Torchwood_The Men Who Sold The World

by Guy Adams

  Angelo sat in the long grass and watched the Hernandez House. All the years he had known it – which wasn’t many, but time moves with greater weight for a 12-year-old – it had remained empty. His mother said it had once belonged to a rich family, had been a place of parties and music that had gone on late into the night. Then the revolution had hounded them out and the building became home to crumbling stone, graffiti and splintered window shutters.

  It sat in overgrown grounds, surrounded by a wall designed to keep people out but better at encouraging children in. There’s nothing kids love more than a ‘Keep Out’ sign. Of course, people said it was haunted. People of a certain age always did. Whenever he mentioned the place to his grandmother, she would suck on the damp end of her cigar and cross herself. ‘It is a house of devils,’ she would say around fat, blue golf balls of tobacco smoke. ‘To go there is to stain your soul.’ But then Angelo’s grandmother thought everything stained your soul, so Angelo didn’t take her warnings seriously. Nor did he think the Hernandez House was a house of devils. Though something had recently taken up residence there.

  The night before, Angelo had lain in his bed listening to his grandmother’s TV. She was deaf, so she turned it up loud enough to shake the walls. She liked action movies, so the walls shook a lot.

  Despite the TV, he had heard the sound of a truck coming down the track towards the Hernandez House. He knew his grandmother wouldn’t hear it, she was too distracted by the adventures of Vin Diesel or – her favourite – Wesley Snipes. ‘Siempre se apuesta por negro!’ she would cry when she saw one of his movies listed in the TV Guide.

  Angelo had got out of bed and peered over the windowsill of his room. The truck was driving slowly down the track. Likely they thought that nobody would see them. Most people thought Angelo’s grandmother’s house was as derelict as the mansion. In truth, she’d just let the place go. There were no other houses around.

  Angelo had watched the truck stop outside the gates of the Hernandez House. A man had jumped out, ran to the gates, opened them and then stood back to let the truck drive through. Once clear the man had swung the gates closed and begun to wind a length of chain around the bars to lock them. ‘The way to keep something safe is not to shout about it,’ Angelo had whispered, but knew that this bit of wisdom would be lost on the stranger by the gates. Truth was, a big padlock just told the world that there was something worth stealing. Tomorrow, he had thought, I’ll see if I can find out what it is.

  Now, having spent an hour or so chasing snakes in the grass, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to know. He figured these people were hiding. You wouldn’t live in a place like that unless you didn’t want to be found. That was OK, Angelo often didn’t want to be found either. He wouldn’t tell. But he wouldn’t get too close. Hidden people were usually scared, and scared people could get angry.

  Shaeffer sat on the closed lid of the toilet and weighed the phone up in his hand. If Gleason caught him with it, he honestly didn’t know what the man would do. He’d never doubted his commanding officer before. Gleason’s rage was usually pointed squarely towards the enemy. But ‘the enemy’ no longer had the simple definition it used to have.

  He tapped on the phone’s screen, scrolling through the photos of Oscar and his wife, Penelope. Pictures of them laughing, kissing, raising their glasses towards the lens. Oscar felt like a spy, looking down on them from the veered perspective of the photographer’s outstretched right hand.

  Oscar shouldn’t have kept his phone with him. It was against orders. Shaeffer proved why as he scrolled through the dead man’s life. Everything from his taste in music and TV shows to messages from friends and family. The phone was a window onto its owner. And the longer that Shaeffer looked, the more he realised he hadn’t known Oscar at all. We all hide behind masks, he thought, in this game more than any other. But if I wasn’t looking at Oscar’s face in these photos, I’d swear this phone belonged to someone else entirely. Someone happy and normal. Someone with Gloria Frigging Estefan on their Favourites playlist.

  The phone had been in Oscar’s bag. Gleason had made it Shaeffer’s responsibility to clear away Oscar’s stuff, dumping it over the side of the boat as they sailed away from the scene of the crime.

  The scene of the crime… Jesus what had they become?

