Match of the Day Page 5

  The Doctor smiled what he hoped was a calm and resolute smile. What he needed was information not comment. ‘Would there be case law on unconsummated kills?’

  ‘Oh there’ll be some. Not a lot and none of it will help your case. You realise she could be skullcapped. Gods, if it was really blatant she could be skullcapped and then cut loose on an open contract. Whatever happens to her you might as well get used to this place, you’re never getting out of here. Not with your feet and hands still attached anyway.’

  ‘Where would I find these references?’ the Doctor asked.

  ‘And some general material on the Court of Attack procedures.’

  Fanson thought for a moment then sighed a theatrical sigh.

  ‘Come here and I’ll show you,’ he said, switching his computer console back on. ‘We agents should stick together I suppose.’

  The Doctor smiled and said, ‘We must hang together or we will surely hang separately.’

  ‘That’s not bad,’ Fanson said. ‘I must remember that one.’

  ‘What is skullcapped?’ Leela asked suspiciously.

  ‘Where did you find her?’ Fanson shook his head in mock disbelief. ‘She really doesn’t understand anything does she?’

  Leela pulled the knife and held it low and loose and casually threatening. ‘That is why I ask questions,’ she said, staring hard at Fanson. ‘The Doctor says there is no shame in ignorance, only superstitiously clinging to ignorance is shameful.’

  ‘I wasn’t joking about that knife,’ Fanson said. He glanced up at the Doctor, who was standing beside him peering at the computer screen. ‘Tell her will you. She obviously doesn’t know what’s good for her.’

  ‘I can’t tell her what to do,’ the Doctor said and thought: not if she realises that’s what I’m doing anyway. ‘She has a mind of her own.’

  ‘Well who else would want it,’ Fanson smirked.

  Leela said, ‘I am making no movements that I have not made already without consequence. If the system is automatic then I am in no danger.’

  Fanson looked at her in surprise and then gave a small nod of acknowledgement. ‘But you were bluffing in that case, so why take the risk at all?’

  ‘Never assume she’s bluffing,’ the Doctor murmured. ‘And if you do, never tell her so. She takes it as a challenge.’

  Fanson looked from Leela to the Doctor, to Leela and back to the Doctor again. It seemed to the Doctor that he was looking at them critically for the first time and was suddenly unsettled by what he was seeing. ‘Where did you say you people were from?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ the Doctor asked trying to keep it cheerful.

  Fanson did not respond cheerfully. ‘It might. I think it might.’

  ‘We’re not local,’ the Doctor admitted. ‘But we hang together or we hang separately, isn’t that what we said?’

  ‘It’s what you said.’ Fanson frowned thoughtfully. ‘Point is I’m innocent.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said the Doctor. ‘So are we.’

  ‘No you’re not, you did it.’

  ‘Technically,’ Leela offered.

  Fanson half smiled and then shook his head and frowned again.

  ‘I’ve got problems of my own. Something’s gone wrong, I need to find out what it is.’

  The Doctor said, ‘Maybe we can help you.’

  ‘That seems unlikely.’

  ‘You never know,’ the Doctor said. ‘We could be good friends to have.’

  ‘Oh spare me the threats,’ Fanson scoffed.

  The Doctor was puzzled. ‘Threats?’ How was offering to be friends a threat? Of course if you lived in a society that was based on a code of violence that was enshrined in law, that

  was the law apparently, you might well be suspicious. You’re only paranoid if they’re not out to get you and in this world it appeared everyone was. ‘I don’t think I understand.’

  ‘I’ve been threatened by the best,’ Fanson said.

  ‘People threatening friendship,’ the Doctor suggested. ‘Or if they were the best, threatening best-friendship presumably.’

  If Fanson recognised the attempt at humour he gave no sign of it. ‘You could be good friends or bad enemies right?’

