by Phil Ford
‘If you can get to her, Toshiko will be waiting for you, unharmed and free to go.’
‘And if we don’t?’ barked Owen.
Lucca shrugged. ‘That won’t concern you. Because you will be dead.’
Jack looked at Gwen. He didn’t want to play Lucca’s game, and he sure as hell didn’t care for his rulebook, but he didn’t see what kind of an option they had.
‘At least put the power back on so that we can get the residents out of the building, Lucca. They don’t have to be a part of this, and there’s still something alien here that’s killing them.’
In his apartment, Lucca shook his head with a sick smile. ‘And if I restore power you have a twenty-second elevator ride to my front door. I doubt that you would get through it, but it would compromise the standards of our experiment. Everyone stays in the building. And, incidentally, you will find that the fire doors and stairwell doors are also locked.’
Gwen lurched towards the doors that led to the concrete emergency steps. They rattled noisily, but wouldn’t budge.
Jack boiled inside. ‘And what makes you think this thing that’s in here with us won’t come and get you?’
Lucca had found his way back into the monitor room now. He watched Jack on the screen. There was no anger in the man’s voice, but as he stood there in that long coat of his, unaware so far that Lucca could see him, there was no disguising the fury he felt in his body.
‘You’re clearly not a gambling man, Jack.’
‘I don’t know, I’ve played some pretty high stakes in the past.’
‘Then you should understand. I’m gambling that you are as good as you think you are. Just that you’re not as good as me.’
Jack found that the smile came to his lips easily. ‘Oh I’m good, Lucca. I’m very good.’
Lucca’s voice came back to him: ‘Then I have no need to wish you luck.’
NINETEEN
Lucca had finished talking. Owen could hear that the line had gone dead. There was no point in checking back in with Jack, with Lucca plugged into the comms circuit that would only be stupid. And Owen’s priority hadn’t changed. He knew that Jack would work out some way of getting to the twenty-fifth floor and rescuing Toshiko – what he had to do was get Alison and her parents out of there.
It didn’t sound like the elevators would be powering up again any time soon, so that only left the stairs. Lucca may have thought he’d secured them, but Owen knew plenty of ways of getting through a locked door. He also had to get Ewan’s ankle strapped up and find him some sort of crutch to help him down the steps. All of which meant he was going to have to get through another door first, and into one of the apartments.
The trouble was, SkyPoint’s door designs had moved on a long way from the kind you could just shoulder in, and these days Owen wasn’t at all sure if his bones were going to be up to the job. A busted hand he could probably live with – if that was what you wanted to call it – a shattered shoulder that would also put his arm permanently out of commission was another matter entirely.
Instead he decided to think laterally.
He decided to hammer on the apartment doors and see if anyone was still home. He’d seen The Towering Inferno, and there had been no end of people that missed the fire alarms going off. Sure, Robert Wagner had died with a wet towel on his head, but who was going to take that as a salutary lesson in high-rise fire survival? People ignored fire alarms in hotels all the time. You generally called them stupid, and dead. But it happened.
He got an answer at the third door he tried.
It took him a few seconds to recognise Marion Blake. If ever there had been a shapeshifter among the guests at the party that night, it looked like it was her. The Carrie Fisher braids had gone and she now wore her hair in a single dark ponytail that she wore cast over her shoulder and trailing over the latex bustier that she wore with fishnet stockings. The pinched, disapproving expression had gone. Her lips were painted a glistening red. And in her hand she had a coiled whip.
She was as shocked to see Owen, as he was her. And tried to slam the door in his face. Owen didn’t think his luck was going to hold out for a second apartment and risked his shoulder against the door.
‘Look, I’m sorry but this is kind of an emergency,’ he said.
Marion looked out at him, and beyond him to Wendy and Alison and Ewan, who had by now turned pale with the pain of his injury.
‘I was going to a fancy-dress party,’ said Marion.
It was now around one o’clock in the morning. Even if it had been true, it didn’t improve the situation.
