FIC: The Last Library 1/3 (Torchwood)
Title: The Last Library
Author: Jewels (bjewelled)
Web Link: http://www.bjewelled.co.uk/fanfic/twfic.shtml
Fandom: Torchwood
Disclaimer: Torchwood belongs to the BBC and is the brainchild of Mr. Davies.
Summary: Pre-series, in the days of Torchwood One. Torchwood London uncovers a mysterious alien artefact and a building full of dead bodies. Imagine their surprise upon finding that Jack Harkness, self-declared head of Torchwood Three, is the only survivor. What happened, and what's a young researcher at London supposed to do to help?
**
I: The Book of the Troublemaker
Most commercial districts, on a weekend, tended towards desertion. At three in the morning on a Sunday, their abandonment was even more complete. The air was still and silent, the world decorated in various shades of sodium-orange as the streetlamps cast ghostly shadows on the ground. For the squat building with the words “Asen Industries” spelled out above its glass and chrome entryway, this should have been a normal silent weekend. But on this particular night, anyone watching would have seen three black and unmarked vans screeching into the courtyard in front of the building with a squeal of distressed breaks, before disgorging six men from each, all dressed head to toe in black, complete with breathing masks. Every one of them carried a rifle and looked ready to use it.
Their entrance was dramatic, but mostly silent. For a few moments the only sound breaking the stillness of the night was heavy footsteps, and the sound of the van engines idling. The team rushed up to the doors that separated Asen Industries from the outside world, and the commander of the unit, a man who those who served with him mostly called 'the Chief' but whose real name was John Mathers, shone his torch through the glass, peering inside.
Dotted around the lobby, in poses that indicated that they'd simply dropped wherever they happened to be, whether that was sitting on the comfortable waiting chairs, or draped over the reception desk, or waiting for the lifts, were bodies, all of them pale and none of them moving.
Under his mask, the Chief's mouth flattened into a thin line. They'd known it was bad, but they hadn't quite expected this. “Louis?” he subvocalised, the movements of his throat muscles picked up by the mic pressed against his throat, transmitted to his team as clearly as if he'd spoken aloud. But it was only his team that heard him through their earpieces. No sound was utterd.
Louis didn't immediately acknowledge him, only raising a hand to press a small disc against the glass. There was a tiny flash of light, easily missed if one wasn't looking for it, and when Louis removed his hand the disc stayed there, attached to the glass. The flash had been the disc, a small probe, burning a hole in the door and extending a microscopic probe through. Louis looked at a small readout screen built into his sleeve as the probe started sending information.
“Air's clear,” he reported, tersely, “The building's locked down, but no other security countermeasures are in place.”
The Chief nodded, and gestured to one of the other team members. “Open it,” he ordered.
It was the work of a few moments and a small line of microexplosives that made mincemeat of the locks, and then the doors were swinging open. There was no sound of an alarm, the security systems were as dead as anything else in the building, and that included its occupants. Louis gave them a quick scan as the team stepped over the bodies, confirming the readings by pressing his fingers to the neck of the woman who had probably been the receptionist, now slumped over a computer screen that was dark and unresponsive.
“I'm not getting any body heat anywhere in the building,” he said, via the subvocal communications.
The Chief nodded, though the movement was mostly suppressed by the bulky clothing he wore. “Where's the target?”
Louis tapped his scanner again. He gestured in the appropriate direction. “Top floor,” he added.
The Chief gestured sharply, and the team fell silent once more. They stepped across the dead bodies, ignoring them, as they made their way through the building.
They encountered no resistance on their way up. The only difficulty they had to contend with was the occasional locked door, easily taken care of through the placing of super-hot microexplosives or a well-placed kick. The only thing they found at first was more bodies, crumpled in various positions, no signs of struggle, injury or pain. It might have been a fast acting gas that killed them, but that was for other people to worry about. The Chief's job was just to make sure that what they came for was here, and that the way was clear and safe.
They reached the top floor sooner than expected, a long way from the very top of the stairway. But all the other doors beyond what was the sixth floor were boarded up, and there was no sign that they'd been tampered with. They broke through that final door, and knew immediately that they'd found what they were looking for.
