Doctor Who_ Trading Futures - Lance Parkin [73]
He looked troubled.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘The last thing we need now is for you to go off the rails.’
‘We’re nearly there,’ he told her.
‘Where?’
‘A facility I own.’
‘A base?’
Baskerville seemed amused by the idea. ‘A secret hideout? No, it’s a factory. I’ve never been there in person, before.’
‘In Russia?’
‘On the Steppes, yes. A secure place to negotiate with Mr Mather and Mr Cosgrove. The personnel at the factory have got orders to fire on everyone except me, and the capability to bring down anything that’s launched against them. No one else, not even those creatures, will be able to track me there.’
‘What do you want?’ she asked.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You have a time machine. So, leaving aside the aliens for a moment, what else could you possibly want?’
‘I told you – access to ULTRA.’
‘You told me at first that you needed it to calculate a course back home to the future. But if you’re not from the future…’
Baskerville looked at her. ‘I think it would be instructive to hear you finish that sentence,’ he said carefully.
If Anji could finish the sentence, she wouldn’t have asked him. She considered it logically, tried to go for the simplest solution.
‘…then you need the ULTRA for something else,’ she concluded, after a moment.
‘That something else being?’
‘I’m not sure what the ULTRA is. So I don’t know what you’d do with it. You said it was an intelligence database… so it’s got some information on it that you want. Or want erased. But it isn’t about you, because you don’t have an electronic presence, or whatever you called it. There’s nothing on there for you to erase. So what else does the ULTRA do? Surveillance? Access to another system?’
Baskerville looked up, worried.
Warm.
‘Access to another system,’ Anji concluded. ‘To do what? Start a war between the US and Europe? You don’t need a computer to do that.’
She dried up, tried to think back to what he’d been talking about before, on the yacht. He was wearing his best poker face, now.
Golden geese. Stealing money.
‘Money?’ she asked.
Baskerville’s face fell. ‘Great heavens, you really are good, aren’t you?’
‘Money?’ she repeated, this time disappointed. ‘You have a Concorde, you have a helicopter, you have a yacht. There comes a point where you don’t really need any more money, doesn’t there? You’re already drinking the most expensive champagne. If it’s not good enough, well, I’m sure you could afford your own vineyard.’
‘IFEC,’ Baskerville said. ‘ULTRA will give me complete access to IFEC.’
The intercom buzzed. ‘We’re coming in to land, Baskerville. Everyone should get to their seats.’
Anji followed him through, puzzled.
Mather and Cosgrove were sitting opposite each other, and had clearly been in conversation. They straightened up, looking like guilty schoolboys.
‘Seatbelts, gentlemen,’ Baskerville reminded them. They both belted up.
Baskerville took a seat, Anji sat next to him. Dee was hurrying through to the cockpit, perhaps to help out with the landing.
The plane was banking down, gently. It had slowed down considerably, even in the time it had taken Anji to come through and take a seat. They were heading through the clouds, now, so there was no visibility.
Anji checked her watch. They’d been flying for about two and a half hours. It took Concorde about three and a half to cross the Atlantic, so they must be well inside Russia.
Baskerville smiled over at her. He trusted her – she could have told Mather or Cosgrove that he wasn’t a time traveller, she hadn’t. Anji was unsure why she hadn’t, but knew it was the right thing to do.
She wondered where he’d got his time machine. There were time machines everywhere, of course, she’d learned that from her travels with the Doctor. It was a bit like L-plates. Before you started driving lessons, you didn’t notice any learners. Once you started, every third car seemed to be from a driving school. And everywhere the TARDIS landed, there seemed to be a time traveller there or thereabouts. The only thing the time machines had in