Doctor Who_ Warlock - Andrew Cartmel [10]
She stuck her hand in it and held the glove up towards Ace, wiggling her fingers and making grotesquely leering camel faces at her. But Ace didn’t notice. Benny turned to see what she was looking at.
Under one of the bare light‐bulbs the Doctor was studying an opaque red plastic envelope marked with a double‐headed eagle and large lettering which read if found return to international drug enforcement agency. classified. do not open. unauthorized opening of confidential documents will result in mandatory criminal prosecution and imprisonment of minimum 30 years and potentially a sentence of death as provided for under terms of martial law by the connors amendment: 5373/dd/f000912.
The Doctor held the envelope up to the light. ‘Either of you two got a letter opener?’ he said.
‘No, but I brought the oven glove,’ said Benny.
‘Thank you. I don’t need that quite yet.’ The Doctor tugged at the red plastic envelope. ‘First things first.’
‘Doctor, are you sure you should open that?’ said Ace.
But the Doctor was busy, searching through a deep drawer on one of the big wooden workbenches. ‘Don’t worry about the letter opener,’ he said. ‘I’ve found something else that will do.’ He took out a rusty old pair of garden shears and neatly sliced open the edge of the red plastic envelope.
‘Oh well,’ sighed Ace, ‘maybe we’ll be able to seal it up again.’
‘It’s not like you to be so unadventurous,’ said the Doctor, spilling a fat sheaf of white papers out of the envelope. The topmost sheet slipped off the pile and off the bench, falling to the oily concrete floor. Ace hopped down to pick it up.
‘That’s thirty years in jail,’ said Bernice as she touched it.
‘Or a death sentence,’ said Ace. As she put the sheet back with the other papers she saw that it was embossed with the same double‐headed eagle and the IDEA logo.
At a newspaper‐covered bench nearby, the Doctor was now switching on a selection of small electrically powered devices. One of these looked like a small coffee grinder. Another was a metal disc hinged like a clam shell with an assortment of thin, brightly coloured wires trailing from it. The wires terminated in a broad, flat bus cable which connected to the third device, a small‐screened computer like a first‐generation Apple Mac.
‘Do you have that pill, Ace? The one our visitors gave you?’
‘Right here,’ said Ace, hopping down from the workbench again so she could get into the small change pocket on her jeans. Trapped there in the warm folds of cloth was the tablet which Shell had given her. Ace nervously dug it out. She’d completely forgotten about it. An aspirin would have crumbled to powder in there but the small white pill was still perfectly intact. It felt faintly warm to the touch as she handed it to the Doctor.
‘Thank you.’
After the Doctor took it from her Ace sniffed her fingers. They felt slightly greasy and smelled strongly of liquorice. Ace remembered that scent on the girl, mixed with the smell of excitement and patchouli. She felt a brief swooning memory of that odd moment earlier. She remembered the warm weight of the cat in her arms. Where was Chick now? Ace remembered the warning about animal experimentation, about kidnapping teams, and she felt a momentary flash of apprehension. But there was Chick, prowling casually through the shadows of the garage.
The Doctor consulted the stack of confidential papers, rifling through them quickly and discarding a dozen of them casually in a bin full of oily rags. He selected one of the remaining sheets and carried it over to the small computer. He set the sheet of paper down and hit the space bar on the computer keyboard. A command line appeared and the Doctor began tapping figures in, occasionally glancing at the paper. The screen of the computer came to life, showing a jagged line in bright luminous green. The glowing line reminded Ace of the cardiac trace on a machine in a hospital. In this case, it looked as if the patient was dying of a violent heart attack.
The Doctor was examining the small pill Ace had given him. He took a clean handkerchief