Pack Animals t-7

by Peter Anghelides

  ‘Get yer kit off, Ianto,’ crowed Owen delightedly. ‘You’re going in! Tosh has programmed you into their access system under a false identity. We chose it from our porn names.’

  ‘Now I’m intrigued,’ said Jack.

  ‘Name of your first pet plus the name of the street you grew up in,’ Owen continued. ‘I had a dog called Bobby and grew up in Warren Drive, so I’m Bobby Warren. Gwen is Tiggi Locke. And Ianto,’ he concluded with a note of incredulity, ‘is Trevor Swanson.’

  Jack roared with laughter.

  ‘Who the hell calls their pet dog Trevor?’ spluttered Gwen.

  Toshiko took a dainty bite from a tuna sandwich in a futile effort to hide her amusement.

  ‘Come on, Trevor,’ said Jack. ‘Time you were going.’

  The suit of clothes started to remove its jacket and tie at the desk. Ianto’s sullen reaction was evident through his body language alone.

  SEVENTEEN

  Jack said it would be funny to have Ianto drive the SUV to Achenbrite. ‘No, hear me out – the bandages, the sunglasses, the whole Claude Raines shtick.’

  ‘Too bizarre,’ Gwen told him.

  ‘Hey, a dead guy drove us to the Pharm-’ Jack began, but Gwen cut him off.

  ‘Ianto, you’re in the back, I’m up front, Owen you can drive. And you…’ She turned to Jack, still hobbling about on his crutches. ‘You stay right here with Tosh.’

  ‘Who died and made you Captain?’ complained Jack in a surly tone.

  Gwen snatched a crutch off him and carried it away from his office and across to the lift platform. ‘Come and get it, boss.’

  Jack didn’t even get as far as the walkway over the pool. He lurched against the rail, gasping and grimacing with pain.

  Gwen propped the crutch against the base of the stainless steel tower for him to collect in his own time. She activated the exit lift, which began its ascent to Roald Dahl Plass. As it rose, she balanced by holding on to Ianto’s hairy, invisible forearm like some odd mime act. She could hear Ianto chuckling. Jack’s outraged expression grew smaller.

  ‘We know that Achenbrite can block our comms,’ Jack shouted up at them. ‘But we don’t know whether they can intercept them. If we’re adopting radio silence for this mission, I don’t want to be stuck here with Tosh.’

  ‘Thanks, Jack,’ Toshiko called from her workstation.

  ‘No offence, Tosh. I’ll just be kicking my heels.’

  Toshiko pouted at him as she waved farewell to Gwen. ‘Well, your heel, anyway.’

  A faint sheen of fine, clinging rain wafted off the Bay and across the Plass as Gwen and Ianto made their way to where Owen was to deliver the SUV. The rain meant there were fewer pedestrians to avoid, but it was still odd to hear the slapping sound of Ianto’s bare feet on the wooden boards.

  Under the cover of the bus shelter, Gwen could make out the faint outline of Ianto’s head, shoulders and back from the fine covering of rainwater. A tell-tale patina of his whereabouts. She got him to stand still for a moment and, for want of anything else, slipped off her jacket and wiped his back with the lining. The cold November air chilled her to goose bumps. Gwen could feel Ianto shivering.

  ‘You poor thing,’ she said. When Owen drew up in the SUV, she banged on the driver’s window and urged him to crank the heating up. ‘We’ll try to park as close as possible to the Achenbrite place without drawing attention to ourselves,’ she told Ianto. ‘No point getting you any more frozen than absolutely necessary.’

  The rear door of the SUV opened and closed by itself.

  Gwen slipped into the passenger seat and buckled up.

  ‘Knowing that Owen is driving,’ said Ianto’s voice from behind her, ‘that’s a very wise precaution.’

  Gwen laughed softly as she remembered what Rhys had said that same morning. ‘The difference between knowledge and wisdom. That’s one of Jack’s, isn’t it?’

  ‘Something to do with tomatoes?’ Ianto asked. ‘Yes, that’ll be one of Jack’s. Sounds more profound than it is, so he uses it when he’s trying to con you.’ He buckled himself incongruously into the seatbelt. ‘Ask me in an hour whether walking into the enemy camp naked was a wise decision.’

