In fact he’d spent most of the tour in the company of a Portuguese multilinguist called Carmela, a swarthy beauty who’d been sent along as his subordinate. She’d travelled practically everywhere with him, sitting in as a secretary-cum-translator on all his discussions. They’d been billeted next door to one another and he’d had the impression she would have made herself available if he’d desired. But he’d never risked compromising himself.
“What is it?” Marisa said. “You are smiling.”
“Nothing.”
But he felt virtuous, like a faithful husband.
His weariness descended again as Marisa poured out the coffees and talked of the wolfhounds. They usually met in St James’s Park when she was out walking the dogs. No doubt Legister had her shadowed for security reasons. No doubt he knew of their liaison. This hadn’t concerned him unduly while they met in public places. But now she was here, in his private domain.
He took his coffee from her, holding it to his nose, inhaling its fragrance. A sip, its delicious sugared warmth spreading through him.
“Look at you,” Marisa said. “You are a mess.”
She said it affectionately. I would have smiled and even winked at her; but not Owain.
“It must be late,” he remarked.
“Soon I will go, and you can sleep.”
“I should ride home with you. In case you’re stopped.”
“Ridiculous! It is no distance. I have my identification, and they will see who I am. Besides, you are like the cat has dragged you home. You need someone to look after you, Owain.”
“Are you volunteering?”
She laughed out loud, as though he had told a vulgar joke. Owain blushed, mortified by his own boldness, though it had in fact been prompted by me. I sensed him stiffening his control.
Outside a night patrol helicopter went by. Owain idly wondered if it was the same one that had sent him fleeing like a subversive less than an hour before. He swallowed a yawn. The coffee had done nothing to drown his exhaustion.
“Lay your head on my lap,” Marisa said. “I will stroke it until you fall asleep. Then I will go.”
Somewhat self-consciously he did so. He felt the warmth of her slender thighs across the back of his head, her splayed fingers tracing slow paths across his scalp. Sensing an opportunity to escape, I willed him to relax.
Despite himself he began to bathe in sensation; it was years since anyone had touched him in this way. Marisa was humming again, the same elusive melody.
Rain on the window. It was night and I was alone in my room. Slowly I rolled over. Tanya was long gone, a folded newspaper on her chair.
I couldn’t gauge how long it had been since I had departed from Owain. It might have been a matter of seconds or hours. Everything was jumbled, fragmented.
Determinedly I resisted the impulse to ponder Owain’s situation, to dwell on his encounter with Marisa. It was too seductive, in more ways than one. Instead I managed to reach out and grab the newspaper.
It was the Guardian. I had to squint in the dim light but I was perfectly able to see that there was no reference on the front page to anything involving a terrorist outrage or any other kind of disruption in Regent Street. I’d woken with a new uncertainty that I’d actually seen any explosion at all. Had I merely imagined the store frontage disintegrating?
Laboriously I worked my way through the newspaper, inspecting every story. There was nothing, no mention of it anywhere.
By the time I’d reached the sports section my head was pounding but my spirits had begun to soar. An explosion in the middle of the capital? Even weeks later there would have been some reference to it, had it occurred. Which meant that it couldn’t have done.
I slumped back on the pillow, grinning with a giddy sense of relief. Though I still couldn’t explain Lyneth’s absence, at least I knew she was still alive. The girls too. I could survive the wrenching dislocations to my counterpart’s world in this knowledge. Let them come. Let them come. Nothing could daunt me as long as my family was safe.
I might have dozed: I might simply have been drifting in the shallows of sleep. But at some point I experienced a great surge of arousal which brought me to full alertness. As I lay there, sharing with Owain the same confused feeling of having been capsized from sleep, I was sway the tidal surges of a nightmare in which he had relived an episode from his recent past.
Though it came as a torrent of images and incidents, fraught with all sorts of threatening emotions, in the aftermath I could only make sense of it by reassembling it as a narrative.
SEVEN
An engine roar, a bumpy ride. Owain driving along a frozen mud track that meandered across a pockmarked wasteland. Four other men in the Spectre, including his commander, Major van Oost, who sat in the co-driver’s seat and kept yelling at him to slow down.
Dropped by Fishtail at dawn, they were deep within the No-Go Zone that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. They’d been sent in to check out satellite evidence of heavy vehicle movements near Minsk. The city itself was just a name on a map: it had been obliterated during the limited nuclear exchanges of the nineteen fifties.
An abrasive babble over the satellite link as the major received the latest update from CommandCom in Leipzig. A remote-imaging satellite had picked up possible exhaust heat signatures in their target area. They were to proceed with extreme caution.
Everyone bulky in the new NBC snowsuits with hoods that enveloped their helmets; respirators hung at their necks. The squad was part of the multinational Special Operations Corps, the cream of a rigorous selection programme.
They descended a frozen gully and made a steep ascent. The Spectre coped effortlessly with the incline. The vehicle’s bolt-on panels meant that it could be adapted to a variety of combat roles.
Near the brow of the ridge, with the display flashing an urgent red to indicate their proximity to the target, van Oost ordered Owain to pull over.
The major was already zipping up his respirator. A blast of snowy air swept into the cabin as he clambered out. Owain caught a stench of frozen mud and rotten vegetation before he fitted his own mask. It was early March, the temperature outside ten below zero, the sky oppressively grey.
Like a slim-line polar bear with a crooked black snout, van Oost scrambled through the snow. On the brow of the ridge he unhooked his binoculars and pressed them against his eyepieces. At this point the familiar hiss of Owen’s satellite link died, as did the dashboard screen.
Silence, expectation, nothing. The men in the back making brittle jokes behind their respirators, Sabrioglu saying that they’d forgotten to put a coin in the meter, Benkis telling Vassall that he should climb up on the roof and thump the dish with a hammer. Vassall, a corporal, stonily silent at first, then warning that rebel groups could rig up signal jammers from little more than an UHF generator and a plastic pipe wrapped with copper wire.
The major returned, unzipping his mask as soon as he was inside.
“Looks like an old army base,” he told e blast oone. “It’s surrounded by trees so I can’t get a good view. But something tells me it’s active.”
“The link’s just gone down,” Owain informed him.
Van Oost peered at the blank screen and nibbled on his damp moustache. He was a sandy-haired man with a lived-in face that made him look ten years older than he was.
“Fuck it,” he said at last. “All right, everybody out. Maybe one of you has better eyes than me.”
Securely packaged in his suit, Owain followed the others through the snow. The latest issue automatic rifles were slung over their backs: Heckler & Koch PF-1s that fired 4.7mm caseless cartridges. Already Owain’s head was filling up with a swampy smog of recycled breath and acrid sterilising vapours.