Kristin Read Free Page A

Islamic
fundamentalists had it right, perhaps America really was the “Great Satan”? And
maybe all those nations in league with it were equally responsible? After all,
it was the Americans who’d started the ball of insanity rolling at the end of
the Second World War. Robert Oppenheimer certainly had a great deal to answer
for in Thom’s eyes. He must have been a man lacking in anything more than a
modicum of humanity.
    Now that the British,
American and French embassies in Riyadh, Damascus, and Amman had closed the
governments of the West no longer shared a dialogue with the Middle East. It
was a complete standoff, and the world held its collective breath. It waited.
    ‘Thom, how has it come to
this, isn’t there anything that can be done, isn’t there still time for
negotiation?’
    Negotiation ?Thom
had never understood the grievances of such people, the concept of Jihad. He
wasn’t able to comprehend what these people wanted of the West. Surely they
could no more expect him to go and live in the desert and pray to Allah five
times a day than he would ask them to abandon everything they know and embrace
Western culture in all its facets? He’d sometimes wondered if it might all just
be a simple question of jealousy — the old story of the haves and the
have-nots, rather than being anything to do with which God you happened to
believe in, which devotional code you lived by. ‘How do you negotiate with
people who have no desire to talk, no clear demands, no rational motive, people
without a conscience?’ he answered. His eyes flashed to the paper, and half way
down the front page he saw a vivid   orange image of a nuclear explosion in full bloom, headed by the simple
but bold caption: “NORTH KOREA: JUST A MATTER OF TIME”.
    North Korea’s nuclear arms programme
had advanced as rapidly as it had under the guidance of a renegade Russian
scientist, Aleksandr Lushnikov. Two decades of his expertise had enabled his
new masters to become the superpower of the East, ahead of the Chinese. Kim Hae
Kyong’s unrecognized administration had refused to abandon its nuclear arms
programme and its missiles were trained upon its neighbour, South Korea, and
cities in Europe, Britain, and the United States.
    He sipped some tea and thought
about his nightmares, of his need to divulge their content, their cryptic
absurdity, and he worried how she would react to hearing what he was about to
tell her. ‘I’ve been having dreams, strange dreams. I’m on a hill top, up by
Greenwich Observatory I think, and I see the bomb explode. I feel incredibly
strong, strong enough to stop it. But last   night was different. I was impotent and the mushroom cloud
just spread, turned the whole city to dust and then ... ’
    She raised her eyebrows.
    ‘ ... I watched you die .’
    Margaret Sharman stared
silently into her cup and swallowed dryly. Now she would shock her surviving
son. ‘Do you remember that white cat from next door — you were very
young, five or six?’
    ‘Vaguely.’
    ‘There was an accident out
in the road, we heard the screech of the brakes, but before we do anything you
ran out and saw it lying there in a pool of blood. You were very upset.’
    ‘I don’t recall that.’
    ‘No, well you seemed to
forget the whole episode and your father and I agreed we shouldn’t mention it
again, or try to find an explanation for what happened next.’
    ‘What did happen?’
    ‘Something quite
unbelievable. You crouched down next to the cat, placed a hand on its stomach
... and it started to twitch. Then it pulled itself to its feet. You patted it
on the head and it ran off.’
    ‘Must have just been
stunned.’
    ‘ Stunned , with all that blood ? No, Thom, it was
dead.’
    ‘What are you saying ...
that I brought it back to life?’
    She didn’t answer.
    ‘ ... But that’s not
possible.’
    ‘I knew from the second you
were born that you were very special, and not just as a son, which you are of
course. I knew that