  On the fourth attempt, Jack managed to get across the Hub without his crutch. He traversed the route from his office, across behind the water tower, and then over the walkway. The throbbing in his damaged leg was intense, but the satisfaction of completing the route was even greater. He approached Toshiko’s workstation, and thought he heard her say to herself: ‘I hope I did good.’ Or maybe it was ‘You did good.’

  Well, yeah, he had done good, and he deserved a reward for his efforts. So he helped himself to the jar of candy on Toshiko’s desk. Toshiko started, and even gave a little squeal of shock. But she recovered her composure quickly enough to minimise the window of the application she’d been working on.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Jack.

  She blanched. ‘Research,’ she said after a beat. She tugged the jar from his hand. ‘Hey, Gwen bought those bon-bons for me!’

  Jack held one between his finger and thumb, and waggled it provocatively.

  ‘The jar spilled,’ Toshiko warned him. ‘I had to retrieve three or four of them from the filthy dirty floor.’

  Jack looked at the bon-bon, and considered the size of the jar. ‘I like those odds,’ he decided, and popped the candy in his mouth. He pointed to the stuffed plush toy on her desk. ‘What’s that for?’

  Toshiko smiled her secret smile. ‘It’s for when Owen comes to ask me a question for the fifth time each day about how to fix his computer. The sort of thing he should be able to work out for himself. So I insist that he asks this stuffed tiger before he interrupts me.’

  He raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Does it work?’

  Toshiko scratched the tiger affectionately between its velour ears. ‘It has an eighty per cent success rate.’

  Jack chuckled, and drew a chair up next to her. ‘Not as good as you,’ he said. ‘This computer of ours, Tosh. Organic, living, intuitive technology light years ahead of anything on Earth. But you got it as soon as you used it. No one understands it like you do, Tosh. What would we do without you?’

  ‘I thought about that today,’ she said quietly. Her fingers tapped nervously on her mouse, and the pointer on her display screen jiggled in response.

  ‘The sauropod that got in here?’ Jack asked. ‘Yeah, that must have been a close thing. But you know what? You did good.’

  She gave him a sharp look.

  ‘I mean it,’ he smiled. ‘I take all the credit, of course,’ he added grandly, ‘I only pick the best. So, watcha doin’?’

  Toshiko didn’t look at him. Instead of answering his question, she pointed to the stuffed tiger. Jack laughed good-naturedly, and Toshiko joined in.

  ‘I’m connecting the dots,’ she told him eventually. ‘I’m doing some conventional data mining. It’s the online version of Ianto snooping naked around Achenbrite, but it’s less likely to arouse suspicion.’

  Jack smiled. ‘Ianto snooping while naked. That’s arousing, right there.’

  Toshiko opened a load of web browser windows, and manipulated them so they displayed across all the available flat-screen display space above her desk. News reports, NHS records, Police SOC reports, birth certificates. They were all linked by dynamically moving lines. And at the centre was a photograph of a young man with sharp cheekbones. Startling green eyes stared out from beneath greasy centre-parted hair.

  ‘Gareth Portland,’ said Jack. ‘Those lines make him look like the spider at the centre of a web.’

  ‘He’s the connection that binds all these facts and events,’ agreed Toshiko. ‘Freak meteorological events, MonstaQuest franchises, family addresses, that sort of thing. There’s a psych report for when he was treated for anger management as a teenager. But it’s the sudden deaths that interest me.’

  ‘Never say that in a public place,’ Jack joked. Toshiko peered over her spectacles at him.
‘Sorry, go on, Tosh.’

  ‘The priest you found this morning? Gareth was one of his altar boys at Holy Innocents. This young woman here? She was the school pupil who he fought with in Year 10 and got a two-month suspension. This couple here are his former neighbours. The zookeeper who got killed? He supervised Gareth’s work placement. Gareth had a MonstaQuest franchise at Pendefig Mall – and that burned down this morning. Gareth’s girlfriend died in a house fire at his home. And there’s more.’

  Jack clucked his tongue. ‘That’s either one really unlucky guy, or…’

  ‘… he is the spider at the heart of the web.’ Toshiko lifted her plush tiger, and Jack now saw that it had been sat on the alien ‘zoo catalogue’ device. ‘He’s got one of these,’ Toshiko continued. ‘A device that takes advantage of Gareth’s fragile emotions by getting him worked up about all sorts of things. He thinks that he’s exploiting it, Jack. But I think it’s using him.’