  Shaeffer wasn’t a stranger to moral grey areas. His career had been built on acts he couldn’t comfortably discuss. But however bad it got, however much blood ended up on his hands, he had always been able to convince himself that he was acting for the greater good. That they were the grunts who got their hands dirty so that others could sleep safely at night.

  He stared at a photo of Oscar and Penelope, heads pressed together, the familiar shape of Manhattan bridge over her shoulder. They gazed at the camera as a Brooklyn sun warmed their cheeks. Had Oscar ever told Penelope about the things they’d seen and done? About the villages they had left burning in Afghanistan, the bodies they had sent floating down the Hari? No. Shaeffer looked at the smiling face of the woman resting her head against Oscar’s and decided that she knew nothing. People only looked that happy in the company of heroes.

  He wondered whether the Company had contacted her yet. Whether they had manufactured a hero’s death. He wondered whether the weight in his chest would lift, if only for a few seconds, if he were to tell her the truth.

  He scrolled through the menu options to the phone’s contacts, thumbing his way down the list until he saw Penelope’s name. He let his finger hover over it for a few seconds then, hearing movement in the corridor outside the bathroom, he locked the phone’s controls and tucked it away in his pocket.

  ‘Shaeffer.’ Mulroney’s voice. ‘You in there?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, finish up and get downstairs. The Colonel wants to talk to everybody.’

  ‘OK.’

  Shaeffer waited until he heard Mulroney’s boots heading back up the hallway, gave it another thirty seconds, flushed and went downstairs.

  He stepped into the front room where the rest of the unit were waiting.

  There was little furniture, just a few chairs that someone had dragged from other parts of the house. The plaster had fallen away from sections of the walls, revealing the thin, wooden ribs of the building beneath. The air smelled wet. The floor felt soft.

  ‘Here he is,’ laughed Ellroy. ‘Finished your chemical warfare?’

  ‘Sit down,’ said Gleason, nodding to a spare chair. Shaeffer did so, trying his best to look relaxed, to look like a guy that wasn’t having doubts about the company he kept.

  ‘OK,’ said Gleason. ‘So I’ve been thinking.’

  ‘Which means this is serious,’ joked Mulroney, the only man in the room who could do so without being shot.

  ‘I guess it is,’ said Gleason, with a half-smile. ‘But, you know, the more I think about it, the more I think we’re looking at an opportunity here. How many years have we been doing this? Dicked around by the moveable “moral compass” of whichever suit currently leads the thinking in global policy. We’ve all left friends in the desert somewhere. We’ve all wondered when what we did might make a difference.’

  Gleason looked at each of his men in turn.

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe I’m just getting old, but the certainty in command I used to feel is gone. I just don’t believe in what we do any more. Yesterday was the perfect example, putting our necks on the line for something that’s going to spend the next few years being poked at by men in white coats.’

  ‘You think it really is what they say, sir?’ asked Mills. ‘You think that stuff’s alien?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Gleason replied. ‘That’s not the point. We weren’t briefed, we weren’t warned, and because of that one of our own dies.’ He looked to Shaeffer, wanting to see how the man reacted. Predictably enough, the soldier was squirming in his chair. ‘Well, that’s enough. I’m drawing the line.’

  ‘You suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?’ asked Mulroney. ‘We going r
ogue here?’

  ‘Too late to ask that,’ said Leonard. ‘We’re off the grid already.’

  ‘We could still come back from this,’ said Ellroy. ‘Come up with some excuse for the radio silence.’

  ‘And stealing several crates of weaponry?’ Leonard replied. ‘Don’t be an idiot, there’ll be a kill order out on us already.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ said Gleason. ‘But I’d like to see them implement it once we crack open those crates and start fighting back.’

  ‘Use that stuff against our own?’ asked Mills.

  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ Gleason replied, glancing again at Shaeffer. ‘But I’m hoping it won’t come to that. At the same time, I ain’t talking about just sitting here and waiting for them. That’s never been my style.’ He smiled. ‘We take the fight to them. Do what we’ve been trained to, infiltrate and execute. We demand enough money to buy ourselves out of this life, new identities and a place to grow old in them.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mills. ‘It don’t feel right. We’ve done some bad stuff in our time but always for the right reasons, haven’t we?’ He looked at the others. ‘Well, haven’t we?’

