Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [81]
After a moment, there was silence again and she opened her eyes to find Paynter lying on one side, blood oozing from a wound at the top of his thigh.
His face showed no pain, only disappointment that his gun had been flung two feet in front of him and out of his reach.
A chunky shadow crossed the floor, the gun and eventually Paynter himself.
A man stood silhouetted in the doorway, stark against the desert sky outside.
‘All right, Geoff?’ said the North Country voice belonging to the shadow.
Paynter grinned, ruefully. ‘Niall,’ he replied, sociably. ‘Bloody terrible to see you again, you waste-of-space tosser. Nice day for a murder, yeah?’
The shadow touched Tegan’s outstretched foot and she slowly moved back and squatted, very still, in the shadows of the door.
Perico moved a fraction into the room. ‘Don’t move,’ he told Paynter, who obliged, albeit unwillingly.
153
‘I’ll lay odds your mate there wasn’t expecting to be used as a human shield to get you inside,’ noted Paynter with a hoarse rattle in his throat. It was amusement. ‘I should have known you’d sell out anybody and anything to make a quick buck. That’s your bottom line, isn’t it?’
‘Tell it to somebody who’s interested,’ said the man, taking another step forward. He was within touching distance of Tegan, but inched slowly straight past her and on towards Paynter who was slumped against the far wall. ‘Principles are for the stupid. And the dead.’
Paynter’s eyes never left the face of his nemesis, but there was a fraction of movement from his hand towards his discarded gun.
A shot thudded into the floor of the shack, inches from his fingers.
‘No, no, no,’ said Perico in amusement. He was playing with Paynter like a cat would play with a bird. ‘So, lost any decent partners lately?’
There was no immediate answer. Instead Tegan saw, for the first time, that Paynter really had been badly hurt by the shot to his leg. Finally the grimace of pain left his face. ‘Lost a better one than you did,’ he said looking at the body of Heldos. ‘Mind you, you always did get that stunted clown to do the really dirty jobs, didn’t you? I wonder what the last thing going through his mind was when he realised that you’d just been using him all the time? ‘
There was no reply from the big man. Only a harsh exhalation of breath.
‘Probably thinking what a great pal you were and how you’d never let him down, do you think?’ continued Paynter, as Perico pointed his gun directly at the UNIT man’s face.
‘Anything else?’ asked the assassin, just as a two-foot-long piece of wood crashed down on his skull from behind.
Perico stumbled on to one knee, his grip on his weapon loosened. A second blow caught him, savagely, on the fleshy part of the back of his neck, snapping the plank in two. The stunted remains dropped from Tegan’s hands to the floor. Stunned, Perico spun towards the girl who now stood behind him, rooted to the spot. With jerky, automatic movements the big man pointed the gun in her direction.
Transfixed and staring death in the face, Tegan was vaguely aware of movement somewhere within the shack but she was glued to the floorboards.
Perico’s finger tightened on the trigger. Tegan opened her mouth to scream but found no sound emerging. Instead she closed her eyes and waited for the searing pain of the bullet that would kill her.
The shot blasted in her ears.
The office was cluttered and untidy, paper strewn everywhere. If Jon Newton had appreciated irony, he might have found some in the fact that Inter-154
Com, the company that had largely replaced paper printing in the world, still seemed to be dependent upon it for their own operations.
But Newton was not, by nature, a man who celebrated the delicious ironies of life. Instead, he was a man who liked blowing things up.
‘Have you got the bomb?’ asked Hayley, rather pointlessly Newton thought.
‘No,’ he said and used