She looked up from the figures on her computer screen – calculations on Rift energy fluctuations – and watched Owen bound up the steel staircase to tend his collection of alien plants. He didn’t move badly for a man who had had his heart smashed to a pulp by a .44 calibre bullet just a couple of months earlier. He still had the hole in his chest; like the finger that he had purposefully broken before her one night in a vicious black mood, it would never heal. One morning, he had turned up in the Hub with flowers poking out of the wound and told everyone he thought Torchwood’s subterranean base needed cheering up. Being dead hadn’t killed Owen’s sense of humour. Or perhaps, like her numbers, it was just a way to cope.
Toshiko had been in love with Owen Harper for two years, since he had joined Torchwood. Then he had been a man scarred by the loss of his fiancee to an alien brain parasite who had tried to lose himself in booze and a nightly succession of anonymous club-shags. But a part of her believed that she had come to love him even more since the bullet from that automatic had ripped his chest apart.
And the big circular airlock door rolled aside. And Toshiko was grateful for the interruption to her thoughts.
Gwen was back.
‘I thought you’d gone home,’ Toshiko called.
Gwen was unique within Torchwood – she had a home and a life to go to. Which was why Toshiko and Owen were still at the Hub. And Jack and Ianto were still around, somewhere, doing something – albeit probably more recreational.
Gwen was closing on Toshiko, urgent. ‘I need you to look for Rift activity in the Bay area.’
Owen stuck his head over the railings above, a faintly luminous blue-green plant in one hand, and a small plastic watering can in the other. ‘Something cracking off?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
Gwen got Toshiko to check the coordinates for the SkyPoint location. She drew a blank.
‘Nothing,’ Toshiko said. ‘No records of Rift activity. Nothing at all.’
Gwen frowned.
‘Hey, watch that. You’ll get lines.’
The voice sounded American. Whether or not Jack Harkness was American was something else. They all knew that wasn’t his name. The real Jack Harkness had died in an aeroplane over England in 1941. Their Jack – this Jack – had never felt any compulsion to tell them his real name; he said it didn’t matter. The man that went by the name he once used belonged to another time, and no longer existed.
The mysteries that surrounded Jack Harkness were impenetrable but, as they had come to learn, unimportant. What mattered was that Jack – wherever he was from, whoever he really was – would always be there for them.
Until he disappeared again. And even then, he would be back.
But Jack wasn’t going anywhere right now. He wanted to know what had broken Gwen away from her new husband so quickly and brought her back to the Hub. He was buttoning the last couple of buttons on his blue service shirt as he asked and, as Gwen quickly ran through events at SkyPoint, she saw Ianto Jones appear. He was as discreet as the tailored suit on his back, and the only hint of any connection between Jack’s buttons and Ianto Jones was the latter’s momentary adjustment of his tie as he glanced into the reflective surface of an inactive monitor.
Jack heard Gwen out without a word, then raised an eyebrow. ‘Just vanished?’
‘All but in front of my eyes,’ Gwen confirmed.
‘But according to my instruments, there’s no indication of Rift activity in that area,’ Toshiko said.
‘But estate agents don’t just vanish into thin air,’ Ianto observed. ‘We’re just not that lucky.’
Owen was sitting on the steel steps that led to his alien hydroponics. ‘But if there’s no sign of Rift activity…?’
‘I know,’ Jack smiled. ‘Intriguing, isn’t it?’ He glanced at his watch, then at Toshiko. ‘You want to go flat- hunting?’
‘I’ll get my gear,’ she said.
And Ianto was already holding Jack’s old RAF greatcoat for him as he shrugged it on.
‘I’m coming, too,’ said Gwen.
But Jack shook his head. ‘No you’re not. First day back to work after your honeymoon? You’re going back home to Rhys, cook him dinner or go buy fish and chips. Watch TV. Make-believe life is ordinary just once more. For his sake.’
Gwen thought about arguing, and then thought about Rhys. Life was never going to be ordinary, but Jack was right, she owed it to Rhys to pretend it was. If only tonight.
‘You ready?’ Jack asked Toshiko as she pulled a messenger bag of Rift and alien-hunting tech in place over her shoulder.
‘Ready.’
‘It’s apartment thirty-two,’ Gwen called after Jack and Toshiko as they headed towards the airlock. ‘Tenth floor.’
‘Thirty-two. Tenth floor,’ Jack called back without looking, and the huge circular door rolled back into place.
It was only then that she wondered whether she should have mentioned the border-line psychopath that lived on the top floor. But she decided that Jack had handled worse things than Besnik Lucca.
FOUR
The crisp white linen shirt that Besnik Lucca had been wearing earlier that evening when he had left SkyPoint was no longer white.
No amount of laundering was going to fix it.
Arterial blood didn’t come out. He supposed that was in the nature of it. Arterial blood wasn’t supposed to come out. But the edge of a razor blade sliced across each thigh of a double-crossing kid hung upside down like a pig on a hook will bring it out, all right. Especially on the first cut, when the blood pressure is still high. That was the gush that had caught him on the chest – and Lucca hadn’t been the one doing the cutting. Lucca had a man who was good with blades to slice flesh for him. It was he who appreciated that hanging a man upside down before you cut the femoral artery meant that death took that much longer. And Lucca appreciated that kind of expertise, especially when it came to dealing with low-life scum at the bottom end of his organisation who entertained dreams of ripping off their boss. The exsanguinated eighteen-year-old’s corpse would serve as a reminder to those other foot soldiers of their position in life. It was worth one spoiled shirt. Lucca was only thankful that he had removed his Armani jacket to personally soften the kid up a little before the blade man had practised his craft.
Lucca left the kid strung up, sobbing and dying, and wishing to God that he had never even thought of cutting flour into his boss’s coke and cutting him out of the extra profit. As he left, despite the ruined shirt, Lucca was smiling.
Fifteen minutes later, Lucca had crossed the city and was sliding his black Porsche into the underground parking bay reserved for him beneath SkyPoint. He had listened to Wagner as he drove. Lucca loved Wagner and, almost 200 years apart, they had both had their reasons for going under the wire to escape Latvia so he felt they shared a kindredship.
The parking bay was alongside the apartment block’s service elevator that would take Lucca directly to his floor. No one would see the blood on his shirt. It was the very reason he had specified this parking bay as his own when he put money into the SkyPoint project.
By the time he had tapped the entrance code into the security keypad and stepped into the elevator, he had forgotten the name of the kid he had left bleeding to death on the other side of town.
As the heavy steel doors of the service elevator closed on Lucca, the only witness to his arrival was a hidden security camera, but that didn’t worry him. The only place those pictures were going was a panel of monitors in his own apartment. Besnik Lucca was forty-two years old, and he planned to see at least as many years again – and he
