Post by Fitz Kreiner on Jan 28, 2013 22:25:29 GMT
Jess looked around the station. She had been on the tube several times, but this time would be different. Carl Reynolds had arranged it so that there would be an hour between the two trains, and now here she was stood on the platform wearing a high-visibility jacket, watching the eight ten train pull out of the station.
She glanced over at Tom who stood impassively beside her, his high-vis jacket standing out even more against his dark clothing, and as incongruous as the TARDIS wherever it landed. She wasn’t sure whether it was the lighting in the tube station, but Tom appeared to be pale and gaunt. She had been concerned about him when she first saw him again, but as time went on, her concerns grew.
Carl Reynolds of the London Underground was stood just in front of them, also wearing a high-vis jacket. He glanced down the station to make sure it was clear before moving to the edge of the platform.
“It’s quite simple,” he said, turning back to them. “There’s a metal walkway that runs along the side of the tunnel. Ever since we had issues back in the sixties, we’ve made sure that the tunnels have surveillance and are accessible throughout.”
“Lots of ways in and out?” Tom asked.
“You could say that,” Reynolds said.
“So, what’s to say that this missing guy hasn’t just gone out of one of these exits?” Jess asked, peering cautiously over the edge of the platform.
“He’s BTP,” Reynolds replied before noticing the blank look Jess was giving him. “British Transport Police,” he added, “he’s a professional. He wouldn’t just disappear in the middle of a shift.”
“Hasn’t stopped some people,” Tom muttered, stepping down off the platform and onto the thin metal gangway.
Swallowing, Jess stepped down onto the gangway after Tom. She hefted the heavy metal torch in her hand and switched it on, flashing the beam down the tunnel ahead. The yawning chasm of arced concrete seemed foreboding; very different from the times she’d been down on the tube whilst visiting London. The air was colder than she remembered; the dry air blowing down the tunnel. For a second, she felt scared, regretted her decision to explore the tunnels of the Underground. Still, it was too late now. And besides, she was with Tom, someone who always made her feel safe.
“How far into the tunnel was he when he disappeared?” Tom asked.
“We’re not sure,” Reynolds said, leading the way down the tunnel. “It was under the river, of that we do know, and that’s about a five minute walk from here, at least.”
“Ok,” Jess said, as she almost over balanced on the thin walkway, “I’m gonna come out and ask it; what happens if we fall off here and hit the lines? There’s one thing I know about the tube and that’s that it’s electric.”
Reynolds stopped and turned round. “Good point,” he said. “Good job I’ve arranged for this line to be switched off.”
“You can do that?” Tom asked.
“We don’t always advertise all that we can do,” Reynolds replied. “After those terrorist attacks last September, we don’t want to let people know how easily we can disrupt the public transport. Have you got any idea just how many people were injured in the stations that day? It’s a miracle nobody was killed.”
“Nobody was killed?!” Tom spluttered. “Are you aware of just what happened down here or in general? Several hundred were killed that day. Shot down in the street by-”
“Tom,” Jess shouted, cutting him off. “This isn’t the time or the place.”
“Yeah, sorry,” Tom conceded, falling into a deep silence.
“Look, I know what you mean,” Jess said. “It’s just that we were there in September, right in the thick of it.”
“I’m sorry,” Reynolds replied. “I wasn’t aware. It’s just that you’re so, erm,” he faltered falling over his worlds.
“Young?” Jess ventured.
“Well, not to put too fine a point on it, yeah,” Reynolds said.
“Just don’t let Tom hear you say that,” she smiled. “He’s older than he looks.”
The trio progressed in an uncomfortable silence for some minutes. Jess continued to glance over her shoulder at Tom who was bringing up the rear. In the tunnels, he looked paler, drawn and troubled. She kept trying to catch his glance, flash him a smile in an effort to get at least one back.
The young Time Lord was scanning the tunnel walls as he walked, almost too intently. Every few steps he would pause and run his hand along the concrete as though he were feeling for something. Occasionally during these moments he would rap on the wall as though knocking at a door.
“How much farther does this go?” he eventually asked.
“The District Line?” Reynolds asked, taken aback by the question.
“Well, I’m guessing that’s much longer than the bit we’re in, but no,” Tom said, studying the wall beside him. “What I meant was, how far into the tunnel was this guy when he disappeared?”
