Peter Anghelides - Pack Animals

‘Maybe they hate the taste of glue,’ suggested Owen. ‘Or they do everything electronically?’

‘No phones,’ revealed Toshiko. ‘No landlines, no cell signal. But there’s visible activity on-site. Including a daily visit by their MD.’ She displayed a blurred photograph of a woman with long, steel-grey hair. ‘Jennifer Portland.’

‘Have we heard of her?’ asked Gwen.

Toshiko shook her head. ‘No. But you’ve met her son.’ Another grainy picture appeared. A lank-haired young man with high cheekbones. ‘Remember Gareth?’

‘All right!’ Jack had that evangelical look of determination in his eyes now. ‘Now we’ve connected the guy who’s bringing these creatures through the Rift to the people who have recaptured at least two of them. We need to know what’s in that Achenbrite facility.’

‘On the case,’ said Toshiko. ‘I’ve already got into their external-access systems. But everything else in there – cameras, communications, business processes – they’re all on a separate, completely isolated server. Someone has to go in.’

‘They were able to disrupt our comms,’ said Ianto, reaching for a sandwich.

Toshiko slapped his invisible hand away again, and slid the plate away. ‘So it has to be a personal visit. You seem like the ideal candidate.’

‘Riiight!’ grinned Jack. ‘Unless you’ve eaten something, Ianto, because then you’d look like a floating mass of half-digested… what are those?’

‘Ianto’s Special,’ said Gwen.

‘I know that,’ said Jack. ‘But what’s in the sandwiches?’

‘Can’t I even have one ?’ bleated Ianto. He pondered what Toshiko was suggesting. ‘Wait a minute. You’re suggesting that I walk into that place naked?’

‘I can get you into the building,’ Toshiko explained. ‘Owen just spent his lunchtime dropping computer memory sticks in the Achenbrite car park, and near their entrance doors. Places where they might plausibly have fallen out of people’s pockets. Several staff members came back after lunch and found them. And two people inserted them into their office machines to look for pictures or files that might give them a clue about who owned them.’

Jack was impressed. ‘I’m glad you’re on our side.’

‘Of course, they didn’t spot the key-logging software that was automatically being installed on their machines,’ explained Toshiko, clearly pleased with the success of her ruse. ‘So I’ve also captured all their most valuable passwords and cracked their badge access. So while I can’t access their server, I have all the information you’ll need to do that when you’re on-site.’

‘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.

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!’