‘Ewan’s hurt, and we have to get out of here,’ said Owen, as he pushed the door open and helped Alison’s father into the apartment. ‘Didn’t you hear the alarm?’
‘It stopped so quickly, I just thought it was an accident,’ she said. Then gave the Lloyds a brazen smile. ‘What an unexpected pleasure.’
Owen got Ewan onto Marion’s couch and started to look for something he could use as a splint. His eye settled on the coiled whip that she had forgotten she still held. Owen grabbed it from her. The leather-bound handle was perfect.
‘Have you got another one of these?’
She looked at him with horror. ‘What? Why would I have another-’
Owen didn’t have time to tango towards the truth with Marion. That was no fancy-dress costume she was wearing. And the whip was no fun-shop toy. Either Marion Blake was seriously into S amp;M or she had been waiting for a paying client – and either way, Owen was pretty sure she’d have another whip close at hand.
‘Just get it,’ he said.
As he expected, she went through into the bedroom.
Alison bent her head to the pixie doll and seemed to listen to it for a moment, then turned and looked at her mother. ‘Mr Pickle says, does Miss Blake work in the circus?’
Wendy couldn’t help bursting into laughter, and Owen joined her, enjoying the release. Ewan didn’t laugh, he was pale and sweating.
‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ he said. ‘I’m going to be sick.’
‘It’s all right, hold on. I’ll find you a bucket or something,’ said Owen.
But Ewan swung his legs off the couch, grimacing and defiant. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I want to go to the bathroom.’
Owen gave an if it’s that important to you, mate. Just don’t puke down me on the way. I’ve got enough problems shrug.
Ewan put his arm around Owen’s shoulders and together they shuffled towards the bathroom. Owen left him to it in there, wondering if Alison’s dad really did feel sick or if he was just too embarrassed to admit that he was crapping himself.
Another advantage of being dead, Owen noted. No matter how bad things got these days, the fear of crapping himself (which could be considered a professional hazard working for Torchwood) no longer applied.
As Owen returned to the lounge, Marion emerged from the bedroom. She had wrapped a dressing gown over her latex and fishnets. It was silk, not the towelling number he would have expected the woman he had met earlier to wear. The more he saw of Marion Blake, the more certain he was that her position as PA to some captain of Cardiff industry was no more substantial than the stockings she wore right now. And she had brought him the other whip.
Owen told her to leave it with the other one and asked her about the kind of household cleaners she kept.
‘Oh, God. I hope Ewan’s not making a mess in there,’ she gasped.
Owen had already made his way into the kitchen area and was going through her cupboards. ‘Even if he is, Marion, I’m not cleaning up after him.’
He found a bottle of liquid drain-cleaner and brandished it triumphantly. ‘Good start.’
Wendy had put her hands protectively on her daughter’s shoulders. ‘Do you want to tell us what you’re doing?’
Owen found another couple of bottles and started to scan the chemicals listed on their labels. ‘The only way out of here right now is down the stairs, and Count Dickula on the top floor
has locked the doors. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get out.’
Wendy was incredulous. ‘You mean you’re going to blow the doors open?’
Owen nodded. ‘The average kitchen has everything you need.’
He saw her draw Alison a little closer, a little further away from him. ‘Just what sort of a doctor are you?’
‘The sort you can trust,’ he said, and fixed her with his eyes. He saw her think about it hard, and saw the slightest movement of her head.
Yes, she thought she could trust him. Owen only hoped she was right and yanked open one of Marion’s kitchen drawers, found a spoon and started to measure out the cleaning chemicals.
Two floors above, Jack was looking at the SkyPoint plans on Gwen’s hand-held module. There was nothing in them to suggest the defences that Lucca had alluded to, but whatever they were he didn’t suppose they were the kind of thing that got registered with the City Council. All they seemed to confirm was bad news: that there was no way up to Lucca’s apartment other than by the elevator.