  Jack turned the catalogue device over in his hand. ‘Better find him, Tosh.’

  ‘Is he in the Achenbrite facility?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Jack. ‘But remember you said you found that place when you worked out what it wasn’t showing us?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Look for catastrophes or deaths that could have happened but didn’t, or haven’t yet. Dive deeper into your data, Tosh. That’s how you’ll find him.’

  Toshiko moved her hands to her keyboard. ‘And what about Ianto?’ she asked.

  ‘No way to contact him now. He’s on his own.’ He saw that Toshiko had stopped typing, and was looking at him worriedly. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told her. ‘I picked the best, remember?’

  But he hoped his voice didn’t betray his true fears.

  EIGHTEEN

  Ianto unclipped his seatbelt as the SUV slowed to a halt. He worked out that it was easier to use the muscle memory of unlatching it than to look for the belt buckle. It was too disorienting to work out where his invisible fingers were in relation to the things he was trying to manipulate.

  Owen parked the SUV behind the For Sale hoarding that hid a defunct print company from the main swag of the industrial estate. This meant they wouldn’t draw attention to themselves by parking right in the Achenbrite car park. But it would also require Ianto to pad barefoot over an access road and across the car park.

  Toshiko’s voice filtered through the SUV’s speaker phone. ‘You’ll be out of radio contact, Ianto,’ she explained.

  ‘I appreciate that,’ he murmured. ‘No earcomms.’

  Owen laughed. ‘That’d be a giveaway. Not much point being invisible if whatever’s stuck in your ear floats around in mid air.’

  They’d decided that even the ‘virtual contact’ lenses could draw attention, in the way a couple of flies might catch the eye of an observer. So Ianto was going in to Achenbrite literally naked. No clothes, no comms, and no weapon.

  ‘Well, anyway, you’ll have to memorise a sixteen-number access code,’ continued Toshiko. ‘So I made it 2738-4947-3354-9937.’

  Ianto started to groan halfway through the numbers.

  Gwen sucked air through her teeth. ‘Yeah, Tosh. How’s he ever going to remember that?’

  ‘He can use the alphanumeric keypad to type in the corresponding letters from the start of a memorable phrase.’ Toshiko’s voice sounded pleased. Ianto imagined she was doing that little ‘aha’ smile that Jack seemed to find so adorable, the one that meant she knew she’d been especially clever. ‘The phrase I’ve chosen is Creu Gwir fel Gwydr o Ffwrnais Awen.’

  Ianto should have guessed. ‘Very funny,’ he said, though he didn’t feel amused.

  ‘Ohhh,’ said Gwen. ‘That bit of poetry on the front of the Millennium Centre.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Toshiko. ‘I thought I should choose something you see every day, Ianto.’

  Ianto threw open the rear door of the SUV. ‘You’ll be sorry,’ he called back into the vehicle. ‘You know that, Tosh, don’t you?’

  ‘What does he mean?’ Gwen asked.

  Toshiko giggled, said she’d explain later, and ended the call. Ianto slammed the door and slunk away.

  None of the adjacent business units seemed to be busy, so there was no one to hear Ianto’s curses and sharp cries of pain as he traversed the roughly pitted surface of the roadway.

  He kept to the side of the route up to the Achenbrite building, and avoided the sharp gravel by treading on the path’s edging to spare his feet. The icy cold concrete of the border froze his soles. Low branches snagged in the hairs on Ianto’s legs as he balanced. Their thorns scratched his skin, maybe even drawing blood, though how would he be able to tell?

  The original plan was for him to tailgate into the building immediately after one of the Achenbrite employees. After hopping from foot to foot in the cold air for ten minutes, he could tell that was never going to work. No one appeared to be entering or leaving the building. Where had everyone gone? Owen had reported the place was buzzing with activity earlier when he’d dropped the memory sticks. Yet now it was mid-afternoon on a busy Saturday, and it might as well have been Sunday for all the activity around the place. Impossible to tell what was happening inside the building, either, because even the main reception had opaque glass windows.

