would-be executioner.
'Finally, still unaware of his professor staring incredulously from the doorway, Xander managed to imprison the rat under an upturned plastic sink bowl, which he then had to stand on to keep it in place while the captive rat hurled itself at the bowl's sides, desperately trying to break free. And almost succeeding. It had prodigious strength. It was able to shove the bowl along the floor even with Xander's full weight bearing down on top of it, nearly knocking him off-balance. The sides of the bowl were starting to bulge outwards, such was the force with which the rat rammed against them. It was only a matter of time before it burst through. This was not, the professor correctly intuited, any ordinary laboratory creature.'
'Xander had done something to the rat.'
'Very much so. The professor later confided to me that the animal's strength and resilience had been amplified tenfold, perhaps twentyfold. Xander had boosted its toughness at a cellular level, through manipulation of its DNA.'
'Super Rat.'
'Ha! Yes. Now, I'm a technology man myself. Engineering, physics, things that can be built from scratch out of manmade materials, things that are solid and fixable and that have predictable effects — these I understand. These are my metier. The organic world, nature, flora, fauna — simply not my sphere. Xander applied himself to biology precisely because of that, I'm sure. Because it was the antithesis of his father's forte.
'And so I can't give you chapter and verse on what Xander actually did to the rat. His professor barely could either, and he was supposedly one of the leading experts in that field of knowledge. Isolation of genes of interest, molecular cloning, transgenesis between unrelated species, prokaryotic vectors to aid transformation of the target organism, and a whole lot of other terminology was wheeled out by him to explain to me what Xander had achieved, or at any rate what the professor thought Xander must have achieved. He theorised that Xander had inserted genetic material from some other creature famed for its durability — he suggested a cockroach or an ocean-bed tubeworm — into the rat, in viral carrier form, and had used advanced restriction enzymes to facilitate the spread of the new genetic material through the rat's body. He'd managed to overcome one of the main obstacles to genetic transformation, rejection by the immune system.
'Though not completely. Not yet. All at once, the professor told me, the rat desisted in its efforts to batter through the sink bowl, let out a spine-tingling squeal of pain, and then went quiet. Moments later, blood came oozing out from beneath the bowl's rim. Xander tentatively stepped off, lifted the bowl, and peeked in. The rat was lying on its side, stone dead. The blood was gushing out from all its orifices. It was only then that Xander realised his professor was standing nearby and had borne witness to the whole escapade. A week later, Xander was sent down. The gates of the university were closed behind him. He was out on his ear.'
'But that wasn't the end of it.'
'Sam, it was barely even the beginning. Xander wasn't about to let a small thing like being turfed out of one of the most prestigious higher-education establishments in the world stand in his way. Not now that he had a goal in life: besting his old man.
'For several months he moped around the house, not doing much, brooding. I kept encouraging him to go out, have some fun, be with friends. What I failed to appreciate was that Xander had no friends. With all his shenanigans, moving from school to school, and then his intensive work habits at university, he'd not got round to making any. Least of all did he have a girlfriend, despite there not being any shortage of potential candidates. He was a handsome lad, and wealthy. Young ladies would throw themselves at him — and then bounce off, rebuffed by his indifference. His hair had started silvering prematurely, as mine did, but that didn't make him any less attractive. It lent him a distinguished, wiser-than-his-years air. But he did not capitalise on his many personal assets. He did not, as they say these days, 'get a life.' He refused to. He just stayed at home, and he was this awkward presence on the property, like a human thundercloud constantly hanging overhead and darkening the atmosphere.
'And still we would clash, he and I. A lot of the time we were civil to each other and you could almost have mistaken us for close acquaintances. Not friends, and definitely not father and son, but two people who shared a grudging mutual liking. Largely, though, we were at war. That ideological stuff again. Not simply about my line of work any more. Broader-ranging subjects. Politics. Religion. The state of the world. The ultimate fate of humankind. The big questions. Whatever stance I took on a topic, Xander would automatically take the opposite stance, regardless of whether he believed in it or not. After a while it didn't seem to matter to him if he was spouting nonsense, so long as the nonsense ran contrary to my opinion. The practice of opposing me became so ingrained, it turned into his reality, and he could no longer tell the difference between what he was pretending to think just to be antagonistic and what he genuinely thought.
'If, therefore, I said I thought the human race would survive, because our ingenuity and knowhow would enable to us to meet all the challenges thrown up by overpopulation, environmental degradation and the rest, Xander would flatly disagree, saying we were doomed. If I said, being something of an optimist, that I could foresee a time when liberal democracy would be universal, there would be a supreme governing world body and war would become a thing of the past, Xander would insist that history would continue on in its current, shambolic, violent way until eventually we wiped ourselves out. Almost in the same breath, however, he might add that some form of pan-national rule could be humankind's salvation. If someone powerful enough was in charge, if some strict global authority took control, then order could be maintained, problems curbed, and the future ensured.'
'He wasn't above contradicting himself.'
'Nor above espousing an orthodoxy that ought to have been abhorrent to someone with his heritage. My parents were refugees, you know. They quit Austria just before the Anschluss, in the nick of time. I reminded Xander of that fact often — how his grandparents had had to leave behind everything they knew, home, possessions, and quite a few of their loved ones, and seek sanctuary in this country, and then had had to watch helplessly as friends and relatives were rounded up and taken away by the Nazis, never to be heard from again. A powerful leadership of the kind he was advocating, running the world by force, was not simply morally repugnant, it was an insult to his own ancestry. His notion of saving the world by enslaving it was the one thing he said that truly irked me, the one thing guaranteed to make me lose my temper with him, and so it goes without saying that it was the viewpoint he voiced the most often and the most vehemently. He'd found a chink in my armour and kept stabbing his sword there.'
'Was that what you had your final argument about? The one that led to Xander storming out and never coming back?'
'That? No. That was about money, of all things. Xander turned twenty-one, and at that point came in line to inherit a substantial trust fund which I had been building up for him. I, however, was not convinced he should have it, so I set about amending the terms of the trust so that it would remain under my custodianship for a further four years. By that time, I reckoned, Xander would have conquered his inner demons and be mature and responsible enough to handle being quite so rich.
'When he got wind of what I was trying to do, he went berserk. He threatened to sue me. He engaged the services of a firm of vicious Inner Temple Rottweilers and warned me that if I didn't let him have the money he would drag me through the High Court and make sure that the case was highly publicised, that every reader of every newspaper and lifestyle magazine in the land knew what a rotten father I was and how miserable I had made his life, how I callously plied my evil trade and how I laughed at the suffering my weapons brought to the world. This was no mere bluster, either, I had no doubt on that score. Xander would do it. He'd do it all, and worse. He'd expose me to the full glare of public scrutiny, and the consequences would be grim, both for me personally and for Daedalus.
'So I had no choice. No choice at all but to be blackmailed by my own son into handing over a small fortune in gilts, blue-chip stock and property.'
'How much in total?'
'People are so fascinated with figures, aren't they?'
'Only the large ones.'
'I'd estimate the fund was worth something in the region of one hundred million sterling.'
'Phew.'
'Enough, more than enough, to leave Xander in a very comfortable position for the remainder of his life. So what did he do with it? He only went and cashed in the lot, incurring, I might add, a hideous amount of capital gains tax along the way. And then, bank account groaning with readies, he disappeared. Just disappeared. For five years there was neither sight nor sound of him. I put out feelers, asked people who might know where he was if they'd
