Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [58]
Then the realisation of where, exactly, the bomb blast had come from cut through the fog in his mind. He felt the blood pouring from a gash above his eye and he knew that his grip on consciousness was tenuous at best, but he 110
managed to spin himself round, slowly and painfully, and sit up. What he saw made him wish he’d stayed where he was.
Barrington’s hand was glued against the glass of the car window, a white silhouette surrounded by dancing orange flames and scorched fabric. His head, in fact his whole body except for the hand, was engulfed in fire. Once again, that pungent, sickly-sweet smell filled the air and Paynter’s nostrils. It was a smell that had been with him for most of his adult life, but it was one he never got used to.
Paynter was still lucid enough to know that it was his friend frying in the middle of the funeral pyre that had once been a car. His friend who was turning black, as the flesh burnt from his bones in the inferno. And the worst thing about it was that every few seconds a little voice kept on reminding Paynter that, yes, it’s Mark in there but hey, look on the bright side, it could have been you as well.
He could hear other voices now. Real ones. Alarmed, hysterical voices behind him somewhere in the direction of the stairs. But he kept staring at the atrocity in front of him wholly unable to tear his eyes away from the horror until, mercifully, shock took Paynter in her arms and dumped him into a blissful unconsciousness.
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Chapter Twelve
Beyond Belief
The door burst open. Chung looked up from the file he was reading on his desk and tried his best to look like the concentration camp commandant in Bridge on the River Kwai. He didn’t bother to hide the bottle of bourbon from which he had been drinking steadily for the last fifteen hours. There was no point – his breath stank of alcohol.
And of weariness and fear.
Despite many years of finely honing his detachment from humanity for scientific purposes, he still felt disturbed by the sight in front of him. Three InterCom guards dragged the beaten and bleeding Kyla O’Shaugnessy into the room. Chung extinguished his cigarette as the shouting girl was forced into a chair. One of the guards held her in a headlock so that she could only look directly at Chung Sen.
Chung stared back at the girl. Once, and not too long ago either, she had been beautiful. Now all of that had changed. Several hours of sustained, continuous, expert pummelling had seen to that. Her lips were swollen and fat, her eyes blackened and bloodied, her nose broken and her teeth loosened or missing.
‘I trust you suffered,’ he said at last.
‘I’ve had worse,’ replied Kyla, though her face was pinched with pain.
‘Liar.’ Chung sighed. He removed his glasses and felt a hollow sadness. ‘You betrayed me Kyla,’ he said, wiping the tiredness from his eyes. ‘There are two things I deplore in life. Deceit and betrayal. I’m very disappointed in you.’
‘Tell it to someone who’s interested,’ shouted the girl, ignoring the strangle-hold that the guard tightened around her throat.
‘I had such hopes for you. Such dreams . . . ’ Chung stood and began to walk around his office. He stopped in front of a photograph of himself, Kyla and two colleagues taken eighteen months earlier in a Tokyo karaoke bar. It was shortly after she had first come to work for him. He had sung ‘New York, New York’ and she had done ‘The Tracks of My Tears’. They had gone on to a teppan-yaki restaurant in Kawaguchi called the Fuji Yama.
‘I had yakitori and yasai tempura,’ he said, aloud. ‘You had tori karaage.’
Behind him Kyla was laughing hysterically.
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‘What is funny?’ screamed Chung, turning and slapping Kyla savagely across her already bruised face with the back of his hand.
There was no reply.
‘I asked,’ said Chung, with a degree of calm sadism in his voice. He slapped her again, and then a third time, back and forth. ‘What. You found. So amusing?’
Four. Five.