Owen glanced across at her and nodded appreciatively. 'That's some good lateral thinking there, Tosh,' he said. 'I bet you're good at crosswords.'
'Actually, I hate crosswords,' said Toshiko. 'But I'd really like to see what's in that basement.'
'Tosh?'
'Yes, Owen?'
'Do you ever feel like a character in Scooby Doo?'
Toshiko laughed. They were walking down the steps toward Basement D-4, or rather they were treading very carefully. The lighting in this part of the facility was poor; fluorescent tubes that hadn't been changed in many years, only some of which still worked. Most of them were grimy or encrusted in cobwebs and dead moths.
'Sometimes,' she said. 'So who would you be?'
'Oh, Fred, definitely,' said Owen.
'Really? I was thinking you remind me more of Shaggy.'
'Yeah?' said Owen. 'Well, you know what they say. Shaggy by name, shaggy by nature.'
'What about me, then?' asked Toshiko. 'And if you dare say Velma, I'll-'
Toshiko had modified one of her counters to specifically target the electromagnetic wave she'd traced to both Michael and the basement, and it suddenly began to crackle a little louder.
'It's weaker than the reading I'm getting off Michael,' she said. 'I've never seen anything like this. As far as I can make out, it's like a kind of radiation which is harmless to humans…'
They were now standing before the entrance of Basement D-4. Toshiko punched the code into the security panel, and the door opened for the second time that night.
'Ladies first,' said Owen, peering cautiously into the gloom.
'Oh,' said Toshiko, 'you really are a gentleman.'
She walked into the storage area, and Owen followed.
'November 1953,' said Toshiko. 'There was only one acquisition that month. No real description of it, except to say that it was an artefact discovered on a British polar expedition. The source was unknown. The records say it was originally meant to be kept here on a temporary basis, after being shipped in directly from the Arctic. They were supposed to keep it here for initial tests before transferring it to Torchwood in London, but that didn't happen.'
Three of the room's walls housed eighty individual doors, like the doors of a locker, and in each door there was a keyhole.
'We're looking for container two-three-seven,' said Toshiko.
They began checking the numbers on each door, until eventually Owen said, 'I've got it.'
He pointed into an upper corner, at a locker door that was eight feet off the ground.
'Great,' said Toshiko. 'Did you bring a stepladder?'
Owen raised a sardonic eyebrow.
'OK,' said Toshiko. 'You'll have to be my stepladder.'
'What?'
'I'll climb onto your back.
'How much do you weigh?'
Toshiko scowled at him. 'What sort of a question is that?'
'Well, if you're going to climb on me…'
'I'm not that heavy.'
'I'll get a ladder…'
'I'm not that heavy, Owen. Come on, it's the only way. It's hardly going to work the other way around, is it?'
'Hey… I'm not that heavy.' Sighing and shaking his head, Owen stood before the wall full of containers, and braced himself ready for her to climb onto him.
Toshiko looked around the room, as if expecting somebody to be watching them, and jumped up onto his back.
'Whoa, easy,' gasped Owen. 'What do you think this is, a bloody rodeo?'
Toshiko stretched out with the key. 'I can't reach it,' she said.
'I'll go find a ladder,' said Owen, turning already, as if about to walk out with Toshiko still on his back.
'Rubbish,' said Toshiko. 'I'll get up on your shoulders.'
'What?'
'Just turn back around and I'll get up on your shoulders.'
Sighing, Owen did as she said, and with both hands pushing down on his head Toshiko climbed up onto his shoulders. He wobbled from side to side to get his balance but eventually stood firm.
Toshiko leaned forward again, and this time found that she could reach the container, sliding the key into the lock and turning it. The door opened. Toshiko felt a wave of warm air, and she could smell something, a static charge perhaps, like the aftermath of a thunderstorm.
She reached into the locker. Inside there was a wooden box, on which the label 'ITEM 4797 24/11/53' had been stamped. She held the box with both hands and slid it back towards the open locker door, pushing out a cascading shower of dust in its wake.
