Doctor Who (2 page)

We could turn around, try to find the spot where I pulled over, try to find that empty can out at the end of the cornfield. I thought about it, but in the end I just kept driving back into Washington. ‘When the book comes out,' I said, ‘they'll know all about it anyway.'

THE SAD STORY
of Sarah Swan ends in a wheelchair somewhere in Virginia. I could start the story in any one of about a dozen places. But let's begin in a kids' theme restaurant on Rockville Pike, Maryland, two days before Christmas 1981. Let's begin with a young lady we'll call Peri Smith.
¹

The right word for Peri is ‘petite'. She's short and slender, with dark hair cut in a bob, deep-brown eyes, and a full mouth that curves into an impish smile. That night she was wearing jeans and a burgundy sweater. It's not the image that you get when you think of a computer criminal: the picture in your mind is some socially inept, grody teenage boy, either bloated on Doritos, or pale and skeletal like a forgotten potted plant.

It was Peri's parents who gave her the wanderlust. A mating pair of archaeologists (her mother had divorced and remarried when Peri was ten), they took her with them from one continent to another throughout most of her teenage years. Staying still for her first year of college, in a tidy dorm instead of a cheap hotel or a tent, had felt like being set in concrete. She joined her step-father in the Canary Islands for the summer vacation, looking for a way out. When she met a migratory English hacker-hippie who called himself ‘the Doctor', she knew she'd found it.

They had an unusual relationship, these two travellers. For
one thing, he had never shown a flicker of interest in her. The Doctor was twice Peri's age at least, but he didn't act like a father or an uncle – more like a big brother with a bad case of sibling rivalry. They spent a lot of their time in half-hearted bickering, usually when one of them made some stupid mistake. He burnt dinner, she got lost, he couldn't steer, she got attacked by some animal.

This time it was the Doctor's turn to screw up. They were supposed to be visiting her family, but the Doctor had got them there at the wrong time, messing up her reunion plans. So now she sat in a booth, looking at a cartoon pizza menu and picking over the contents of her plate. It seemed a little weird to be surrounded by familiar language, money and food. A little creepy, even, reminding her of those long months dragging around at college.

They'd had a fight about it, like always. Now the Doctor was off sulking, sitting in another booth and bugging some waiter who had more important things to do than talk to him. She glanced over. The lanky, bald-headed waiter had actually sat down at the table with him.

Usually, the Doctor dressed like a cross between a flower child and a character out of Dickens. For this trip – to stop her father panicking – she'd insisted he wear something more normal. He'd come up with a tailored black suit and a multicoloured tie. His curly yellow hair still stood out a mile.

The next time Peri looked up from her salad, he was gone. So was the waiter he'd been talking to. Peri shrugged and stabbed her fork into a lettuce leaf. He'd get over it eventually, and then they'd get out of this dump and go somewhere interesting.

After half an hour, with her plate long empty and the ice cubes in her Coke melted, she decided she'd better go and look for him. She wandered around the restaurant, dodging
uniformed waiters and shrieking kids. There was a big video game section, and against one wall four robot dogs jerkily mimed to the Beatles. She hoped the Doctor hadn't brought her here because he thought she would
like
it.

Peri played a couple of games of Centipede and went back to the booth. It was empty: the dregs of her snack had been removed and the table wiped.

Where was he?

Peri hovered on the sidewalk, trying to pick the Doctor out of the last-minute Christmas crowds running in and out of the cluster of stores bordering the parking lot. She slumped back into the booth inside, clutching her handbag.

Wouldn't this be just the perfect opportunity for him to dump her, so close to home? A theatrical exit like this would be just his style. But on the other hand, what if someone had grabbed him? He was always getting thrown into jail for one thing or another.

What if whoever had got him was waiting to get her, too?

She had the restaurant call her a taxi, and dashed into it the moment it appeared. She had plenty of cash and a couple of credit cards the Doctor had given her. She told the driver to take her to the first hotel she could think of, the Marriott in Bethesda – she'd been there once for an aunt's wedding. The hotel's tourist shop was still open, so she bought some toiletries and an oversized T-shirt that said ‘WASHINGTON DC' to wear as a nightshirt.

