Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [33]
Guest was being watched. Someone was using surveillance equipment, high‐level surveillance equipment, to monitor the room. The receiver had picked up the telltale signals, and Kode had almost missed it.
‘I’m going down to the other room,’ said Guest, significantly. ‘Does anybody want to join me?’
‘I might as well come,’ said Compassion, faking a yawn and stretching her arms. ‘I am supposed to be the one looking after security.’
Guest nodded. Then, together, they left the room, shutting the door behind them. Kode thought he saw Guest scoop something up from a chair as he left, but he wasn’t sure what it had been.
He didn’t really want to know what was going to happen next. So he turned the TV back on, and tried to concentrate on the interference patterns.
* * *
Room 4.13
Llewis read the brochure again. There was sweat under his arms. There was always sweat under his arms, but this time it felt just about ready to gush out of his shirt and drown the whole room.
None of this was possible. Not even with the best technology in the business at your fingertips. And even if you believed what the people in the RUC had told him, about how C19 had ‘black’ technology they weren’t ready to tell the rest of the world about, it still wouldn’t have explained all this.
Back at COPEX, the man called Guest had shown him a promo video, explaining the full capabilities of the stuff his company was offering. It had started off pretty much the way Llewis had expected: lots of state‐of‐the‐art espionage and counterespionage equipment, lots of computerised gizmos that could tap into data transmissions while whistling ‘Whiskey in the Jar’, the usual kind of thing. Then the video had described the company’s antipersonnel material.
Which was when things had started to go off the rails.
According to Guest, their primary product was called Cold, and it came in little cans. Just like Mace. The video had demonstrated the substance with a scenario in which a man dressed in riot gear (obviously an actor) had confronted a man dressed as a comic‐book terrorist (obviously another actor). The terrorist had rushed the soldier, the soldier had responded by taking out a canister of Cold, and spraying it over the terrorist’s entire body.
And the terrorist had disappeared. That was what Llewis had seen, and the brochures backed it up, with a series of glossy, full‐colour stills from the video.
Oh, the terrorist hadn’t just vanished in the blink of an eye. That would have looked silly and Llewis would have thought it was some kind of special effect. No, the man had been eaten away. He’d vanished, piece by piece, a thick black skin forming over his body, taking whole chunks out of his flesh as it spread. There was no blood, no sign of injury. Just clean, effective removal. Finally, the skin had disappeared as well, eating itself into oblivion.
At one point, Llewis had thought he’d spotted shapes dancing across that skin. He’d been sure he’d seen eyes. Mouths. Teeth, chewing away the fat from the terrorist’s bones. For an instant, the actor on the video had been a silhouette, a shadowy man‐shaped corner full of skulking, snapping things.
Guest’s voice‐over had explained the technical details of all this, although Llewis hadn’t understood the lingo. Most of it was repeated in the brochure, but it still didn’t make any sense. The brochure didn’t even mention a company name, just the name of the MD. The target, Guest had explained, had been taken out of existence, chewed up by the Cold and put into… what was the word? ‘Stasis’? The target existed outside of normal circumstances, babble babble babble, could be retrieved at the user’s discretion, babble babble babble, the implications for internal security were babble babble babble…
But that hadn’t been the worst thing.
He remembered sweating in the side office at the