“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.
Now it was Owain who lurched up from the table. His head began to fill up with a siren sound. It was a second before he recognised it as the wail of an air-raid alarm.
Swiftly he moved through the dining area towards the corridor. He half hoped to find Rhys sprawled over a sink or slumped in a cubicle. He’d haul him out as unceremoniously as possible.
But the line of washbasins was unattended. Owain pushed each cubicle door open with his foot. All proved to be empty. He looked around, thinking that Rhys must be lurking in some corner. But there was no sign of him.
He went back out into the corridor. The siren’s wail sounded more urgent. In the dining area people were still sitting at their tables, eating and talking. He could scarcely credit it. Did they think themselves so privileged here that they were immune to the fall of a bomb or the trajectory of a missile? Did they imagine they could survive like superhumans?
He headed for the stairs, certain that Rhys must have fled for safety the instant the alarm began. He had always been one for protecting himself. It was easy to imagine him scampering away into the darkness, consumed with terror.
Outside the siren noise was louder, though no one was panicking. It was months since the last air-raid warning and perhaps people thought there was no longer any danger. The more fool them.
He thought of seeking sanctuary via the Eagle monument, of burying himself in the Whitehall complex. Given his status, he was confident there would be no problem in gaining emergency admission. But no: he would spend the night with the ordinary citizenry, shelter with the anonymous masses.
He sprinted across the street, heading towards the Underground station. The gate at the entrance was already unlocked. He scrambled down the stairs.
Bomb damage had brought about the collapse of the tube system when he was a child, but many stations were still used as air-raid shelters. He swiped his ID card through a slot in one of the turnstiles and pushed through. Pale blue bulkhead lights provided a minimal illumination as he descended, making everything look spectral.
The platforms were deserted: he was the first one in. He paused to recover his breath.
Pallets and sleeping bags were strewn everywhere. Here he would be safe. Here even the ghost of Major van Oost wouldn’t be able to find him. Soon others would come, but for the moment he had the pick of the bedding. He found a dry mattress and dragged an eiderdown across himself, huddling up like a child—excited, relieved and, suddenly, fill/p> an overwhelming weariness.
He could no longer hear the siren, only the sound of water dripping further down the tunnel. He rested his head on the mattress. The solitude and tranquillity accentuated his feelings of escape, of refuge from everyone and everything that oppressed him. It felt like bliss.
A phone was ringing.
Tanya rose from the table. I had an immediate sense of just having left Owain, yet I was sitting in the dining room, the remains of my main course in front of me. The other two place settings at the table were unoccupied.
I struggled to adjust to the abrupt shift in focus. It was all the more disorientating for its seamlessness.
I had a vague recollection of sitting down to dinner, of making conversation with Tanya, though I had no idea what we might have talked about. Owain’s experiences were far more vivid, especially van Oost’s manifestation. A dead man whom Owain plainly imagined was still alive. A hallucination, doubtless like the one of Vassall clinging to the Spectre in the NGZ.
Tanya reappeared, holding the handset. “It’s Rees.”
This was all I needed. Tanya looked a little concerned, and I wondered how I could have been sitting here behaving more or less normally while simultaneously occupying Owain.
“Speak to him, Owen.”
I took the handset from her. “Rees?”
“Sorry.”
I had to focus resolutely on the present moment. “What’s happened?”
“I’m not going to make it.”
“Where are you?”
“Couldn’t programme the video.”
It took me a few seconds to process this. His ancient VCR. He was always having problems with it. It might absorb his whole attention for hours.
“Is everything all right?” I asked gingerly.
“It’s sorted now.”
“I thought you were bringing someone.”
“She had to work.”
He didn’t elaborate. There was an edgy, distracted tone to his voice.