It didn't take long to sweep the area, and then the Chief reached up and tapped his radio, switching carriers. “Artefact secure. Building clear.” He gestured to his team to take up guarding positions. “Send in the team.”
Outside, two more vans pulled up. These two, unlike the first team, had a single marking on the side, a stylised T drawn in hexagons. The people who exited were dressed head-to-foot in white protective gear, with matching gloves and filter masks. The only exposed skin was at the eyes, and those were protected by plastic goggles. They each carried one or two heavy black cases, and followed men left at the entrance into the building. Unlike the guards, they weren't as militarily minded, and one or two gasped and muttered in dismay as they caught sight of the bodies.
“Later,” was all Doctor Swan, leader of the Research team, said. She was only distinguishable from the rest of her white-garbed colleagues by the fact that she was overly well-endowed in the bust, which was clearly visible even through the baggy clothing.
The scientists and researchers that followed her fell into an uncomfortable silence, and they trailed after the security men who led them up through cramped stairways, past bodies that had been unceremoniously dragged out of the way, and all the way up to the reason that they had been brought here.
The sixth floor, it was easily to see on entrance, had once been the sixth, seventh and eighth floors. But the dividing ceilings separating these had been knocked through to create a cavernous environment, more like a warehouse than an office building. It had clearly been done hastily, with extra steel bracing brought in to shore up a building which had suddenly been deprived of a lot of its supporting structure. There were doors and windows visible higher up on the walls that had been hastily boarded up.
It was all to make room for what had been given the name of the “Artefact”. No one had been told if there was a proper name for it, it was simply that no one else knew what to call it. They'd had very little intelligence to work on when they'd decided to make their move, and it was agreed by all that calling it a 'Thing' lacked gravitas. It was cubic in shape, nearly reaching to the roof of the three stories that had been cleared out, and glowed with rippling neon light. The strangest part was that that light didn't seem to extend beyond the cube. The rest of the room was still pitch dark, only lit up by the torches that the team had brought with them.
As the research team began to set up their equipment, small power generators and lighting going up quickly and efficiently, one of the researchers, couldn't help but step towards the cube. It was unlike anything he or anyone else he had worked with had ever seen, he was sure. It was... hypnotic... the way the lights danced and swirled, and if he concentrated hard enough, he was sure he could hear something, some alien noise, just out of his range of hearing-
“Jones!” Doctor Swan's voice, muffled by her face-mask, nevertheless resounded like a whipcrack.
Ianto Jones drew back sharply, turning away from the Artefact. He hadn't even realised he'd been reaching out, as if to touch it. Doctor Swan eyed him disapprovingly.
“How about you find an interface unit for whatever they were using for data-processing on this thing?” she said, “And quickly, please. We don't have all night.”
Chastised, Ianto nodded, and hefted his torch. “Yes, Doctor,” he said.
Swan grunted, and turned away. Ianto frowned, and started hunting around. It was a cold room, the heating and plumbing all ripped out to make way for the huge cube, and he could see his breath misting whenever he crossed through the torchlight of one of the security staff. Of all the places he wanted to be at three am, in a cold corporate building surrounded by dead bodies and armed guards wasn't what he would have chosen.
He'd been quite happily engaged in supervising an overnight experiment with one of the others from the research department, supervision which required them to do nothing more than sit around one of the labs trading bad jokes and coffee-making duties, when Doctor Swan had barged her way in and ordered them to suit up for a field trip. They'd been given no guidance on what to expect, and it was so rare that researchers got out into the field that he only just remembered what gear to pack and where to find the anti-contaminant clothing.
The only reassurance he had was that Doctor Swan was as clearly in the dark as the rest of the staff that she'd hauled out of bed in the middle of the night. Ianto was starting to think that no one in the Torchwood hierarchy quite knew what they had on their hands, but they knew they had to control it.
It wasn't something he had to worry about, he told himself.
He stopped.
He'd been sweeping his torch from side to side, scanning for anything that looked like a computer access point, when his beam had landed on one of the bodies. The security team that had cleared the way were slowly moving the corpses out of sight, but they'd not gotten to the far side of the cube, where Ianto stood, just yet. He lifted the beam of his torch to look at one of the other bodies. It was wearing, like the other dozen or so bodies that littered the room, a lab coat. Ianto looked back at the body the had caught his eye.