  So it was time for Plan B, which was to use the access authority that Toshiko had remotely programmed into the Achenbrite security system.

  Ianto raised his hand to the reception door, to shade it as he peered through. He stifled a laugh at the absurdity of attempting this with invisible hands. He resorted instead to squinting through the door, noting with curiosity how his invisible breath condensed and became visible on the smoked glass.

  The main area and front desk were deserted. He turned his attention to the proximity badge reader at chest height by the door. It had a recessed display screen, with a keypad for anyone who needed to get conventional access without an ID card.

  He tapped in the sixteen numbers and waited. Of course that number was something he saw every day – it was identical to his supposedly secret Torchwood login code. And he’d chosen it for exactly the reason that Toshiko had just explained to Gwen. She was giving him a coded message that he would understand but Gwen and Owen would not: sneakily telling Ianto that she had cracked his personal login.

  The door buzzed open, and Ianto slipped swiftly inside. The only risk was if any security camera saw the door move on its own.

  The warmth of the entrance area and the soft texture of its carpet tiles were a welcome change. A couple of CCTV cameras poked out of the wall as visible deterrents to intruders, but it was evident from their stillness and extinguished indicator lights that they were not operational. That was odd.

  The main desk was still unoccupied. When he checked behind it, Ianto found papers scattered across the desk and on the floor by the overturned chair. It was as though the receptionist had rushed away somewhere. They’d left their display monitor unlocked, too, so Ianto had a look at the information on that.

  One side of the screen displayed the name Trevor Swanson, because that was the alias Toshiko had specified in the system to allow coded entry. He smiled at the picture she’d chosen to accompany it: a photo of Barry Nelson, who had once played James Bond on TV. Toshiko knew Ianto’s enthusiasms, as well as his password.

  He stopped smiling when he saw what was being cross-referenced on the other side of the screen. Names and faces scrolled upwards: Douglas Caldwell, Gerald Carter, Lydia Childs, Gwen Cooper, Suzie Costello, Harriet Derbyshire…

  A list of former and current Torchwood operatives in Cardiff. How the hell could Achenbrite know about them?

  Ianto stared around the reception as though, impossibly, he might be observed. There was no one there, and the CCTV was dead. Yet more than ever he felt his own vulnerability as he stood by the all-too knowing screen, naked and defenceless.

  He keyed in his access code at the next proximity badge reader, and slipped through into a linking corridor.

>   There were two further doors to either side, and another one ten metres away at the far end. A fluorescent tube sputtered behind a transparent ceiling panel. Halfway down, above head height, was another pair of CCTV cameras, but their lights were dead. By the time Ianto had walked far enough to examine the cameras, the carpet tiles felt gritty under his bare feet.

  Ianto hunkered down to check, and discovered a scattering of fine sand. Some of it had drifted up against the skirting. It built into a higher, heaped pile against the far door. Rooted in the sand, fitfully illuminated by the overhead light, a row of four thin-stemmed double-headed flowers nodded in the breeze.

  Wait a minute… what breeze?

  He shuffled away from them, his feet scuffing sand. The flowers twisted their heads around to face him. Ianto sprang high into the air and away. The petals on the double-headed blooms snapped open, and a shower of seeds spurted onto the spot where Ianto had been standing only moments earlier. Some of the scattered seeds struck the wallpaper just above the skirting, where they stuck and quivered like little darts.

  Ianto scrabbled to locate the nearest handle, then wrenched the door open. It was a meeting room, and it was in darkness. He slapped at the adjacent wall, finding the switches by touch. As the lights pinked and fluttered into life, he hurried into the room.

  The dismembered bodies of half a dozen Achenbrite staff had been discarded across the meeting room. They slumped against the wall or over the table in the centre. In some cases, their limbs had been ripped off, ragged flesh the only visible remains in grey uniforms darkened with purple blood. Further smears of blood and savage indentations in the plaster walls bore witness to a fight with some huge creature.

  Two corpses were decapitated. The eyes of the others were wide, the faces twisted at the final sight of some unknown horror. An undulating surface of sand half-buried the furthest bodies, like the ripples on a beach at low tide. Against the far wall were more of the double-headed flowers, though these had collapsed in limp rows. He could see where their seeds had sprayed over the dead bodies and taken root.