  Nobody could answer him.

  ‘You think they’ll go for it?’ Mulroney asked later.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Gleason admitted, opening two bottles of beer and passing one to Mulroney. ‘Shaeffer’s not thinking straight, and Mills has principles.’

  ‘He’ll learn,’ said Mulroney taking a sip of his beer. ‘Ellroy and Leonard will be OK. They do as their told.’

  ‘And you?’

  Mulroney smiled. ‘Don’t give me that, you know better. How long have we known each other?’

  Gleason had to think for a moment. ‘Seventeen years.’

  ‘Damn right, two turns in the Gulf and several lifetimes between. We know how it is. This life ain’t ever going to change unless we do the changing.’ Mulroney shrugged. ‘You know I’ve had plans.’

  Gleason nodded and took a long draft of his beer.

  ‘Only an idiot wouldn’t think ahead.’ Mulroney continued. ‘Otherwise we keep at this until we’re the ones left behind in the desert, or the jungle, or the swamp. Either we die in a foreign land or we get our legs blown off by a mine and put a bullet in our own heads cos we just can’t stand to sit still. Unless…’

  ‘Unless?’

  ‘Unless we take an opportunity like this.’ Mulroney moved closer to Gleason. ‘And let’s have no more about this being a battlefield crisis of conscience – you wanted that shipment before you even stepped on the boat.’

  Gleason stared at him, and Mulroney saw the very worst of both of them in his eyes. Then the older man smiled. For a moment, regardless of their shared history, Gleason had considered killing Mulroney, and Mulroney knew it.

  ‘You think I disagree? If I did we wouldn’t be having this conversation.’

  ‘OK.’ Gleason nodded. ‘I thought about it when the orders came through.’

  ‘Of course you did. But I agree we keep that to ourselves. These kids don’t know the world like we do they’re not as…’

  ‘Pragmatic?’

  ‘A nicer word than I was going to use.’

  ‘Then let’s stick to it.’

  ‘They need to justify this to themselves, they still want a flag to march under.’

  Gleason finished his beer. ‘I used to think that way.’

  ‘You and me both, Colonel,’ said Mulroney. ‘Then we grew up.’

  Shaeffer said he needed fresh air, and Gleason had let him go. Shaeffer knew the casual attitude wouldn’t last. Gleason would cut them a little slack now as long as they agreed to be pulled back in later.

  Shaeffer walked through the long grass, heading away from the house. He walked slowly, smoking a cigarette and glancing around like he was admiring the view. Always mindful of what he would look like if someone was watching him from the house. Just a guy chilling out. Nothing to worry about.

  He cut a diagonal across the undergrowth, aiming for the ruins of a gazebo in the far corner. Once upon a time a band would have played here, he guessed, blowing swing and dance tunes to the wealthy owners of the house and their friends.

  He stared at it for a moment, looking at the lopsided pillars that supported the roof, the heavy undergrowth that had woven its way between them. He kept his back to the house. Playacting casual interest. Hey, look at this old place… It must have been great in the old days…

  Then he stepped inside, slowly moved past the plant life and turned to see if he was blocked from view. He was. Keeping an eye on the house through a tiny gap in the branches, he pulled the phone out of his pocket. Glancing down, he saw the screen still showed the address book. He pressed Penelope’s name and watched the screen shift to call mode. Connecting, it said, a flowing blue arrow illustrating his signal swooping out over the world and changing his life for ever.

  ‘Hello?’ came a quiet voice from his hand and he lifted it to his ear in a panic, as much to silence it as answer it. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘It’s… a friend of Oscar’s.’

  ‘A friend? I know Oscar’s friends, who is this?’

  ‘I work with Oscar, you know…’ He had no idea what to say, no idea how much Oscar would ever have told her. ‘It doesn’t matter, I just wanted to tell you. There’s been an accident. Oscar…’

  ‘Oscar’s dead, I know.’

  Shaeffer sagged with relief, she already knew! But how could she?

  ‘How did you…?’

