‘I’ve called Amy and the Doctor,’ said Andrew.
‘They’re on their way. They might get here in time to help us.’
‘The doctor?’ said Jane weakly. ‘Do I need a doctor?’
‘No, he’s… Well…’ Andrew looked at Sameera.
‘Yeah, we think he’s an alien as well, to be honest. He seems to know a lot about time travel.’
‘Amy said they travel in time with him,’ said Sameera.
‘Yeah, they seemed to know everything about what’s going on here. Talked about “Time Harvesters”…’
Jane’s eyes opened very wide.
The banging at the door halted for a few seconds.
They stared suspiciously at the door, wondering if the Symington and Blenkinsop had given up. But then it resumed. There was longer between each bang but the sounds were louder. They were taking run-ups.
‘Why do you think they haven’t just come back in time to get here before us?’ Andrew murmured, eyeing the door.
Jane said, ‘I heard Vanessa say to one of them once that the office was… shielded? Is that the word? Because of the storage dangers?’
Sameera nodded. ‘That makes sense. Still, they’ll get in here soon enough.’
Jane looked at them both. ‘You trust him, this Doctor?
You trust him with your life?’
Andrew looked at Sameera. She had a funny half-smile on her face. He’d seen it on her in meetings when she knew she had the winning argument and was just waiting for her moment to use it. He hadn’t realised how well he knew her face until just then.
‘Well,’ said Sameera, ‘I trust him a hell of a lot more than I trust most of the people who work in this bank.’
‘Can he save us?’ said Jane. ‘The Bank? Or the world?
If you get to him and tell him what you know about Vanessa, will he be able to save us?’
Andrew opened his mouth and closed it again. In his work at the Bank, his job had always been to talk everything up, to say that things were going to be better than they really were. But he was never going to do that again.
‘I don’t know,’ he said at last, ‘but I don’t think anyone else can do it.’
‘You’re going to bring him here?’ Jane asked.
‘He’s on his way,’ said Sameera.
‘OK then,’ said Jane.
Above her head, there were two almighty bangs as Symington and Blenkinsop took another run-up. The wood around the lock was starting to splinter.
‘We don’t have much time,’ she said, ‘but I know what to do.’
Nadia’s watch was sparking purple and green. She stared at it. She was getting younger now, younger by the minute, by the second, she could feel it. It had happened so many times before, but each time, in each direction, it felt sickeningly wrong.
Rory was pulling her wheelchair into the goods lift at Lexington Bank. A wheel had stuck, she was bumping in her seat. The motion was doing something to the watch, something in it was jogging loose she could feel it and with it…
‘Doctor!’ she said, and her voice was higher than she’d
expected, and lighter. ‘Doctor, something’s happening!’
‘Right,’ said the Doctor. ‘Let’s see if we can do something about that.’
He tinkered with her watch again with his little pen-like laser device. He rattled her wrist, then gave it one extra burst. She felt another lurch begin in her cells.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘That ought to… Hmmm. That wasn’t supposed to happen.’
‘Doctor, she’s—’ began Rory.
‘Yes,’ said the Doctor. ‘I can see that.’
‘What’s happened?’ said Nadia, and her voice was so high-pitched and childlike that it startled her.
‘You’re um…’ began Amy, wrinkling her brow, ‘I don’t know how to tell you this but you’re, um…’
‘You’re about 10,’ said the Doctor. ‘Well have to fix it, but not right now. Come on, at least we can leave the wheelchair.’
They set off at a sprint up the stairs. And Nadia, more full of energy at least than she’d been for years, began to run with them.
In the outer office, Symington and Blenkinsop roared at each other with their shark faces. They could feel that the door was starting to give way. They were exultant.
They would have been infinitely patient; if the door had taken ten years to break down they would have given the time to it, but the moment of triumph was near.
They sniffed the air with their blunt noses and scented blood. They charged again, running towards the door, heads down, noses forward. Three or four more good runs would do it.
