Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [82]
Hayley, her face, like Newton’s, covered by a black Balaclava, thought for several seconds. Then she pulled the terrorist headgear off, shook her hair and said, ‘Well, if you’re not going to take this seriously . . . ’
Newton finally went ballistic. ‘Just watch the sodding door you stupid cow, and leave the thinking to me.’
Why, he wondered briefly, had he chosen to bring sludge-for-brains here along as his lookout? He could have chosen any of the coven . . . Well, actually, that was a point. Hayley was intellectually superior to the rest of the group.
Newton knelt beside the office desk, put his black canvas bag on the floor and carefully removed the detonation device. Laying it to one side, he took a roll of gaffer tape and began to fix four obese blocks of Semtex to the under-side of the desk.
Next he produced a carrier bag full of assorted shrapnel and nails, and taped this over the explosive. As he fiddled with the wiring of the detonator he could hear Hayley behind him, humming something tuneless.
‘Shut up,’ he snapped.
Hayley muttered something about Newton being a pig and then resumed her watch.
‘Any movement . . . ’ hissed Newton as he shoved the final wire into place.
‘Nothing,’ responded Hayley, without realising that it had been a command rather than a question. As she said it somewhere within the office complex, with an irony that neither of them would have appreciated, a klaxon sounded loudly. Newton juggled and almost dropped the bomb in his surprise. He gave Hayley an angry look as she turned, an equally startled expression on her face.
‘What did you touch?’ he demanded.
‘I didn’t touch anything,’ shouted the girl, panic dripping from every syllable. She turned and looked again through the office window.
‘We’re surrounded,’ she said. ‘Security’s everywhere.’
‘Shit,’ exclaimed Newton angrily. ‘We’ve been ratted out.’ He was half on his feet when he suddenly realised the danger they were both in. ‘Hayley,’ he shouted, ‘get the hell away from the . . . ’
But there was no time, and the shot that smeared half Hayley Tonkin’s brains in a lurid red mosaic across the clean white walls of the office had been and gone before the word ‘window’ left his lips.
155
Newton looked down at her lifeless body. Outside, there were shouts, orders and commands. But he wasn’t listening. They wanted a gun battle, a nice orderly opportunity for him not to be captured alive. Well, he’d give them that. But on his terms.
He kissed Hayley on her blood-splattered cheek and then crawled under the desk, got himself into a comfortable position in which to die, and detonated the bomb.
Several miles away, in the Holiday Inn penthouse, Ryman and Control watched as the Los Angeles late afternoon skyline flashed yellow, orange, then red. A plume of smoke and fire was clearly visible from the Hollywood area.
The sky seemed to be ablaze.
‘I believe that was another piece of the jigsaw biting the dust,’ said Ryman with a sinister chuckle as he handed Control his overcoat.
Control was aware that he was being dismissed from Ryman’s presence. It was the kind of insulting stunt that he himself would often use on his CIA minions. A wave of revulsion and anger swept through him and he snatched his coat, wordlessly, from Ryman’s hands and headed for the door.
‘I told you it would be worth your while,’ Ryman said, his face just visible in the half-light of the burning sky. Then he seemed to lose all interest in Control and turned his attention back to his little masterpiece of performance theatre in the distance. Already the air was full of the sound of police, fire and ambulance sirens and the searchlights of news helicopters buzzing over the bombed office building like flies around a rotting carcass.
Control closed the penthouse door and headed for the elevator, a sick feeling in his stomach at the way in which he had been used by this creature. He opened his mobile phone and called Greaves who was waiting