Doctor Who_ The Dying Days - Lance Parkin [42]
Benny rolled her eyes.
'Well, I can't just cal directory enquiries, can I?' the Doctor retorted, as if it was her fault. 'No-one's meant to know that they exist.'
'There must be someone you can call.'
The Doctor stared wildly for a moment, then clicked his fingers. 'Of course, yes. Why didn't I think of him earlier?
Hold out your hands.'
Benny did as he asked. The Doctor was rummaging through his pockets and producing his usual assortment of junk: a cricket ball, an elephant feather, a bag of kola nuts, a big bal of string, a piece of the True Cross, even a dog whistle. He handed everything but the string to Benny. Final y he found what he was searching for: a piece of vellum. On the front was a letter written in the Doctor's handwriting. A couple of strings of numbers and characters were scrawled in felt-tip on the back.
The Doctor dialled the first of the numbers.
Before the first ring, Benny thought of something and quickly cut the connection.
'Bernice!' the Doctor cried.
'We can't phone him,' Benny insisted. 'He used to be a senior military man, with access to the deepest, darkest secrets of the twentieth century. Hell, there are things that he saw that stil haven't been declassified in my time.'
The Doctor frowned. 'I know that. I was there, too. That's why we're phoning him.'
'So don't you think there's a good chance that his line will be tapped?'
The Doctor's shoulders had slumped, like a child who'd just been told he couldn't have an ice cream. 'Yes,' he conceded.
'I'm sorry, but we can't get in touch with him. They've seen both of us. We can't risk implicating him. They could kill him.'
Suddenly the Doctor's sad eyes were wide open. 'The other number, what a stroke of luck!'
He dashed across the room and flopped in front of an unused terminal, straightening out the parchment. He began tapping out the number.
***
'Yes, Prime Minister. No, everything is running very smoothly in your absence. Everything is going to plan. How are our American cousins? Excellent. Talk to you tomorrow. Goodbye.'
Staines passed the handset to his PPS, who replaced it. 'That was the Prime Minister.'
'Yes, Home Secretary,' the civil servant replied understandingly.
'Just checking up to make sure you were running his country properly?' the gruff-voiced man in the trench coat asked. He and his colleague had arrived halfway through the conversation. He was holding the samples case.
Staines grimaced. 'Something like that, yes. As you heard, I told him that everything was going to plan.'
All four men in the room laughed.
'Won't NASA be monitoring the transmissions from Mars?' the PPS asked. 'They'll know about the Lander.'
The gruff-voiced man chuckled. 'Over the years, we've got the hang of jamming the lads at Cape Canaveral.
They'll be getting signals that they think are from Mars.'
'Frightfully advanced technology, Simon,' Staines assured him.
'Actually, Home Secretary, the technology's been around since the seventies. We developed it at the time of the Viking missions and it's stood us in good stead since then. Remember the Mars Observer a couple of years ago?'
Staines didn't. 'The upshot is that the Americans don't know about what happened to either the Lander or the Orbiter.'
'The Orbiter?' the gruff-voiced man said.
'Yes, there was a terrible accident with the airlocks. The whole crew was killed.'
41
The other man shifted uncomfortably. 'But the plan was to - '
'It was an accident,' the Home Secretary snapped. 'I regret losing any more astronauts than we had to, and I appreciate that it makes things more complicated. I also regret having Alexander Christian running around the country terrorising people. The plan will still go ahead.'
'But without the Martian artefacts - '
'But we have come too far to stop now. The alien technology would have been nice, it would have cut some corners, but we can still achieve our objectives without them.'
The Home Secretary