jacket pocket, and brandished his Torchwood ID at the astonished senior consultant.
‘Don’t bother with that phone call,’ he told Majunath. ‘I
TWENTY-TWO
‘Where’s Owen?’ asked Toshiko Sato’s voice
Gwen turned from her desk to see Toshiko standing by the entrance to the Hub’s main area, bedraggled and dripping rainwater on to the floor. ‘Couldn’t he drag himself in here like the rest of us?’ She brandished something in Jack’s direction. Her apparent intention to look intimidating was spoiled by the bedraggled newspaper that she’d been using as an improvised umbrella.
Ianto managed to sound as though Owen’s absence was his fault. ‘We couldn’t reach him this morning. I haven’t seen him since yesterday afternoon. He wasn’t irradiated any more, and said he was going out to celebrate. Didn’t say where. He was a bit grumpy.’
‘What are you, his mother?’ asked Jack.
Toshiko peeled off her wet coat to reveal wet jacket and trousers. They looked almost as wet as the coat. ‘The radiation has changed him.’ She affected an American accent, ignoring Jack’s mocking look. ‘“Doctor Owen Harper, physician, scientist. An accidental dose of radiation alters his body chemistry. And now, a startling metamorphosis occurs. Owen Harper is… the Incredible Sulk.”’
Gwen laughed along with her. ‘“Captain Harkness, don’t make me grumpy! You wouldn’t like me when I’m grumpy!”’
‘Thank you, ladies,’ said Jack firmly. ‘Owen going AWOL is not our only problem right now. Doesn’t help, but let’s save the ass-kicking for when he’s in range.’ Gwen watched his reaction. Behind his cheerful sarcasm, he was keeping something from them. Not information, she was sure. He’d not keep that from them. More likely to be his own worries about Owen, things that she knew he felt but that wouldn’t help them at the moment, stuff that would only get in the way. That would be typical of Jack — reassuring, supporting, keeping them focused. In the police, she’d seen several teams deteriorate into helplessness when the head of the investigation had lost it in front of them. Their guv’nor, raging at a briefing meeting. Or cursing over a pint at the local pub. Revealing his own frustration, his own powerlessness
— and, by implication, theirs. Not Jack. This guv’nor wasn’t like that. He gestured towards the Boardroom: ‘Shall we?’
Within minutes, they had been succinctly briefed by Jack. ‘So, it turns out that we still have two more fuel rods to locate. And our missing soldier, Sandra Applegate, is probably hunting them down as we sit here.’
‘You think she could have survived that fall?’
‘Gwen, she did survive that fall. Unless someone was waiting for her to drop from the window.’ Jack paused, as though he was considering the likelihood of this. ‘So how can she be so resilient? Did she know she could make it? No, that shot merely carried her forward and she couldn’t stop herself.’ Another pause for contemplation. ‘The other soldier, Bee, faced his death like there was nothing to fear. And Wildman… could he really have thought he might survive that drop from the eighth floor? Maybe there’s something else that could survive a drop like that, but the autopsies showed that Bee and Wildman were human… What are we missing?’
His statement was punctuated by a roll of thunder from outside.
‘Whoa,’ Jack laughed. ‘Timing, huh? And that must be some kinda storm, if we can hear it all the way down here. Ianto, run upstairs and close the bathroom window.’
Ianto looked for a moment as though he might take this request seriously.
‘The weather has deteriorated dramatically,’ Toshiko told them.
‘Oh, you think?’ smiled Jack helpfully. ‘Are you dried out yet?’
Toshiko ignored him, and punched up some images on the meeting room main display. ‘Here are some views from around the Bay area… the city centre…’ More images. ‘The wetlands… out into the Bristol Channel…’
The views came from traffic cameras, security cameras, CCTV. The images varied between grainy monochrome in half-lit areas through to higher quality colour shots of well-illuminated buildings. What they all had in common was that they showed chaos and devastation. In the shopping areas of the city, the pedestrianised streets were awash with streams of water carrying scraps of newspaper and discarded fast food containers. Shop awnings were ripped from their metal structures, and flapped madly in rage. In one road, cars crawled through a torrent of water that reached their sills. In another, a white van had slewed off the carriageway and into a post box. A park bandstand was whipped by the trees and bushes that bordered it. The foliage was thrashing about as though it was alive.
It was Monday morning, the start of the rush hour, but nowhere were there crowds of people. The few individuals Gwen could make out were struggling along, leaning into the rain and the wind like adventurers struggling against a foreign climate. The selection of images continued with a security camera on a boat in the Bay. She watched with growing incredulity as the camera surreally kept the seats and railings of the boat steady in the frame. Behind the boat, Bay water churned. Passengers were flung around like discarded dolls in a toy-box.
‘It’s getting worse,’ Toshiko observed.
They were looking at an apparently endless queue of traffic on the motorway. Gwen thought it looked like a shivering snake made up of flickering headlights. Windscreen wipers madly, fruitlessly swiped away at the water. In the grey daylight and the endless deluge of rain, it was impossible to tell the colours of cars, and only the sodium orange of the motorway lights gave any indication that this was a colour image. ‘Could it be worse?’
‘You’d be surprised,’ replied Toshiko in a tone that suggested the exact opposite. Her fingers danced over the keyboard again, and a different picture emerged on the main screen. A long queue of traffic still, but this time bright sunshine sparkled off the metal trims of the motionless cars, and their vibrant colours were clearly visible.
Gwen wondered if Toshiko had switched to the same stretch of motorway at an earlier point, but the timecode on the image showed it was a live feed. ‘Where’s that?’
‘Eight miles further up the M4,’ Toshiko explained. ‘The end of the same queue. But look at the weather.’
Jack looked as amazed as Gwen felt. ‘How?’
‘The effect is localised.’ More keystrokes. ‘Here’s the most recent satellite pass, about twenty-three minutes ago. It’s like a typhoon, but restricted within an eight-kilometre radius.’
‘Radius means a circle,’ said Jack. ‘So where’s the centre?’
Toshiko overlaid a pattern of lines on the satellite image. ‘From an analysis of the variables, it’s out in the Bay. And you can see from the Bay cameras that there’s nothing out there except for plenty of churning water and a crowd of seasick sailors.’
Gwen studied the composite image. ‘It’s underwater.’
‘It’s underwater,’ confirmed Toshiko. ‘Something must be coming through the Rift, below the surface. My projections show that if it continues then it will create tidal waves across the Bay. Maybe out into the Bristol Channel, too. The Wetlands Nature Reserve is flooding already-’
Jack laughed humourlessly. ‘Aptly named.’
‘And you saw what’s happening out there above the water. A couple of water taxis were sunk by freak waves. They’re struggling to prevent damage in the Roath Basin — the lightship berthed there has already smashed into the quayside.’
‘Yeah, great place for a lightship.’
Gwen laughed at Jack’s sarcasm. ‘You’ll never become a Blue Badge Guide with that attitude.’
‘The tourists wouldn’t like the stories I could tell them about Cardiff.’
‘Hello?’ interrupted Toshiko. ‘Do you want to see these data and schematics?’
‘Data,’ Jack said. ‘That’s like information, right?’
Toshiko gave him a freezing look. ‘Or I could just stop now. Go and do some more correlations of the variables on my own.’ She paused, as though to let this sink in. Jack affected to look contrite, and Gwen stifled further laughter. Toshiko continued: ‘The telemetry from the boreholes is so confusing, it’s as though water is flowing uphill. Thing is, even though there have been unexpected tidal surges way up the Rivers Taff and Ely, it’s all caused by this localised weather system.’
