Skypoint

emergency lighting on the stairs wasn’t up to a glow-worm’s arse, and together they had managed to help Ewan into the passageway on the eleventh floor, where Owen had quickly examined the injury. There was no way Ewan was going to make it down another twenty turns of the staircase down to the ground.

He told Jack all of this quickly, uncomfortably conscious that Ewan was sitting on the passageway floor with his back against the wall, and that Wendy and Alison were crouched around him. Owen’s eyes flickered from one wall to another. The spacious hallway of the eleventh floor had become strangely and insidiously claustrophobic.

He missed the comforting weight of the automatic in his hand. He wasn’t sure how much good it would be against something that could slip through the atomic structure of a brick wall, but it would have felt good anyway.

‘Listen, Owen, I think Lucca has cut the power. It puts the elevators out of commission and that makes him unreachable.’

‘And traps us with whatever that thing is,’ said Owen.

‘Maybe he’s hoping it will do his work for him,’ Gwen suggested.

‘In the old days in Eastern Europe there were noblemen who gave their enemies a sporting start, then set their hunting dogs on them. But this is the twenty-first century, and I have something that comes through the walls.’

Jack, Gwen, Owen and Ianto all froze. Besnik Lucca had whispered into their ears.

Above them, on the twenty-fifth floor, he stood in the monitor room that showed him the Torchwood team on three different screens, and spoke into the communications device he had found in Toshiko’s purse.

Jack hated the sound of the man in his ear, he felt contaminated by it. Biting down on his anger because he didn’t want to give Lucca the satisfaction of knowing he had got to him, he said, ‘What have you done with our friend?’

Lucca moved unhurriedly away from the monitors and into the lounge. He had Toshiko gagged there, tied to the arms of an armchair, but unhurt.

‘She’s a little tied up right now, but otherwise well,’ Lucca said.

‘What do you want, you bastard?’ Owen demanded.

Toshiko’s eyes followed Lucca around the room as he ambled through it, taking in the treasures of his art collection. Unlike the rest of SkyPoint, the penthouse remained drenched in light – it was clearly fed by a separate power supply.

‘I have a proposal for you, Torchwood. I have no real idea who you are, or who you represent, but I have had the fortune to study some of your equipment and your methods. You are clearly well resourced and also resourceful.’

‘Thanks for the compliments, Lucca,’ Jack scowled, ‘but I’d rather you got to the point.’

‘An Englishman’s home is his castle, don’t they say, Jack? I presume the dictum still stands in Wales. Perhaps not, as the English built their castles here to subjugate the natives.

‘Well, SkyPoint is my castle, my fortress. As perhaps you can imagine, a man in my position has many enemies – those from my homeland that are still looking for me – people here that would take from me what I have worked for.’

‘Don’t you mean stolen and killed for?’ said Gwen.

Lucca ignored her. ‘My castle has many fortifications but they are, as yet, untested. I have every reason to believe that they cannot be breached, but only the determination of a skilled and motivated force can prove that.’

Jack shook his head in disbelief. ‘You want us to prove your security systems? Take a hike, Lucca.’

‘If you can get to her, Toshiko will be waiting for you, unharmed and free to go.’

‘And if we don’t?’ barked Owen.

Lucca shrugged. ‘That won’t concern you. Because you will be dead.’

Jack looked at Gwen. He didn’t want to play Lucca’s game, and he sure as hell didn’t care for his rulebook, but he didn’t see what kind of an option they had.

‘At least put the power back on so that we can get the residents out of the building, Lucca. They don’t have to be a part of this, and there’s still something alien here that’s killing them.’

In his apartment, Lucca shook his head with a sick smile. ‘And if I restore power you have a twenty-second elevator ride to my front door. I doubt that you would get through it, but it would compromise the standards of our experiment. Everyone stays in the building. And, incidentally, you will find that the fire doors and stairwell doors are also locked.’

Gwen lurched towards the doors that led to the concrete emergency steps. They rattled noisily, but wouldn’t budge.

Jack boiled inside. ‘And what makes you think this thing that’s in here with us won’t come and get you?’

Lucca had found his way back into the monitor room now. He watched Jack on the screen. There was no anger in the man’s voice, but as he stood there in that long coat of his, unaware so far that Lucca could see him, there was no disguising the fury he felt in his body.

‘You’re clearly not a gambling man, Jack.’

‘I don’t know, I’ve played some pretty high stakes in the past.’

‘Then you should understand. I’m gambling that you are as good as you think you are. Just that you’re not as good as me.’

Jack found that the smile came to his lips easily. ‘Oh I’m good, Lucca. I’m very good.’

Lucca’s voice came back to him: ‘Then I have no need to wish you luck.’

NINETEEN

Lucca had finished talking. Owen could hear that the line had gone dead. There was no point in checking back in with Jack, with Lucca plugged into the comms circuit that would only be stupid. And Owen’s priority hadn’t changed. He knew that Jack would work out some way of getting to the twenty-fifth floor and rescuing Toshiko – what he had to do was get Alison and her parents out of there.

It didn’t sound like the elevators would be powering up again any time soon, so that only left the stairs. Lucca may have thought he’d secured them, but Owen knew plenty of ways of getting through a locked door. He also had to get Ewan’s ankle strapped up and find him some sort of crutch to help him down the steps. All of which meant he was going to have to get through another door first, and into one of the apartments.

The trouble was, SkyPoint’s door designs had moved on a long way from the kind you could just shoulder in, and these days Owen wasn’t at all sure if his bones were going to be up to the job. A busted hand he could probably live with – if that was what you wanted to call it – a shattered shoulder that would also put his arm permanently out of commission was another matter entirely.

Instead he decided to think laterally.

He decided to hammer on the apartment doors and see if anyone was still home. He’d seen The Towering Inferno, and there had been no end of people that missed the fire alarms going off. Sure, Robert Wagner had died with a wet towel on his head, but who was going to take that as a salutary lesson in high- rise fire survival? People ignored fire alarms in hotels all the time. You generally called them stupid, and dead. But it happened.

He got an answer at the third door he tried.

It took him a few seconds to recognise Marion Blake. If ever there had been a shapeshifter among the guests at the party that night, it looked like it was her. The Carrie Fisher braids had gone and she now wore her hair in a single dark ponytail that she wore cast over her shoulder and trailing over the latex bustier that she wore with fishnet stockings. The pinched, disapproving expression had gone. Her lips were painted a glistening red. And in her hand she had a coiled whip.

She was as shocked to see Owen, as he was her. And tried to slam the door in his face. Owen didn’t think his luck was going to hold out for a second apartment and risked his shoulder against the door.

‘Look, I’m sorry but this is kind of an emergency,’ he said.