Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [12]
‘Doris?’
24
‘She asked me to give you her regards.’
This amused the Doctor. ‘She’s a good woman.’
‘Yes,’ agreed the Brigadier absent-mindedly. ‘She is.’ He threw the last of the bread to the pigeons and brushed the crumbs from his trousers. ‘You will be wondering why I called you here, today?’
The Doctor shook his head expressively. ‘Actually, I’m more interested in why you’re out of uniform. The last time we met you were retired. I take it . . . ’
‘Things change,’ said the Brigadier, returning to the Doctor’s theme of a few moments earlier. ‘You, of all people, should know that.’
‘Indeed.’
‘I rejoined UNIT over two years ago in an advisory capacity. A sort of all-purpose consultant. To be honest I think they keep me around because the pension would be too expensive. I’ve got a small team working from an office in Covent Garden. I’m trying to get back to the original UNIT ethic. Investigating the unexplained, the unusual. Trying to stop alien invasions before they land on top of Nelson’s Column and betray their ignorance of how this world works by asking to be taken to our leaders.’
The Doctor was clearly impressed. ‘That’s wonderfully proactive of you, Brigadier,’ he said. ‘My influence?’
‘Perhaps,’ noted Lethbridge-Stewart with a rare smile. ‘If you like, my group is UNIT’s X-Files.’
‘I’m sorry?’
It was Lethbridge-Stewart’s turn to offer an apologetic shake of the head.
‘It’s a television programme, apparently. Quite popular with the chaps in the section. I’ve never watched it myself, but they tell me it’s very good. The point is, I can more or less do what I want, investigate who I want. The downside is that resources are limited.’
‘Hence me?’ asked the Doctor.
‘If I need to bring in an expert,’ admitted the Brigadier with irritation in his voice, ‘it has to be one that doesn’t require an expense account. Someone who can run the gauntlet as it were.’
‘Strange idiom,’ noted the Doctor. ‘I’ve never fully understood its origin.’ He paused. ‘I don’t wish to be indelicate, but aren’t you getting a little . . . ’
‘I’m seventy-one this year,’ answered the Brigadier quickly. ‘You know what they say about old soldiers?’
The Doctor was ashamed of his uncharacteristically bad manners. ‘I apologise. I, myself, am hardly a spring chicken!’
‘I was going to make that very observation.
Doctor,’ said Lethbridge-Stewart, caustically. ‘Appearances, as you are aware, can be very deceptive.
25
Which, in a way, brings me to the point.’ He produced a blurry surveillance photograph and passed it to the Time Lord. ‘Do you recognise this man?’
‘No,’ said the Doctor after a moment. ‘Should I?’
‘His name is Paolo Sanger,’ began the Brigadier. ‘Italian-American. Thirty-nine years old according to his publicity people, although we’ve been unable to find documentary evidence that he even existed before 1982. He’s a bil-lionaire, the head of a company called International Communications. It’s a multinational conglomerate that has its fingers in a dozen media. Publishing, broadcasting and communications networks, that kind of thing. Over the last few years he’s been able to circumvent many national laws on copyright by using that blasted Internet contraption to push copyrighted material into terri-tories where these laws don’t apply. It’s estimated that InterCom may destroy the television and newspaper industries within the next decade.’
‘This is a bad thing?’ asked the Doctor.
‘I agree, it isn’t my real concern,’ noted Lethbridge-Stewart. ‘What I am interested in is a titbit of information that came our way via MI6. It seems that Sanger’s organisation is buying large quantities of high-grade plutonium from Third World sources, mostly in the former USSR. He has enough to blow up the world ten times over.’
A sarcastic tone could be detected in the Doctor’s voice as he said, ‘Once would be quite enough.’
‘Well, exactly. What could a man possibly want with that much plutonium?’
‘Maybe he’s building a time machine,’ ventured the Doctor. Then he shook his head at Lethbridge-Stewart’s startled reaction.