'But what about Valentine?' asked Gwen. 'If Cromwell's file is on there, why isn't Valentine's? It's like somebody's wiped him out of existence.'
'There's one other thing,' said Ianto, turning back to his screen and pointing at the photograph of Cromwell. 'I've met this man.'
EIGHT
Looking out of the grubby windows of the DLR carriage, Ianto Jones wondered whether he would ever get to live in a swanky Docklands apartment. A place with a balcony would be nice. The kind of place where he and his friends could stand drinking fancy drinks and listening to the kind of music that people listened to when they stood on balconies and drank fancy drinks.
Maybe the new job would help. He hadn't had his first wage packet yet, but maybe a few months in this job would give him enough to get a nice apartment with an impressive view. Not yet though. For now, the elevated train would whisk him all the way from Canning Town to Canary Wharf, so that the towering apartment buildings with their balconies and their concierge service were little more than a flicker book for him to envy.
At least the job felt like something impressive. He'd wanted to work in Canary Wharf since he first moved to London and, if he was honest with himself, he'd wanted to work in a skyscraper since he was a kid. Working in a skyscraper felt like a proper job, in lieu of working in the kind of job his father would call proper, like the steelworks or fixing cars.
Canary Wharf felt like somebody had taken a little slice of New York and dropped it into the East End of London. Ianto loved the sheer verticality of this part of the city; the almost unnerving sense of vertigo he got when he craned his head back to look up at the gargantuan spires of steel and glass.
As the doors of the train opened, Ianto stepped off, buoyed by the surge of commuters, and ran down the escalators and out into Canary Wharf.
She was waiting for him near the fountains in Cabot Square.
Lisa.
'Awight, darlin?' she said in her best 'mockney' accent. Ianto wondered whether he was blushing. He'd only known her a week, but there was something there, some kind of spark. At least he hoped there was.
'So what did you do last night?' she asked. 'Get up to much?'
'Nah,' said Ianto. 'We started a James Bondathon at my house. Just a few of the lads round.'
'A James Bondathon?'
'Yeah. We're watching our favourite James Bond films in chronological order. We're up to
'Sounds exciting,' said Lisa, sarcastically. 'So how's week two going so far?'
Ianto shrugged. 'OK, I guess,' he said. 'Taking a little bit of getting used to.'
Lisa laughed. 'Yeah. Tell me about it. My first month I was just freaked out most of the time. I mean, you sign all the official secrets stuff, and then… wham!'
Ianto knew what she meant. The interview had given him no clue as to what the job would actually entail. Of course, they'd told him it would be largely administrative work: filing, photocopying, answering emails, arranging meetings, that kind of thing. He'd even known that it involved classified government work, and that it was strictly hush-hush. He'd had to sign the Official Secrets Act at the interview itself, which gave him some clue as to just how secretive it might be, but the one thing nobody had cared to mention at that first interview, or indeed at any of the subsequent interviews, was aliens.
He couldn't quite describe how that piece of news had felt. He'd try and compare it to the moment when, as a child, he'd found out that Father Christmas was a myth, but he couldn't properly recall that crushing disappointment. If anything, this was like that discovery in reverse. It was as if somebody had taken him into a quiet room and told him that yes, there
The worst thing was knowing he'd never be able to talk about his job with his friends, but then he supposed he knew very little of what his closest friends did for a living. He knew that Gavin did something involving insurance and that Nathan worked for a travel company but, if it came down to actually describing the everyday tasks their jobs involved, he'd be stuck. Why should his job be any different?
Once they had bought a coffee and a cookie each from a Starbucks kiosk, they returned to the fountain, where they both sat on a bench. It was their morning ritual, before entering the hubbub and the organised chaos of the Torchwood Institute, or at least it had been for the last few working days.
'Oh, listen to this…' said Lisa, as if about to impart a salacious bit of gossip. 'I was talking to Tracey last night, right, and she said something weird happened while she was on the twelve-eight shift.'
Tracey was one of Lisa's colleagues on the twenty-eighth floor.
'Apparently they had a Code 200.'
'What's a Code 200?'
'It's an intruder. Somebody somehow breached all of our security, got past all the cameras, all the motion detectors, everything.'
'Really?'
'Yeah. Happened just after we left, apparently. He just turned up. Nobody knows how he got in. Tracey said they're holding him on your patch, in Information Retrieval.'
Ianto laughed. 'Yeah,' he said. 'But you know what Tracey's like. Last Wednesday she told me they'd had an actual Predator, like in the movie, down in the basement.'
'She didn't say that. She said they had pictures of something that looked a bit like the Predator. Not an actual Predator.'
'Hang on… Should we actually be talking this loud when we're outside?'
Now Lisa was laughing. 'You're right,' she said. 'It's mental. I keep almost forgetting that nobody else knows. It's so difficult. You know, when you're on the phone to your mum and she asks you what you did in work today. I always end up saying, 'Same old same old'.'
'Me too,' said Ianto. 'But I always did that anyway.'
For a while they sat drinking coffee and watching the splashing waters of the fountain without saying another word. Ianto wasn't sure that he'd ever had this kind of friendship with somebody so new before, where he didn't feel the need to fill the silence, where it didn't feel like he had to keep talking. He liked it. He more than liked it.
'Come on then, Welsh Man,' said Lisa. It was the nickname she'd given him when they'd first met, during his initial training, pronouncing it in such a way that it sounded like the name of a super hero. 'Time for work. Another day, another dollar.'
'Ianto, we need to take the quarter three expenditure for Inf Ret and mark it up for the attention of Graham Evesham at UNIT. He said he needs it by eleven. Have you got that?'
The voice belonged to Ianto's line manager, Bev Stanley. It was Bev who had carried out his first interview for the job. On that occasion, she had been sweetness and light personified, but that veneer hadn't taken long to crack. Now, just a week into his job, Ianto had come to realise that Bev only used that act in interviews. The rest of the time she was busy trying desperately to transform herself into a clone of Yvonne Hartman, the Director of Operations. She bought her clothes from the same shops, styled her hair in a rough approximation of Yvonne's, and was forever telling the others amusing or witty things that Yvonne had said to her, usually at the kind of functions she was only ever rarely invited to:
'Oh, Yvonne said the funniest thing at the Intelligence Community Awards at the Grosvenor the other night.
'Yvonne and I were talking the other day, and she said…'
That kind of thing.
Now she was barking instructions at him, instructions that made very little sense after just six whole days of working in the department. His predecessor, a nervy guy by the name of Simon, had left under a storm cloud and
