The mouse in the far cage was starving. Toshiko hadn’t fed it for several hours, and she could tell by the way it was climbing the sides of the cage that it was desperate for food.
‘I’m probably going to regret asking this,’ a voice said from the doorway, ‘because when I ask similar questions of Owen I get some rather disturbing answers, but what are you doing in here with two white mice and an alien device?’
Toshiko looked around. Ianto was standing in the doorway.
‘I’m trying to confirm a theory,’ she said. ‘I think this is an emotional amplifier. I think it can actually transmit emotions over long distances.’
‘And you’re trying this out with mice, which are not, as far as I know, renowned for their emotions.’
Toshiko smiled. ‘Hunger is an emotion,’ she said.
Ianto entered the room and glanced at her experimental set-up. ‘So one of these mice is hungry, and the other one isn’t? And you want to see if you can project the hunger from one to the other?’ He raised his eyebrows, looking at the small plate Toshiko had put to one side. ‘Left to myself, I would have picked cheese. I notice you’ve gone for the rather more unusual chocolate-smeared-with-peanut-butter option.’
‘I’ve worked with mice long enough to know that cheese is a cliché born of old Tom and Jerry cartoons,’ she replied.’ ‘If you really want to tickle a rodent’s taste buds, you want peanut butter and chocolate.’
The mouse on the bench beside her wasn’t paying much attention. It had spent the past hour gorging itself on food. Now it just wanted to clean itself up and sleep it off.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Everything is set up.’ She took a last look at the video cameras, to check the right lights were on, and then moved across to the device.
‘Based on the interior structure,’ she said to Ianto, ‘the button that activates the device is here.’ She indicated a wider section in one of the raised ribbons that criss-crossed the device. ‘In fact, there are two buttons: one to activate the power and a separate one to operate the receiver and transmitter combination, placed far enough apart that a careless finger can’t accidentally touch them both together. It has to be deliberate — first one button, then the other, and probably within a set period of time.’
Toshiko picked up the piece of peanut butter-smeared chocolate and slipped it through a hole in the top of the nearest perspex cage. It turned as it fell, landing sticky side down. The mouse in the cage glanced at it incuriously, and went back to cleaning its whiskers.
Toshiko pressed the first button on the device, and then the second one.
The ribbons along the side of the device glowed with a subtle apricot colour. Toshiko stepped backwards so that the video cameras could get a better view.
The mouse in the container on the far side of the firing range didn’t react. It kept on climbing the sides of its cage, desperate to get at the food and satisfy its hunger. The nearest mouse, however, sat bolt upright, ears pricked, whiskers pointing forward eagerly. A sudden blur of motion and it was on the chocolate, tearing at it with tiny teeth, turning it over and over with its paws, wolfing down big chunks of the peanut butter. It was acting as if it was starving, as if it hadn’t eaten for hours.
Toshiko reached out to touch the power buttons again. The apricot glow faded away.
The mouse rocked back from the chocolate. It brought its paws up in front of its tiny nose in an almost comical double-take, seemingly surprised at the peanut butter that was smeared across them. Convulsively it began cleaning its whiskers all over again. The chocolate lay, ignored, where it had fallen.
‘Point definitively proven’, Ianto said, impressed.
The area was mostly office blocks with wide glass frontages and lobbies that were all rose marble and lush tropical plants. Few cars passed by, and those that did were either chauffeur-driven, high-end hire cars or lost. No bus routes came that way: there was too much risk of hoi polloi getting in. Any old Cardiff pubs that had survived the blitzing and rebuilding of the area had been gentrified into wine bars or gastropubs catering for the office workers of a lunchtime. No chance of an eighty-year-old bloke with his dog nursing a pint of mild and bitter all night while watching a game of darts, Rhys guessed. The entire place was probably like a ghost town come nine o’clock.
A board in the lobby of the block that Rhys had entered contained a list of all the companies that occupied the offices. Half of the block appeared to be empty: an indication of the way businesses were being priced out of Cardiff by increasing rents.
A uniformed man, sitting at a rose marble desk that seemed to have been extruded from the ground rather than carried in and placed there, was giving him a curious stare. Rhys scanned the list, looking for one name in particular.
Each floor seemed to be devoted to a different company: Tolladay Holdings, Sutherland amp; Rhodes International, McGilvray Research and Development… collisions of surnames and generic phrases that didn’t tell you much about what the companies did. There were probably people working for them who weren’t entirely sure either.
And there it was. The Scotus Clinic. Twelfth floor.
Rhys took a deep breath. This was it. Once he booked in at the security desk, there was no going back.
He wanted Gwen to notice him again and, if Lucy’s story of extraordinary weight loss was anything to go by, then this was the way to do it.
Nodding to the guard, he walked into the elevator and pressed the button for the twelfth floor.
He could do this.
He knew he had it in him.
FIVE
‘So what have we got so far?’ Jack asked.
They were back in the Hub. It was late on Thursday afternoon, and he’d called a council of war, pulling everyone back from whatever they were doing. In Gwen’s case that had been interviewing the friends and relatives of the dead boy, Craig Sutherland: a depressing process, combining one part grief with four parts suspicion, to which she had become depressingly familiar during her time with the police and thought she had managed to escape when she joined Torchwood. No such luck.
Jack was standing at the head of the Boardroom table, the LCD screen behind him showing a rotating Torchwood logo, providing a dramatic backdrop to his muscular frame: constantly changing and yet constantly the same, moving and seemingly at rest.
‘Well,’ Toshiko said, and looked around at the others, ‘I could go first.’ She was sitting there, legs crossed, arms folded carefully in front of her. ‘I have been working on the alien device, and I have discovered what it is. Or at least, I believe I have determined a part of its function.’
‘I’ll bite,’ said Jack. ‘What is it?’
‘I haven’t completed my tests yet, but I believe that it is an emotional amplifier. It can detect emotions some distance away and amplify them locally, or detect them nearby and amplify them at a point some distance away.’ Seeing their blank faces, she continued: ‘It works in much the same way as a loudhailer, for instance. That picks up quiet sounds and amplifies them so people can hear them a long way away.’
‘Or a directional microphone,’ Owen added. ‘That picks up quiet sounds a long way away and amplifies them so you can listen to them.’ He looked around the room. ‘Not that I would ever try that outside Torchwood, of course. That kind of thing is wrong. Especially at three o’clock in the morning, when you think the girl across the street is having it off with her boyfriend. Completely wrong.’
‘Moving rapidly on from Owen’s dodgy moral sense,’ Jack said, ‘can anyone suggest what such a device might be for?’