They ran and braced their heads for the impact and
hurtled forward, but when the blow came the door was a lot more yielding than they’d expected. It crumpled forward, giving no resistance. It had been unlocked from the inside. The door burst open, half off its hinges.
Behind the desk, at the far end of the room, Jane Blythe was sitting, smiling faintly.
Symington and Blenkinsop crashed through into the room, stumbling and dazed. They focused on Jane and advanced, roaring. Behind them, Andrew and Sameera quietly tiptoed through the open door, into the outer office. Symington and Blenkinsop’s faces morphed back into their polite, deadly human forms. They advanced on Jane.
‘You have concealed wanton criminals,’ said Mr Blenkinsop.
‘Come now,’ said Mr Symington, ‘tell us where you’ve hidden them.’
‘I’m afraid that we shall have to take matters into our own hands,’ said Mr Blenkinsop.
‘We have no other choice,’ said Mr Symington, tipping his head to the side like a predator eyeing its prey.
‘We usually try to be polite.’
‘Courteous.’
‘We go out of our way. But in a case like this.
‘I’m afraid,’ said Mr Symington, ‘that the gloves are off.’ His skin turned greyer and greyer.
‘We have to go back and help,’ whispered Sameera as Andrew dragged her past Jane’s neatly ordered post-it notes towards the door of the outer office.
‘There’s nothing we can do,’ whispered Andrew.
‘We have to find the Doctor and tell him what’s going on here.’
‘But we—’
There was a piercing scream from the inner office.
‘They’re going to kill her! And she never even had one of the watches!’
‘There’s nothing we can do,’ said Andrew. ‘If we go back, they’ll kill us too. Come on, before they find us!’
He put his arm around her shoulders and half-led, half-dragged her to the lift. And behind them there was a sound of screaming, eventually overwhelmed by the noise of crunching bones.
In the library of Lexington Bank’s London office, workmen had set up a podium for the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s visit. Chairs were lined up in rows.
Beautifully bound presentation copies of the Bank’s annual report were on each chair - someone had worked several nights at once to get those done in time. Television cameras were there too, trained on the podium where the Chancellor would deliver his speech. And behind the stage, an urgent whispered conversation was taking place.
‘It was horrible,’ said Sameera. ‘We could hear them eating her.’
‘How can they do that, Doctor?’ asked Andrew. ‘I thought they had to work according to contracts? If you never borrowed from them, they couldn’t touch you. I thought… I thought it was all our fault.’
Sameera caught his hand and squeezed it for a moment.
‘Sounds like they’ve changed the way they operate,’
said the Doctor. ‘Plus, have you noticed that none of them are anywhere about?’
‘Yeah, we noticed,’ said Andrew. ‘We expected they’d follow us, thought we’d be on the run like all of you.’
He looked around. The thin orange glowing-pencil line was drawn around the Doctor, Rory and Amy from Nadia’s watch. Sameera and Andrew had taken the change in Nadia qu
ite well, considering.
‘You brought a child with you… to a bank full of aliens?’ Sameera had asked.
‘I’m not a child, I’m the Head of Marketing,’ Nadia had said, and Sameera had stared at her, then shrugged, deciding to accept it.
‘Do you think they’re planning something, Doctor?’
asked Rory.
The Doctor shrugged.
‘Probably. They’ve probably already planned something.’
He peeped round the black material forming the backdrop of the stage.
The television crew were testing their equipment.
‘One two, one two,’ said a woman into a microphone.
‘Did you pick that up OK, Steve?’
The Doctor turned his attention to the centre of the atrium, with its great twisted-glass sculpture. He stared up at it.
‘So we all know what we’re here to do, right?’ said Amy.
Rory nodded. ‘We have to let the world know what’s going on, before everyone’s wearing those watches.’
Lexington Bank employees started to file into the hall. The place was going to be packed. No one would be able to tell who was supposed to be here and who wasn’t.
