Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [80]
The door burst open. Light flooded Tegan’s world, and she found herself pressed against the wall of the shack as a multitude of gunshots exploded all around her.
The Doctor was sitting in his hotel room in Beverly Hills, deep in thought, when a cough alerted him to another presence.
‘Any word on them?’ he asked the Brigadier.
Lethbridge-Stewart, for once, found himself the bearer of good news. ‘Yes, actually. Captain Paynter rang in around an hour ago. Seems they encountered a UFO in the desert late last evening and their car lost all power. We’ve sent a helicopter to pick them up.’
The immense relief in the room was tangible. Colour flooded back into the Doctor’s pale cheeks.
‘Thank you, Brigadier,’ he said simply. He picked up a pair of half-moon spectacles from the bedside cabinet and put them on. Then he began to read from a three-page print-out that had been lying on the bed. ‘“The conglomerate operate in total autonomy to the Central League on Jexa. They have the authority to initiate any operations that they decide will maximise the ability of the Jex to successfully integrate themselves into the indigenous population and aid with invasion and conquest. The classic Jex invasion takes place in three stages. One: infiltration. Two: economic conquest. Three: bombardment . . . ” And so it goes on.’
Lethbridge-Stewart took the proffered report and read it closely. ‘Where did you get this?’ he finally asked as he came towards the end of the final page.
‘I accessed the TARDIS databanks from UNIT last night using your space-time telegraph for the file transfer,’ admitted the Doctor. ‘I wish I’d done so earlier, it might have saved us an awful lot of trouble, not to mention Mark Barrington’s life. I’d have said we were heading towards the end of Stage Two now, wouldn’t you agree?’
The Brigadier finished reading the report and handed it back to the Doctor.
There was little he could add. ‘We must do something,’ he said simply.
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‘I agree,’ replied the Doctor. ‘That’s why I’d like you to arrange a meeting between us and Sanger.’
‘When I said we must do something,’ Lethbridge-Stewart began cautiously,
‘suicide wasn’t the course of action I was thinking of.’
The Doctor shook his head quickly. ‘Brigadier, I’ve been blinded by my own inertia,’ he said. ‘I think it’s time we took the fight to them.’
‘But walking into the lion’s den?’ the Brigadier asked. ‘It’s insane.’
There was a quiet determination in the Doctor’s voice. ‘I’ve let things run away from me,’ he said softly. ‘I’ve been diverted by trivia and by people playing games with the lives of others. That stops now. When in doubt, attack the brain.’
Just as Tegan was beginning to think it couldn’t possibly get any worse, Paynter fired a rapid burst of four shots just above and to the left of her head, towards the opened door. Tegan was too startled even to scream. She merely stared mutely at Paynter until a figure slumped through the door and fell, dead, on the floor in front of her.
‘Small world,’ Paynter told the corpse.
She looked down at the man. A twisted hobgoblin, his limbs spread-eagled and his face turned to one side so that Tegan could look into his cold, dead eyes. The expression on his face was one of astonishment as though he had never, for one single second, believed that today would be the last day of his life. And there was something else visible. Betrayal.
Tegan was about to tell Paynter this when another burst