Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [78]
‘Is that what you do for fun?’ asked Tegan sarcastically. It was too late to stop now.
Paynter resisted an overwhelming urge to put her over his knee. ‘Lesbian,’
he suggested turning away from her and bringing (what he hoped would be) an end to the conversation.
Tegan ignored him. For a moment. Then she said, ‘You’re a moron.’
‘Listen you stupid bint,’ replied Paynter, frothing with rage. ‘I’m the moron that’s keeping you alive right now. If you don’t like it then you can leave any time you want. Now sit down and shut up. And whilst you’re about it . . .
Smoke my cornet, big arse!’
‘My bottom is not fat!’ cried Tegan. ‘That’s a terrible thing to say. You’re an awful man. I hate you.’
‘Mutual,’ replied Paynter.
148
Tegan slapped his face. Hard.
The whizzing, zipping impact-sound ricocheted around the tiny shack.
Paynter responded in kind, a vicious backhander across the left-hand side of Tegan’s face. Her mouth hung limply open for several seconds. She raised her hand to slap him again, in response, but Paynter caught her arm in midair and held on to it firmly whilst she winced with pain.
They stared at each other, a shared hatred in their eyes.
And then, for some reason, they started kissing.
When the sun rose to a certain point, its reflection cast a fractured cascade of mutated light across the lake in front of the InterCom ranch house, turning the surface of the water to every colour of the spectrum. Sanger and Giresse stood on a wooden jetty, wearing dark glasses and staring deeply and intently at the shades that the curious effect of nature was producing.
For almost an hour they watched, motionless and silent, scarcely even breathing. Then, simultaneously, they came out of their trance and turned to walk back to the house and resume their conference.
‘This girl?’ Giresse asked as they approached a group of their colleagues standing by the entrance to the house.
‘Kyla?’ asked Sanger.
Giresse nodded. ‘I’m concerned.’
For once, Sanger’s façade of quiet consideration dropped a fraction of an inch. Giresse saw a weary and irritable expression as his face betrayed him.
Betrayal, it seemed, was all around.
‘If she was Canavitchi . . . ’ Giresse began when Sanger’s continued silence threatened to bring an end to the conversation before it had properly begun.
‘Then, they are closer to the heart of the organisation than we had previously thought,’ reasoned Sanger.
‘Exactly.’ Giresse signalled to the men to return to the ranch house ahead of them. He looked at Sanger gravely, and grasped his colleague by the shoulders, spinning him round.
‘We knew they would come eventually,’ he urged.
‘That is true,’ admitted Sanger, shaking himself free of Giresse’s grasp.
Again, there was a dismissive quality to what he was saying that both annoyed and terrified the Frenchman.
Giresse’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘But you know what this really means?’
he asked.
‘Of course,’ replied Sanger. ‘If the Canavitchi are here and they’ve infiltrated our organisation in one sphere, then they’ll almost certainly have made inroads elsewhere. There may even be a traitor in the conglomerate.’
∗ ∗ ∗
149
‘Where the hell did that come from?’
Tegan was just as perplexed as Paynter.
‘Temporary madness brought on by claustrophobia?’ she asked. ‘I am claus-trophobic . . . I’m not sure whether I’ve mentioned it before?’
Paynter seemed satisfied with this explanation, then added one of his own.
‘Pressure of combat,’ he said helpfully. ‘I’ve seen similar things.’
‘But . . . ’ Tegan was horrified. ‘We kissed!’
There was something about the way in which she said it that seemed to equate the deed with drinking water from a lavatory. Paynter felt himself getting angry again. ‘It wasn’t that bad, surely?’
Tegan could hardly believe that, at such a critical moment in both of their lives, Paynter was worried about whether she thought he was a decent kisser or not. ‘Bad?’ she yelled, angrily. ‘Bad? It was brilliant!’
Paynter, not for the first time, was extremely