‘Time for our cue, then,’ said Andrew.
‘Let’s go,’ said Sameera, and they walked towards their positions near to the podium.
From the other side of the fabric backdrop, two men in smart suits listened to the conversation, watched Andrew and Sameera walk in and take up their seats on the aisle in front of the stage.
‘How very interesting, don’t you think, Mr Symington?’
‘A conversation with an invisible entity.’
‘Partially visible, Mr Symington, partially visible.’
‘Quite so. Intermittently perceptible, intermittently quite vanished.’
‘Curious.’ Mr Blenkinsop tipped his head to the side.
‘Do you think that this could have anything to do with this Doctor, of whom we have heard so much?’
‘So much, Mr Blenkinsop, but not nearly enough.’
‘I certainly think we need to hear a great deal more about him.’
‘And to see him. Really to come to understand him.’
‘Indeed. My guess is that he will make a very valuable acquaintance for us.’
‘Very valuable indeed,’ said Mr Symington, smiling.
Chapter
17
As his car drove past St Paul’s Cathedral, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was running through his final notes. It had been a good year so far, broadly speaking. After the first six months of 2007, the economy was booming, the City was doing well, and Lexington Bank was a model of efficiency and work-life balance. The Chancellor was pleased. The Bank would be the perfect place, and this the perfect time, for a speech about Britain’s sustainable economic future and the end of the cycle of boom and bust. He checked the time with his aide. They were a couple of minutes ahead of schedule. Marvellous. An hour to deliver the speech now, after that a meeting with the Prime Minister, then an early dinner before tackling some of those red boxes. Plus, his wife had mentioned some wonderful watch she’d picked up that she was longing to show him that evening.
The car pulled up outside the back entrance of Lexington Bank. The Senior Vice-President of the London office was there to greet him - Vanessa Laing-Randall
had unfortunately been called away on urgent business.
But everything else was running like clockwork. A brief set of handshakes. A photoshoot with the Bank’s in-house photographer. A few moments behind the curtain at the back of the stage to make sure his notes were in the right order and wonder, very briefly, who that odd man in the tweed jacket was. And then an arm at his elbow, a muttered ‘This way, Chancellor, don’t trip on the cable,’ and the bright lights of the TV cameras and a speech to deliver.
Loitering by the television cameras - and flirting idly with the cameramen - Amy waited for the red light that meant ‘live’ to go on. The Doctor had told her she could get a few metres away from Nadia without the Symingtons and Blenkinsops being able to see her, but not much further than that. It was all right - she didn’t have to go far, and she’d worked out what she was going to do.
The light went red. The cameraman cocked his finger by his ear and pointed to the Chancellor at the podium.
It was only live on the Parliamentary News channel, but as soon as they’d heard what Amy had to say, the story would be all around the world.
‘I’m delighted,’ the Chancellor was saying, ‘to speak today at Lexington Bank, a model of how banks across the world should run their business and a symbol of what makes London the greatest financial centre on Earth. The commitment shown by Lexington to employee welfare, and the value it generates for the economy.
Amy suddenly broke away from the cameraman and sprinted down the main aisle. No one tried to stop her
- all the dignitaries and senior bank officials in the aisle seats were too puzzled by what was happening to react quickly enough. The Chancellor stumbled slightly in his speech but gamely tried to continue as Amy leapt up in front of him at the podium.
‘The City of London is the great powerhouse of our economy,’ he read, ‘and as such it is fitting that…’
‘It’s all lies!’ shouted Amy. ‘Aliens have taken over -
they’re giving out watches like these,’ she rolled up her sleeve to show the watch.
‘Get her down!’ shouted someone. ‘Security!’
Two besuited men who’d been standing quietly behind the Chancellor of the Exchequer took him gently by the elbows and guided him out through the curtain to the waiting limousine - they’d been well briefed for events like this. The cameraman was looking for instruction from a producer standing by. Amy realised that to the millions of people watching the television right now she must sound insane.
