Dancing the Code Part 7

When Catriona Talliser woke up, she hadn't forgotten where she was. She hadn't slept much; she was surprised that she'd slept at all.

The stone floor hurt her back if she stayed still for too long, and the glaring light bulb and the flies constantly crawling over her skin hadn't helped. When she had slept, there had been disturbed dreams - she remembered one where she was being interrogated by the dying Anton Deveraux, who was screaming at her, and was somehow carrying a Kalashnikov and a belt of small black grenades. More than once she had woken with a grunt of fear, drenched in sweat.

This time, it was the door that woke her. The lock was being worked, the bolts drawn. Catriona sat up, sweating, her heart thumping. She glanced at her wrist, but they'd taken her watch away from her.

The door opened. Catriona composed a stony face, an angry stare.

But it wasn't her interrogator: it was one of the other female, pistol-toting guards. She wondered in pa.s.sing whether this was an all-female prison, or whether it was a women's wing of your ordinary h.e.l.l-hole where they kept political prisoners.

' Allez! Allez! ' said the guard, looking over her shoulder. The door opened wider, and another guard pushed forward a small, young, blonde woman wearing a blue T-s.h.i.+rt and brown flared trousers. ' said the guard, looking over her shoulder. The door opened wider, and another guard pushed forward a small, young, blonde woman wearing a blue T-s.h.i.+rt and brown flared trousers.

'You can't do do this to me!' she was protesting. 'I'm from the United Nations!' this to me!' she was protesting. 'I'm from the United Nations!'

Catriona would have laughed, but it didn't seem polite.

'At least give me my shoes back!' the young woman shouted at the closing door. She tried beating at the door as the locks were turned and the bolts were pushed home on the other side. Then she stopped, shrugged and began running her hands over the metal, prodding at the lock with her fingers, feeling the edges of the door for - Catriona supposed - gaps or hinges. Finally, she turned round to look at the cell.

'h.e.l.lo,' said Catriona quietly.

The girl - woman woman, Catriona corrected herself with an effort - stepped away from the door and managed a quick grin.

'Er - h.e.l.lo,' she said, then marched across the narrow cell with her hand extended. 'I'm Jo Grant.'

'Catriona Talliser.' Catriona pushed herself upright, shook hands.

'Er - what are you - in for?'

Catriona grinned. 'I'm a reporter.'

'What happened to your face?'

Catriona felt at the bruise, winced, then managed another grin. 'I bit the interrogator. I think I'd got slightly bored with the interrogation.'

She paused, swallowed. Time for a bit of honesty. 'I'm glad to see you, Miss Grant.'

'Jo.' The young woman met her eyes and smiled. 'And I'm glad to see you, Catriona. Do you know anything useful? Why they've arrested us, for instance?'

Catriona shook her head. 'All they've done is ask a lot of very stupid questions and threatened to kill me a few times.'

'Oh.' Jo sat down on the cell floor, cross-legged. She didn't look at all unnerved by the prospect of death threats; she seemed to be thinking. Catriona decided that she wasn't either as young or as inexperienced as her manner suggested.

'You're the one that rang Captain Yates, aren't you?' said Jo at last.

'About Captain Deveraux.'

Catriona nodded. 'And you're attached to UNIT, the United Nations top secret intelligence taskforce against alien and other uncla.s.sifiable threats, which, by the way, the entire press corps knows all about, so I wouldn't worry about the Official Secrets Act too much if I were you.'

Jo glanced at her, not particularly surprised. 'Oh, well, I suppose after that stuff with Sir Reginald Styles's conference quite a lot of people got to hear about us.'

'The cybermen?' hazarded Catriona.

'Oh, no. They were Daleks. Well, Daleks and Ogrons. You see there was this alternative future, and the Doctor -' She stopped abruptly, put a hand in front of her mouth. Her face went an interesting shade of red.

Catriona grinned again, sat herself down on the cold floor next to Jo.

'It's okay, I know what's off the record. And you can't get more off the record than locked up in a cell in a Kebirian People's Prison awaiting possible execution.' She paused, realized what she'd just said. 'I don't suppose they sent you on your own?'

