Doctor Who_ Match of the Day - Chris Boucher [62]
Leela could hear the self-satisfied smile in his voice but for some reason she found she could not turn her head to look at him. ‘You are a dead professional!’ she shouted at the top of her lungs.
‘Well that’s impressive,’ the man murmured. ‘I almost heard that. Whispering is better than most can manage at this stage. Stop fighting it you psycho-bitch scuffler or I will up the concentration and leave you to die right here, right now.’ He tugged on her arm and she pulled away from him with all her strength and furious anger. ‘I am Leela of the Sevateem and you will be sorry you laid a hand on me,’ she raged. As he pulled her against him, another man stepped into the gap on her other side and between the two of them they braced her into a standing position. ‘You know,’ she heard the first man say. ‘If the deal goes sour -’
‘Why should it go sour?’ the second man said.
Leela could not feel anything much now or move at all but just as the one with the self-satisfied smile in his voice had said, she could still see and she could still hear. It was like a bad dream.
‘I’m only saying if it does; if it does go sour for some reason.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know.’
The two men were talking as if she was not there and Leela recognised that she must be truly helpless. These men had no fear of her. These men knew she was completely in their power. For a gasping moment she was breathless with terror.
Helpless was not something she had been trained for.
Helpless was the same as dead. It was worse than dead.
Helpless was chaos and terror. But the moment passed and she drew breath again.
‘So why bring it up?’
‘I don’t know; I’m just saying if it does we could probably sell her on the open market and still come out ahead on the deal.’
The moment passed and Leela realised that while she could still see and hear and, most important of all according to the Doctor, while she could still think she was not helpless.
Confident was not the same as sure, her warrior trainer had said, but in the same way captured was not the same as helpless. Had he said that? She could not remember, but if he had not said it he should have done.
‘She’s too high profile.’
The moving pathway had reached the floor it was linked to and the men stepped off with Leela between them. The three of them chatted amiably as they strolled on towards the far end of the concourse where the freight elevators were situated.
‘I still say she’s worth money either way.’
‘Leela? As seen on every scuffling screen in the entire scuffling system. What am I bid? You don’t think we might draw attention to ourselves?’
If anyone noticed that the cleaner was not contributing much to the conversation and that her feet were hardly touching the floor, they gave no indication of it.
‘I wasn’t suggesting an auction.’
‘So a one-off sale then. Available as slave or practice dummy, one Leela? Same problems.’
Leela stared ahead trying to pick up clues from her limited field of vision and listened to her kidnappers for any information that might turn out to be useful.
‘We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.’
It seemed, Leela thought, the two men were professional enough not to give up any information accidentally. But there was something about those words: we do not want to draw attention to ourselves, that should remind her... It was only then that she remembered him and wondered what had happened to Nenron.
Since he had mocked up one of his own, the Doctor had become something of a connoisseur of offices and this, he felt, was a particularly fine example of the ostentatiously unostentatious. He assumed the few duelling artefacts that adorned the walls of the antechamber were authentically old and valuable, and the simple carpets and furniture were originals and the most perfect of their kind.
When he was eventually shown into the minister’s personal office it was similarly aching with good taste. The one apparent concession to the man, since it was an obvious expression of his power, was the heavy, ornately carved desk behind which he sat. The State Security Minister