“It can’t have been much farther,” Reynolds replied. “We’re under the river now, so anywhere around here.”
“Why, have you found something?” Jess asked.
“No,” Tom replied. “But I’ve got a funny feeling.”
“Like what?” Jess asked, a look of anxiety crossing her face.
“Well, more a feeling of foreboding I guess,” Tom replied. “Something tells me that this isn’t cut and dry. If it were an accident and he’d fallen on the lines, we’d have found a body, or body parts.”
“Still your cheery self I see,” Jess said, trying not to think about the fact that she could step on an arm or hand or other body part.
“Just being logical, I think,” Tom muttered.
“Hang on,” Reynolds said, looking further down the tunnel. “That’s not right.”
“What?” Jess asked looking where Reynolds was shining his torch. “It’s just exposed brickwork.”
“It’s not supposed to be there,” Reynolds said. “This section was re-enforced some years ago.”
“So, some of the concrete has fallen off, that’s all,” Jess replied. “Things don’t last forever, and I know how shoddy council work can be at times.”
Tom shuddered looking at the wall. “Something’s not right about it,” he said.
“Don’t you start,” Jess shuddered feeling a sudden chill. “You’re starting to give me the creeps. What’s so wrong about it?”
“Even if it’s the concrete falling off, the brickwork isn’t right,” Reynolds explained. “It’s too modern. This tunnel was opened in the 1860s.”
Jess looked at the exposed brickwork. It was old and worn, grubby from the dust and muck kicked up by the trains as they rattled by. Yet looking closely at it, she could see what Reynolds was talking about; the brickwork did seem more modern. For something that was supposed to be one hundred and forty years old, it seemed less than half that age, not that she was an expert.
“It’s still pretty worn and old,” she said. “Maybe it’s a repair job?”
“I don’t recall seeing any repair work on the logs,” Reynolds replied.
“Yeah, but look at it,” Jess retorted. “It’s not new, is it?”
Glancing up and down the tunnel, Tom jumped off the metal gangway and stepped over the rails to the wall.
“Hey, be careful!” Reynolds shouted after him.
“I wanna get a closer look,” he replied over his shoulder before stepping up onto the catwalk on the other side of the tunnel and flashed his torch over the brickwork. “What’s the other side of the wall?”
“Erm, the Victorian sewers I think,” Reynolds replied.
“Victorian sewers under the river?” Jess asked. “I thought they all emptied into the river?”
“Or something like that,” Reynolds shrugged. “I’m sure I saw some old plans once with old tunnels near the line.”
“How convenient,” Tom muttered.
“What’s that?” Reynolds asked.
“Just that it’s odd that there’s some other tunnels the other side of this wall in a tunnel where someone mysteriously disappeared with a convenient section of brickwork that shouldn’t be there.” Tom replied. “The brickwork might look old, but it’s not.”
“What do you mean?” Jess asked. “Old bricks?”
“No,” Tom replied. “There’s not much weathering and there are some odd scratches that are pretty new.”
“Well, that could be anything, couldn’t it?” Jess asked. “Something caught in a train, rubbish or something.”
“No rubbish could cause these scratches. Not unless it was some heavy metal or stone or something.” Tom replied running his hands over the bricks.
“What are you trying to say, then”? Reynolds asked, stepping down off the catwalk and crossing the tunnel.
“I dunno,” Tom replied. “But I’d like to try to get a look at the tunnels the other side of this wall.”
“That could take time,” Reynolds said. “Like I said, the plans I saw were old. I don’t know if they’re even there anymore.”
“Cheers,” Tom replied, turning to walk back the way they had come, “but I think this one may have to go through UNIT.”
“So what are we going to do now?” Jess asked.
“I thought you were the one with the plan?” Tom smiled back.
“Ok, so my plan ran out when we got here,” Jess admitted with a smile.
“We go back and report to the Doc,” Tom said over his shoulder, jumping back up to the gangway. “And we let these chaps get on with their work.”
“Doctor?” Lovatt dashed into the operations room and looked around. The Time Lord was sat at a desk in his shirtsleeves, still working away on the laptop. “Doctor?” she repeated when it became apparent he hadn’t heard her.