It was male, and not wearing protective clothing like the others. Instead, he was covered by a long woollen coat, either blue or grey in colour, it was hard to tell. And he...
... was he moving?
Ianto crouched down and reached forward to roll the corpse onto it back, grunting slightly at the dead-weight, and was scared almost out of his skin when blue eyes, hazy and unfocused, but definitely alive fixed on his, and he had time to take in the confused and panicky expression before the man lunged upwards, wrapping his hands around Ianto's throat.
Ianto made a strangled noise and would later think that he would never say a bad word about security again as two officers nearby sprung into action in seconds, yanking the man's hands away from Ianto's throat and pinning him to the ground. Ianto coughed, his pride more injured than his throat; the man's grip had been weak and kittenish.
The man was looking around, confused, “What... what happened?” he was saying, shaking his head as if to dispel some confusion, and struggled against the grip of the burly security men.
Ianto looked up. The ruckus had attracted the attention of one of the other researchers. “Get Doctor Swan,” he barked.
The researcher - who it was he wasn't sure - nodded, and ran off.
Ianto looked back at the man, and realised he should probably do something. He fumbled in the breast pocket of his overalls and retrieved a small penlight. “Can you tell me your name?” he asked, loudly, shining it into the man's eyes. “Can you tell me what happened?
The man shied away from the light, but not before Ianto could see his pupils reacting normally. “Wha...?”
Ianto realised that 'what happened' had been the man's own question and, given his confused state, he was probably a little unclear on the issue. He tried to stick to the simpler question. “What's your name?”
The man stilled somewhat, no longer fighting the security men. “Jack... Harkness...” he said, sounding a little uncertain on the issue. His eyes met Ianto's, and Ianto took a breath, to ask if he was alright, but just when he would have continued questioning, but Doctor Swan arrived, and imperiously tapped him on the shoulder, wordlessly instructing him to move out of the way.
He stood, standing off to the side, and watched silently as Doctor Swan made her own assessment, punctuated by sharp questions that Harkness didn't seem able to answer. After a moment, she stood, and ordered the security men to take him back to Torchwood Tower. Ianto watching them go, and then realised that Swan was glaring at him.
“I believe I asked you to look for an access point,” she said, sharply, eyes piercing even through the perspex glasses.
Ianto didn't need telling a third time. He got back to work.
**
The interrogation rooms of the London branch of the Torchwood Institute, labelled on its official documentation as “Torchwood One”, were buried in the building's underground levels. The theory was that it would be much harder for any prisoners to escape from convoluted underground passageways, and those same corridors would be much easier to seal off in an emergency. The rooms themselves were plain, white, and utterly lacking in any sort of personality. At first glance, there was only a table and three chairs, each bolted to the floor.
They were designed for to allow others to observe though, and one wall of the room was designed to be transparent from an adjoining area. There were no obvious mirrored windows, like those to be found in American crime television, they looked instead like a plain concrete wall, covered in off-white paint. There was no indication that that an apparently solid wall was anything other than what it looked like.
But on the other side of that wall was a room filled with computer monitors and screens a plenty, all of them constantly spewing readouts. Sensors inside the cell were trained on the occupant all the time, delivering real time information regarding heart rate, blood pressure, neural activity, displaying it alongside a video field. There were computers set up, constantly humming and chewing through data, and a long desk designed for other observers who simply wanted to watch the prisoner squirm.
Ianto sat along that desk, which was pressed up against the fake wall, along with two other researchers, and two members of the upper echelons that he dimly recognised enough to know that their presence was bad news. He hadn't said anything to them on their entrance as they sat down next to him at the long observation desk, only fixed his attention on the laptop he'd brought down and set up to piggyback on the video and bioscan feeds.
Doctor Swan had given him the task no one else wanted, which was to come down and 'take notes', which essentially meant writing down everything that happened in addition to all the logged data. There would be no difference between his notes and the computer files - it was a duplication of effort - but the official reason was that if there was anything that influenced the Human mind and not machinery (or the other way around) it would show up by the two reports being different.
In all the time that Ianto had worked in Research, that had never happened, and so it was a boring, thankless task that no one wanted and that he could, by this point in time, do in his sleep.
