square. Presently he said, “Remember the old song ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’?”
Owain was still simmering. I made a renewed effort to impose a regular, calming rhythm on his breathing.
“In and out the City Road,” Rhys sang in a low voice. “In and out of the Eagle.”
Once more he laughed. Owain saw that he was staring at the gilded monument at the centre of the Square.
“It’s an emergency exit, of course. For all the staff under Whitehall and the old Parliament buildings. One of several. Do you know how far the underground complex stretches?”
Owain had a renewed urge to throttle him.
“It’s pretty extensive,” he managed to say.
“They’re always adding to it. Perhaps one day it’ll be big enough to house the entire surviving population. Our enemies might have the same idea. We’ll all be troglodytes, still lobbing everything in our arsenals at one another, burrowing deeper and deeper holes into the earth to protect ourselves.”
He found the notion amusing. Owain was suddenly concerned that he was losing coherence.
“What point are you making?”
His brother looked blearily at him. “There was an R&D section. Under Soho. One of the places where some early work was done on a prototype of the device. A kind of pilot plant, if you like.” He smiled to himself. “In those days I don’t suppose anyone realised how potentially dangerous it might be, otherwise they wouldn’t have sited it so close to the heart of things. Must never put all the most important people at risk, must we?”
He took another mouthful of wine, appeared to lose himself in his own thoughts.
“So?” Owain prompted.
Rhys blinked and regained focus. “Problems with backflash started to emerge. Blow-outs. At the time we didn’t know how to control them. In the confined space they were caught up in a kind of geographical Moebius loop, splurges of displaced topography squirting out every time a prototype was used, no matter where they originated from. They’re all linked, you see, routed through AEGIS.”
“AEGIS is controlling them?”
Rhys shook his head emphatically. “It’s just the railway lines. Don’t believe that stuff about it being the network controller. Convenient smokescreen. Believe me, it’s no more than an electronic idiot savant.”
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.”