Torchwood_Long Time Dead

by Sarah Pinborough

  ‘Don’t talk to me about battles,’ he muttered, making do with taking a deep breath of the scent of Marlboro Lights that filled the room. ‘Those I can deal with.’

  ‘Well, in my line of work, it’s nearly always a psychological battle. Whatever is going on, I imagine she’s going to want this to stop as much as we do. The Hub is somewhere she’s familiar with – even in the state it’s in, it’s as close to a home as she’s ever had. She’ll feel safe there, and right now I think feeling safe is what she wants most of all.’

  ‘You really think she’ll turn up with the device?’ Jackson had little understanding of women, but having seen Suzie Costello acting as normal as the next person while at the same time killing strangers with the device and then doing what she did to that man in her flat, he wasn’t entirely convinced.

  ‘I told her I loved her,’ Cutler said. ‘And told her to trust me.’ The policeman’s face darkened. ‘I don’t think anyone’s told Suzie Costello they love her in a long time. She’ll come. She’s going to want my help.’ He blew out a long stream of smoke. ‘And if your scientists have the data right from the Hub then there’s no reason our plan won’t work. But just remember – if we’re not out, you go ahead with what we’ve agreed anyway.’

  ‘It’s all taken care of,’ Jackson said. DI Cutler might have had some strange experiences in his working life, but he had no idea about the tough calls Jackson himself had made over the years. ‘If you’re not out, that’s it. Good luck.’

  Cutler nodded. ‘Thanks.’ He reached for his coat. ‘Well, I should probably get going. You’ll have to stay here. I’ll get someone in your uniform in the cells and your name logged in the system. Just in case she’s got someone feeding her information from here. I wouldn’t put it past her.’

  ‘Take care, Detective.’ The images from Jackson’s nightmares surged in the darkness behind his eyes. Despite all his practicality and lack of imagination, he knew the policeman was right. Something terrible was coming. ‘Can I ask you one thing?’ he said. ‘You don’t have to answer.’

  ‘Fire away.’ Cutler was at the door, and he cut a lonely figure, heading off to save the world.

  ‘Did you mean it? When you told her you loved her?’ He didn’t know why it mattered, but somehow it did.

  Cutler looked at him for a long moment before answering. ‘Yes. Yes, I meant it.’ His eyes darkened. ‘But it won’t stop me doing my job, you can count on that.’

  Elwood Jackson stood between Peters and Stand, the two Department men who’d arrived from London that afternoon. At least a whole brigade hadn’t arrived. Perhaps they hadn’t quite grasped the seriousness of the situation, but he thought these two at least were surely catching up now. They muttered to each other occasionally or turned their backs to quietly take phone calls that Jackson and his men clearly weren’t supposed to hear. God only knew what they were relaying back.

  Dr Holdt had joined them in the room up in the higher levels of the Millennium Centre, where they could look out through the glass windows between the huge letters to where the police now guarded the site.

  ‘I hope you’ve understood the data correctly, Dr Holdt,’ he said, softly. ‘Or else, I do believe we’re all in trouble.’

  ‘Let’s just hope the woman shows up,’ Dr Holdt answered. He didn’t sound quite as respectful as he had earlier in the day, and Jackson knew it was because he wasn’t dressed in his full uniform. He was still the Commander though, and this was still his operation. Even if the Department were quietly coming up with their own back-up plan. Not that rank would really matter if that came to pass. ‘So, the data you have definitely shows that there was alien activity present as soon as the building was destroyed?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Holdt said. ‘The monitor hadn’t failed; we just weren’t working it properly. The signal from the day of the explosion is weak and given everything else that was going on at that time there were lots of readings to work our way through, but there was definitely a slight spike of alien activity in the vault on that day. It stays almost invisible until the point when John Blackman was killed at which point the strength was much higher.’