There were three people inside, two interrogators, their bioscans, also picked up by the sensors, scrolling by on a small monitor, just out of Ianto's immediate line of sight, and the man they'd recovered from the Asen building, Harkness, he'd said his name was. He was wearing a thin hospital gown, but it didn't grant him the uncomfortable, small appearance that most people gained on donning it. In fact, he was looking rather relaxed.
“What were you doing in the Asen Industries building?” One of the questioners, a woman whose name Ianto didn't know, asked the question. Her colleague sat next to her, taking notes with a pencil and a studious expression.
“You know,” Harkness said, with a smile that could only be described as 'blinding'. “I'm about as averse to taking my clothes off as the next free spirit, but you could at least turn up the heat.”
American. Ianto hadn't noticed that before. His fingers tapped out his notes, writing out what he saw, what he heard, the process so automatic he only gave it half his attention.
The woman didn't seem perturbed at the lack of an answer. “What were you doing in the Asen Industries building?” she repeated.
“After work sex with the CEO,” Harkness said, and gave his interrogator a distinct leer. “Blonde bombshell with legs up to here. Bit like you. Only with a personality.”
A small laugh, more of a snicker, escaped Ianto's lips before he could stop himself. One of the senior execs glanced at him, and he quickly focused his attention on his laptop screen.
The woman seemed to realised the wisdom of changing tacks. “You were found in a room with an artefact of obviously alien origin, surrounded by dead bodies,” she said, flatly, “You consider that an appropriate venue for a romantic liaison?”
“You'd be surprised at what I consider appropriate,” Harkness said.
“Why were you at the Asen building?” The woman said, again. “How did you find out about the artefact?”
Harkness abruptly looked tired. Ianto realised that the man had probably hadn't had any rest since he was dragged out of the building over a day earlier. Ianto at least had slept a little Sunday night, after spending the whole day picking through what what left of the building with the rest of the research team. Everyone else was back in the labs, combing through the data, while Ianto was here, playing typist. He wondered if Harkness had managed to get any sleep at all.
“I don't...” He broke off, looking away, towards the wall behind which the observation team sat. Harkness unknowingly made eye contact with Ianto, and he shivered, trying to mask the motion as discomfort from the air conditioning system. He really did have the most remarkably piercing eyes. “Was there really no one else alive?”
“You were the only survivor,” the woman confirmed. She leant forward, hands down on the table, her body language screaming “openness”. “Why don't you tell us what happened? Tell us how you found out about the artefact.”
Harkness's expression locked up tightly again. “I don't have to answer any of your questions,” he said, firmly, “Torchwood One's nothing but trouble.”
“You work for us,” the woman said, convincingly. “You do have to answer.”
Ianto, surprised, stopped typing. He'd not realised that Harkness was a Torchwood employee. From one of the other branches, maybe? He'd certainly never seen him about Torchwood Tower, not that that was surprising, given the number of people that worked in the building.
What had someone from Torchwood been doing inside that building? Asen hadn't been one of the Institute's shell companies, as far as he knew, and had been a perfectly legitimate research outfit in its own right. He didn't know much beyond what he'd heard in the break rooms, as people gossiped madly about the new investigation, but it had been a technology company whose biggest product until now had been a new type of microprocessor for putting inside talking dolls.
And yet Asen had managed to strip out half its building to accommodate an apparently alien piece of technology. Ianto frowned. Something wasn't adding up. He wasn't supposed to sit there thinking about the situation, only take notes, but he couldn't stop himself from wondering about the mystery of it all.
“No,” Harkness folded his arms, and smirked. “I don't.”
There was a gusty sigh from one of the execs, a balding man with a distinct pudginess about his middle. “Jack fucking Harkness,” he said, heatedly, to his companion, a thin man with even less hair than he had. “Thorn in our side for years. Why haven't we got rid of him yet?”
Ianto pretended not to hear. In Torchwood it was best to pretend that you didn't notice that sort of conversation between very senior people.
The other man offered up an unreadable look. “Her Majesty's very fond of him,” he said, “Something about the Corgis.”
Inside the interrogation room, the woman sat back, and smiled tightly. “What,” she said, enunciating every word clearly and precisely, “Were you doing in the Asen Industries building?”