She took a long shower and collapsed into bed, going over her options in her mind. She could have gone back to their boat, maybe left a message for the Doctor. But she didn't want to lead any bad guys there, and what was worse, she realised she didn't even have a key. What about leaving a message at the theme restaurant? Same problem. What was she supposed to do?

She wasn't sure where in the world her parents were right now. Could she keep on travelling, by herself, until she was ready to go back to college? Were the Doctor's credit cards real or were they fakes? How long would they last? Where was he? Was he OK? Would she ever see him again?

She dozed off around midnight, held tight between clean sheets, exhausted by worry.

Peri has slept well in palace beds and badly in prison cells, and sometimes the other way around. She is a little vague about exactly where she has been with the Doctor. But it's obvious they've travelled the globe many times over, usually off the beaten path, more likely to stay in a hut than the Hilton.

The hardest place she ever slept was on a flat plain of ice in a screaming fifty-mile-an-hour blizzard. She and the Doctor were squeezed into a tube-shaped tent, hoping desperately that the wind didn't rip the fabric; the smallest hole and the whole thing would've torn apart like a punctured kite. What kept Peri awake was not the fear, not the rock-hard ice underneath her, but the jet-engine roar of the wind. The blizzard lasted forty-four pitch-black hours. Crawling out of the half-buried tent, their faces covered by breathing apparatus, was like being born again.

Peri's parents had taught her that you ask for what you want, and you make sure that you get it. In five-star hotels or fleapit boarding houses, they checked their rooms before booking in, making sure the locks and the plumbing were OK and that the linen was clean.

Peri had learnt for herself that you couldn't always get what you want. You might imagine that after surviving the tent in the snow, Peri would never care how soft her mattress was or whether there were clean towels. But instead, it taught her that getting your own way was a precious privilege never to be
wasted. She would ask for what she wanted, and she would make sure she got it.

She'd expected something to happen during the night. Maybe the Doctor would track her down and show up at the hotel – she knew he could find her if he wanted to. Or maybe an intruder in her hotel room, come to kidnap her. But when she woke up, there was just the whirr of the air conditioning and pale, snowy light from behind the layers of curtain.

She made herself eat a full hotel breakfast. She had always loved filling in the little forms as a kid, ticking the boxes for toast and juice and eggs. She didn't have much appetite, but experience had taught her that sometimes it could be a long time between meals.

She decided to go look for the Doctor herself.

Pert took a cab to a hairdresser and had her dark bob bleached blonde. She bought a new outfit, black jeans and a grey sweatshirt, and a good black coat. A pair of sunglasses completed her disguise.

The first place to check would be last night's restaurant – the last place she had seen him. She played video games for an hour: Space Invaders, Tempest, Berserk. Real aliens and robots, she thought, would take more to kill than a tap of the fire button.

At last the waiter from last night showed up. He was easy to spot, with his cue-ball head and his sunglasses: the kids stared at him nervously as he took their orders.

Peri ambushed him as he headed for the kitchen. ‘Excuse me,' she said. ‘I'm looking for my friend, the Doctor. You spoke to him last night, remember?'

The guy looked at her for a moment. They were both wearing shades, reflecting one another's faces. ‘Big guy?' she said, holding her hand over her head to give an idea of the
Doctor's height. ‘Fair curly hair?' She hoped they weren't having a language problem; her high school Spanish had been a disaster. But that wasn't the problem. He was ignoring her He actually turned away and was about to walk in the kitchen door when she put herself in his way.

‘Excuse me,' she said loudly. ‘I'm asking you a question here. Now you can either answer me, or you can get the manager, and maybe he'll have some answers.'

That got his attention. He looked at her over the top of his shades for a moment, and for a second, she could have sworn that his irises sparkled like red glitter.

‘I can't help you, Ma'am,' he murmured. ‘Ma'am, I think it's up to your friend whether he talks to you. Ma'am, I think you should wait for him to talk to you. Yes? No?'

