第 8 页

But for security, to complete her camouflage, as Jana passed an open door and saw a couple of white coveralls hanging there, she grabbed one, ducked into a side-corridor and quickly slipped it on, glancing at the name-tag and photo card. Hopefully no one would look too hard and see that as a six-foot blonde, Jana was hardly suited to the role of a hospital janitor, and could not really be Tommy Taftitti, presumably of Caribbean origin.

Continuing her search, Jana found herself in a ward, the curtained-off beds telling her nothing she needed to know. She considered 'accidentally blundering' into each cubicle but decided that, before long, someone would challenge her and break her disguise.

'Hey, you there.' Jana turned at the sound of a voice. A young doctor, his hair untidy and his eyes heavy with weariness, had emerged from one of the curtained booths, and was pointing angrily at a distant cupboard. 'Yes, you. Cleaner. Get me some disinfectant and a mop, there's a mess in here.'

For a moment she was tempted to ignore him, but then she thought better of it. Exaggerating her Dutch accent, she apologized and shuffled towards the cupboard. As she opened it and leant down to get the liquid, a door at the far end of the ward swung open.

It was the two nurses. She ducked down, pretending to search through the cleaning fluids as she watched them go into one of the curtained-off areas and emerge pushing a trolley with a patient on it, seemingly on their way to an operating theatre. A few overheard words exchanged between them and the young doctor confirmed this. Ah well, so much for instinct - there was hardly anything sinister about that, Jana decided. Shaking her head at her own stupidity - pathetic, she admonished herself - she lifted the disinfectant and straightened up, facing the door they had just left through.

'TO WARDS 3, 4, 5' declared the hoarding above the door.

It took a moment to sink in. Then: 'Damn!' as her brain registered the problem. All the signs for the operating theatres she had seen on her way up the corridor had indicated forward. The odd couple and their patient were going in totally the wrong direction. Wherever the strange nurses were taking their patient, it wasn't to an operating theatre.

Dropping the disinfectant, she yanked her white coat off and dashed back the way she'd come. Valuable seconds had passed - enough for the two creepy nurses to have gone in any door, down any stairwell or into either lift.

'Gaweg!' she snarled as she slammed her fist against a door. How could she have been so stupid? What were they up to? Why was she spending so much energy chasing them - unless...

She dashed back down towards the reception area. The place had cleared a lot since she was last there, and there was no queue at the desk. She stopped, breathless, in front of the receptionist.

'Hi.' She tried to smile politely. 'You know those two nurses you saw earlier?' 'I see lots of nurses,' muttered the receptionist without taking her eyes from the pile of admission forms in front of her.

'Yes, well, let's try not to be obtuse, shall we? You know which nurses I'm talking about. We both thought they looked odd.'

The receptionist slowly raised her face and Jana realized it was a different woman from the one she'd seen earlier. She swore again, under her breath this time, and turned away to look at the security guard. Who had vanished. In fact, the reception area was totally empty.

'You cleared your patients quickly, didn't you? Ten minutes ago, this place was swarming.'

The receptionist leant forward, offering a pen and one of her pieces of paper. 'You were here a few minutes back, were you? Did you fill in an admission form?'

'I am not a patient,' snapped Jana, stepping back. 'I am a... a visitor. Jana Kristan. Seeing a patient.'

'Oh. And which patient would that be?' The receptionist smiled insincerely.

Jana paused, swallowed and, despite her instincts -which she'd ignored too often today as it was - screaming for her to keep quiet, she jumped in with both feet. She opted to play the role of ignorant foreigner; it had served her well in the past. 'I am flying over from Holland. I am here to visiting my cousin, a policewoman. She was hurted in Smallmarshes.'

'And her name?' The receptionist's smile took on the falsehood of a pantomime villain's grin.

It didn't seem to be working. In a fairly blatant attempt to see if she could read the policewoman's name upside down, Jana leant towards and over the desk. The receptionist, caught by surprise, pushed her chair back to get away from the reporter.

In an instant Jana understood everything. She was trapped. The receptionist she'd seen earlier was lying face-down under the desk, a trickle of blood oozing around her ear. Whether the woman was dead or alive, Jana couldn't tell, but she immediately guessed that a similar fate had befallen the security guard and any unfortunate patients and associated relatives or friends who had been seated there ten minutes ago.