‘So Lucca is in control of the power and the elevators,’ he said.
‘And, it’s reasonable to assume, everything else,’ Gwen confirmed.
‘But he’s taken control. Those things have to be run from somewhere else under normal circumstances.’
The small computer unit in Gwen’s hand cast a bluish light over her face as she scrolled through the pages. She found what she was looking for – there was a control room down in the basement.
Jack grinned. ‘Then maybe we can just take control back again. Override his override.’
Gwen nodded without enthusiasm. ‘Maybe we could. If we had Tosh. I know you’re a man of hidden talents, Jack, but I never see you getting hands-on with the computers in the Hub.’
Truth was, where he came from computer science was a little more advanced than they even had in the Hub, and who needed to know how a light switch worked so long as you could see where you were going when you pressed it? Jack was more of a physical player than a tech. Like Gwen.
Which meant that if they were going to rescue Toshiko they were going to have to do it with muscle, not technology.
‘What about the exterior?’ he said.
‘So you’re Spider-Man now, are you?’
‘I’m thinking laterally.’
She shook her head. ‘Jack, Lucca’s apartment is over sixty metres up.’
‘And it has a roof garden. Show me the plans.’
She did as she was told. Jack took the module and zoomed in and around the 3-D plans of the highest part of the building.
And he saw what he was looking for.
‘Jack, you’re crazy,’ Gwen said.
‘It’s the only way.’
She bit her lip, knowing he was right. If there was any flaw in Lucca’s fortress defences, the chances were that Jack had just found it. There were just two problems.
One: It was probably impossible.
Two: They’d have to get to the twenty-fourth floor first.
‘So what are we waiting for?’ asked Jack.
He walked across to the locked doors to the stairwell, and turned to Gwen. ‘You do have the key, don’t you?’
He stepped back as Gwen raised her weapon, nesting her gun grip in the palm of her left hand, and took aim.
The sidearm was a specially developed variant on the Glock 20, modified to carry a double-clip of thirty 10mm rounds with a machine-pistol mechanism that could fire the full load in under ten seconds. Gwen fired the whole double clip into the door in less time than it took the average man to die from a single bullet. The sound was deafening and the air smelled of cordite. The door panel was perforated by a circle of bullet holes.
As Gwen ejected the spent clips and replaced them, Jack stepped forward and kicked at the weakened body of the door. A few seconds later there was a hole big enough for the two of them to step through and they started to make their way up the steps.
Several floors below, Ianto and his companions in the elevator had made themselves as comfortable as they could on the floor. According to the acrylic plaque on the wall of the cabin, it was supposed to carry no more than ten people at a time. Ianto thanked God that they hadn’t been travelling at maximum capacity when the power went. It already felt like they were running out of oxygen. He knew that was ridiculous, the cabin wasn’t airtight; they weren’t going to suffocate, it was just getting hot, that was all. He had already peeled off his jacket and loosened his tie.
Ryan, the guy that had lost his wife, had stopped whimpering. He had stopped doing anything, in fact. He just sat in a corner of the cabin staring ahead of him, almost catatonic, probably playing over and over in his mind the moment that Gillian had been taken by something awful that came out of the wall. Ianto seriously hoped that they got him out of there soon, or perhaps the poor man would be caught in that hideous mind-loop for ever.
Simon and Andrew sat opposite Ianto, their arms looped together. It looked casual but he knew that they were each taking comfort from the contact. He thought about Jack, and hoped that he was all right.
He caught himself, and smiled. Like Jack wouldn’t be all right.
‘What’s funny?’
It was Simon. It was a fair question. Anything that diverted them from craziness in here seemed fair.
How long had it been already?
‘I know a joke about being stuck in a lift,’ Ianto said. He didn’t want to share Jack with them.
‘Really?’ said Andrew with zero interest. ‘I know about you.’
‘Me?’
‘Torchwood. I’ve heard about you on that radio show. Abigail Crowe.’