She couldn't pick out his accent. It was more like he didn't have one. He spoke in a monotone, like the robots from the Berserk game. She tried to interpret the sudden tumble of words. ‘I should wait?' she repeated.

‘Ma'am, I think you should wait. I can't help you, Ma'am.'

Peri stared at the guy. Was it some kind of message from the Doctor? Or was he just telling her to take off? ‘Please, can't you tell me anything else? I'm really worried about him.'

But the guy just looked at her blankly. She got out of his way. He slouched into the kitchen, looking relieved.

Peri ate a couple of slices of pizza and went back to the hotel.

The phone call came at 6 a.m. on Christmas Eve, jolting her out of bed. ‘Doctor!' she almost screamed. ‘What the hell is going on?!'

‘Calm down,' he told her, ‘and listen. There's a young man I want you to track down for me. His name is Robert Salmon.' Peri
scribbled it down on the hotel stationery. ‘He's about fifteen years old, and lives in McLean, Virginia. He's a computer expert.'

‘A computer expert? Doctor, where are you? What's this all about?'

‘Later, Peri,' he said. ‘For now, just find him. Get him to this phone. This planet may be in considerable peril. And I need you to steal something for me. I'll call again.' And he hung up.

Peri put the phone down. She was still shaking a little from the rude awakening. It wasn't unusual for the Doctor to talk about the end of the world. In fact, given some of what she had been through at his side, there was a chance the fate of the human race might really depend on her finding Robert Salmon.

Peri let out a sigh. She wasn't sure what was going on, but she knew there was terrible danger. In other words, things were back to normal.

¹
Not her real name

PERI STOOD OUTSIDE
the door of the university's systems administrator, reading the Garfield cartoons. She knocked a second time. No answer.

‘He's in there,' said a passing student. ‘Just kick the door down.'

Peri pushed open the door to discover Bob Salmon stuffed into a sleeping bag underneath his desk, his snores mightily magnified by the cramped confines of the office. The walls were hidden behind shelves of computer manuals, boxes of components and floppy disks, old issues of
Scientific American,
dog-eared printouts, and several partly dismantled Rubik's Cubes. It looked like it was all about to crash down onto the floor at any moment.

Bob woke up when the light from the hallway outside hit his face. He blinked up at her for a moment, then scooted out from under his desk. ‘Can I help you?' He wriggled like a caterpillar, trying to get loose from the sleeping bag.

‘The Doctor asked me to come see you,' said Peri, watching with dismay as Bob fished his sneakers out of the trash can. The Doctor had told her to look for a teenage kid, but Bob looked like he was maybe twenty. His fine, pale hair stuck out around his face like a halo. He wore a T-shirt printed with the black and white image of a tuxedo, complete with bow tie.

Bob had one foot halfway into a sneaker. ‘The Doctor?' he said. ‘Are you talking about the tall blond British guy?'

‘That's the one,' said Peri, relieved she had got the right man.

They got coffee in plastic cups from a machine in the staff room. Peri sat down on a bright orange sofa in front of a long white coffee table. Bob sat cross-legged on top of the table.

‘I haven't seen the Doctor for five years,' he said. ‘Did he tell you the story?' Peri shook her head. ‘There was a programmer working for the navy who put a trapdoor in his own program, so that he could log on to their computers any time he wanted to. If they had ended up using Professor Xerxes' software, he could have completely taken over their network, or spied on them, or blackmailed the government.'

Peri was finding it a little weird the way Bob avoided eye contact. ‘So you and the Doctor stopped him?' she prompted.

‘You bet we did. You bet we did.'

‘The Doctor said you should come back to my hotel room.' Her ears turned bright red, but Bob was looking around the room. ‘We only got into Washington last night, and then he just disappeared. He called me and said to keep you by the phone in the room until he called again. And there was something else.' Bob sucked out the last of the coffee and balled up the cup, an enthusiastic look on his face. ‘He said he wants us to steal something.' Bob's head bounced up and down in agreement.