**
Ianto wandered along the corridors of the fifth floor, rolling his neck from side to side, hearing the bones pop and crack. He'd spent all day, on and off, hunched over a keyboard, typing, and he was glad of the reprieve. The interrogators had finally called an end to Harkness's questioning, no further along than when they'd started. They'd spent all day asking the same questions over and over, to which Harkness responded to with increasing lasciviousness. He'd hit on his female interrogator, then his male one, and then suggested a threesome, then offered an open invitation to anyone in the observation room to join in, proving that he knew exactly that he was being watched.
The mental images had meant that Ianto's typing went to hell for several minutes, and he'd have to rewrite his notes later. In fact, that was what he'd have to spend the evening doing. He sighed, and reached into the pocket of his lab coat, the one he always wore around the Tower. It was the easiest way to identify what level of the hierarchy you were in. If you weren't a manager, you were permanently wearing a lab-coat, even if you didn't work with anything that required you to protect your clothing. Ianto's lab coat was plain, unadorned by coloured piping, as the specialists were. Just another one of the faceless masses.
Ianto privately thought that the reason behind the dress code was because someone in Personnel had a white-coat fetish, and wondered if it would help getting his timesheets processed faster if he turned up in the office one day wearing nothing but a lab coat. Lisa, doubtless, wouldn't approve.
Thinking of Lisa...
He pulled his mobile out of his pocket, and thumbed through the contacts until he found Lisa's name. He leant against the wall as it rang. She'd be at home, he knew, her day having finished hours earlier.
“'lo.” She sounded cheerful, if a little out of breath.
“It's Ianto,” he said, unnecessarily. His name had doubtlessly come up on her phone as soon as he'd rung.
“Hello, babe. Still at work?”
“Unfortunately,” he said, glancing down the hallway. Making personal calls during work hours wasn't forbidden, as such, but it wasn't a good idea to get caught doing it. “Shouldn't be more than another couple of hours, though.”
“Oh,” Lisa said, breezily, “Don't hurry on my account.”
“You're not having an affair and trying to keep me out of the house,” he said, mock-threateningly, “Are you?”
Lisa laughed. Her voice, coming down the phoneline, made him feel as warm as if she were standing in the room with him. He always felt just that little bit happier in her presence, even if it was only an electronic version of it. “Oh no, no. And if I were, I'd just wait until you were off on some late night experiment. No. I'm cleaning.”
He blinked. “The house was spotless when I left this morning. What did you do?”
“Nothing!” She protested, though she sounded nervous. “I just thought it could be cleaner.”
That sounded somehow ominous. “Lisa...” he started.
“You should get back to work. Doctor Swan, isn't it? Total bitch that one. Work hard, my dear. I'll see you later.” And with a click, the call ended.
He eyed the phone, but realised that if Lisa really was up to something, there was hardly anything to be done now, while he was stuck here in the Docklands and a fair distance from Lisa. He scowled and put his phone away, reaching for the memory card with the notes he'd been making all day. With luck he could get it done quickly and then be home before midnight for once.
He rummaged around his pockets, both his lab coat, and his trousers, and then swore profusely. Somehow he'd managed to go and leave the files back in the interrogation centre.
“Well done that man,” he muttered to himself, as he stomped off towards the lifts, swiping his card viciously in the security scanner, as if to impress upon the device how unhappy he was about having to make the return trip. On the other hand, the alternative was explaining to Doctor Swan why he'd left research materials just 'lying around'.
The observation room was empty when he arrived back, the researchers and observers having long since left. He was expecting the interrogation room to be equally abandoned, but he realised, as he crossed over to where he'd left his laptop, about to retrieve the memory card from where he'd forgotten to unplug it, that Harkness was, in fact, still sitting in the interrogation room, this time on his own.
Ianto hesitated, wondering whether the man had simply been forgotten, and if he should inform one of the guards, but then he realised that the man was sitting calmly, staring at the door. He was waiting for something.
Without quite understanding why, Ianto sat down in the chair he'd been using all day to wait as well. He'd been staring at the man's face all day, via video screens, with occasional glances at the transparent wall, but he hadn't really sat down and examined him. He looked every inch the square-jawed American hero, and Ianto wondered how an American wound up working for such a British-centric Institute. He didn't have the sedentary look of the high ranking execs that frequented the Tower. He looked like a man who was active, and the watchful glint in his eyes was one that Ianto had seen mirrored in the faces of a lot of the field ops, the one who'd been around the longest and gone on the most missions.
