Doctor Who_ Father Time Part 24

Sallak shot him.

Chapter Fourteen.

The Interrogation Game Ferran watched, unmoved, as two guards dumped the Doctor on the interrogation table. This was the first time he'd seen his brother's enemy.

The Time Lord was unconscious, corpselike and blindfolded. They strapped him into the restraints without his so much as stirring.

The interrogation chamber had been grown quickly in one of the rooms on the top floor of the Tower. Its size meant it should be an intimate s.p.a.ce, but the white-tiled walls, the stainless-steel surfaces, the harsh light gave it the ambience of an abattoir.

'We should kill the woman,' he told the Deputy.

'She could still be useful.'

'The Doctor's our prisoner. He's not going anywhere.'

'You have never faced him in battle, My Lord. We should keep the girl alive, as a possible hostage. If he escapes, rescuing her will be his priority.'

Ferran nodded. He'd read enough of the archives to know the Deputy was right. He thought about killing the Doctor while he had the chance, finding the Last One for himself, but accepted that this was the most efficient way to obtain her location. 'As you wish. Begin the mind probe.'

The Interrogator stepped to the control box. He was a small man who looked like a toad. He began turning dials with clear relish for the task ahead.

'The Doctor possesses a great many mental techniques and defences,' the Deputy told the Interrogator. 'I suggest you concentrate on the mental link between the Doctor and his TARDIS.'

Ferran frowned. 'What good will that do us?'

The Deputy smiled. 'The Doctor is never far from his police box, you can't imagine him without it. But it's not within a hundred miles of here, or we would have detected it. So the Doctor is based elsewhere.'

'Find the TARDIS and we find the Last One?'

'That is the theory, My Lord. He and the TARDIS have a symbiotic link. Logically, the TARDIS will provide the safest place to secure the Last One.'

The Interrogator bent over the controls. 'We should be able to follow that link, My Lords.' He took a circlet from its compartment on the console and placed it on the Doctor's head. The Interrogator was already wearing the matching one.

As the Interrogator set about his work, the Deputy began examining the case the Doctor had brought with him. Ferran looked over his shoulder. Half the case was taken up with a bulky piece of equipment, the other half was packed with odds and ends.

'Components salvaged from the saucer,' the Deputy said. He took a few items out, then something caught his eye.

He pulled it out, brandished it.

Ferran s.n.a.t.c.hed it from him.

This was the knife, blessed by his brother, imbued with his sacred duty. This was the knife with which he would carve out the Last One's hearts.

'The instrument of his destruction,' he laughed. 'He kept it. He didn't understand what it symbolised.'

The Deputy was watching him, silently pleading for his master to show more reverence.

'It is destiny,' Ferran hissed.

Joel lay back on his silk sheets. He was full of champagne and amphetamines.

Kirst lay alongside him, smelling of perfume, diamond earrings hanging from her ears like bunches of grapes catching the candlelight.

'Can't beat going straight,' he said.

Kirst was worried, he could tell.

'We've not stolen anything,' he reminded her. 'It's that trans.m.u.ter they've got.'

'They've got a girl tied up downstairs,' she reminded him. 'It says on the news that the police are looking for her; they say she's a teacher and her husband was stabbed to death.'

'You heard what they said, Kirst: that's why they're here. Three people. That's all they want. The bloke they've killed, the Doctor, that Last One they keep going on about.'

'Do you know who that is? I asked Sallak. It's the Doctor's daughter. They want to kill a sixteen-yearold girl.'

'We don't know what she's done.'

Kirst slammed her hand down on to Joel's chest, squeezing the air out. 'Sixteen,' she repeated. 'What could could she have done?' she have done?'

Joel sat up. 'What do you want to do, then?' he asked. 'In two or three days, Sallak and Ferran go back to outer s.p.a.ce, we get to keep all this.' He reached out to the fruit bowl, dug his hand into the pile of gemstones and let them trickle through his fingers.

'If we're not caught.'

'I keep telling you: we've not done anything wrong.'

Kirst leaned over, took a ruby from the bowl. 'So we buy things with these from now on we go into a shop and hand over a ruby and ask for our change in emeralds?'

'No, we sell them.'

'Where?'

'Jewellers,' he said, annoyed. 'OK we fence them. I know people.'

'Yeah, criminals. Your big plan is that you tell a bunch of criminals that we've got a house full of gold and jewels and would they like to buy them off us, at the market rates?'

Joel glared at her, but he knew she had a point.

'Look, we'll worry about the details later,' he a.s.sured her.

She rolled her eyes.

'Look, we're better off than we were. I'm not totally happy with this, but Sallak's not a monster.'

That was when the man they had imprisoned upstairs started screaming.

The Doctor's mouth was wide open, but it was silent now.

The Interrogator was motionless, lapping up every moment. He was in direct control of the Doctor's mind. The Doctor's thoughts were his thoughts. His face twitched as each agony he was inflicting on the Doctor fed back to him.

