Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [51]
‘We’ve got every policeman in America on the lookout for him, you know.
We’ll find him, if . . . ’
Tegan was horrified. ‘If he’s still alive?’ she asked, angrily.
98
‘I was actually going to say if he’s still on the planet,’ said Milligan, giving her a sympathetic smile.
‘You got back late last night,’ noted Paynter. Barrington had finally surfaced and was brushing his teeth with a look on his face that suggested that his mouth tasted as though something had died in it.
‘This city never sleeps,’ said the lieutenant through a mouthful of tooth-paste. He spat it out into the basin and rinsed his mouth with water. ‘Interesting place. It’s like England with buttons . . . ’
‘Was the gig any good?’
Barrington thought for a moment, as if trying to pull distant memories from a dusty box-file in the darkest recesses of his mind. ‘Not bad. It’s a pity there was only George, Billy and Klaus left from the classic line-up. I met some people from Leeds and we went to a place called the Cheesecake Factory in Marina del Ray. Which was bloody expensive.’
‘Good menu?’ asked a fascinated Paynter.
‘Not bad. Oasis soup . . . ’
‘You get a roll with it?’
‘Precisely. Then we went to a nightclub somewhere in Hollywood. I kind of lost track of the time,’ admitted Barrington.
‘Funny place Leeds,’ noted Paynter. ‘Full of thieves and recidivists. So, did you score then?’
‘None of your business,’ replied Barrington.
‘That means “no”, I take it?’
Barrington refused to take the offered bait. ‘Anyway the club was horrible.
Lots of Tracys and Shirleys dancing to handbag music. Or the LA equivalent.’
‘You’re a long way from Britpop Central, Mark,’ said Paynter, opening the window blinds and allowing the brilliant morning sunlight to flood into the room.
‘Tell me about it. I passed cardboard city near the airport on the drive back.
You’d think in a place like this they’d be able to solve homelessness, wouldn’t you?’
Paynter sought for a way to avoid answering the question. Finally he said,
‘People who have all the answers should never be trusted. Want some breakfast?’
‘Nah,’ replied Barrington. ‘Touch of Montezuma’s revenge this morning.
Shouldn’t have had that thing with prawns on it.’
‘Get your trousers on,’ said Paynter. ‘The Brig’s due in from New York this morning. I expect he’ll want to see us.’
∗ ∗ ∗
99
If only our mail could talk, what a story it would have to tell. The passage of a small, innocuous package through time zones and national borders would become an epic tale. A novel. A trilogy. A whole multivolume saga.
If only our mail could see, what sights it would have access to as it heads, inevitably, towards a final destination.
Neither of these thoughts passed through the mind of Kyla O’Shaugnessy as she waited in a deserted bus terminal in rural Japan for her contact to arrive.
Neither had they been foremost in the mind of her contact, a small overweight Englishman in his mid-forties with thinning, sandy-coloured hair. His name was Burdon, and he was massively overdressed for the occasion, looking like someone who had stepped into a colonial time warp in 1962 and had only just emerged to find the empire gone along with rationing, the maximum wage and traditional jazz. He took the package containing the CD-ROM from Kyla with a monosyllabic lack of interest concerning its contents.
An hour later Burdon was on board a flight to Darwin, the package masking-taped to the inside lining of his tweed jacket. And there it stayed whilst its courier read a Bernard Cornwell novel and a terminally boring fly-fishing magazine, watched the in-flight movie and took the vegetarian option at dinner.
When he landed in Australia he headed for a motel on the outskirts of an anonymous Northern Territories border town and waited for several tedious hours before the telephone rang and he was given the location of his drop-off point.
On a country road seemingly a million miles from civilisation Burdon stood at a deserted crossroads and waited patiently for yet more hours until a jeep appeared in the distance