He looked at Harkness's hands, where they were resting lightly, palms down on the table and slightly curved so that only the heel of the palm and the fingertips touched the surface. He could see the index finger of the left had absently rubbing the clear plastic surface, and Ianto wondered for a moment whether, if he was an active field agent of some description, his hands had the gun callouses that Lisa had complained about developing, the inevitable result of handling weaponry day in and day out. He imagined the gentle abrasiveness, how it would feel against his own skin-
The door to the interrogation room opened with a bang, and Ianto jumped, pathetically grateful for the interruption from his own thoughts. Fantasising about prisoners now? Maybe he ought to check the rosters and see how much time off he was due.
Harkness hadn't flinched as the door opened, and offered the intruder a sunny smile. “Ah, Yvonne, how nice to see you again.”
Ianto held his breath. Yvonne Hartman, Director of Torchwood London and universally feared by her staff and Whitehall (something which was only made worse by the way she went out of her way to remember everyone's names and exactly what they did at Torchwood), was standing in a pristine business suit, as if it wasn't eight at night, a smile on her face that could only be described as brittle.
Ianto swallowed convulsively. If Hartman caught him watching the prisoner unsupervised, when he was clearly supposed to be elsewhere, and when she had obviously thought he was alone, he'd be lucky if he only vanished into one of the bioresearch facilities. Torchwood was very unforgiving of betrayal.
He should leave. He should leave right now.
He stayed.
“Jack,” she said, and took a seat opposite him. She laced her fingers together in front of her. “I hope you're being treated well.”
Harkness shrugged, the motion causing the hospital gown to flap about. “I could murder a decent cup of coffee. But no one seems to take the time to make coffee properly any more. It's all instant-this and Starbucks-that. True coffee,” he said, “Is an art form.”
“I'll put it into our training schemes,” Yvonne said, dryly. “It's nice to see you've retained your sense of humour.”
“And it's unpleasant to find out that your draconian habits of prisoner incarceration haven't changed,” Harkness said. His smile, Ianto could see, wasn't as bright as he'd first thought. The skin around Harkness's eyes was tight, and he showed just a few too many teeth.
Yvonne spread her hands apologetically. “Come now, Jack. It's standard procedure, you know that.”
“Standard procedure for London,” Harkness corrected.
“Yes, and how are things going out in Cardiff these days?” Yvonne said, “It's you and, what... two other people these days? Three?”
“Enough for the job,” Harkness said.
Cardiff. Ianto realised with a start that they must be talking about Torchwood Three. The other branches weren't discussed much in Torchwood, the Londoner belief that the capital was the centre of the universe stretching to the people who worked there. Four disappeared, Two was a glorified library, and Three was just some monitoring post that absolutely no one talked about.
In retrospect, Ianto should have perhaps wondered why there was such an official reluctance to talk about the sister branches.
“And don't think,” Harkness continued, “That just because I'm locked up in here, you can send another assault team in to take the Hub. You think it was bad with just me? You won't stand a chance against my team.”
Ianto frowned. Another assault team?
“I've no interest in your hole in the ground,” Yvonne said, betraying her distaste for the first time in the conversation. “And since you managed to get Her Majesty on your side, that is an official disinterest as well. If you want to sit on the shores of reality and collect the rubbish that washes up, you can. But,” she leaned forward, “I'd like you to remember that even if we have not always seen eye-to-eye that we do still both work for Queen and Country, and the Torchwood Institute. Surely we can work together better than we can apart.”
Harkness shook his head, looking amused.
Yvonne narrowed her eyes. “What were you doing at Asen Industries?”
Jack leaned forward. “What were your guys doing there?”
Yvonne looked thoughtful. Finally, she seemed to come to a decision and nodded. “We detected a burst of naderon radiation, the sort of energy one normally associates with protonic fusion.”
Harkness frowned. “Protonic fusion.”