“Ah, Allison, I’m still collating most of the information I’ve got, but from what I can gather,”
“Doctor, please,” Lovatt said, cutting him off and finally getting him to look at her. “There’s been an explosion at Thamesmead. The store has been completely gutted from what we can gather. The fire brigade are there and Captain Morris is on his way.”
“Allison, I’m trying to work through a lot of complex base code here and one thing I can tell you is that it’s not Earthly. A warehouse fire isn’t exactly the top of my priorities at the moment.”
“This one might be,” Lovatt said, stepping closer to the Doctor and looking down at him. “It was our main store house. Most of the alien tech and equipment UNIT has captured or that has fallen to Earth or left behind over the past few decades.”
“And?” the Doctor encouraged, leaning forward on his elbows and staring intently at Lovatt.
“Well, like I said, there’s been an explosion,” Lovatt said. “The whole facility has been gutted from initial reports. There’s been no contact with the team there.”
“When was this?” the Doctor asked getting to his feet.
“About ten minutes ago,” Lovatt replied checking her watch. “If we leave now, we can be over there by twenty one hundred.”
“What good would I be there?” the Doctor asked.
“Doctor,” Lovatt said, turning to face the Time Lord. “No one outside of UNIT knew that the Thamesmead facility was a military instillation. It stored some rather sensitive items, especially in the wrong hands. I know how reports can be exaggerated so we don’t yet know the full extent of the damage. Now I might be jumping to conclusions, but you said earlier that you should never ignore a coincidence, and to me, this seems rather coincidental after we’ve just stepped up our investigation.”
“You’re right,” the Doctor said, getting to his feet and shrugging on his coat. “It is rather coincidental. Although I do have two questions: one; why store such sensitive and dangerous material in London and two; had you stored any volatile or explosive material there?”
“Nothing that we knew of,” Lovatt said. “You’re the expert there, and you were here during the seventies when we were getting a lot of it.”
“That’s a fair point,” the Doctor smiled. “I don’t suppose you have an inventory anywhere do you, or did that go up in flames?”
“No, we haven’t put all our eggs in one basket,” Lovatt replied fishing in her jacket pocket. “I had a feeling you’d ask that,” she smiled.
Captain William Morris stood grimly watching as the fire crews were trying to beat back the flames. Despite his protestations about the nature of the building, he hadn’t been allowed to close to the blaze. So far, there had been no sign of Thompson or Bailey, the two watchmen.
Morris had got the call whilst on his way to visit the family of the latest young person to go missing. Weighing up the two options, he quickly came to the conclusion that this was the more important. Already some more of his men had arrived and were helping the fire brigade and police put up a cordon. Morris wanted to keep as many of the public away from the potentially sensitive material as possible.
There had been no eye witnesses to the explosion, but so far, the fire crews had stated that it appeared that it had started in the basement. Morris had to smile at that; if only they knew what the basement to the warehouse was. It still worried him; the nature of everything stored down there was highly sensitive and the general population knew nothing about it. In fact, the majority of the population knew nothing about it, including police and most other army groups.
The sound of a car pulling up behind him made him turn and squint as he looked towards the headlights. The lights died out just before the two occupants got out of the car. He didn’t really need to know that it was the Doctor and Lovatt. He was starting to get a certain feeling whenever the Time Lord was near.
“Well, we’ve certainly got a bit of a pickle here, haven’t we, Will?” the Doctor said as he approached, hands in pockets.
“That’s putting it mildly,” Morris muttered. “Something we’ve picked up in the past has just exploded causing us no end of trouble.”
“I don’t think so,” the Doctor replied, reaching into the inside of his jacket and pulling out a well-thumbed sheaf of papers and handed it over to Morris. “There’s nothing on this list of items that indicate that anything is explosive or potentially explosive.”
“Sabotage then?” Morris suggested.
“Possible,” the Doctor replied. “But somehow I doubt it’s as cut and dry as that.”
Morris sighed, rolled his eyes and turned to face the Time Lord. “Doctor, I’d appreciate it if you cut out the man of mystery, stopped talking in riddles and just came out with it already.”