'You'd better hope I don't sneeze,' said Owen.
'It's really heavy,' she said.
'How heavy?'
'Really, really heavy.'
The box rested on the edge of the locker. Just one simple lift, thought Toshiko, just like picking up a television, put the weight against your chest…
As she pulled the box free of the locker, it quickly became apparent that it was even heavier than she'd thought. The sudden addition of the extra weight sent Owen stumbling back. The box fell to the ground with a loud crash, and both Owen and Toshiko fell flat on the floor.
'Ow!' said Toshiko. 'I landed right on my coccyx.'
Owen giggled.
'You said co-'
'It's not funny,' said Toshiko. 'I'm in quite a lot of pain, actually.'
They both looked at where the box had fallen. The box itself was now smashed beyond repair, its splinters scattered around the room. The artefact lay exactly where it had fallen, on top of a floor tile that was now cracked in half.
'How heavy is that thing?' said Owen.
'I told you. Very.'
'Not as heavy as you, I bet…'
'Hey!'
It was a metal sphere, about the same size as a football. At first it appeared quite smooth, but as they both crawled closer towards it they saw that it was covered with finely detailed engravings. One side of the metal ball was cracked open, but neither of them could see what was inside.
'Did we just do that?' asked Owen
'No,' said Toshiko. 'Look around the edges of the crack. It's melted, like something burnt its way out from inside.'
Owen climbed the stairs into the Hub, holding the metal ball to his chest. He liked to think he had a certain youthful athleticism, but even so he was exhausted. The ball must have weighed forty kilos, at least, and it was a long walk from Basement D-4 to the Hub.
Gwen and Ianto were at their workstations, their eyes fixed upon the screens. On a third screen, between the two stations, there was a CCTV image of Michael sleeping in the Boardroom.
'What's Michael sleeping on?' Owen gasped, still struggling with the weight of the ball.
'Inflatable mattress,' said Ianto, turning in his chair. 'Left over from our camping trip. One of the few things that didn't get trashed. I couldn't find the pump, so Gwen blew it up. She's got a set of lungs on her, that girl.' He pointed at the metal ball. 'Is that a present for me?' he asked.
'Not quite, no.' Owen wheezed. He got as far as the nearest table and put the ball down. It landed on the surface with a heavy thud. 'So while I've been slogging my guts out carrying that thing up the bloody stairs, what have you two been doing?'
'Michael said there were two men,' said Gwen. 'Cromwell and Valentine. They visited him in the hospital. Asked him some weird questions. We've been trying to find out who they were.'
'Any joy?' asked Toshiko.
Gwen nodded. 'There was nothing on our database for Valentine, so I did a cross-check of all data from 1953. Much more joy.'
She span back so that she was facing the screen.
'Kenneth James Valentine. Born 1921 in Newport. Worked as a carpenter from the age of fifteen until 1941, when he joined the Royal Dragoon Guards. Was present during Operation Overlord, otherwise known as D-Day, when as part of the Twenty Seventh Armoured Brigade he took part in the landings on Sword Beach. Was injured in combat and shipped back to Britain where he spent the remainder of the Second World War convalescing. Joined
the Cardiff Borough Police in 1947, and then… Well, that's it.'
'That's it?' said Owen. 'What happened? Did he die?'
Gwen shook her head. 'There's no record of him being paid by Cardiff police after 1950, but there's no death certificate. Nothing. He just vanishes.'
'And what about Cromwell?'
Gwen turned to Ianto. Ianto looked from Gwen to Toshiko and Owen. He seemed cagey.
'I kind of already knew,' he said quietly.
'What do you mean?' asked Gwen. 'What did you already know?'
Ianto pointed at his screen, and the others gathered around him. On it there was an image of a man in his mid thirties; sharp beady eyes focused on the camera. It was a standard black and white portrait, taken in the 1950s, like a passport photograph. Next to the image there was a microfiche of his typed resume:
NAME:
CHARLES ARTHUR CROMWELL
BORN: 06/03/1915
DIED:
14/02/2006
MARITAL STATUS: Divorced, no dependents
EDUCATION: Brunei Grammar School, Port Talbot, 1926–1933 Exeter College, Oxford 1933–1937
MILITARY etc: Royal Navy, 1938–1941, Lt Cdr MI6, 1941–1945 Torchwood, 1945–1975
'Oh my God,' said Owen. 'He was one of us.'