  ‘His body was found embedded in the nose of a jumbo jet that crashed in the Gulf of Mexico. News like that travels. Now who is this?’

  A jumbo…? Shaeffer couldn’t even begin to get his head around that. He nearly hung up. Then his sense of self-preservation kicked in. He tried to decide what to say, peering again at the house through the branches. ‘Look,’ he said, adopting a more businesslike tone, ‘we’re all up to our necks out here, our commanding officer’s gone…’ He had been about to say mad but that was far from true – Gleason knew exactly what he was doing. ‘There’s a situation here,’ he continued, ‘and I want out, but my life won’t be worth squat unless I’m careful.’

  Slowly but surely he began to lay out a deal.

  Four

  ‘OK,’ said Rex. ‘So this guy wants out. Why’s it my business?’

  ‘Penelope reported the call,’ Esther replied. ‘Passed on the details, and within half an hour they’re all off the system.’

  ‘What do you mean “off the system”?’

  ‘Just that. None of that S.O.G. team exist on record and there’s no detail of an operation to retrieve them. As far as the Company’s concerned, they don’t exist.’

  ‘More likely their extraction is so sensitive it’s off the record.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as “off the record” if you dig hard enough. What if Gleason isn’t the only one who’s gone rogue?’

  ‘You’re saying someone’s covering his tracks? Burying the data trail?’

  ‘Exactly, leaving him free to get on with whatever the hell he’s planning.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Why not just report it? Make it someone else’s problem?’

  ‘Because according to Shaeffer they’re in Cuba and you’re only a stone’s throw away. And because I trust you, and Penelope’s good, she deserves someone trustworthy.’ She paused, unsure for a moment whether she should continue. Then, with a deep breath: ‘And, sorry, but because you’ve made such a mess of things there you need to vanish and repair your previously gleaming reputation with some acts of unbelievable heroism.’

  ‘I hate you, Esther, you know that, right?’

  ‘Penelope Lupé?’ said the old man on Penelope’s doorstep. He removed his hat with a gloved hand and doffed it at her. Then, not waiting for the answer, as, in truth, he already knew: ‘I’m sorry to disturb you. It’s about your husband. May I come in?’

  She stepped back to let him p
ast, it never occurring to her to do anything else. It was only as she closed her apartment door that she wondered why she had been so careless. It wasn’t in her nature. After all, her husband hadn’t been the only one whose monthly wage was paid by the security services.

  ‘Can I see some ID?’ she asked, better late than never.

  ‘Of course you may, my dear,’ he replied. ‘What sort would you prefer?’ He reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a black leather wallet. ‘I don’t have a driver’s licence, I’m afraid, I’ve never been comfortable behind the wheel of a car.’ He flipped the wallet open to show a selection of clear plastic folders. ‘But I have my social security card.’ He passed it to her. ‘My pensioner concession card, so useful on the buses.’ Again, he handed it over. ‘Even a library card.’

  ‘How about something that shows me who you work for?’ Penelope asked looking up from the cards in time to see the syringe the old man was thrusting towards her. She turned to avoid it, but he was surprisingly quick, stepping around her, jabbing the needle into her neck and depressing the plunger.

  She caught him a slight blow to the side of his head as she turned to face him, her legs buckling underneath her before she could press the attack home.

  ‘Clumsy of me,’ the old man said, rubbing at his temple. ‘I must remember I’m not as young as I once was.’ He moved over towards the couch and sat down. ‘Forgive me while I get my breath back.’

  Penelope twitched on the polished floorboards of her apartment, her feet rucking up a Mexican rug and knocking over a small occasional table.

  ‘Do try to be careful,’ said Mr Wynter. ‘I shall have to tidy up before I leave. You wouldn’t want an old man to struggle, would you?’

  Penelope’s face reddened, the tendons in her neck sticking out, teeth clenching together and snipping off the tip of her tongue. The little pink sliver of meat stuck to her chin.

  ‘That’s the way, my dear,’ Mr Wynter said, leaning back on the rather comfortable couch. ‘It could have been worse – in my youth I was known to play awhile. These days I just don’t have the energy.’