‘Nothing escapes your eagle eye.’
‘I see you’ve got a new watch, too.’
‘I’m trying it out. Though it’s an old watch. Antique.’
Ianto looked at it admiringly. ‘Very nice. Perhaps you should have one for casual and one for best.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Jack shucked off his sopping wet shoes and kicked them into the corner. ‘A guy with a watch knows what time it is. A guy with two watches is never sure.’ To Ianto’s dismay, he proceeded to peel off his socks and wring them out into the waste bin. ‘Are Tosh and Gwen back?’
‘Waiting for you downstairs,’ said Ianto.
‘You’re not wearing any socks,’ Gwen told him.
‘Nothing escapes your eagle eye,’ replied Jack. ‘Have you admired my watch yet?’
He plonked down into a Boardroom chair, and waited for Toshiko to complete her presentation materials. ‘That flooding is getting critical. We’re gonna have to seal the side entrance. Or put Ianto on a steroid regime, so he can get the door closed.’
Gwen pointed through the Boardroom’s glass wall and into the main Hub area. She could see the water at the foot of the stainless steel tower was rippling. ‘The basin is tidal, isn’t it?’
Jack followed her directions. ‘Yeah. And look how much higher that’s got. Tosh, have we got a valve control on that thing to prevent it flooding the Hub?’
‘Yes,’ she told him, ‘but I can’t promise that the rest of the place is waterproof. There’s a pool of water building up against the exterior window of the Autopsy Room. It would only take one careless accident for that to break.’
‘Owen had better be careful then. He around?’
‘I think Ianto knows where he is,’ said Gwen.
Toshiko tapped the display screen to get their attention again. ‘As for the rest of Cardiff, they’re a lot worse off. Three hundred thousand people are staying at home to avoid getting their feet wet. We’re supposed to have thirty-six inches of rain a year, and we’ve had twenty-four inches in as many hours.’
‘The Oval Basin is starting to fill up with water,’ agreed Gwen. ‘It was like a river raging through there when we walked back from the car. If it carries on like this, by tomorrow morning only the people on the top floors of St David’s Hotel will still be dry. And they probably won’t notice until the caviar runs out.’
Toshiko showed a few more graphics on the display. ‘They did a lot of groundwater modelling studies when they were proposing the barrage for the Bay. I’m going to tap into their instrumentation…’
Gwen laughed. ‘Very good.’ Toshiko didn’t look pleased by this interruption. ‘Sorry, I thought you were joking. You know, water… tap…’
‘Tosh doesn’t joke about her work.’ Jack wagged a finger at Gwen in mock admonishment.
‘They’ve got over two hundred boreholes recording groundwater levels every thirty minutes,’ persisted Toshiko. ‘And they measure other environmental parameters like rainfall, obviously, and atmospheric pressure. Tide and river levels. That lot should give us some idea what’s going on.’
Jack leaned back in his chair, put his bare feet up on the table, and waggled his toes. ‘There are some people round here who still talk about the Bristol Channel floods of 1607.’
‘I imagine there may be some who are old enough to remember it,’ muttered Gwen.
Toshiko was more impressed with the information, however. ‘Thousands died. Houses and villages were swept away. Livestock got destroyed when farmland was inundated. The surrounding region was set back for more than a century. And there’s a recent theory that it was a tsunami. If today’s water levels continue to rise like this, it could do the same kind of damage.’
‘But not as fast,’ observed Gwen.
Toshiko switched off the display screen. ‘A slow tsunami? Well, that would still cause devastation. Wreck the local economy. And kill tens of thousands this time.’ She closed the lid of her laptop. ‘If I’m right.’
Ianto came into the room to offer them coffee. He looked disapprovingly at Jack’s bare feet, so Jack removed them from the table. ‘OK, let’s have your program run overnight Tosh, and see what it tells us tomorrow. Go home now, it’s late. Have a lie-in tomorrow. You too, Gwen. Better take the scenic route, because I think Ianto here has welded the side door shut.’
Gwen knew better than to protest. She heaved herself out of her chair, and made her way to the exit platform with Toshiko.
‘Doesn’t your boyfriend mind you working this late?’ asked Toshiko.
‘He said he was going out to an all-night
Toshiko looked unconvinced. ‘In this weather?’
‘They’re
‘Ah,’ said Toshiko, ‘I understand.
‘
The platform began to lift them upward.
‘And
‘I think that’s pronounced “Owen Harper”.’ Gwen looked up above them and sighed. ‘You realise that we’ve forgotten the umbrellas again.’
The pavement slab opened up overhead, and the cold rain showered in on them.
Jack watched Ianto polish the table where his feet had been propped. Ianto could tell that his boss didn’t really approve, but he thought that Jack would dislike it even more if the place got to be a mess. At the moment, he had other things to worry about though.
‘Gwen tells me you know where Owen is, Ianto.’
Ianto stopped polishing. ‘No. His radiation readings reached normal, and so he decided to go out. On a date, he said.’
‘A date? What about the work I asked him to do?’
Ianto produced a buff folder of printouts. Balanced on the top of it was the radiation sponge. ‘He asked me to give you these. He said that there’s a lot of information about what a brave and resourceful soldier Sergeant Applegate is, fine service record. And she has 450 Nectar points, in case that’s important.’
‘I could kiss you, Ianto.’
‘No you couldn’t, sir.’
Jack flipped open the folder and stood up. ‘I’m gonna take this down to my office.’ They both walked out of the Boardroom and made their way down the spiral staircase to the main Hub.
Ianto noticed how the water in the centre had risen higher, and seemed to be slapping higher against the edge of the basin. The view through the portholes in the wall above them also seemed to be more turbulent, with fragments of weed whirling past in the dark water and fewer fish visible than usual.
Jack walked away towards his office. ‘You can go home now.’
‘Thank you. I have a bit more filing to do. In the basement. I’d like to finish it.’
Jack laughed. ‘You may as well live here, Ianto,’ he shouted before he closed his office door.
I could say the same thing about you, Ianto thought as he set off to the basement to continue his own work.
NINETEEN
The sodium glare from the streetlights cast a jaundiced pall across the sodden T-junction. Owen sat listening to the howl of the wind and the battering percussion of rain above the Boxter, and wondering if the roof latch would hold. No wonder he’d got a deal on the car. Too good to be true at 18K, even with 40,000 miles and schlepping all the way out to Colchester for it. He should have bought the Honda S2000, like he’d first thought. But he’d gone for style and speed, so now he found that the windstop on this 1997 model Boxter didn’t hook properly and ended up