“Will, Will, Will, Will, Will,” the Doctor said turning to face Morris and tapping him on the forehead. “Use that grey matter in there. Isn’t this all too convenient? Who knew this facility was here? I certainly didn’t, and consider how long I’ve worked with you lot.”
“Doctor, please get to the point,” Morris said, loudly cutting the Doctor off before two stretcher teams coming through the rubble caught him off guard.
The Doctor turned to see what Morris was looking at, immediately spotting the two stretcher teams. Cutting round the Doctor, Morris jogged over to the two teams who were making their way away from the ruins, white sheets covering the bodies on the stretchers. Between the two teams, Corporal Loding made her way over the rubble, her face grim.
“Corporal?” Morris asked as he got closer.
“We think it’s Thompson and Bailey,” she replied. “The bodies are rather charred, at least on one side.”
“How could only half their bodies be burnt?” Morris asked.
“If the other side was submerged in water,” the Doctor said.
Loding glanced at the Doctor. “How could you know?” she asked.
“It’s starting to support my theory,” the Doctor said, turning back to the dying flames, waggling his finger in the air. “This explosion was a cover for something else; a theft. I would be far from surprised if someone hadn’t removed something from your store then caused the explosion to destroy most of what was there so that no one could be sure whether anything was taken. Am I right?” he finished looking at Loding.
Loding nodded solemnly, “We discovered water in the basement store and what could have been an entrance tunnel.”
“Sorry, but that sounds really careless to me,” Morris said. “Why go to the trouble of disguising your theft with an explosion if you’re going to leave the evidence that you’ve broken in in the first place?”
“Because, that’s not the point, Will,” the Doctor said. “Whoever it is must be getting ready to up their game. The point of the explosion wasn’t to disguise a theft; it was to mask what was taken.”
“Yeah, looking down there, you’d have no idea about anything. Most of it looks like it was disintegrated,” Loding said, nodding.
“You had something in your store that they wanted, and they wanted to make sure you didn’t know what it was they took. Whoever it is, is going to great lengths to cover their tracks, and if that’s the case they’re either incredibly feeble and weak in numbers, or,” the Doctor trailed off, looking through the smouldering ruins of the warehouse to the lights reflecting on the river beyond.
“Or what, Doctor?” Morris asked.
“Or, they’re masking everything to the point of by the time we’ve discovered what they are and what they’re up to it will be too late.”
She glanced over at Tom who stood impassively beside her, his high-vis jacket standing out even more against his dark clothing, and as incongruous as the TARDIS wherever it landed. She wasn’t sure whether it was the lighting in the tube station, but Tom appeared to be pale and gaunt. She had been concerned about him when she first saw him again, but as time went on, her concerns grew.
Carl Reynolds of the London Underground was stood just in front of them, also wearing a high-vis jacket. He glanced down the station to make sure it was clear before moving to the edge of the platform.
“It’s quite simple,” he said, turning back to them. “There’s a metal walkway that runs along the side of the tunnel. Ever since we had issues back in the sixties, we’ve made sure that the tunnels have surveillance and are accessible throughout.”
“Lots of ways in and out?” Tom asked.
“You could say that,” Reynolds said.
“So, what’s to say that this missing guy hasn’t just gone out of one of these exits?” Jess asked, peering cautiously over the edge of the platform.
“He’s BTP,” Reynolds replied before noticing the blank look Jess was giving him. “British Transport Police,” he added, “he’s a professional. He wouldn’t just disappear in the middle of a shift.”
“Hasn’t stopped some people,” Tom muttered, stepping down off the platform and onto the thin metal gangway.
Swallowing, Jess stepped down onto the gangway after Tom. She hefted the heavy metal torch in her hand and switched it on, flashing the beam down the tunnel ahead. The yawning chasm of arced concrete seemed foreboding; very different from the times she’d been down on the tube whilst visiting London. The air was colder than she remembered; the dry air blowing down the tunnel. For a second, she felt scared, regretted her decision to explore the tunnels of the Underground. Still, it was too late now. And besides, she was with Tom, someone who always made her feel safe.
“How far into the tunnel was he when he disappeared?” Tom asked.
“We’re not sure,” Reynolds said, leading the way down the tunnel. “It was under the river, of that we do know, and that’s about a five minute walk from here, at least.”