  Commander Jackson nodded. Cutler had better be right with his reasoning. If the explosion was what had started the device working, then an explosion should shut it down. All he needed to do was get it out of Suzie Costello’s grip. If she thought that keeping the device close to her was keeping her alive, then Cutler was going to need all his persuasive charm. That worried Jackson. As far as he could see, Cutler didn’t have that much. Still, as long as what he had worked on Suzie, that was all that mattered.

  ‘Look,’ Dr Holdt said, and something in his voice had all the men staring out of the window immediately. There she was, Sue Costa, or Suzie Costello or whatever other names she had on passports tucked away in safety deposit boxes across the country, slowly walking towards the Hub site. She had balls, Jackson had to give her that. But then, what else could you expect from a woman who’d been dead twice?

  ‘Are the explosives ready?’ he asked. At a desk in the far corner, a man hunched over a laptop nodded.

  This was it then, Elwood Jackson thought. The fate of the world was now in Detective Inspector Tom Cutler’s hands. He was surprised to find that he felt quite calm. He just had to roll with it. He’d live or die with the rest of them.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  ‘Given the increased damage levels of the current situation in Cardiff, I presumed that we’d be seeing the organ grinder rather than the monkey today,’ Mr Black, the head of the Department said as he took his seat at the table, a cup of coffee in hand.

  ‘Ha, bloody, ha. I have the full authority of the PM to chair this meeting on his behalf.’

  Mr Black wasn’t the only one to let out a slight snigger around the table. ‘Yes,’ one voice muttered, ‘remind me to lose an election some time. Quickest way to the top these days.’

  ‘Enough.’ The butt of their jokes glared at each of the men and women around the table as he snapped the word. The group quietened, but more out of politeness than fear or respect. Most of them were faces entirely unknown by the general public – the real faces of power in the country, the kind of power that came from more than just oratory. ‘We’re all busy, so let’s get to business, shall we? First, the PM wants to know what the situation is with the missing Torchwood personnel.’ He looked over to a thickset woman to his right. ‘I take it Harkness and Gwen Cooper are still unaccounted for? No signs of them at all?’

  ‘Thus far, no. We have a cross-agency alert out –’ several heads nodded in agreement – ‘but we’re not getting anything. Harkness, of course, may not even be on Earth, but we’re hoping to find Cooper and her husband within the next few weeks.’

  ‘Shouldn’t be that difficult,’ Mr Black cut in. ‘She’s pregnant, after all. At some point, she’s going to be ready to push it out. She’ll need medical care then.’

  ‘And what about the items that have been recovered? Do we have any buyers for those yet?’

  ‘We’re weighing up the options,’ Mr Black said. ‘There are obviously security issues with buyer choice.’ He nodded at a man and woman seated opposite. ‘MI5 and MI6 are exploring the bidders.’

  ‘The PM would like that hurried along. We’re in a recession, and there’s only so many cutbacks we can make before the cut is going to be running along our political throat, as it were. There’s only so much we can blame the jobless scrounger element of society for. Soon it will be the jobseekers losing their allowances. We need a cash injection and quickly. The Americans seem the obvious choice as far as we can see.’

  ‘Rich and stupid?’

  ‘Something like that. Just make it happen and quickly.’

  Mr Black’s phone rang and he answered it. No one questioned him. As he listened, he peered out of the Westminster window. The sky was grey and rain smeared the glass. Down below, people scurried here and there through London’s streets. Cardiff seemed a million miles away.


  ‘Thank you.’ He ended the call. All eyes at the table stared at him.

  ‘The situation in Cardiff is apparently somewhat worse than we originally thought. The men on the ground there are attempting to control it and we’ll know shortly if they have. If they fail, however, we may need to consider more drastic action.’

  ‘More drastic?’ It was the head of MI6 that asked the question first.

  Mr Black thought of the bustling city that had the misfortune to have been built below the Rift. ‘Nuclear, in fact,’ he said. ‘We may need to destroy the city. Before whatever is happening there destroys the entire world.’

  There was a long pause, during which time Mr Black sipped his coffee. Finally, the man at the head of the table, who had paled quite significantly since snapping at them for order, swallowed hard. ‘I think we might need the PM himself for that kind of go-ahead,’ he said eventually.