The young woman shook her head. 'Mike Yates came with me.

And Sergeant Benton, and a team of - well, back-up people. But they arrested all of them. I'm - well, just an a.s.sistant, really.'

It figures, thought Catriona. Whilst they're defeating the latest threat to the Earth, they need someone glamorous to make the coffee.

She almost said it out loud, bit her tongue just in time. It wasn't fair, and it wasn't accurate. Jo wasn't glamorous: she had the kind of robust innocence that entirely precluded glamour. And she wasn't stupid - she looked as if she could do a lot more than make coffee if she put her mind to it.

As if to prove this, Jo suddenly leaned forward and said, 'Do you think we could escape from here? I can pick locks.'

Her large brown eyes radiated an impossible sincerity. 'And can you run two or three miles barefoot?' asked Catriona.

The young woman looked at her feet, already grubby from the prison's none-too-clean floors. She shrugged, jumped up, began to pace to and fro in the tiny s.p.a.ce.

'We've got to do something something. We can't just sit here.'

'Why not? They're bound to let us go sooner or later - they can't hold foreign nationals indefinitely. Especially not United Nations people. They'd lose every trade concession in the book.'

It didn't sound convincing, even to Catriona's own ears. She became aware that her back was still hurting, that clumps of pain and tension were forming at the base of her neck.

Jo bit at a fingernail. 'What if they're not Kebirians?'

Catriona frowned.

Jo stopped in front of her, knelt down so that their faces were level.

'They could be aliens. Some of the aliens I've seen could make themselves look like people. Or could make duplicates of people - the Axons could do that. And that thing you saw sounded like it was an alien.'

'How many sorts of aliens have you seen?' Catriona asked.

To her amazement, Jo began counting on her fingers. 'Well, first there were the Nestenes, and their plastic things, the Autons. Then there were the Axons, the Daemons, Ogrons, Daleks, Methaji, Arcturians, Sea Devils, Ice Warriors, Draconians, Hoveet, Skraals, Solonians - and - umm - Kalekani and Venusians, though I've never really met the Venusians but the Doctor talks about them all the time - and then if you count things like the Dras.h.i.+gs - oh, and the Spiridons of course, that was only last week, except that you can't actually see them because they're invisible - '

The earnest, innocent expression in the big brown eyes didn't falter once. Catriona began to experience a strange emotion, for the circ.u.mstances: envy. This young woman had seen things that would win her a whole lifetime's worth of Pulitzer Prizes.

'Over a dozen, I should think,' Jo concluded. 'The Doctor says the Daleks are the worst but I was terrified by the Autons.' She paused.

'They could look like people, too. If they had masks on.'

She sprang up, paced over to the door, pressed her ear against it for a moment, then began examining the lock. 'Have you got a nail file?'

she asked suddenly. 'They took my bag away.'

Catriona stared at the younger woman. There were a hundred things she wanted to ask, from UNIT policy to what the aliens looked like to had all these aliens been to Earth or had she been to other planets - Jo was stepping carefully around the room, examining the walls as if she were looking for a hole in them.

'I need a piece of metal about two inches long and thin enough to be flexible,' she said, adding, 'At least, that's what they said on the training course.'

Catriona decided not to think about why this 'innocent young woman' might have been on a lock-picking course. She just said, 'Jo, there are two bolts on the outside of the door. I've heard them drawn across several times now.'

'Yes, that's what I need the nail - the piece of metal for. The lock I can do with a hairpin.'

'I haven't got a hairpin either.'

Jo smiled. 'That's okay. I've got several in my -' She stopped suddenly, and her face fell. 'Oh.'

Catriona tried very hard to suppress a grin, and didn't quite succeed. Fortunately Jo was lost in thought and seemed not to notice.

'The other thing I've done when I've been locked up in places -'

Catriona decided not to ask how many times Jo had been locked up in places '- is to call for the guard, then when he turns up, one of us stands by the door and bashes him over the head with - with -' she scanned the room for a moment, then saw the bucket in the corner, which was a heavy, iron affair. She went over, picked it up, then seemed to realize what was in it. She put it down, rather suddenly, and again went an interesting shade of red. 'Sorry.'