“Ok,” Jess said, as she almost over balanced on the thin walkway, “I’m gonna come out and ask it; what happens if we fall off here and hit the lines? There’s one thing I know about the tube and that’s that it’s electric.”
Reynolds stopped and turned round. “Good point,” he said. “Good job I’ve arranged for this line to be switched off.”
“You can do that?” Tom asked.
“We don’t always advertise all that we can do,” Reynolds replied. “After those terrorist attacks last September, we don’t want to let people know how easily we can disrupt the public transport. Have you got any idea just how many people were injured in the stations that day? It’s a miracle nobody was killed.”
“Nobody was killed?!” Tom spluttered. “Are you aware of just what happened down here or in general? Several hundred were killed that day. Shot down in the street by-”
“Tom,” Jess shouted, cutting him off. “This isn’t the time or the place.”
“Yeah, sorry,” Tom conceded, falling into a deep silence.
“Look, I know what you mean,” Jess said. “It’s just that we were there in September, right in the thick of it.”
“I’m sorry,” Reynolds replied. “I wasn’t aware. It’s just that you’re so, erm,” he faltered falling over his worlds.
“Young?” Jess ventured.
“Well, not to put too fine a point on it, yeah,” Reynolds said.
“Just don’t let Tom hear you say that,” she smiled. “He’s older than he looks.”
The trio progressed in an uncomfortable silence for some minutes. Jess continued to glance over her shoulder at Tom who was bringing up the rear. In the tunnels, he looked paler, drawn and troubled. She kept trying to catch his glance, flash him a smile in an effort to get at least one back.
The young Time Lord was scanning the tunnel walls as he walked, almost too intently. Every few steps he would pause and run his hand along the concrete as though he were feeling for something. Occasionally during these moments he would rap on the wall as though knocking at a door.
“How much farther does this go?” he eventually asked.
“The District Line?” Reynolds asked, taken aback by the question.
“Well, I’m guessing that’s much longer than the bit we’re in, but no,” Tom said, studying the wall beside him. “What I meant was, how far into the tunnel was this guy when he disappeared?”
“It can’t have been much farther,” Reynolds replied. “We’re under the river now, so anywhere around here.”
“Why, have you found something?” Jess asked.
“No,” Tom replied. “But I’ve got a funny feeling.”
“Like what?” Jess asked, a look of anxiety crossing her face.
“Well, more a feeling of foreboding I guess,” Tom replied. “Something tells me that this isn’t cut and dry. If it were an accident and he’d fallen on the lines, we’d have found a body, or body parts.”
“Still your cheery self I see,” Jess said, trying not to think about the fact that she could step on an arm or hand or other body part.
“Just being logical, I think,” Tom muttered.
“Hang on,” Reynolds said, looking further down the tunnel. “That’s not right.”
“What?” Jess asked looking where Reynolds was shining his torch. “It’s just exposed brickwork.”
“It’s not supposed to be there,” Reynolds said. “This section was re-enforced some years ago.”
“So, some of the concrete has fallen off, that’s all,” Jess replied. “Things don’t last forever, and I know how shoddy council work can be at times.”
Tom shuddered looking at the wall. “Something’s not right about it,” he said.
“Don’t you start,” Jess shuddered feeling a sudden chill. “You’re starting to give me the creeps. What’s so wrong about it?”
“Even if it’s the concrete falling off, the brickwork isn’t right,” Reynolds explained. “It’s too modern. This tunnel was opened in the 1860s.”
Jess looked at the exposed brickwork. It was old and worn, grubby from the dust and muck kicked up by the trains as they rattled by. Yet looking closely at it, she could see what Reynolds was talking about; the brickwork did seem more modern. For something that was supposed to be one hundred and forty years old, it seemed less than half that age, not that she was an expert.
“It’s still pretty worn and old,” she said. “Maybe it’s a repair job?”
“I don’t recall seeing any repair work on the logs,” Reynolds replied.
“Yeah, but look at it,” Jess retorted. “It’s not new, is it?”
Glancing up and down the tunnel, Tom jumped off the metal gangway and stepped over the rails to the wall.
“Hey, be careful!” Reynolds shouted after him.
“I wanna get a closer look,” he replied over his shoulder before stepping up onto the catwalk on the other side of the tunnel and flashed his torch over the brickwork. “What’s the other side of the wall?”
