Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [23]
They’re fulfilling Nostradamus’s prophecies, so they say. The end of the world is nigh, all that crap.’ The man stood up. ‘I don’t know what this country’s coming to. Once upon a time the only people you had to worry about were the goddamn immigrants. Now it’s white guys from down the street. It’s getting scary.’
He left, shaking his head, just as Turlough arrived holding a pair of keys in his hand.
‘Sorry that took so long,’ he said. ‘They wanted to confirm we were who we said we were and everybody in UNIT’s Los Angeles office was too busy to take the call.’ He looked at the departing man. ‘What was all that about?’
‘Those terrorists,’ said the Doctor, seemingly deep in thought.
‘Surety the activities of a group of madmen have nothing to do with why we’re here?’
43
‘Have you learned nothing from our time together?’ the Doctor asked, in irritation. ‘ Everything is connected.’
‘To what?’ asked Turlough.
‘Everything else, of course.’
‘I often think that cubism was an expression of optimism rather than taste.’
Paolo Sanger stroked his chin, deep in thought. ‘Meaning?’
Joyce walked around the geometrical reconstruction of a cat. ‘Symbolists believed that one could achieve order from chaos. Expressionists believed that order was chaos . . . ’
‘Surrealists?’
Joyce shook his head. ‘Who knows what those guys were thinking about?
The point is that art is all about meaning. I’m not sure what this means.’ He gestured towards the Picasso. ‘It’s pretty, but is it art?’
‘It means whatever you want it to mean,’ said Sanger, still staring intently at the painting. ‘Logic is dead. Use your imagination. The purpose of art is to disturb.’ He held his thumb out towards the canvas and turned it sideways, closing one eye and dramatically squinting at the painting. ‘ Feel the work.
Feel the lines, the spaces, the depth . . . ’
‘You’ve really turned pretentious since you bought this place, haven’t you?’
There was a significant pause before Sanger turned and walked into a different section of the white-walled art gallery. He removed a pair of half-moon spectacles from the breast pocket of his jacket and slipped them on to the bridge of his nose.
‘For those of you watching in black and white, this one is in Technicolor.
Pre-Raphaelite is more to your tastes, no doubt? Millais?’
Joyce hurried to keep up. ‘Yes,’ he replied, peering closely at The Blind Girl.
‘How much did it cost?’
‘Nine million,’ replied Sanger dismissively. ‘You admire it?’
‘I do.’
‘The price of this art is junkies and whores,’ Sanger continued. ‘The product of a world that will soon be engulfed in flames.’
44
Chapter Five
Turn Left at the Rising Sun
The night had come quickly but still Control sat in his office, like a spider at the centre of a gigantic web of intrigue and mayhem. His green-baize-topped desk contained not the paper clutter of bygone days, but a single laptop computer and a constant scrolling stream of information. In the dark, the reflection from the screen lit up his face with strange reds and blues. He looked like the silhouette of an alien, and not a little demonic, to Greaves who entered with a single knock and stood waiting for his summons into Control’s presence.
Sometimes the dandruff on Control’s collar gave the impression of someone who was slowly crumbling to dust. An individual who had spent too long in the darkness and the shadows and, like a vampire, was damned by the light.
On other occasions Greaves, or one of his colleagues, would catch themselves looking at Control out of the corner of their eye when they entered or left his room.
What they saw, or thought they saw, terrified them.
‘The sad thing about the advance of technology is that information becomes fractured. Abstract.’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Greaves nervously.
‘This gimmick gives me access to everything. A world of random fragments.
There are patterns, but you spend so much time finding them