  Even with the gravity of the situation, Mr Black had to fight a small smile.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  He had followed the directions he’d been given and worked his way carefully through the wreckage of the Hub. Despite the portable fluorescent lamps that hung here and there on collapsed masonry or the remnants of walls, most of the site was filled with an eerie darkness. Tom Cutler breathed slowly and deeply to fight the rising panic that constantly threatened to overwhelm him.

  He’d never suffered from claustrophobia, and nor was he particularly afraid of the dark – neither of those would be good traits for a detective – but down here it was almost as if the terrible blackness Suzie was spreading had come to find him. He knew that wasn’t true – this was just ordinary darkness – but in the quiet, with only his shuffling movements and the occasional drip of water from somewhere on site it was hard not to let the dread inside take over. Instead he tried to picture the place as it was when he had last been there.

  As he passed under tumbling networks of wires, he could almost see Ianto Jones standing behind a workstation, a coffee in his hand, staring up at a screen. Somewhere over there was Jack Harkness’s office and that mess of concrete over to his right had collapsed into a cavernous hole that might be the wreckage of the Boardroom where he’d sat among them and planned how to trap the alien that was murdering the best singers in Wales.

  How strange that they’d never mentioned Suzie, he thought, as he picked his way down to the next level of darkness in the bowels of the building. But then they’d barely mentioned their two colleagues who’d only just died. Was that how it was for Torchwood? Always moving forward? Was losing their workmates just part of the job? People talked about it in policing, but it was rare. This wasn’t America, where officers lost their lives in shootouts with drug lords, and Cutler wasn’t convinced it happened over there all that much. He thought of Gwen Cooper, ex-uniformed officer, then Torchwood, and now what? Was she somewhere amongst the dead down here? The maudlin turn of his thoughts didn’t help the fear in his core, the screaming of millions that was coming if they couldn’t stop it.

  He trod more carefully now, aware that not only was the site still a danger zone of its own making, but that earlier that afternoon, Army bomb experts in police uniforms had come in and planted several packages of explosives in key structural areas around him. It was hard to imagine what a key structural area might be in all this mess, but he trusted those men to have found them. Once Suzie arrived – if Suzie arrived – then he had half an hour to get her to give up the technology and get them both out of there before the place went up. Or came down, depending on how you looked at it. Either way, whatever was left of the Hub would be blasted to dust.

  The vault was cool, the air filled with a vaguely sickly smell that he didn’t want to ponder on and he refused to look over at the crumpled bank of drawers, some of which would have held alien artefacts, and the rest – well – somewhere in there must be the crushed dead bodies of Toshiko Sato and Owen Harper and whoever else had died in the name of Torchwood. Strips of blue light were dotted here and there, and he scanned the space with his torch to get his bearings. If he couldn’t get Suzie to leave the device behind for whatever reason, then he was going to have to keep her down here until the bombs blew. He was surprised by the calm practicality of the thought – the summation of his own possible death. Perhaps he just wasn’t really accepting it. Or maybe, and he thought this was the more likely cause of his pragmatism, he could feel that his life, woven as it had been with Torchwood for so long, had been leading up to this point. Perhaps this was his purpose.

  He almost laughed at the Zen quality his thinking had taken on. Sometimes he was so full of shit. What would happen would happen, but he was pretty damned determined to get out of it alive. He sat down on the upturned metal drawer that lay half-exposed under some rubble.

  He laid his torch down on the floor, idly noting an unfamiliar name stencilled on an empty packing crate: ‘Colasanto’. He pulled out a cigarette. Sod being told not to. If there was gas down here, there’d have been an explosion already. The yellow flash of his lighter was warm in the gloom, and he left it open for a few seconds longer as he sucked in the smoke. That was better. Right now, cigarettes were hardly top of the league for things likely to kill him. He stared into the golden flame and waited.