  ‘No, I’m not really in the market for any more enemies,’ the Doctor said. ‘They take up too much time and attention, I find. And they can get a bit boring. But if you have a particular need for enemies I can recommend one or two unpleasant life forms lurking around the universe that I would be more than happy to see the back of. I have a soft spot for the Daleks myself. It’s a swamp on Rigella Five but I’ve never been able to get them into it. Very boring creatures, Daleks.’ I’m babbling inanely, he thought. Why do I babble inanely when I’m having trouble persuading someone to do what I want them to do? Is it panic? I end up not making much sense. It’s probably panic.

  ‘You are not making much sense, Doctor,’ Leela said.

  ‘That’s a relief,’ Fanson said. ‘I thought it was me.’

  ‘You weren’t making sense either,’ the Doctor said. ‘I was panicking, what was your excuse?’

  ‘You’re entirely insane aren’t you?’ Fanson said, and then he snorted and chortled. ‘It’s no defence you know. The Court of Attack doesn’t recognise insanity.’

  The Doctor smiled his vivid smile. ‘It could swing from the light fittings and gibber,’ he said, ‘and nobody I’ve met so for would recognise it.’

  ‘Everybody’s mad except you,’ Fanson said.

  ‘I do hope not,’ the Doctor said. ‘I was counting on your good sense to help get us out of here.’ He was almost sure that Fanson was the sort of natural con man who naturally couldn’t resist being conned.

  ‘You could have been a great agent,’ Fanson said. ‘You’re a natural.’

  Keefer had collected the five bodies and carried them, together with their guns and equipment, into the shelter of the trees. He was intending to cover them with brushwood, hoping against hope that they wouldn’t be found until he was away and running, but the full realisation of how quickly his enemy had reacted brought him to a standstill. The assassin, the gun-ship, the ambush; each attack cued by the failure of the previous one. What was the point of running? If they knew he was alive before, then they knew it now.

  If they knew he was alive before...

  He looked at the men he had killed. They carried no communications equipment. Their IDs said they weren’t government and their performance said they weren’t professionals. Private citizens then, borderline psychos who’d just scraped through the computer screening in all probability. Gun club freaks maybe, looking for one illegal chance to try the kick of murder. That would explain the tracers: thrill before skill. One thing was certain, they weren’t a fast assault group thrown in to meet a sudden emergency.

  In which case they were probably there all the time. They were there all the time.

  It was the same with the gun-ship. It would have come whether the assassin had succeeded or not. Once he’d got it, the answer was obvious. Redundant systems. It was a complete fail-safe pattern designed to operate automatically, built in just as it would be for any mechanical system. His moves had been computed in advance, like the failure of a major system component would be projected for the drive unit of an orbital shuttle. And just as backup systems waited to meet such a failure so each death had waited for him to come to it. They didn’t know he was alive. His enemy had simply computed what he’d do if he wasn’t dead.

  The only question that remained was whether they’d stuck to the three-level redundancy back-up, which was the computed optimum for automatic systems. Or had they anticipated his next move, and his next, and his next? Oddly he found that thought didn’t worry him. Now he knew how it was done he could cope with it. He half hoped they did realise what would happen next. It might make them sweat a little. After all, counterattack was known to be his speciality.

  He looked again at the bodies. Five private citizens of average anonymity whose ID and cash plates he
now had.

  Since they were in no position to report the loss, the key plates would remain valid at least for a while. If he was lucky he might just be able to disappear in the most effective way known to a computer-regulated society. With one piece of physical evidence to back up the deception he could become someone else long enough to confuse the computers and maybe get off the planet.

  For the moment he set aside the thought that this whole thing could be another trap and concentrated on the details of what he must do. From his medical kit he took the bio-plastic dispenser and sprayed each man’s right thumb. When they were set he carefully rolled off the tubes of artificial skin before they had a chance to bond with the natural tissue.

  Each one bore a thumbprint natural enough when slipped over his own thumb to fool most low-level identity scanners.

  Carefully he placed each artificial thumbprint in the relevant ID pack and pocketed it.

  This done, he dragged the bodies into a rough pile. In the mouth of each one he poured a handful of the remaining tracer bullets. When he burned the bodies these would explode making rapid dental identification unlikely. Then he scoured the wood for dead trees and dry brush, heaping everything he could find into a crude funeral pyre.

