'Jack's right,' she said. 'We're all insane. It's a Sunday night, and you're here watching the resident Weevil, Tosh is upstairs doing… I don't know… Tosh things…'
'Ianto?'
'I don't know. I haven't seen Ianto.'
Ianto Jones was at his station behind the run-down Tourist Information Centre that served as a front to the clandestine goings-on in Torchwood. His bare feet were on his desk, his tie slumped like a crestfallen snake next to an open pizza box, the top two buttons of his shirt undone.
'Taking it easy, I see?' said Jack, stepping out through the security door that led into the Hub itself. 'Well, at least someone has the right idea. Whatcha doing there, Sport?'
'"Sport"?' said Ianto. 'Not sure I like "Sport" as a term of endearment. "Sexy" is good, if unimaginative. "Pumpkin" is a bit much, but "Sport"? No. You'll have to think of another one.'
'OK, Tiger Pants. Whatcha doing?'
Ianto laughed.
'I…' he said, pausing to swallow a mouthful of pizza, 'am having a James Bondathon.'
'A what?'
'A James Bondathon. I'm watching my favourite James Bond films, in chronological order.'
'You're a Bond fan?'
'Oh yes. He's the archetypal male fantasy, isn't he? The man all women want to have, and all men want to be.'
'Are you sure it's not the other way around?'
Ianto raised an eyebrow and took another bite of his pizza.
'Hey,' said Jack. 'I'm sending everyone home. There's nothing happening here. The Rift is still giving out minimal readings. Gwen's going home, Owen's going home, and I think Tosh is almost done.'
'The place to ourselves?'
'Well…' said Jack, grinning.
'So long as it's not going to interrupt my James Bondathon. I've only just started watching Goldfinger, and I haven't even reached the bit where Shirley Eaton gets painted gold yet.'
'OK… Well, I'll just say goodbye to Owen and Gwen, and tell Tosh to wrap up, and then-'
Jack didn't have a chance to finish his sentence. Even if he had, it was doubtful Ianto could have heard him, as the air was pierced by the shrill sound of the alarm.
'What is it?' Ianto asked, his fingers in his ears. 'Fire?'
'Jack…' It was Toshiko, speaking over the comms. 'We've got an intruder.'
Gwen and Owen were leaving Janet and the holding cells when the alarm rang out and they heard Toshiko's voice.
'Owen, Gwen, I need you up here immediately. We have an intruder. Hurry!'
Owen bolted out through the door and Gwen followed. Together, they ran through the dark, dank corridors of Torchwood until they came out into the Hub. Toshiko was standing at her workstation, pale and stunned.
'What is it?' asked Owen. 'Who's here?'
'There's somebody in the basement,' said Toshiko. 'I was monitoring the pulse, and then… I checked one of the cameras, and there's a man down there. Where's Jack?'
On cue, Jack entered the Hub with Ianto. Seeing Ianto with bare feet and a dishevelled shirt, Owen turned to Gwen and raised an eyebrow, but it did nothing to calm her nerves. How could somebody have got into the basement? More importantly, who or what was in there?
As Toshiko turned off the alarm, Jack ran across the Hub to her workstation and looked down at the monitor.
'It looks like a man,' he said. 'It looks human, at least. Tosh. . How the hell did he get in there?'
'I don't know, Jack. I was tracing the pulse, and I narrowed it down to Basement D-4. There was nothing there, and then… and then the image turned to static, and when the picture came back he was there. I've scanned the whole room; he's definitely human.'
The image on the screen showed the basement, filmed from an upper corner. In the dim light, Jack could just about see a man, sat on the ground and hugging his knees.
'And the pulse,' said Toshiko. 'It was temporal before, coming and going, but now it's constant. I thought it might be an electromagnetic wave, like radiation, but I'm not sure. It's not like any kind of radiation I've seen before.'
'OK,' said Jack. 'I need to go down there.'
'I'm coming, too,' said Owen.
'No you're not,' said Jack. 'We could have the human equivalent of Chernobyl sitting in our basement if Tosh's readings are correct. I need to go down alone. I need a Geiger counter.'
Toshiko ran to her workstation and opened a drawer, rifling through her collection of screwdrivers, soldering irons, and pliers.
'Here,' she said eventually. 'It's charged.'
Jack took the counter from her and headed out of the Hub. As he ran past, Ianto tried to say something, but couldn't. It was no use; none of them could stop him at a time like this. It was times like this that reminded them exactly whose organisation this was. They might be a team, and a team that had coped without him, but he was still the one in charge.
'I was so bored,' said Gwen. 'I actually thought at one point, "Please let something interesting happen, I'm so bored".' She shook her head, and turned to Owen. 'Remind me never, ever to think that again. I was so much happier when I was bored.'
'Liar,' said Owen.
Jack stepped down towards Basement D-4. It was the first time he'd been there in a very long time. Even in a building this sealed off from the outside world, there was still a lot of dust. Dust, and spiders' webs, and all the evidence, if it were needed, that life finds a way of getting into even the most apparently sterile environments. It unnerved Jack a little to think, if spiders could get in, what else might be able to get out.
Worse still, the Geiger counter was picking up next to nothing. If the electromagnetic waves weren't conventional radiation, that left only one possibility as far as he was concerned, and he didn't want to consider what that meant. As he neared the entrance to D-4, a metre-and-a-half-thick steel door, he brushed those thoughts away as easily as he had the spiders' webs. Someone was on the other side of the door. Someone that didn't belong there. He had to stay focused on that. Someone had got in through a room that hadn't been opened in thirty years or more. Someone was in there, and alive, in a place where the oxygen itself was stale and about as old as his staff.
Jack punched a code into a panel at the side of the door, and waited four seconds before he heard the locks clank open inside. The door opened, and it sounded as if the room itself were breathing in. A gust of cool, fresh air (or as fresh as the air in Torchwood could be) swept in, and that old, dry, dusty air came out. Jack had, in his time, been in far too many crypts and sepulchres, of many different kinds, on many different worlds, and that was exactly what this felt like. It felt dead.
'Hello…' said Jack, taking his revolver from its holster and holding it at his side. 'Hello… Can you hear me?'
His voice echoed around inside the room, but no reply came.
'OK… I'm going to come in now. But I warn you — I'm armed.'
As he stepped into the room, he saw the same figure that he had seen on Toshiko's monitor, a man hunched over on the floor, still holding his knees to his chest.
'Hello?' said Jack.
There was something about the man's clothes that was familiar to him. They didn't belong in Cardiff in 2008, that was for sure. He'd seen clothes like that many years before, the kind of utility clothes that everyone had after the war; drab and grey and lacking in any kind of ostentation.
'Are you OK?' said Jack. 'I'm not going to hurt you.'
He thought he could hear sobbing.
The man on the floor looked up with eyes bloodshot from tears and an expression of absolute terror, and Jack gasped. He dropped his gun to the ground, and fell back against the wall of the vault.
'Michael…' he said.
TWO
'Jack?'
He'd been sitting alone in his office for ten minutes, while Owen and Gwen were taking Michael from Basement D-4 to the Boardroom; ten minutes in which he had done nothing but think, and yet those thoughts were still so clouded. How could he have allowed himself to be blindsided like this? How could he not have known this was going to happen?