Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [91]
And freedom.
174
Chapter Nineteen
Bring It On Down
‘They want to meet up with us?’ Giresse was absolutely astonished. ‘UNIT?
This is some sort of trap, it has to be, surely?’
At the other end of the telephone Sanger was silent as though that thought had never even occurred to him. Finally he said, ‘I don’t know.’
Giresse, in his car with Luvik and another member of the conglomerate, Carter, had visions of machine-gun-wielding soldiers storming the InterCom complex. ‘Listen,’ he said quickly. ‘I’m on Ventura now, I can be at the site in forty minutes. Nothing simpler.’
Sanger laughed into the speaker grille and the sound rattled harshly at the other end. ‘Alain,’ he said, genially. ‘Go back to Europe and prepare our people for what is to come.’
Unsecured line or not, Giresse didn’t appreciate the implication that he was being fobbed off. ‘I still don’t like it,’ he said. ‘Why would . . . ’
Sanger’s patience finally wore down to the knuckle. ‘Will you stop worrying,’ he snapped. ‘I can handle UNIT. They’re second-rate tin soldiers working for a third-rate dictatorship. Goodbye Alain.’
The conversation ended with a click. Giresse turned to his colleagues with a fragile smile that quickly fell to the automobile floor and shattered. ‘This is wrong,’ he said angrily.
Luvik didn’t know what to say. Instead, he looked out of the window at the palm trees flashing by as the car headed towards Van Nuys airport. Finally he came out of his shell. ‘What could UNIT possibly know? They’re . . . ’ He searched for some phrase that would accurately describe his contempt for the organisation. For the planet. ‘Not as we are,’ he said at length, and gave a short, humourless laugh.
Carter was ready to agree, but Giresse still looked worried. He closed the thin communication window between the rear of the limousine and the driver’s seat and leaned forward, encouraging his colleagues to speak in conspiratorial whispers. ‘We are so near,’ he rasped. ‘So close to a 10,000-year-old dream of absolute conquest.’
‘Nothing can stop us now,’ Luvik replied, at equal volume. ‘Not even the Canavitchi.’
175
The name of their enemy seemed to strike Giresse like a dagger to his heart.
He looked at Luvik with terror in his eyes. ‘You are young and have seen nothing,’ he snarled. ‘I, on the other hand, have seen the Canavitchi destroy worlds, solar systems, in their bloodthirst. In their quest for revenge on us.
Whatever you believe you know about them, they are a hundred times worse.’
In his office Sanger sat wondering whether the stress was finally getting to his old friend Giresse. Ultimately it didn’t matter, with victory mere inches from their grasp. But still a nagging doubt danced merrily, stubbornly, in the back of Paolo Sanger’s mind.
‘Any word yet from Ryman?’ he asked Michelle Stonebringer.
‘Yes actually,’ replied the secretary, pleased to be, for once, the bearer of some good news. ‘He called in a few moments ago. It seems that the “problem with the overgrown schoolboys” you mentioned some time ago has been dealt with.’
‘Really?’ asked Sanger, recovering his optimistic outlook with this revelation.
Ms Stonebringer looked at her notepad and, without any emotion, read from it in a flat monotone voice: ‘“Tell Paolo that they’ve been taken to the woodshed and given a paddling they won’t survive,”’ she said. Closing the pad, she looked up and raised both eyebrows. ‘I take it that was a metaphor for something?’
Sanger laughed, leaning backwards in his chair until it was almost horizontal. ‘It certainly is, Michelle.’ He paused and checked his watch. ‘Have Chebb go over to Eva’s place to bring that alien creature in, would you? I think it’s time we stopped messing about and took his DNA. We’re going to know soon enough what UNIT have on us.’
He stood and walked towards the boardroom window as the last rays of the dying sun set above the Santa Monica hills, plunging the valley into darkness.
The private InterCom