Torchwood Long Time Dead (24 page)

'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.

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. T 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.'

'You were dead?' Cutler feigned surprise, but
his heart warmed. She was telling him the truth
and he couldn't help but feel happy about that,
even though he was aware of their minutes ticking
away and the need to get to the point.

'Twice.' She laughed again. 'God, it sounds so
ridiculous.' She sniffed loudly. 'I wish I'd stayed
dead.'

'I'm glad you didn't.'

She nestled in to him, the two of them like
ghosts in the gloom, as he smoked. 'The device
brought me back to life I think. When it activated.