Part 14 (1/2)

She shook her head silently.

'I think it would be a good idea.'

The little girl reached into a pocket of her dress and held something out to Chris. 'He said I could stay. He said you might need this.'

Chris reached out for the object. It was a book. No. It was a Filofax. Jim Allen's Filofax.

The little girl said, 'I took it from a bag in the motor car before you went to the mountains. I didn't mean to do anything bad. I was just interested.'

Chris sighed. He picked the girl up and bounced her on his shoulder. 'Little girl, I think you may just have saved my life. Among others.' He sat down in the deckchair, the child perched on the back of his neck, gripping double handfuls of his thick blond hair and grinning' madly. Chris began to input commands. Not as fast as I'd seen the Doctor operate a computer but fast nonetheless. I was ignored, both by him and the little girl.

'Pa.s.sword,' he muttered obsessively. 'Pa.s.sword, pa.s.sword, pa.s.sword.'

The little girl took up the chant as well. A few minutes pa.s.sed.

Nothing.

I took the Filofax from him, held it out to the girl. 'Did he tell you about a special page?'

She smiled. Nodded.' Took the book. It fell open at a page held by a bookmark.

The page was empty.

Chris sighed. 'Back to the pa.s.sword program I suppose.' 'Maybe not.'

The little girl was holding out the bookmark. It was a cheap novelty thing: a thin strip of card cut into the shape of a houseboat at the top. The boat had windows. A giraffe was sticking its head out of one window.

Chris grinned. He tapped the bookmark. 'That's it.' He typed in: FLOOD.

Nothing.

In rapid succession he tried, DAY OF FLOOD, NOAH, ARK, DOVE, RAVEN, OLIVE, OLIVE BRANCH, ARARAT, MOUNTAIN and G.o.d.

Nothing.

Now it was my turn to grin. I had been looking at the little cardboard bookmark and I'd had an idea. I reached over his shoulder and typed: GIRAFE.

Nothing. I swore?

Then the little girl reached down and corrected my spelling. GIRAFFE.

It was like magic. The files opened up. A torrent of data surged across the screen, so fast I couldn't follow a tenth of it, downloading into the laptop's memory. The little machine bleeped almost constantly?

Chris was whirling the little girl around his head. Even I was smiling. Then I stopped, because I had a sudden picture of the Doctor, sitting in the TARDIS, maybe light years or centuries away, but still with that knowing expression I was coming to hate? He'd known this was going to happen.

He'd known because he'd set it all up. The kid. The Filofax. Me. Chris.

Benny.

He'd used us all?

No, worse than that: he made use of us all, our interests, our relations.h.i.+p, our presence here in Turkey. He'd used us the way ... the way Chris had used the laptop.

As if we were tools.

I rubbed the back of my neck. I was getting a headache.

I was getting angry again as well. Very angry.

Then I thought of even my anger being planned for and I became even more annoyed.

Chris put the girl down and she ran off to play. He leant over the laptop, fingers flicking at the keyboard.

He began to pull up files.

I let out a breath, tried to make my thoughts sound rational, sensible, convincing. 'Chris, the Doctor's just using us. He does it to everyone. I should know. I've done it myself. You must see that. Look, we have to go back for Bernice. It's important. To me.'

Chris smiled uneasily. I could almost see him backing off. It was as if he was scared of me? Like he was running away from something? The truth. I thought about my experiences on Deneb and found myself angry again?

What right did Chris have to treat me like a punter?

Chris shook his head, a little uneasily. He pointed at the laptop. 'I'm getting some important stuff here.'

'I don't care!' 'You should care.'

Despite myself I leant closer to study the files he had pulled up on to the screen.

The first showed a number of aerial photographs. 'Those look like the satellite photos Raelsen claimed showed the location of the Ark on Mahser Dagi.'

Chris shook his head? 'Uh huh. This is a NASA file. It was taken from a shuttle in high orbit. Uh ... nineteen ninety-nine by the look of it.'

'Really?'

'Yeah. And that's not all.' Chris input commands. The high-res aerial shot peeled away layer by layer. 'It's been doctored.'

'Look, so some Patrick Moore type has been playing with his Corel Draw program in his lunch break. So what?'

Chris shook his head impatiently. 'You don't get it. Look.' The picture changed again? This time it was overlaid with a series of lines, like a contour map. The lines emanated from two points. One on Mahser Dagi, one on Ararat. I was beginning to see a picture I didn't like.

Chris said, 'These lines represent magnetic-field strength. Something big is buried under both those mountains. Something the Iraqis and the Iranians both think is uranium.'

'Are you telling me it's not?' 'Absolutely. It's not missiles either.' 'I don't get it. What is it then?'

'I don't know. But look. There's a file cross-reference here. The file name is Tranquillity.' Chris pulled up another geological map overlaid with lines of magnetic force: These lines were much more intense. 'I don't recognize the country.'

'That's because it's not on Earth. It's a shot of the Moon. Taken from the same shuttle mission which photographed Raelsen's Ark. A mission commanded by James Edward Allen.'