Abigail Crowe ran a late-night internet radio show from somewhere in the city. She played a few records – weird stuff mostly – but generally it was talk. Phone-ins and guests – and, mostly, more weird stuff. It wasn’t entirely unreasonable; after all, there was an awful lot of strange stuff that went down in and around Cardiff. Plenty of people noticed it now and again but, thankfully, not too many people put it all together or talked about it. Abigail Crowe tried to piece it all together, and she did so with the help of the people that rang her show.
A lot of them were nutters, of course – there were people who said they were witches and werewolves and some guy was on there a few weeks ago talking about how he had married a vampire.
Ianto listened to it occasionally, not that he was about to admit that to Andrew right now – and probably never to anyone in the team, either. And he had heard Abigail Crowe talk about Torchwood. People had heard the name; the police and the civil authorities were familiar with it – but no one actually knew exactly who they were or what they did. And that, of course, was always going to fuel talk. He had heard suggestions that they were some sort of black-ops outfit attached to the military, seeking out terrorist cells in Cardiff, and that was probably as close as anyone was ever going to get. For all Cardiff’s weirdness over the last hundred years or so, no one was ever going to come out and say they were the city’s answer to the Men in Black.
Even Abigail Crowe never said that. But she had hinted at it, once or twice.
‘You’re always around when something strange happens, aren’t you?’ said Andrew.
‘I have no idea. That would depend on how often something strange actually happens,’ Ianto pointed out.
Andrew shook his head and smiled. ‘Come on. The Official Secrets Act doesn’t apply in broken-down lifts. Everyone knows that.’
‘I wouldn’t know, I’ve never signed it.’
Andrew’s eyebrows rose above his red glasses like French windscreen wipers. ‘Really? So you’re not part of the government? So what are you, then? Who do you work for?’
The absolute truth was that Ianto didn’t really know. Torchwood had, of course, developed from the Torchwood Institute which was founded by Queen Victoria in 1879. He sometimes wondered if their pay cheques came from an office somewhere in Buckingham Palace. Maybe one day he, Jack and the others would all f
ind themselves on the Honours List.
Most likely, posthumously.
Simon could tell that his partner was never going to get a straight answer out of the Torchwood guy.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘To be honest, I’m not interested in who you are, or what Torchwood is, but I think you do owe us some sort of explanation as to what’s going on here. And just what happened to that poor man’s wife.’
Ianto looked from Simon to Ryan, who, if he had heard a word of their conversation, made no sign of it.
‘All right,’ said Ianto. ‘There’s an alien in the building.’
He got no further than that because the elevator shook as if it had hit the side of a mountain – and the alien started to come through the roof.
TWENTY
The day that Ewan Lloyd met Besnik Lucca he had been moments from killing himself.
The trouble had started with the car crash. He had been at his office when the police showed up. He had been at his desk, immersed in figures relating to a major new construction project that one of the company’s clients had under way in the Bay. There was something about the finances for the project that troubled him, had been nagging at him for days, but he was damned if he could put his finger on it. Being an accountant was no different from any other job, sometimes you developed a sixth sense. A doctor could look at a patient, a mechanic could listen to an engine, and sometimes an accountant could look at columns of figures that seemed to make sense and know that in some way they didn’t. That was how he felt about the finances on the SkyPoint project. Something about them was wrong. He just couldn’t see what it was.
But the police officer that came through his door wrecked any interest he had in solving the puzzle.
Wendy and Alison had been taken to St Helen’s Hospital. The driver of another car had hit them at a junction. Wendy had only cuts and bruises; Alison was in intensive care.
The next week had been a fog to him and he had been lost in it. He had found Wendy at the hospital and they had held each other and cried until they both thought their hearts would shatter. And they had sat beside their fragile, bruised, broken daughter in her ITU bed every day, listening to the machines and the computers that kept her alive and monitored her condition. They stayed there, and they waited for a sign of life, and they prayed.
