Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [59]
The screen of Cobb’s PC burst inwards with a terrific crunch. Peri yelped, jumping back and letting go of the flamethrower’s trigger.
Swan dropped the phone the instant she heard the window go, knowing instantly that she’d been had. She ran back towards the study.
She reacted just as quickly when she saw the flames: she ran like hell in the other direction, bursting out the front door of the house. We never even saw her, running like hell from the back of the house.
She ended up watching from a couple of streets away as the fire engines rolled in. The trip hadn’t been wasted; she knew far more than she did before. The ruse with the phone tap bad been worth it, although It meant she could never again use that method for disinformation. If the Doctor and co had arrived only a little earlier, she would never have had the chance to learn so much. But Cobb had never had the component at all, whatever he may have hinted to his fellow collectors.
California, Canada, Salisbury. The components she and Luis had bought were the only two left. Correction: the component Luis had hatched in his bathtub was the only component left. The Doctor was obviously playing the same role as Cobb had, acting as the original owner’s agent. And she had let him take away something that was worth scouring the continent for, something that was worth killing for.
There was only one thing to do now
The Doctor had watched until he was satisfied with the level of destruction; then he pulled a pair of miniature fire extinguishers out of the duffle bag and set about dousing the conflagration before it could spread further.
‘As a matter of fact,’ he assured me between cold bursts of white vapour, ‘I called the fire brigade to warn them of my intentions just before we set to work. They’re taking longer to arrive than I had expected. Perhaps they thought it was a prank call.’
We had made a hasty exit, climbing over a fence and running through the concrete at the back of a garage to avoid the neighbours’ eyes. (The Doctor has a surprisingly light stride.) We ran through the blackness to the Travco, still parked safely where we had left it.
None of us spoke until we had been on the road for several minutes. Peri sat on the bed right at the back, watching for police lights through the venetian blinds. Nothing. We had got away with it.
‘So,’ said Peri. ‘The real point of all that was to get rid of anything Cobb had left behind about the Eridani.’
‘The other motives were real too,’ said the Doctor. ‘That was quite well done.’
‘Gee thanks’ said Peri. How long had they been planning that little stunt? What else was going on that they weren’t telling me?
‘Doctor,’ I said, suddenly alarmed. ‘You didn’t trash Cobb’s house to prevent me from getting a look at the info –
did you?’
‘Far from it,’ he said. ‘The most sensitive information would have been dangerous only to those who believed in it.’
‘You know everything Cobb did – don’t you?’
‘There’s quite a lot I can still tell you. On the trip home.
Let us absquatulate. In fact, why don’t I take a turn behind the wheel?’
‘You comfortable with driving on the wrong side of the road?’
‘You seem to have got used to it.’
‘Yeah, but I’ve had years of practice:
‘Trust me,’ he said.
‘Uh,’ I said. ‘It’s OK. I’ll drive for a while.’
Route 50 begins two blocks from the Atlantic, and runs the whole way across the country. As we left town on the Route 50 bridge, passing under the “Sacramento CA 3073 miles”
sign, I glanced in the rear vision mirror and got a glimpse of the ocean. It felt like the waves were gaining on us. And the rain started to fall, the first fat, dusty drops.
70
One
Swan contemplated her plan long and hard. It had to be flawless. There was no margin for error; if this realised her intentions towards his new toy, there would be no getting it away from him.
She considered setting up an automatic program that would email him at intervals, convincing him she was somewhere she was not. Maybe even an ELIZA. program that could chat with him in real time over the wires,