Doctor Who: The Evangelion Error (Book Two)

E9 Part 3: Tears In Heaven

Tokyo-3

Makoto glanced carefully around the corner of the alleyway. Did that do it? Had he lost her? For a moment, he allowed himself the luxury of relaxing.

Then -- nope. The woman with plastic hair stepped into view at the end of the street. She scanned the area from behind her pitch-black sunglasses.

Crap! He ducked back behind cover. What now? Well, duh, idiot, he thought. Call Security already. You know you're being followed for sure now, don't you? He braced his dry cleaning under his chin and dug his cell phone out of his pocket.

Then he hesistated. Wait, wait... what if this woman was Security? Or working for them or something? A week or two ago, the thought would've seemed ludicrous. But now... Aoba hadn't been into work in two days. From what Makoto had heard, he hadn't answered any of the calls made to his apartment or his cell phone...

So what if... what if Commander Ikari was knocking them all off, one by one? All the people who now knew about Lilith. And what if calling Security was just the excuse they needed to take him off the street and put a bullet in his head?

He heard the sound of the woman's heavy footsteps just beyond the corner. Makoto recoiled and fled down the alleyway. The captain, he thought. If he could just make it back to the apartment and call her, she'd know what to do. She always did...

***

Secondary Dogma. Block 6, Level 3, Room 5.

Misato had no idea what to do next. She made a sound of disgust as they crossed back into the very first room they'd searched. "What a waste of time."

"Aww, don't say that." It had taken the Doctor remarkably little time to cheer up, at least outwardly. Finding the fez down in the lower levels seemed to have helped. He wore it proudly on his head at a jaunty angle. "I didn't hear you complaining in that room with the classic Mazdas."

Misato smiled. "Yeah, okay. That was pretty spectacular."

"See? There you go."

"Still..." Misato rolled her head back and forth. Gah. Her neck felt as stiff as a board. She could use a massage. Part of her idly wondered if the Doctor knew anything on the subject. "I can't believe we couldn't find anything. Nine people can't just up and vanish without leaving some kind of sign."

"Going from the evidence, seems that they can." The Doctor took out and examined the screwdriver. "And not in any of the usual ways, either. Didn't pick up any radiation traces from disintegrator weapons. No transmat energy signatures, either... wait. Was that there when we first came in?"

He abruptly dodged away towards a six-foot-wide oil painting hanging on the back of one of the nearby racks, donning his glasses as he went. The picture in question portrayed a lush river valley with some kind of white bird hovering above it amid the clouds. "Oof. Look at that," the Doctor said. "Straight through Martin's Celestial City." He poked the screwdriver through a small tear in the canvas.

Misato narrowed her eyes. "Can you pull this off the shelf?"

The Doctor ran the screwdriver over the painting's edge, then lifted it off of its mountings. Behind where the landscape had been fixed, Misato could see a sizeable bullet hole. She ran her finger around the entrance mark. "At a guess... looks like it's from a nine-millimeter hollow-point. Same ammo issued with standard NERV sidearms."

"So if we plot the trajectory back..." The Doctor muttered some numbers under his breath, then rushed back down the rows of shelves. He halted as his gaze fell on something outside of Misato's line of sight. "Over here!" He disappeared down one of the aisles.