Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [40]
– his own people –
– had sent to Earth. But Faction Paradox had taken the secrets of time travel away with them, so the only way of getting to the twentieth century was by the long route, one day at a time. Fitz had considered using the Cold on himself, putting himself into ‘Cold storage’ for the next two hundred years, but he’d soon spotted the flaw in the plan. How could he tell the people of the twentieth century to get him out again? The Remote wouldn’t help him, he knew that for a fact. No, the only way would be to send some kind of message to Sam and the Doctor, two centuries in the future…
That was when he’d figured it out.
Fitz Kreiner was now thirty-three years old, not counting the time he’d spent in the Cold. The last four years had been wasted in the company of the Faction and the Faction’s followers. That was a huge chunk of his life he’d lost, a huge chunk of himself he’d given up to the cult. Even if he made it back to the Doctor, then so what? He’d never be the ‘complete’ Fitz again, the person who’d joined the TARDIS crew. And, if that were true, then it hardly mattered what lengths he went to now, did it? He was already dead, more or less.
So Fitz stood on the ground floor of the great transmitter tower, and watched the people around him, the technicians and builders in their multicoloured uniforms, as they put the finishing touches to the little white dome buildings. Soon, he told himself. Soon, I can take the only way out that’s left.
It didn’t matter what the media said. It didn’t matter how much of him was real, and how much was just interference. He was going to get back to 1996, even if he had to die to do it.
* * *
19
The Nature of the Beast
(Mr Llewis gets down to business)
When Alan had been young – ‘young’ not meaning any particular age, really, other than ‘longer ago than he might like to think’ – there’d been a big walk-in cupboard under the stairs of his grandmother’s house. In the mind of ‘young’ Alan, the cupboard had been important for two reasons. First, it was where the dolls had been kept, in a big cardboard box next to the gas meter; boy’s dolls, soldier dolls, the things his cousin had left behind after he’d been killed by some people called ‘wogs’ in a place called ‘Suez’. Secondly, there’d been a gas mask there. It had belonged to his grandfather during World War Two, and it had been nailed to the cupboard wall as a kind of memento.
Whenever Alan had visited the house, his task had seemed straightforward. Get to the dolls without looking at the gas mask. Whatever happened, it was vital not to look at the gas mask. Because the gas mask – as Alan knew full well, even though nobody else had ever noticed it – looked back.
* * *
Alan Llewis was finally in control. And, predictably, he was hating every minute of it.
He steered the car along one of the twisty-turny roads between London and Newbury, past damp fields, damp slopes and damp sheep. One look in the wing mirror told him that the vans were still behind him, three grey smudges in the morning light, following his every move. He was in charge of those vans, theoretically. If he wanted to, he could tell them all to turn around and go home, and never get within a mile of Guest’s warehouse.
Theoretically.
Yesterday, when he’d finally gone back to the office, he’d given the details of the deal to Peter Morgan (Llewis didn’t have the strength to think of him as Peter bloody Morgan any more), and Morgan had – amazingly – been satisfied. He’d had a lot of questions, of course, and he’d probably guessed that Llewis had been covering something up, but he hadn’t pushed the point. Llewis wondered if it had been anything to do with the Ogron, who’d been following him around like a huge puppy with raw meat on its breath.
Llewis had spent last night at home, the first time he’d done that in almost