'But what about Valentine?' asked Gwen. 'If Cromwell's file is on there, why isn't Valentine's? It's like somebody's wiped him out of existence.'
'There's one other thing,' said Ianto, turning back to his screen and pointing at the photograph of Cromwell. 'I've met this man.'
EIGHT
Looking out of the grubby windows of the DLR carriage, Ianto Jones wondered whether he would ever get to live in a swanky Docklands apartment. A place with a balcony would be nice. The kind of place where he and his friends could stand drinking fancy drinks and listening to the kind of music that people listened to when they stood on balconies and drank fancy drinks.
Maybe the new job would help. He hadn't had his first wage packet yet, but maybe a few months in this job would give him enough to get a nice apartment with an impressive view. Not yet though. For now, the elevated train would whisk him all the way from Canning Town to Canary Wharf, so that the towering apartment buildings with their balconies and their concierge service were little more than a flicker book for him to envy.
At least the job felt like something impressive. He'd wanted to work in Canary Wharf since he first moved to London and, if he was honest with himself, he'd wanted to work in a skyscraper since he was a kid. Working in a skyscraper felt like a proper job, in lieu of working in the kind of job his father would call proper, like the steelworks or fixing cars.
Canary Wharf felt like somebody had taken a little slice of New York and dropped it into the East End of London. Ianto loved the sheer verticality of this part of the city; the almost unnerving sense of vertigo he got when he craned his head back to look up at the gargantuan spires of steel and glass.
As the doors of the train opened, Ianto stepped off, buoyed by the surge of commuters, and ran down the escalators and out into Canary Wharf.
She was waiting for him near the fountains in Cabot Square.
Lisa.
'Awight, darlin?' she said in her best 'mockney' accent. Ianto wondered whether he was blushing. He'd only known her a week, but there was something there, some kind of spark. At least he hoped there was.
'So what did you do last night?' she asked. 'Get up to much?'
'Nah,' said Ianto. 'We started a James Bondathon at my house. Just a few of the lads round.'
'A James Bondathon?'
'Yeah. We're watching our favourite James Bond films in chronological order. We're up to Goldfinger.'
'Sounds exciting,' said Lisa, sarcastically. 'So how's week two going so far?'
Ianto shrugged. 'OK, I guess,' he said. 'Taking a little bit of getting used to.'
Lisa laughed. 'Yeah. Tell me about it. My first month I was just freaked out most of the time. I mean, you sign all the official secrets stuff, and then… wham!'
Ianto knew what she meant. The interview had given him no clue as to what the job would actually entail. Of course, they'd told him it would be largely administrative work: filing, photocopying, answering emails, arranging meetings, that kind of thing. He'd even known that it involved classified government work, and that it was strictly hush-hush. He'd had to sign the Official Secrets Act at the interview itself, which gave him some clue as to just how secretive it might be, but the one thing nobody had cared to mention at that first interview, or indeed at any of the subsequent interviews, was aliens.
He couldn't quite describe how that piece of news had felt. He'd try and compare it to the moment when, as a child, he'd found out that Father Christmas was a myth, but he couldn't properly recall that crushing disappointment. If anything, this was like that discovery in reverse. It was as if somebody had taken him into a quiet room and told him that yes, there was a Father Christmas, he did live in Lapland, and furthermore, the company Ianto now worked for existed solely to deal with his existence.
The worst thing was knowing he'd never be able to talk about his job with his friends, but then he supposed he knew very little of what his closest friends did for a living. He knew that Gavin did something involving insurance and that Nathan worked for a travel company but, if it came down to actually describing the everyday tasks their jobs involved, he'd be stuck. Why should his job be any different?
