“That’s inevitable. There are always differences of opinion.”
“Is it possible that those differences may have reached breaking point?”
Giselle was looking down over the jumble of Pelican transporters and Vantage interceptors that were parked in front of the airport buildings. No planes were coming or going on the runways.
“What is it you want me to do?” she asked.
“Warn Uncle. Tell him that something needs to be done about Rhys. I think it’s essential to establish if he’s sane. And, if so, where his loyalties truly lie.”
“Are you suggesting we arrest him?”
“It would be more a case of taking him into protective custody. But keep it in army rather than CIF or SP hands. What harm can it do? After all, Sir Gruffydd’s his guardian.”
The rising whine of jet engines drowned out her reply. Beyond the clutter of military aircraft on the runway a white Nimbus-9 passenger jet was slowly taxiing. The aeroplane appeared newly refurbished, its domed back housing a retractable radar dish. One of a small fleet of AWACs craft that could also be used as aerial command-and-control centres during emergencies. It looked like the aeronautical equivalent of a swan drifting serenely past a gaggle of ugly ducklings.
Giselle’s pager bleeped on her belt.
“I must go,” she said.
Owain had hoped for more: more time and more information.
“Will you speak to him? Even if I’m wrong, ital to ess better to be prudent.”
“Of course. I promise.” She led him to the top of a fire escape and jangled a set of keys in front of him.
“What are they for?”
“Did you expect to fly home yourself?”
He hadn’t even thought about it.
“There’s a Panache in the car park.” She pointed through the snow and he saw it, the only civilian vehicle amidst ranks of staff cars and Land Rovers. It was the blue of a cloudless sky, the colour of memory.
“It’s yours?” he said.
“A good friend in the Admiralty. He needs it delivered to the bays there. You can leave the keys in the ignition. And no scratches, please. I will see you tomorrow. Bon voyage!”
Before he could thank her, she was striding away, leaving him thinking that she had revealed nothing of what she knew or thought.
He didn’t linger, hurrying down the fire escape, swiping his ID card through unmanned security barriers, nothing hindering his progress.
The Porsche was a custom-built model of a similar vintage to Rhys’s Mercedes. Snow was beginning to fall more thickly, but he was confident of its road handling. The height-adjustable black leather seat oozed comfort, the vehicle’s walnut-panelled dashboard a refined expertise.
He gunned the engine and reversed out of the parking space, for once determined to indulge himself in unaccustomed feelings of luxury. It was easier to do when he was alone. When he knew it was only borrowed time.
Evidently the car’s number plates had already been security flagged on the way in, and he was not delayed at any of the checkpoints. Within minutes he joined the A40 from the slip road.
There was no traffic about. He depressed the accelerator pedal steadily and felt the car pushing him back in the seat. As the interior began to warm up he caught a hint of Giselle’s lingering scent. Was it the car of a lover? No business of his if it was.
The needle was at eighty. For prudence’s sake, he moved out into the middle lane, where the view was better on both sides. Turning the wipers up to maximum he kept accelerating, fat snowflakes hurling themselves at the windscreen with exhilarating abandon. He felt like he was sweeping the storm aside, that nothing could hinder his path. With any luck he’d have a free road until Paddington.
The formalities of rank had prevented him from pressing Giselle more strongly about what was going on. In the end, he could do no more than defer to her and hope that she respected his misgivings sufficiently to take appropriate action. But two realisations were pressing in on him. The first was that Giselle hadn’t actualenied that Omega existed. The second was that the man he’d glimpsed through the doorway with Tyler was more than familiar. Almost certainly it had been Carl Legister.
THIRTY-TWO
One of my father’s favourite epigrams was that history is just informed opinion. He often bestowed such nuggets of wisdom on Rees and me as we grew older and he sought to challenge our views. “Examine the facts with as little preconception as possible,” he would tell us. “Assume nothing that is not implied by the evidence.” Not that he believed in an absolutely objective view about anything: even science wasn’t free of human bias. It used the same methods as the best historians, the analysis and interpretation of evidence, but it was also a product of personal prejudices and—a favourite word of his—the Zeitgeist.
So dark was the shadow he cast over my youth I suppose it’s not surprising that I should end up rejecting both him and his works. Not to read his books, in particular, was a way of countering his dogmatism with blithe neglect. They filled the shelves of my childhood, those volumes of his, all stripped of their dust jackets, which my father considered vulgar. I can see them now with their dark spines and daunting titles such as The Origins of Totalitarianism and Patriots and Scoundrels: Nationalism and Politics in the Twentieth Century. He had also written a memoir of Harrow school and a biography of Neville Chamberlain.
I never doubted that he deserved his eminence, or that he had had important things to say about the course of human affairs in the twentieth century, the era in which he specialised. But the austerity of his judgements meant that charity was often lacking in his work. At times it had an air of ruthlessness, most starkly illustrated in his expropriation of my grandfather’s diaries for a book that took no account of my mother’s feelings.
At fewer than three hundred pages, In the Eye of the Storm was a slimmer volume than he usually produced. It was originally published in hardback under the title: Duty Bound: The Diaries of Colonel Heinz Thom, and for once his original title better captured the essence of the book. Heinz Thorn (he lengthened his surname to Thomas on immigrating to England) had been a young officer who was attached to the general staff of the German army shortly before the outbreak of the war. He served under its chief, Franz Halder, and his successor, Kurt Zeitzler, until a bout of ill health forced his retirement from active duties in the summer of 1944.
The colonel, who never joined the Nazi party, was the son of a Lutheran pastor from Osnabruck in Lower Saxony. Between 1940 and the end of the war he kept diaries that revealed a romantic, philosophical bent. A description of linden blossom glimpsed on an otherwise grey morning might lead him into a disquisition on the evanescence of beauty. The fall of light on a polished table might give rise to reflections on the subjectivity of perception. The sound of a horse clattering over cobbles might catapult him back to childhood and the smell and feel of such a creature in a humid stable when he was lathering it after a gallop. My grandfather had obviously read Proust; he was clearly a man of refined sensibilities.
No mention was made in any of the entries of hisday-to-day duties, and he kept them scrupulously free of any political comment. There were only passing references to the war, as when a joyous family Christmas in 1942 was contrasted with the plight of the troops in the east, by which he doubtless meant the encircled Sixth Army at Stalingrad. The regular entries ended when he was transferred to Munich after a bout of tuberculosis; after that they became infrequent, and much more focused on his joy at having his wife close at hand. They didn’t record what must have been his growing horror at the advance of the Red Army. Though he never expressed any untermenschen sentiments in his writings he plainly had a great love of his country and its culture. He also had a deep commitment to the ties of blood and family. He recorded his delight at his wife’s pregnancy and the eventual birth of my mother in early 1945, then mere weeks later his despair that his wife, who had gone to Danzig to rescue her elderly parents, had been trapped there and consumed in the Soviet onslaught, missing presumed perished.