“Erm, the Victorian sewers I think,” Reynolds replied.
“Victorian sewers under the river?” Jess asked. “I thought they all emptied into the river?”
“Or something like that,” Reynolds shrugged. “I’m sure I saw some old plans once with old tunnels near the line.”
“How convenient,” Tom muttered.
“What’s that?” Reynolds asked.
“Just that it’s odd that there’s some other tunnels the other side of this wall in a tunnel where someone mysteriously disappeared with a convenient section of brickwork that shouldn’t be there.” Tom replied. “The brickwork might look old, but it’s not.”
“What do you mean?” Jess asked. “Old bricks?”
“No,” Tom replied. “There’s not much weathering and there are some odd scratches that are pretty new.”
“Well, that could be anything, couldn’t it?” Jess asked. “Something caught in a train, rubbish or something.”
“No rubbish could cause these scratches. Not unless it was some heavy metal or stone or something.” Tom replied running his hands over the bricks.
“What are you trying to say, then”? Reynolds asked, stepping down off the catwalk and crossing the tunnel.
“I dunno,” Tom replied. “But I’d like to try to get a look at the tunnels the other side of this wall.”
“That could take time,” Reynolds said. “Like I said, the plans I saw were old. I don’t know if they’re even there anymore.”
“Cheers,” Tom replied, turning to walk back the way they had come, “but I think this one may have to go through UNIT.”
“So what are we going to do now?” Jess asked.
“I thought you were the one with the plan?” Tom smiled back.
“Ok, so my plan ran out when we got here,” Jess admitted with a smile.
“We go back and report to the Doc,” Tom said over his shoulder, jumping back up to the gangway. “And we let these chaps get on with their work.”
*
“Doctor?” Lovatt dashed into the operations room and looked around. The Time Lord was sat at a desk in his shirtsleeves, still working away on the laptop. “Doctor?” she repeated when it became apparent he hadn’t heard her.
“Ah, Allison, I’m still collating most of the information I’ve got, but from what I can gather,”
“Doctor, please,” Lovatt said, cutting him off and finally getting him to look at her. “There’s been an explosion at Thamesmead. The store has been completely gutted from what we can gather. The fire brigade are there and Captain Morris is on his way.”
“Allison, I’m trying to work through a lot of complex base code here and one thing I can tell you is that it’s not Earthly. A warehouse fire isn’t exactly the top of my priorities at the moment.”
“This one might be,” Lovatt said, stepping closer to the Doctor and looking down at him. “It was our main store house. Most of the alien tech and equipment UNIT has captured or that has fallen to Earth or left behind over the past few decades.”
“And?” the Doctor encouraged, leaning forward on his elbows and staring intently at Lovatt.
“Well, like I said, there’s been an explosion,” Lovatt said. “The whole facility has been gutted from initial reports. There’s been no contact with the team there.”
“When was this?” the Doctor asked getting to his feet.
“About ten minutes ago,” Lovatt replied checking her watch. “If we leave now, we can be over there by twenty one hundred.”
“What good would I be there?” the Doctor asked.
“Doctor,” Lovatt said, turning to face the Time Lord. “No one outside of UNIT knew that the Thamesmead facility was a military instillation. It stored some rather sensitive items, especially in the wrong hands. I know how reports can be exaggerated so we don’t yet know the full extent of the damage. Now I might be jumping to conclusions, but you said earlier that you should never ignore a coincidence, and to me, this seems rather coincidental after we’ve just stepped up our investigation.”
“You’re right,” the Doctor said, getting to his feet and shrugging on his coat. “It is rather coincidental. Although I do have two questions: one; why store such sensitive and dangerous material in London and two; had you stored any volatile or explosive material there?”
“Nothing that we knew of,” Lovatt said. “You’re the expert there, and you were here during the seventies when we were getting a lot of it.”
“That’s a fair point,” the Doctor smiled. “I don’t suppose you have an inventory anywhere do you, or did that go up in flames?”
“No, we haven’t put all our eggs in one basket,” Lovatt replied fishing in her jacket pocket. “I had a feeling you’d ask that,” she smiled.
