TWENTY-SEVEN
An antique dresser stood underneath the window in the narrow room. The blackout blind was kept permanently pulled down so that no one could look in. Owain didn’t switch on the light but left the door open to the dusky illumination from the hallway.
The room was decorated in faded pink with a bells-and-ribbons motif under the picture rail. A young girl’s bedroom that he’d had neither the time nor inclination to redecorate since moving in.
He’d covered one wall of the room with press cuttings and album photographs of his father. Another held old regiment and rank badges that he’d collected as a child, while his father was still alive; the pips and crowns were arranged in order, showing his father’s steady progression up the military hierarchy. In the dresser drawers was some of the equipment he’d used: gloves, poncho, a hand gun, knife, even an early-issue NBC respirator that still gave off its stink of charcoal-impregnated rubber. Neatly folded in the bottom drawer was the temperate combat dress he’d actually worn before his transfer to the Middle East. Owain had tried it on. It fitted him perfectly, as did the old midnight-blue beret, redundant after the consolidation of the Alliance armed forces.
Finally, in the topmost drawer, were the most valuable memorabilia of alclass="underline" his father’s letters, sent over the years from overseas postings. At least one a month for ten years until his father’s death, many of them still in their original envelopes bearing the exotic stamps his father had insisted were to be used rather than army franking.
The letters mostly contained snapshot descriptions of locales and army life with the occasional paternal musings intended to be self-improving to the impressionable minds of his young sons. Subtly they stressed the virtues of self-discipline and a sense of duty that should be based on a clear appreciation of the facts rather than a blind following of the rules. For the youthful Owain the letters represented a nurturing wisdom made more potent by distance.
From the living room Owain fetched the helmet he’d brought back from France. He’d paid a fair sum to have it restored. The webbing had been adjusted to his own head size, but he didn’t put it on. Instead he laid it on the dresser next to the last photograph to have been taken of his father, a matter of weeks before his death.
The photograph showed a Jerusalem room with windows open on a balcony. His father was sitting at a table in the foreground, one hand resting across a map, gazing up at the camera, the VC he had won in Istanbul visible on the breast of his uniform. He held a major general’s rank, was one of the youngest in the entire army to do so. His eyes looked bright and steadfast, his mouth slightly upturned in something that was not quite a smile but more an expression of benign tolerance for the intrusion of the photographer. Behind him in the near distance was a pale street frontage whose dark vacant windows carried the suggestion that only its façade remained.
Once, soon after his posting to the Middle East, he’d brought Owain and Rhys out for a brief holiday, a year after their mother had died. One morning he took them on an emergency flight to a place near the Turkish border where archaeologists had been investigating early evidence of agriculture. The site had been razed, re team having been slaughtered by militia vying for control of the region. Watching from a distance, Owain still remembered him looking down into the grain store pits the team had excavated and where their bodies had been dumped in the aftermath. He was rigid with despair.
His father had been a rock to him in those days, something fixed and immutable. Yet he, too, was gone within two years. Apparently he’d been sending regular reports warning of the dangers in the region, where Christian, Jewish and Muslim groups were acquiring ever-increasing stores of arms to fight one another while the Alliance was focused on stabilising the eastern European front. The Palestinian Federation was in turmoil, the Caucasus a breeding ground for renegade groups of zealots and ultra-nationalists, Mesopotamia a lawless zone where Alliance control had broken down through lack of resources.
Despite this, there had been no warning that an attack was coming, let alone a nuclear one. The spasm had occurred over three days, a series of strikes throughout the Middle East, on oilfields, waterways and military headquarters. Extensive areas of the Mediterranean littoral and the Euphrates-Tigris basin had been laid waste; radioactive hotspots stretched from Aleppo to Abadan. Perhaps five million people had died in the immediate aftermath, among them a hundred thousand Alliance troops.
Jerusalem had been hit on the third day, the only urban area to be directly targeted. His father was in the centre of the city, supervising the dispersal of forces, trying to get everyone out.
The Convulsion, as it came to be called, had brought an abrupt halt to hostilities in the east along with vehement Russian denials of any involvement. The crudeness and low megatonnage of the devices pointed to a captured or black market arms store; their trajectories suggested an origin in the disputed territories of the Caucasus and Kurdistan. Retaliatory strikes reduced the entire area to a radioactive wilderness. Regional warlords who had been implicated in the attacks were all declared dead. But for Owain it came far too late: his father was already less than ashes.
Owain heard a movement outside. The window faced out on the balcony, but there was no access beyond it. He retreated from the room, locking the door behind him and slipping the key into his trouser pocket. Now he could hear footsteps just outside his door.
He switched off the hall light and fetched his pistol before positioning himself in the bathroom doorway where he had a clear view down the hall.
His heart was racing with something that might have been excitement. I felt no urge to do anything to interfere; he was far better equipped to deal with any threat.
Into the silence came the sound of someone urinating outside. Owain crept forward and eased the front door open, steeling himself against the shock of the cold night air.
A fur-hatted figure hunched up in a bulky overcoat was copiously relieving himself close to the balcony edge. Owain waited for him to finish. He moved quickly forward, grabbing him by the scruff of his coat with his left hand while bringing his right across his chest and wedging the barrel of the pistol under his jawbone.
The man gave a combination of a shriek and a gurgle as he was hauled back towards Owain’s open door.
Owain dragged him inside and let go. The man sprawled, losing his hat while he fumbled to zip himself up. Expensive navy trousers. Handmade black shoes and a padded barathea overcoat. Black lamb’s-wool lining inside the hat.
“God in heaven!” said Rhys. “You almost made me wet myself.”
“You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you,” Owain told him. “Go creeping around in the dark without announcing yourself and you’re asking for trouble.”
Rhys removed a handkerchief from his coat pocket and began swabbing himself down. He was still sitting on the floor. Owain made no move to help him up.
“Suddenly I was urgent,” Rhys said. He looked and sounded a little drunk. “Besides, I didn’t know you were in.”
Patently a lie. Owain closed the door and bolted it.
His brother climbed to his feet and inspected the scuffed heels of his shoes.
“What do you want?” Owain demanded to know.
Rhys looked warily at him. “I’m in London for a spell. Thought I’d look you up.”
“What’s wrong with the telephone?”
“I heard that Uncle was taken ill. I’ve been to see him.”
The field marshal was still in convalescence. Owain had only seen him once in the last forty-eight hours, and that briefly, while he was sleeping. Though no longer confined to bed, he was apparently still weak and obliged to delegate his duties to others. All the evidence suggested that the food poisoning was a simple mistake, a result of negligence rather than design. But Owain wasn’t convinced; he wasn’t convinced at all.