Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [17]
‘Tell him,’ said Sanger as she arrived at the desk. Michelle turned and smiled at Ryman who noticeably failed to return the compliment.
‘He’s arrived,’ she said, adjusting her spectacles. ‘An hour ago at LAX.’
‘The fool,’ shouted Ryman, half-standing. ‘I told Bulyjin to come in through one of the municipal airports. Did the FBI get him?’
‘No,’ said Sanger, his passive expression unchanging. ‘I understand that there was an incident as he arrived but that he was not involved.’
Ryman was visibly relieved. ‘That could have endangered the entire project,’
he noted angrily.
‘I agree. Michelle,’ continued Sanger, ‘make sure that our friend is taken care of. And that he has no problems with any political factors during his visit. He is our guest after all.’
‘Political?’ asked Stonebringer.
‘International politics.’ Sanger nodded his head and his personal assistant turned and left the room quickly. ‘We can deal with potential consequences later. I’ll leave that in your capable hands,’ he told Ryman. ‘For now, I want the plutonium safe. Meanwhile, I have something else I’d like you to do for me.’
‘What is it?’
Sanger momentarily became lost in his thoughts. ‘I want you to look into some minor league difficulties that we are experiencing with a group of overgrown schoolboys. They need to be taught a lesson that they will not forget.
Make an example of them.’
‘We?’ asked Ryman. ‘Meaning . . . ?’
‘International Communications Conglomerate. If I had meant “we”, we wouldn’t be having this conversation on our own. We would all be here.’
Those who believe that, in a world of infinite variety, an improbable amount of duplication occurs naturally would have just loved the coincidence.
33
At almost exactly the same moment that Ryman and Sanger were discussing Bulyjin’s arrival in the US, four hundred miles to the north, in an ostensi-bly identical office on the twenty-ninth floor of San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid, a remarkably similar topic was being discussed.
‘The information that we have from our sources in LA,’ said Frank Greaves,
‘is that there’s a UNIT presence in the city.’ Greaves was a gnomish, tired-looking man with thinning blond hair and a sickly pale complexion that suggested far too many sleepless nights. He cast a nervous glance at his CIA superior who was small, completely inconspicuous and in his early fifties. Greaves wondered briefly if this information was what he wanted to hear. But, as on so many occasions in the past, the man behind the desk merely gave Greaves a wry smile full of double meanings (or, perhaps, no meaning at all), pressed his fingers together underneath his chin and closed his eyes as though searching for some inner truth.
‘The information was a little garbled,’ continued Greaves, hurriedly. The first message was that the arrival was merely of various agents of a foreign power, but . . . ’
‘The British?’
‘Yes. How did you . . . ?’
Control smiled like the cat who had got the cream. ‘Lethbridge-Stewart and I are old friends,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘We go way back.’
The closing doors. That was all she could concentrate on. It was all she would allow herself to think about.
‘Make it, make it, make it, make it . . . ’
She stumbled the last few steps and then threw herself at the ever-decreasing gap between the metal and glass of the Shinkansen bullet train’s doors. Her trailing leg felt the sear of rubber scraping across her skin as she flew the final couple of yards virtually horizontal and fell with a muffled crunch into the carriage.
‘Made it!’
Behind her, the doors closed with a satisfied hiss of compressed air. On the floor of the train Kyla spun round, avoiding the startled and disapproving looks of her fellow passengers. She looked back through the window at the four men, all