Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [66]
Chung was almost in a trance as he opened the door. He expected to be faced by an InterCom colleague of many years standing, with a gun in his hand and an apologetic look on his face.
He got two out of three, which wasn’t a bad average, he thought. Nevertheless, the gun was missing and that made him curious.
‘What?’ he asked Shajo wearily.
‘The girl,’ replied the security man. ‘She’s dead.’
Chung nodded. And then became angry when the relief that he wasn’t about to be shot in the head had sunk in. ‘You’ve come all this way to tell me that? You could have used the videolink . . . ’
‘No I could not,’ Shajo hissed through gritted teeth. ‘There were things about her death that couldn’t be broadcast even on a secure channel.’
Chung shook his head, his clashing emotions forcing him back into his apartment. Shajo followed him.
‘The disk?’ asked Chung slumping on to the sofa. The schoolgirls were gone now, replaced by an epic underwater battle between a purple squid and an oceanic army of men in diving suits. He found himself unable to take his eyes away from the screen, even when the programme was interrupted by an advert for eggs.
‘No,’ replied Shajo, ‘she died without revealing the whereabouts of the disk.
She was stubborn and bitter and by the end quite insane, but she told us nothing.’
Chung nodded. ‘Good for her,’ he whispered in quiet admiration.
‘There’s one other thing you should know,’ said Shajo, closing the door and turning on the lights.
Chung blinked at him like a small woodland creature caught in the head-lights of an oncoming car. ‘What is it?’
‘She wasn’t human.’
127
Chapter Fourteen
Treason (It’s Just a Story)
Once Greaves, Control’s weasel-like assistant, had ushered the Brigadier and the Doctor back to their car, Lethbridge-Stewart’s anger should have begun to subside. But it didn’t. And still the Doctor said nothing as the car sped through the cross-town traffic towards the airport.
Some small talk was exchanged for the benefit of the driver. The weather (unusually inclement for the time of year), the city (a strange mixture of the old and the new) and absent friends (concerning Mike Yates’s last known whereabouts in Tibet).
It was only when they were through the security cordon in the airport and safely back on the UNIT helicopter that would return them to Los Angeles that the Brigadier’s feelings found an outlet.
‘Well that was a complete waste of time,’ he thundered. ‘God’s on our side and so is Washington. Allegedly.’
‘Do you think so?’ asked the Doctor. ‘I thought it told us rather a lot.’
Lethbridge-Stewart was angry and he wanted the Doctor to know just how angry he was. ‘I wish you’d tell me what, Doctor, because at the present moment in time I’m none the wiser about anything. In fact, I think I know less now than I did when I went in there.’
The Doctor smiled and summed up. ‘We know what the aliens want,’ he said simply.
‘Which is?’
‘To control the media to aid them in a forthcoming invasion. That much is obvious, surely?’
‘Yes,’ said Lethbridge-Stewart. And now he came to think about it, that much was obvious. Staggeringly so.
At last, the Doctor sensed that he could clarify the connections. ‘But they wanted Turlough for a specific reason and, thanks to our ageless friend in the CIA, we now know what that is.’
‘I’m listening . . . ’
The Doctor sighed, as though he were attempting to explain nuclear fusion to a lobster. ‘Turlough is an alien, yes?’
The Brigadier shrugged. ‘If you say so.’
129
‘You were his maths teacher for goodness sake, didn’t you know that?’
‘No,’ said Lethbridge-Stewart. ‘I was told he came from Coventry!’
This amused the Doctor greatly. ‘The planet he comes from is a drab and colourless place, hot and gaseous. Very unlike Coventry. Well, the drab and colourless . . . ’ He stopped, and steered the conversation back to