  When his phone rang in the silence, he almost jumped out of his skin. Suzie – that was his first thought. She wasn’t coming. She’d seen through their plan.

  ‘Yes?’ he said softly.

  ‘I need you to give Suzie a message for me,’ the voice at the other end said.

  Cutler froze, his heart thumping. American. Smooth. Determined. ‘Jack?’ he said. ‘Jack Harkness?’

  ‘Tell Suzie I’m coming for her.’

  ‘Jack? What –?’ The phone went dead in his ear. Captain Jack bloody Harkness. Of course. Cutler’s face flushed angrily. Who the hell was he to turn up now – at the last minute when all the work had been done. He looked at the rubble around him that hid the powerful explosives. ‘You might be too late to come for her this time, Captain Jack.’

  It was about twenty minutes and three cigarettes later that Cutler heard movement. Footsteps, light and delicate, carefully making their way through the wreckage towards him. When she stepped into the remains of the vault, the soft hues of the unnatural light tainted her skin. Was this how she’d looked when she was dead, he wondered? Ethereal blue? No, he dismissed it. Right now, standing awkwardly a few metres away from him, she looked beautiful. The dead never did, no matter how much you dressed them up and rouged their cheeks. The best you got was a strange- looking waxwork dummy. Suzie Costello had been shot several times before she’d died the second time round, and the first time she’d put a bullet through her own brain. Even with her looks, her corpse would not have been pretty.

  ‘So,’ he said softly, ‘I’ve managed to park the blame on Jackson for now, but it won’t last. This thing is out of control.’

  She laughed a little, and then it turned into a sob and his heart ached. ‘You could say that.’

  She didn’t move towards him, but he could see her eyes glistening as they darted this way and that.

  ‘How much do you know?’ she asked. She couldn’t meet his gaze.

  ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘For now, at least.’ He tapped the space beside him, and she crept forward a couple of steps but didn’t sit. ‘I ran a test on a hair on my shirt and it matched those left at crime scenes which linked to the deleted file.’ He kept his voice soft and even. ‘So I’m guessing you’re Torchwood. Just not of the Torchwood team I met.

  I’m not quite sure what you came back here for,’ he looked around at the wreckage, ‘but you did for whatever reason, and then you found the activated device and took it with you. And now it’s making you kill people, and I think it has plans for all of us? How am I doing, honey?’

  He lit another cigarette. They were completely apart from the world down here in the earth, and it was hard to think of all those dead people, and that mutilated man in her flat, and link
them with this fragile woman in front of him, whose smell he could still remember. He thought of Captain Jack Harkness’s message. Tell Suzie I’m coming for her. Well, this time round he wasn’t doing what Jack Harkness dictated. Whatever was going on down here, it was between him and Suzie. He was taking care of it. He didn’t need Jack to get involved.

  She stared at him for a long moment. ‘Did you mean it when you said you loved me?’ It was a child’s voice. As if, even in this situation, love was the only thing that mattered.

  ‘Yes, I did.’ He looked into her dark eyes. ‘I think you’re messed up and I don’t know what is going on in your head, but yes, I love you. I feel right with you. I’m hoping we can get this situation sorted and see if that’s real.’ He meant it, even though he knew it was a lie. If they got out of here alive, then Suzie had other crimes to answer for. There was no way he was going to be able to whisk her away into the sunset.

  Her tears breaking free in streams down her face, she sat down heavily beside him and rested her head on his shoulder. ‘Why couldn’t I have met you years ago?’ she whispered. ‘Before the glove. Before everything started to go wrong?’

  ‘Life just doesn’t work that way.’

  She hiccupped a small laugh. ‘I’m an expert on life and death. Death especially. Not just killing people. I’ve been there.’ He wiped a tear from her cheek. It was so warm, so alive, and she looked so sweet. ‘You don’t understand,’ she said, looking away. ‘I didn’t come back down here. I was down here.’ The bitter tone made her voice deeper. ‘I was in this drawer in fact. Dead. Nothing. And then suddenly I was alive again.’