Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [102]
‘You enjoy coincidence, I enjoy irony.’
‘In a manner of speaking that makes you the real Taren Capel,’ the Doctor said.
‘Nice touch, don’t you think?’ Carnell remarked without smiling. ‘The movement’s self-destruction was built in, of course.’
‘How?’
Carnell shrugged. ‘All sorts of ways. A strategy doesn’t start from scratch. You use what already exists. The relationship between Sarl and Tani, for example, was to be uncovered during the investigation and that would be one of the ways in which the Tarenist leadership would be discredited. That wasn’t crucial. It was an embellishment.’
‘I’d say you overcomplicated the plot,’ the Doctor said.
Carnell smiled. ‘That is a tendency of mine,’ he agreed. ‘I live by making what I know will happen, happen. It makes everything. .’
‘Disappointingly familiar,’ suggested the Doctor.
‘I was going to say predictable. Except in this case it wasn’t.
And I had to know why. It was you and the girl, Leela. You were the undefmed variables in this strategy. Main players I didn’t know were there. You threw the whole thing out from the beginning.’
‘What about Taren Capel?’ the Doctor asked.
‘What about him?’
‘At the end of these bays there’s a concealed entrance to a hidden lift which goes to a secret laboratory. I think you’ll find there’s a main player down there you didn’t include in your strategy.’
‘I know about the lab. I didn’t know exactly where it was but my employer authorised its establishment. Ultra-secret robotics research. It’s a separate and unlinked function of his position.’
‘Another closed variable?’ the Doctor asked.
‘Ultimately.’
‘Perhaps you should consider a different profession,’ the Doctor suggested.
Carnell nodded. ‘Kaldor is not my finest hour, I will admit.’
He looked almost shamefaced. ‘I was actually reduced to building a small sub-plot into the Tarenists. A hidden fail-safe for me. Personal leverage against my client should the need arise? I never felt the need before.’ He patted the TARDIS. ‘I must have known you were coming.’ He cheered up abruptly.
‘So are you going to tell me how this works?’
Cailio Techlan entered the room first. Uvanov was disappointed that he had been unable to win her over, but like calls to like, as Landerchild had once said about the man who followed her in.
Even so, he was still puzzled by her attachment to the plump-faced scholar and robotics engineer with a weakness for skinny young women like her. It could only be because he was the Firstmaster Chairholder. And that was about to change.
‘This is uncalled for, Firstmaster Uvanov,’ Diss Pitter said, looking round at the people in the room. ‘I thought we were to meet here in private.’
‘Carnell told me everything,’ Uvanov said. ‘The Landerchild faction would be amazed to discover that their psycho-strategist was working for you all along. I was similarly amazed to find that my assistant was working for you too, though in a rather more intimate way.’
‘You’re taking a very serious risk, Uvanov,’ Pitter said coldly.
‘You and your few friends.’
Uvanov was brisk. ‘Your problem is that you have no friends at all when news of this gets out,’ he said. ‘How have you screwed up? Let me count the ways. One. Landerchild’s supporters betrayed. Two. My supporters betrayed. Three.
Robots running amok and killing people. Then there’s the six missing researchers and the secret laboratory you set up. What are we going to find there, I wonder. Shall I go on?’
‘What do you want?’
‘Your job. Your support and the support of the Minor Faction.’
‘And in return?’
‘You get to retire honourably and safely. You and your charming young friend.’ He smiled at Cailio Techlan. And firing you is going to be an even greater pleasure he remembered saying and was wryly aware that it wasn’t in the end any sort of pleasure at all. ‘Suppose I decide to fight you,’ Pitter was saying.
Uvanov stared at him until the man looked away uncomfortably. ‘You