*
Captain William Morris stood grimly watching as the fire crews were trying to beat back the flames. Despite his protestations about the nature of the building, he hadn’t been allowed to close to the blaze. So far, there had been no sign of Thompson or Bailey, the two watchmen.
Morris had got the call whilst on his way to visit the family of the latest young person to go missing. Weighing up the two options, he quickly came to the conclusion that this was the more important. Already some more of his men had arrived and were helping the fire brigade and police put up a cordon. Morris wanted to keep as many of the public away from the potentially sensitive material as possible.
There had been no eye witnesses to the explosion, but so far, the fire crews had stated that it appeared that it had started in the basement. Morris had to smile at that; if only they knew what the basement to the warehouse was. It still worried him; the nature of everything stored down there was highly sensitive and the general population knew nothing about it. In fact, the majority of the population knew nothing about it, including police and most other army groups.
The sound of a car pulling up behind him made him turn and squint as he looked towards the headlights. The lights died out just before the two occupants got out of the car. He didn’t really need to know that it was the Doctor and Lovatt. He was starting to get a certain feeling whenever the Time Lord was near.
“Well, we’ve certainly got a bit of a pickle here, haven’t we, Will?” the Doctor said as he approached, hands in pockets.
“That’s putting it mildly,” Morris muttered. “Something we’ve picked up in the past has just exploded causing us no end of trouble.”
“I don’t think so,” the Doctor replied, reaching into the inside of his jacket and pulling out a well-thumbed sheaf of papers and handed it over to Morris. “There’s nothing on this list of items that indicate that anything is explosive or potentially explosive.”
“Sabotage then?” Morris suggested.
“Possible,” the Doctor replied. “But somehow I doubt it’s as cut and dry as that.”
Morris sighed, rolled his eyes and turned to face the Time Lord. “Doctor, I’d appreciate it if you cut out the man of mystery, stopped talking in riddles and just came out with it already.”
“Will, Will, Will, Will, Will,” the Doctor said turning to face Morris and tapping him on the forehead. “Use that grey matter in there. Isn’t this all too convenient? Who knew this facility was here? I certainly didn’t, and consider how long I’ve worked with you lot.”
“Doctor, please get to the point,” Morris said, loudly cutting the Doctor off before two stretcher teams coming through the rubble caught him off guard.
The Doctor turned to see what Morris was looking at, immediately spotting the two stretcher teams. Cutting round the Doctor, Morris jogged over to the two teams who were making their way away from the ruins, white sheets covering the bodies on the stretchers. Between the two teams, Corporal Loding made her way over the rubble, her face grim.
“Corporal?” Morris asked as he got closer.
“We think it’s Thompson and Bailey,” she replied. “The bodies are rather charred, at least on one side.”
“How could only half their bodies be burnt?” Morris asked.
“If the other side was submerged in water,” the Doctor said.
Loding glanced at the Doctor. “How could you know?” she asked.
“It’s starting to support my theory,” the Doctor said, turning back to the dying flames, waggling his finger in the air. “This explosion was a cover for something else; a theft. I would be far from surprised if someone hadn’t removed something from your store then caused the explosion to destroy most of what was there so that no one could be sure whether anything was taken. Am I right?” he finished looking at Loding.
Loding nodded solemnly, “We discovered water in the basement store and what could have been an entrance tunnel.”
“Sorry, but that sounds really careless to me,” Morris said. “Why go to the trouble of disguising your theft with an explosion if you’re going to leave the evidence that you’ve broken in in the first place?”
“Because, that’s not the point, Will,” the Doctor said. “Whoever it is must be getting ready to up their game. The point of the explosion wasn’t to disguise a theft; it was to mask what was taken.”
“Yeah, looking down there, you’d have no idea about anything. Most of it looks like it was disintegrated,” Loding said, nodding.
“You had something in your store that they wanted, and they wanted to make sure you didn’t know what it was they took. Whoever it is, is going to great lengths to cover their tracks, and if that’s the case they’re either incredibly feeble and weak in numbers, or,” the Doctor trailed off, looking through the smouldering ruins of the warehouse to the lights reflecting on the river beyond.
“Or what, Doctor?” Morris asked.
“Or, they’re masking everything to the point of by the time we’ve discovered what they are and what they’re up to it will be too late.”
