Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [52]
‘Who...?’
‘The Times’s correspondent – I really don’t want to meet him here now.’
Pia smirked. ‘You have history with Philby?’
‘Not yet. I didn’t even know he’d be here.’
Pia sat back so she could watch the bar, trying not to giggle as she saw the Doctor trying to surreptitiously watch the other Englishman. He was like a little child playing peek-a‐boo, with that same intense concentration on his face. She wasn’t surprised when the other man glanced in their direction. It was always possible to sense someone watching too closely, even if you weren’t sure who. She held Philby’s eyes for a moment, so he would assume he had spotted his observer and stop glancing over. When he looked away, she leaned into the Doctor, nudging him not-so‐gently.
‘Why are you trying to find Blair?’ she asked quietly.
‘I have to do something. Blair is as good a place to start as any.’
Pia took her drink from the table and finished it. She toyed with the empty glass for a moment, then caught the Doctor’s eye.
‘People vanish. Not all of them want to be found again,’ she remarked. She stood and gathered up her bag and gloves. Then she leaned down, putting one hand on the Doctor’s shoulder, and whispered, ‘Go back to your Hotel, look to yourself first. Look to Anji. People vanish all the time here.’
She hurried away and took the stairs down. She wanted to get back to her room and sleep. Burton would want to know everything they had discussed tomorrow.
* * *
He glanced at his watch. 4 p.m. According to the Doctor’s instructions, it was almost time. Looking down into the town, he could just glimpse the busy central square, the antlike swarms of people gathered there.
The first explosion was muted, more like a car backfire. Then the pall of smoke started to drift upwards from somewhere close to the central square. A bell started to clamour frantically. Sasha joined Fitz on the hillside, wiping his dirty hands on his trousers.
‘It can’t be a shell,’ he remarked, shading his eyes to look at the spiralling smoke, ‘we’re at least six kilometres from the front.’
‘Maybe the front has retreated?’
Sasha shook his head. ‘Not that much, not this fast. There will be some battalions falling back but the whole front cannot have fallen this quickly.’
‘An acciden‐’ Fitz broke off, the loud blast of another explosion overriding his voice. This was louder, harder. It seemed impossible to believe that two could be accidents. He resisted the urge to paraphrase Oscar Wilde. Sasha had disappeared into the back of the truck, re-emerging after a moment with a set of binoculars. He trained them on the town for a moment. Then handed them over to Fitz. It took Fitz aggravating seconds to get the focus right as he tried to see what was happening in the main square, where the explosions had started fires.
A crowd of people were milling about, shying away from the heat of the flames. Whatever it was had hit the market and Fitz started as a huge dark shadow resolved itself into a horse, caught in the conflagration. It jolted out of his view and he guessed, hoped, that someone had shot it. There were soldiers in the ragged militia uniforms in the square and he assumed they would be organising putting out the fires. There was a blur that could have been one of them running by too fast for Fitz to focus on properly, his arm hurling something.
There was another explosion.
Fitz almost dropped the binoculars, his eyes hurt by the flash of the grenade. The soldiers were bombing their own town. That wasn’t right, that went against everything he knew, everything he thought the Republicans were about. Had he been misled? He glanced at Sasha, who was watching impassively as chain reactions started, the flames leaping from building to building. It was spreading fast, far too fast to be natural. Fitz thought of the crates marked aid that clearly were arms, grenades. The jerry-cans of petrol. Soviet aid of a less than humanitarian type. Fitz tried to remember when the show trials had been. ’37