  Now it was over Keefer had no particular feelings about the men he had killed. They’d lost that was all, and he was alive.

  He used six incendiary pellets to set the fire. As it took hold he walked unhurriedly back through the wood towards the motorway.

  Chapter Four

  They had been working for several hours and even the Doctor’s natural optimism was beginning to disappear. Who was it who said never confuse movement with action, he thought, as he paced backwards and forwards. He glanced across at Jerro Fanson hunched over the desk, staring blankly into the computer screen. It was a stupid aphorism; you might just as well say never confuse sitting still with thinking. And what was that legal one: anyone who represents himself in court has a fool for a client? He was a fool to think he could find a legal solution to the situation he and Leela were in. He’d be better off exploring the possibilities of escape. Movement, action, that’s what they needed.

  ‘That could be the way to go.’ Fanson sat back and rubbed his eyes. ‘With the right sort of publicity it could have been a major crowd-puller. A real must-see match of the day.

  Suppose this was all just a cunning plan. Suppose you had it in mind all along to use your fighter’s peculiar attitude to killing -’

  ‘Peculiar?’ The Doctor stopped pacing and turned to glare at Fanson. Just because the world was mad it didn’t follow that you had to go along with it, and anyway that wasn’t the sort of statement he wanted Leela to hear go unchallenged. ‘I don’t call refusing to kill somebody a peculiar attitude to killing.’

  ‘No you’re right!’ Fanson agreed, suddenly excited. ‘It isn’t about killing at all. It’s about not killing. It’s about not killing and getting noticed as a result.’

  ‘And it wasn’t a cunning plan,’ the Doctor objected. You couldn’t lie your way out of something like this, even if he was good at it, which he wasn’t. In fact lying still made no real sense to him despite his best efforts to understand it and use it, technically. A lie was the deliberate denial of a truth.

  How could that be anything but absurd? What a waste of memory. Let go of the truth and you would end up drowning in a sea of nonsense. One day he would step out of the TARDIS and it would be impossible to understand what he was doing, there would be cause without effect and effect without cause, there would be no reason in anything, he would never find his way back to reality. Of course reality had nothing to do with legality. Legalities, all legalities, were not about truth or lies or fairness or unfairness: they were about rules and how they were interpreted...

  ‘It was not a plan, not any sort of plan,’ Leela put in. ‘It just happened.’

  ‘Exactly,’ the Doctor said. ‘And to say it was a plan distorts the multiverse. A minor distortion but a definite distortion.’

  ‘Get a grip, Doctor,’ Fanson said testily. ‘I told you already -

  insanity is not an acceptable defence. And it doesn’t impress me anyway.’

  Leela was standing with one of her wrist bands pressed against a wall scanner plate. She was once again trying to cut the band away with her knife. ‘The Doctor says living is truth so it follows that death is lying,’ she said.

  ‘Spare me the gnomic utterances of your agent and stop trying to outwit the security system. You’re not equipped for the job,’ Fanson said.

  Leela ignored him and continued to press the point of the knife under the unyielding band.

  ‘Listen Doctor,’ Fanson said, ‘it doesn’t matter whether there was a cunning plan or not. The rules only require that the possibility of your having a cunning plan could exist.’

  ‘Regardless of the truth,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘Regardless of the truth,’ Fanson agreed.

  ‘Which is,’ the Doctor went on, ‘that there was no cunning plan; I had no cunning plan; no cunning plan existed in any way, shape or form. In terms of cunning plans I was newly arrived in this sick and perverted world. In terms of cunning plans I was a stranger in a strange land. In terms of cunning plans I was as innocent as an egg.’

  ‘Now you’re getting the idea,’ Fanson enthused. ‘So your cunning plan was this: your fighter deliberately engineers an unconsummated kill. You’re both arrested.’

  ‘Strictly speaking I was given the choice,’ the Doctor said.

  Fanson shook his head. ‘You were asked: do you wish to accompany your client to the lock-up? It’s a common mistake to assume that means you have a choice.’