‘Look!’ she said.
Nadia was lurking at the side of the stage. Amy hauled the 10-year-old girl out in front of the lights.
Two security guards were thundering across the atrium towards the gathered visitors. Rory and Andrew stepped out smartly to head them off. Andrew tripped one up with a chair, Rory started shouting at the other one about something happening behind him - enough to confuse them for a moment.
‘Nadia, tell them what happened to you!’
Nadia looked straight into the eye of the camera. She pulled down her sleeve so that her blistered arm with the sparks still flying out of the watch were clearly visible.
‘Six months ago,’ she said, ‘I was 40 years old. But I was stupid. I borrowed time using this device. Look at me now.’ She shook her wrist angrily. ‘Just look at me.’
They never knew whether it was the shaking that had done it, or whether the watch, always fragile and malfunctioning, was never going to last much longer.
But as Nadia shook her hand at the camera, as the security guards reached up to pull Amy from behind the podium, Nadia’s watch gave out a final spurt of sparks, made a gentle sighing noise and a series of short clicks.
Its face went dead. Nadia stared at it with horror.
The thin protective orange shield around Amy collapsed. All around the atrium, and in all the offices looking out onto it, dozens of heads turned instantly towards Amy. They were all Symingtons and Blenkinsops. Like predators scenting blood, their faces turned towards her - blank, unsmiling, with very sharp teeth indeed.
Sameera could see what was happening. She watched the Symingtons and Blenkinsops approaching Amy, who was blinded by the TV lighting.
There were only seconds left. This was the last opportunity to show the world, and Sameera was going to take it. She ran up onto the podium.
‘Look!’ she said into the TV camera. ‘If you don’t believe her, watch this. I’m going to pay back the time I’ve borrowed - just watch!’
Sameera looked into the lens of the camera, a measured and thoughtful look. She brought her watch up in front of her face. She pressed the payment button.
She felt thirty-five years heap upon her body, all the
accumulated damage of that amount of time, all the sore joints and the stiffened sinews and the aching muscles and the thousand different tiny pains one learns to live with over the years, all of them descending on her in one cataclysmic moment. She would have screamed, but she didn’t have the strength in her. She noticed her wrinkled hands as she clung to the podium for support.
She kept looking at the camera.
‘This is what they’ve done,’ she said. ‘And now they’re coming for us.’
It was instinct, it seemed. Not calculated, not well thought out. It was the instinct of a cat unable to stop itself twitching towards the cotton reel on a string.
The Symingtons and Blenkinsops began to run, loping towards Amy in a single amalgamating pack, a body of animals scenting the hot sharp smell of fear. The security guards were helpless now, washed away by the tide of Symingtons and Blenkinsops.
Amy backed away, pulling Nadia with her, back behind the curtain, as Rory on one side of the podium and Andrew and Sameera on the other side tried to fight off the business-suited men closing in from all directions. Behind the curtain, Amy found the Doctor using his sonic screwdriver on the scaffolding structure holding the curtain in place.
‘That was very good, Pond, very succinct, warning the nation, very direct I thought, you could go into politics maybe, if the whole… professional kisser thing doesn’t work out.’
‘Doctor, they’re coming!’
‘I know,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘You push over there,
I’ll push here.’
He indicated a spot at the far end of the scaffolding.
Amy leaned on the weak point and pushed with all her might. The Doctor heaved too, and the whole structure toppled gracefully forward, carrying the billowing black fabric down. It fell onto nine or ten of the approaching shark-men. Amy could see them struggling under the swathes of cloth.
But more were coming. Rory was ready with his camera, trying to get them as they came through the door, and the resulting bubbles full of Symingtons and Blenkinsops blocked the entrance a bit, but of course the bubbles popped unexpectedly, and there were more coming, always more and more.
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