Once they had bought a coffee and a cookie each from a Starbucks kiosk, they returned to the fountain, where they both sat on a bench. It was their morning ritual, before entering the hubbub and the organised chaos of the Torchwood Institute, or at least it had been for the last few working days.
'Oh, listen to this…' said Lisa, as if about to impart a salacious bit of gossip. 'I was talking to Tracey last night, right, and she said something weird happened while she was on the twelve-eight shift.'
Tracey was one of Lisa's colleagues on the twenty-eighth floor.
'Apparently they had a Code 200.'
'What's a Code 200?'
'It's an intruder. Somebody somehow breached all of our security, got past all the cameras, all the motion detectors, everything.'
'Really?'
'Yeah. Happened just after we left, apparently. He just turned up. Nobody knows how he got in. Tracey said they're holding him on your patch, in Information Retrieval.'
Ianto laughed. 'Yeah,' he said. 'But you know what Tracey's like. Last Wednesday she told me they'd had an actual Predator, like in the movie, down in the basement.'
'She didn't say that. She said they had pictures of something that looked a bit like the Predator. Not an actual Predator.'
'Hang on… Should we actually be talking this loud when we're outside?'
Now Lisa was laughing. 'You're right,' she said. 'It's mental. I keep almost forgetting that nobody else knows. It's so difficult. You know, when you're on the phone to your mum and she asks you what you did in work today. I always end up saying, "Same old same old".'
'Me too,' said Ianto. 'But I always did that anyway.'
For a while they sat drinking coffee and watching the splashing waters of the fountain without saying another word. Ianto wasn't sure that he'd ever had this kind of friendship with somebody so new before, where he didn't feel the need to fill the silence, where it didn't feel like he had to keep talking. He liked it. He more than liked it.
'Come on then, Welsh Man,' said Lisa. It was the nickname she'd given him when they'd first met, during his initial training, pronouncing it in such a way that it sounded like the name of a super hero. 'Time for work. Another day, another dollar.'
'Ianto, we need to take the quarter three expenditure for Inf Ret and mark it up for the attention of Graham Evesham at UNIT. He said he needs it by eleven. Have you got that?'
The voice belonged to Ianto's line manager, Bev Stanley. It was Bev who had carried out his first interview for the job. On that occasion, she had been sweetness and light person
ified, but that veneer hadn't taken long to crack. Now, just a week into his job, Ianto had come to realise that Bev only used that act in interviews. The rest of the time she was busy trying desperately to transform herself into a clone of Yvonne Hartman, the Director of Operations. She bought her clothes from the same shops, styled her hair in a rough approximation of Yvonne's, and was forever telling the others amusing or witty things that Yvonne had said to her, usually at the kind of functions she was only ever rarely invited to:
'Oh, Yvonne said the funniest thing at the Intelligence Community Awards at the Grosvenor the other night.
'Yvonne and I were talking the other day, and she said…'
That kind of thing.
Now she was barking instructions at him, instructions that made very little sense after just six whole days of working in the department. His predecessor, a nervy guy by the name of Simon, had left under a storm cloud and had said very little to Ianto except: 'Watch Bev. She's got a mean streak a mile wide.'
He had some idea of what Bev was talking about. It had something
to do with any incidents in which those who passed through Information Retrieval were also dealt with by UNIT, and the way in which the two organisations would split the costs of rendition and transferral, but other than that it was all still a mystery to him.
As he searched through the different drives on his PC for the quarter three budget, Bev stepped back out of her office.
'Oh yes, Ianto. We're expecting a visitor at some point this afternoon, from Cardiff. His name's Mr Cromwell. If he turns up any earlier, make sure you offer him tea or coffee, and if I'm away from my office call me on my mobile immediately, OK? He's to be treated like a VIP.' She paused, as if in thought. 'Actually, offer him tea or coffee and biscuits. And not the cheapy brand chocolate digestives, either. Give him the Hobnobs.'
Ianto suppressed a smile and nodded. When Bev's office door was closed once more, he chuckled to himself before carrying on with his work.
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