  ‘Ah,’ the Doctor said. ‘A ritual form of words. Interesting.’

  ‘Why?’ Leela demanded, abruptly giving up on her furiously determined assault on the wrist band. She slammed her wrist against the scanner plate, and then did it again and then again.

  ‘Why is it interesting?’ the Doctor asked mildly.

  ‘Why did the referee not mean what he said? Why was it a ritual form of words?’ She slapped the scanner plate with the flat of her hand but it was clearly no more than a gesture of frustration.

  ‘Politeness,’ the Doctor said. ‘Its purpose is to calm a violent situation. Some people call it good manners.’ He shrugged. ‘I call it interesting.’

  ‘Do you want to chat amongst yourselves or do you want to hear my brilliant plan to save your hands, feet and what pass for your brains?’ Fanson asked. ‘Because if you don’t want to listen to me I can go back to working on my own problem here.’

  It suddenly struck the Doctor that for a prisoner Fanson seemed quite relaxed and remarkably unconcerned about being overheard or spied on in any way. ‘I apologise,’ the Doctor said. ‘We meant no disrespect, did we Leela?’

  Leela frowned. ‘He talks much but says little. He should not be offended by interruption.’

  There were times, the Doctor thought, when she seemed to go out of her way to be offensive. He smiled encouragingly at Fanson. ‘You were outlining the mythical cunning plan.’

  ‘Mythic possibly,’ Fanson declared. ‘This is a mythic plan.

  So you’re arrested. Hell breaks loose. Snot and teeth all over.

  The worlds and their satellites, every scuffling man and woman and all the various variations, hear about the case.

  To a man, woman and whatever, they all want to know how the rematch will play. Without breaking sweat you and your charmless fighter are interplanetary players. Only now there isn’t going to be a rematch. Abrupt end of cunning plan,’

  ‘I am charmless because the Doctor made me give up my charms,’ Leela said. ‘The Doctor told me they got in the way of thought. He told me they were foolish nonsense for the superstitious and the lazy-minded.’

  Fanson ignored her. ‘The actions of the referee,’ he went on,

  ‘have denied you the opportunity to maximise your client’s potential. It’s scuffling blood-spattered brill
iance - you would have made a fortune - you could have pushed her straight to Prime. You could have been somebody. She could have been a contender. You can argue agent-fighter privilege. You can argue denial of your first subsection rights under Kill Rule Two. You can argue that it wasn’t an unconsummated kill but an involuntarily interrupted contest under Kill Rule Three Subsection Seven. I’m a genius. They’ll fall over themselves to turn you loose. You’ll be famous. You’ll be rich.

  You’ll be rich and famous. And here’s the spooky part.

  Cunning plan which you didn’t have in the first place turns out to work after all. Which means you must have had it in the first place otherwise how could it have worked so cunningly?’ He was beaming with pleasure. ‘You are in the presence of genius and if you feel the need to applaud, don’t be embarrassed, just let yourself go.’ He nodded slightly and made small, circular waves of the hand in acknowledgement of the imaginary applause.

  ‘I’m impressed by your confidence,’ the Doctor said, hoping that it was based more on expertise than on his obvious talent for salesmanship. ‘And you’re right I did have a plan. I planned to look for expert help and so far my plan seems to be working far better than I could have hoped.’ As he expected Fanson was pleased by the shallow compliment.

  Also as he expected Leela was scowling and giving every impression of not being impressed. If Fanson had produced the key to the restraints, directions back to the TARDIS and a packet of sandwiches to eat on the way Leela would still not have warmed to him. He was never going to change her basic hostility. Not that it seemed to bother him in any way. The Doctor was sure now that it was no more than he expected from her. She was a fighter. Fighters were clearly different.

  ‘It is still only talk,’ Leela said. ‘Pointless talk. Confident talk is usually pointless in my experience. I have known it used to persuade fools to smile at their own destruction.’

  Fanson said to the Doctor, ‘I’ll print out the precedents: there are only three and only one that really counts. If this works you’re going to make history.’