Aware that her cover had been blown, the fake receptionist tried to stand, groping across the desk for something that lay unseen under a pile of paperwork. Jana lashed out with her handbag, catching the impostor across the temple with its weight. As the nurse staggered back, Jana yanked the bag open, puffing out a small, compact blue-grey pistol with silencer out of a side-pocket.

'In case of emergencies,' Jana said, and aimed.

The fake receptionist feinted back and then dived forward, catching Jana under the chin with a swift right hook. Surprised, Jana let herself drop to the floor but twisted sideways as she fell. Coming out of the roll, she slammed into a chair and sent it skittering noisily across the waiting area. She was up on one knee, the pistol aimed and firing in less than a second.

The bullet took the fake receptionist in the forehead. She flopped down hard on her chair, a look of complete amazement etched onto her face. Jana kept the gun on her for a second, just to be on the safe side, then scattered the papers from the desk across the floor. Under the admission forms lay a small blue-grey pistol, the same model as her own. Jana stared at it, then quickly swapped her gun for the duplicate after hurriedly wiping it clear of fingerprints. The impostor, it would now seem, had been shot with her own gun.

Without waiting to check on the real receptionist or trying to find the others, Jana scooped up her discarded handbag and plopped the new pistol inside. Pausing only to catch her breath and run a hand through her hair to straighten it, she walked out of the hospital. She kept one hand inside the bag, grasping the pistol in case anyone else came towards her.

There was no one around in the car park. She began to walk purposefully towards her red Mini, then stopped almost immediately. Everything in her training told her that something was wrong.

She darted across the car park, dodging behind and between cars, heading for her Mini. When she was still ten yards from it, she heard the first two shots from behind her, audible although fired from a silenced weapon, and she dived into cover between two cars. As she cautiously looked out, two more shots followed. They weren't meant for her.

The red Mini exploded in a ball of flame which scorched her face and sucked the breath from her lungs. The door and front wheels were flung forty feet into the air before bouncing down onto the blackened gravel. Hospital windows exploded inwards and a smart MG beyond her Mini was enveloped in flames, its petrol tank erupting seconds later, shattering more windows in the surrounding area.

Amidst the confusion, screams and fire alarms, Jana nodded to herself. 'Very good. A professional job.' They knew who she was, because they knew which of the cars was hers. And she knew what sort of people normally carried those blue-grey pistols, and how formidable their resources were. It was, she thought, time to disappear again. Right now.

It was a short sprint away from the carnage and through the hospital gates, out into the rapidly filling street. No shots followed her this time. Think fast. Blend in. If you behave as if your clothes aren't singed and your face isn't burnt, nobody will notice. Past on-lookers gathering to gawp at the carnage, stunned shoppers and halted cars, she walked swiftly but unobtrusively in the direction of Hastings railway station.

Although strictly speaking it was UNIT Headquarters' laboratory, Mike Yates, like everyone else, had come to think of it as the Doctor's laboratory. It had a sense of personality and purpose when he thought of it in that way. The Doctor belonged at UNIT, in his lab, and his presence made everyone feel safer.

Although he had not long been seconded to UNIT, Mike had come to respect and trust the Doctor's judgement in most matters.

'Weird, but good,' was Jimmy Munro's one comment on the subject, when Mike asked him about his future scientific advisor at a cricket match, shortly before joining UNIT. 'I didn't get to interact with him much because I gathered from the Brigadier that he was quite ill.' Mike remembered Jimmy Munro's cryptic smile. 'Apparently he'd gone grey and grown six inches, because James Turner had known him a couple of years back, and he said the Doctor was quite small and dark.'

On the strength of that, Mike had sought out Major Turner just before he and his dolly wife had flown out to his new posting in Ceylon - or Sri Lanka, as they now had to say.

'Oh, he was just divine,' had been Mrs Turner's main comment. 'I got some smashing pictures of him in the heat of battle.'

Major Turner had coughed suddenly. 'Isobel is something of a photography student,' he explained. 'But alas, everything she took during my time as a captain with the Brigadier is covered under the Official Secrets Act. Once you're fully ensconced in UNIT's happy bosom, I'll get Isobel to send 'em on.'