'So much,' the Interrogator breathed. Every thought and memory would take a little prising out of the Doctor's mind.

'Focus,' the Deputy ordered.

The screen on the Interrogator's console was showing a blue box. An image of the Doctor's TARDIS, taken by one of Sallak's robot marines on Falkus. The Doctor was standing to one side, along with two young people: a tall man and a dark-skinned woman. This would act as a trigger image the Interrogator would search the Doctor's mind for it.

The Interrogator gleefully pulled levers, as if he was operating a rack. Each adjustment brought a new type of scream from the Doctor. Each agony was mirrored on the Interrogator's face.

Finally a new image swam into view. The same police box, sitting on a lawn.

'There,' he gasped.

'Where?' the Deputy demanded.

But the image had gone.

Ferran watched the Interrogator, who was swaying slightly. 'He has a powerful mind.'

'Your address,' the Deputy said. 'What is your home address?'

Instinctively, the Doctor remembered. The address appeared on the screen, but the words were blurred.

'He's too powerful,' the Interrogator said. He stared ahead, he started clutching his chest.

'What's happening?' Ferran demanded to know.

The Interrogator lunged for the console, started scrabbling around it.

'He's trying to release the Doctor,' Ferran realised. It took both him and the Deputy to pull the Interrogator away from the control panel.

'Why?' the Deputy asked.

The Interrogator opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Then he keeled over.

'Oh dear,' the Doctor said from the table. 'It looks like the poor chap forgot how to keep his heart beating.'

Ferran and the Deputy turned to the Doctor. The Time Lord was smiling, undeterred by being blindfolded.

'I saw inside his mind,' the Doctor said. 'And I have no doubt that he deserved that. Now, let me out, and we'll discuss this rationally.'

The Deputy drew his pistol, pointed it at the Doctor and fired.

Ferran shoved into him just in time. The energy bolt exploded against the back wall, shaking the room.

'There's a better way,' Ferran told him, puffing the circlet from the Interrogator's head and placing it on his own.

He felt the Doctor's thoughts.

'My Lord, this is most dangerous,' he heard Sallak say, through two sets of ears.

Ferran narrowed his eyes, focused on his hatred for the Last One.

'Miranda,' the Doctor echoed, weakly.

The image on the screen changed. Now there was a girl with frizzy blonde hair, standing at a window.

Ferran smiled.

Miranda didn't need much sleep, indeed she could do without it.

Tonight she had wanted to doze and dream, but the weather conspired against her. The rain was clattering against the roof, the wind was shaking the trees as if they were rattles. She was also buzzing from asking Bob out, with her father's absence, with his warning her to be on her guard. She was drowsy and warm.

She'd read and reread the comic she'd borrowed from Bob, and was sure she was missing the point.

The grandfather clock had tocked its way past midnight. It could be set to chime the hour, but Miranda and her father both agreed that was merely irritating.

The television sat unwatched in the corner, there to provide illumination as much as anything else. Miranda was dimly aware that it was the weather forecast, and that there was a severe-weather warning in force across the whole country.

Miranda went over to the window, drew the thick velvet curtain back a little, and watched the rain. The garden was walled off from the rest of the world, the house was set back from the road. It was like her own private kingdom. Very safe: the walls were lined with infrared sensors, there were security cameras around. A burglar, intruder or her father's 'enemy' could get into the grounds, with difficulty, but Miranda would know they were there. They couldn't get into the house, she was sure of that. The doors looked like wood, but underneath were made of thick steel plate. The windows all had locks, and were double-glazed. Her father had insisted on the best when they'd moved in. It had sounded paranoid, as though he had been expecting trouble, but Miranda was grateful for it.

There was a light in the garden. Either a flashing light, or one that was being continuously obscured by branches as they swayed in the wind. She tried to work out which.

There was a distant crack of thunder. She hadn't seen the lightning; perhaps that had been before she'd gone to the window. In which case the storm was still a long way away. She wondered how far.

There was the light again, a regular pulsing light. It was like a signal, the sort of beacon a secret lover would use to signal across the moor to his lady, or that a spy on a clifftop would send out to a submarine.

She dismissed the idea that it was Bob. He was possibly capable of a romantic gesture, but it wouldn't be something so cryptic.

She saw the lightning this time, or thought she did. Automatically, she began counting under her breath. Six seconds later there was a roll of thunder.

The flashing light was calling to her: she felt it drawing her towards it.

No, that was silly. She tried to a.n.a.lyse the thought, but it remained out of reach, as though it belonged in a primal part of her brain. The nearest she got was that it was calling her home.

Miranda went to the front door, opened it.

The rain was coming down in sheets, all beautifully lit by the security light above the door that had flicked on automatically as it sensed her presence. Another sign that there wasn't an intruder he'd have triggered it.