This time, Catriona didn't bother to suppress her grin. Jo looked at the floor, then giggled a little. Wearily, Catriona got up, walked over to the girl, took her arms.

'Look, Jo, if we do something crazy like that the best thing that could possibly happen is we get chucked back in here, painfully, and maybe kicked about a little before they lock us in again. The worst - ' she paused, to make the younger woman meet her eyes, then repeated it '- the worst result, if the guard panics, is that we could be shot.'

Jo looked down, bit her lip. Catriona let her go. 'We've got to do something,' she said eventually, stubbornly.

Catriona began to wonder if this young woman was as stubborn - and therefore as dangerous - as the Kebirian interrogator.

'We can't do anything!' she shouted. 'This is a prison, for Heaven's sake. There are armed guards all over the place, several locked doors between us and the street, barbed wire, watchtowers and we haven't even got any shoes on!' She suddenly became aware of how loudly she was shouting, turned away and sat down, breathing hard. 'We'll have to wait until the morning. It's all we can do.'

'And what if they're aliens? All of them? What then?' Jo was angry too: she was staring at Catriona, her fists clenched by her sides.

With an effort, Catriona controlled her voice. She pretended she was talking to Bernard Silvers, that she was on camera.

'I respect your experience with aliens, Jo, and I know after what I've seen that something pretty strange is going on, but I don't believe that the entire population of Kebiria is under alien control. Not even the entire army.'

'It wouldn't have to be all of them,' said Jo. 'Just the leaders. I've seen them do that, too. Or try to.'

Catriona put her head in her hands. If only the woman would shut up for a minute and let her think.

'We've got to do something something.'

Catriona gave one of the theatrical sighs that she was famous for in the newsroom of the Journal. It was going to be a long night.

The phone was ringing.

The confounded phone was always ringing, thought the Brigadier, struggling reluctantly back to consciousness. Did it have to ring at - his sleep-numbed fingers found the bedside lamp, switched it on - half-past four in the morning? He had been having a nice dream. It had been about - about - Well, something nice. And now the phone - Was still ringing. With a groan of dismay, he pushed himself upright, pulled the receiver towards him.

'Lethbridge-Stewart here.'

It was Osgood, the duty Sergeant. 'Sorry to disturb you, sir, but Captain Yates and his team have been arrested.'

'Been what what?'

The Brigadier's body, long trained in middle-of-the-night crises, was already rolling out of the bed, finding the trousers of his uniform, which were neatly folded over a handy chair, and stepping into them, even as his mind took in the details of the Kebirian situation as relayed by Osgood on the phone.

'I'll be right over,' he said, already buckling his belt. 'Oh, and see if you can find the Doctor. I'll bet he's still working on that contraption of his. He never seems to sleep.'

'Right-o, sir.'

It was only after the Brigadier had hung up that he remembered that the Doctor and the TARDIS were gone, and might not be coming back. That the Doctor thought he was going to shoot him. Thought that he was going to shoot Jo.

He shook his head, quickly finished dressing; then glanced at himself in the mirror. Crisis or no crisis, he decided, there was time for him to shave.

Catriona was half-asleep again when she heard the footsteps approaching the cell. She jolted awake. Jo had already grabbed the bucket, was positioning herself by the door.

I don't believe she's doing this, thought Catriona.

Jo seemed to read her thoughts. 'It's all right,' she said. 'I've done it loads of times.'

Catriona looked up at her. 'What, hit someone over the head with a bucket full of p.i.s.s?'

Jo blushed. 'You know what I mean.'

Outside, voices spoke in Arabic, not quite loud enough for Catriona to make out any of the words. Then the bolts drew back, the key rattled into the lock. Jo gave her a confident grin.

Catriona swallowed. This wasn't funny. The woman was mad. She was going to get them both killed. United Nations or no, Catriona should stop her before - The door swung open, and a guard stepped inside. 'You are to come with me for further - '

She stopped talking as her eyes flicked across to Jo. The pistol seemed to spring out of its holster of its own accord, was in her hand.