Mike Yates had arrived at UNIT, wondering which former captain had perceived the Doctor correctly. Now, after having worked closely with the Doctor during their recent sojourn in the Pacific Islands, he felt that neither of the opinions he had received really began to do the man justice. He liked the Doctor, although he'd never admit it out loud, and he liked the man's rarefied form of anarchy. He enjoyed the way the Doctor could out-do the Brigadier without actually humiliating him. And he liked the Doctor's assistant, Doctor Shaw, enormously.

Maybe he could ask her out for a date.

No. Perhaps not. She seemed a bit fierce and, while Mike guessed that was mostly a professional attitude - and probably used as a defence against the Doctor's irresponsibility - he seriously doubted he had the necessary experience or patience to break her resolve.

Nice legs though.

Mike coughed as he prepared to enter the Doctor's lab. He was aware that he could be interrupting a vastly important experiment requiring non-moving air molecules (the cause of Corporal Nutting's most recent telling off) or a heated discussion between the Doctor and Doctor Shaw. On the occasions this had happened, the debate had been so far beyond Mike's sixteen-plus in General Science that he'd had no idea whether he'd intruded on the start, middle or end of the conversation.

Taking a deep breath, he knocked lightly on the green double doors and pushed them open.

'Sorry to interrupt, Doctor, but -'

He found himself alone in the laboratory. The windows were shut, the hatchway above the spiral steps seemed to be bolted from the inside, and the benches were free of any signs of ongoing experiments. The Doctor's cape was gone from the hat-stand near the window overlooking the canal. The window through which Mike had often found the scientist staring, miles away from anything or anyone.

'Oh,' he said aloud, feeling rather foolish.

The telephone rang, on the desk near the window, next to the funny police box that the Doctor kept there. It rang again as he considered whether he should answer it, and reached for the receiver.

'Hello, UNIT laboratory, can I help you?'

'Is Liz Shaw there, please?' The voice was distant, polite and well-educated.

'Not at the moment,' Mike replied. 'May I take a message for her?'

The phone went dead. 'Oh,' Mike said again. He replaced the receiver, shrugged his shoulders and turned to head back to the Duty Office where John Benton was setting out the Scrabble set. 'Must remember to tell Doctor Shaw that her father, or someone, rang for her.'

Marc Marshall was not sure what happened after the policewoman hit the wall. Not really.

He had a strange feeling of light-headedness, almost like floating. It reminded him of when he'd been ill about two years previously, with glandular fever. Drifting in and out of deep sleep, his mother's face fading in and out of focus. Everything feeling heavy, slurred and sepia-toned.

That's how he felt in the bathroom of the old house. That's how he felt when the three-eyed creature had placed him over its shoulder and carried him past the still woman. Was she dead? He didn't know. Marc tried to focus on what that meant. Dead. Someone was dead? He'd never seen anyone dead before but despite the novelty, somehow he couldn't hold onto the thought. Couldn't concentrate on anything. He was drifting -

He was jolted into complete wakefulness by the sea. More specifically, by being dropped face-first into it. Coughing and spluttering as the salt water rushed into his mouth, he tried to get up, to stagger away. But it was dark now, and the sea-shore was deserted apart from him and his captor, who was holding him down. All he could see was a pair of dark shoes.

No, not shoes. Feet. But strange feet. Mud-brown over green leather... with three toes.

And claws.

Not leather - scales. Like fish. Or snakes.

Marc panicked, splashing backwards as far as he could go, and wriggled enough that the weight on his back was eased. As he felt the pressure relax, he pushed himself up, flipping back and landing on his backside.

And then he saw it. It. Whatever it was, it certainly was not a human - no fancy-dress costume could be that good. Besides, there was something about it that he was sure he remembered seeing before -. somewhere, a long time ago...

Mamma! Where is mamma? Have the Devilbacks got her? What about the others? Was everyone caught except him? Trapped in the strange cages with wood-that-isn't-wood that moves by itself barring the exit. The Devilbacks stare hard, stare with their red eye and the wood-that-isn't-wood entraps them all. That must be what happened to mamma and the others. Mamma! 'Mum! Help!' Marc stared up at the creature, trembling in terror. Somehow he knew it would hurt him. The third eye, there in the centre of its forehead - he knew it, he'd seen it before.