Peter Anghelides - Pack Animals

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.

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?