Downtime - Marc Platt [38]
Undeterred, the DJ continued, ‘You know, we want to share that with you all. Meantime it can be a meeean time out there, so let’s unlock the beat right now.’
Bleahh, went Sarah. ‘You’ve got to be joking. Give K9
some air-time and a few CDs and he’d do better than that.’
The music settled into a bland pop number by the latest teeny idols Fizzy Milk, which seemed coincidentally to continue the background beat, already an obvious hazard of listening to this station. In hope of something soothing, Sarah switched to Radio 3, but the Composer of the Week was Stockhausen and he was obviously not at his best on Thursdays. As a last resort she turned to Classic FM and hoped to stay awake until she got to the university.
She still hadn’t decided on her line of attack. New World had employed her after all, but she was going to give them only about an eighth of what they wanted. And, having listened to the bog-standard quality of their radio station, she couldn’t work out what they could possibly want it for. Maybe she’d be better off investigating them. The fee was fine: they told her there would be an article in it for her too. It was the content that worried her. It had seemed simple enough: trace the people on this list. Some twenty-five years before, they had all been present at something called ‘The London Event’, but it would have helped if someone could define what the
‘Event’ actually was. No one seemed to know.
The official channels started clamming up immediately.
They were almost racing ahead of her, slamming doors and shutting up shop before she even turned the corner. Sarah had plenty of strings to pull and favours to call in, but the more she uncovered, the less she knew. She began to run out of strings.
Of the people on the list, several were dead, at least three had vanished without trace and those surviving seemed in truth not to remember.
She even knew two of them personally. The veteran TV
presenter Harold Chorley of Yours Chorley fame had been delighted to see her again, but couldn’t remember her name properly, let alone what story he had been covering in London a quarter of a century ago. He called her Sandra and kept staring over her shoulder as if he expected a cue card to materialize out of the ether.
What concerned her most was the large number of army names on the list. And the name of one colonel in particular.
At that point, she decided it was definitely time to give New World University a good going over.
There was also another name, which, although not on the prescribed list, had emerged when she started to conduct her own research. There was no ID photo on the MoD report, old enough to be held only on hard copy. But the description of a male, aged approximately 50 years, height five foot nine, with long dark brown hair and eccentric dress, plus the almost deliberate lack of any other information, only confirmed his identity. It matched her own brief memories of one of several gentlemen that her best friend had once introduced her to. He said that they were manifestations of himself, but her best friend had the knack of talking scientific or philosophical nonsense. Or just being bloody-minded for that matter.
Anyway, that situation had been absurd, and it was much too complicated to explain to her university employees. The MoD report simply called him ‘The Doctor’, but that name, allied to that of Colonel Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart, was enough to set her blood tingling.
From a window high in the techno-studies block, Danny Hinton watched the yellow sports car pull up outside the reception block. Its driver, a woman with thick auburn hair, wore a smart fawn suit and startling cherry pink accessories.
She was carrying a briefcase and hurried into the foyer as if she was late.
Danny closed the blind with a snap and turned to the terminal on the desk beside him. He had about an hour before anyone was due to use the room. An hour elsewhere; other places to