“Yes,” Yvonne said, “Which would rather indicate that someone had built and activated a protonic fusion generator, except the people who should have that sort of technology are us. We sent a team. Imagine our surprise when we found a building full of dead bodies, a mysterious alien artefact which is not all that forthcoming about its nature, and a not-so-dead agent.” She smiled. “Which is even less forthcoming about it's nature.”
Harkness smirked and dropped his voice into a seductive purr. “Maybe if you just asked the right questions, in the right way...”
Yvonne tried not to look perturbed, but Ianto, watching carefully unseen, she licked her lips, quickly. From Harkness's satisfied grin, he knew he'd gotten to her as well.
Ianto wasn't even in the room with him, but the man's charisma, or rather, his utter confidence in his irresistibility was overwhelming. He watched as Harkness leaned forward, reaching forward to touch his fingertips to the back of Yvonne's hands, still carefully laced together. “Surely you've heard some stories,” he said, voice now so soft that Ianto had to use the microphones in the interrogation room to listen. “Your predecessor and I, for instance,” he chuckled, “She was lovely. I taught her some things that would amaze you, things that would make your toes curl and your breath quicken. Haven't you ever wondered? Here's a Torchwood legend, complete with a reputation that would make your mother blush, willing and... eager.”
Yvonne's breath had hitched slightly. Harkness leaned in towards her, and Ianto wondered exactly what he'd do if he was about to be subject to seeing a side of Yvonne he'd never wanted to see, but, a heartbeat before their lips touched, Yvonne drew back sharply, her face flushed, and her eyes flashing angrily. “Your reputation does indeed precede you,” she said, icily, and slightly breathless.
Harkness leaned back in his chair, all traces of seduction gone from his face. Instead, he wore a satisfied smirk. “Of course it would,” he said. “I promise it's well earned.”
“No doubt,” Yvonne snapped. Ianto thought he'd never seen her quite so unbalanced. She stood, hands pressed against the tabletop. “I'll have someone escort you to secure quarters,” she said, and smiled unkindly. “I'm afraid your lack of cooperation means I'll be forced to keep you here for a while. Protocol, you understand.”
Jack Harkness watched her go, and after the door closed, he shook his head, and uttered a short laugh, shaking his head ruefully. There was no way to know what he was thinking, and a few moments later, two guards entered the room. They escorted Harkness out, presumably to the cells that lay even deeper underground than the interrogation room.
Ianto sat in the silent observation area for several minutes, gathering his thoughts. He ejected the memory card from his laptop, which had contained not only the days recordings, but the exchange of barbs that had just taken place. It took several moments of staring contemplatively at the card before he realised that Harkness had neatly avoided Yvonne's question about what he'd been doing when the Torchwood investigative team had found him, half dead, on the floor in the Asen building.
It took several more long moments before Ianto could stand up without embarrassing himself. Jack Harkness definitely had an undeniable charisma.
**
Later that night, after finally finishing his compliance report for Doctor Swan, Ianto asked Lisa, “Have you ever heard of Jack Harkness?”
He asked while they were having sex, which was perhaps not the best time to start quizzing her, but it was a thought that had rather been preying on his mind.
Lisa paused in the attentions she had been lavishing on his chest, and looked at him speculatively. She did not, at least, appear offended at his distraction. “I told you,” she said, with a wicked smile that he adored, “No threesomes. Not unless there's tequila involved and it's all about me.”
He couldn't deny the appeal of that thought and was successfully distracted for a few moments, until Lisa straddled him, lowering herself down onto him with a low throated noise and then stilled for a moment, both of them enjoying the sensation.
“Seriously,” he said, “The name's familiar for some reason.”
Lisa looked at him as if to say 'you're thinking about this now?' and started to move. “Probably is,” she said, as she smirked in satisfaction at eliciting a moan from him. “Captain Jack Harkness is the name of the head of Torchwood Three. Don't tell me you're that isolated up in Research.”
Not just some nameless field agent, but the Commander of Torchwood Three, Yvonne's equal, and her apparent nemesis. And yet, for some reason, he'd been found in a London business with an alien artefact, and was refusing to say what he'd been doing there.
Ianto would have questioned her further on the matter of the mysterious Jack Harkness and the Cardiff branch but, really, he did have better things to be getting on with.
**
Some other poor unfortunate was assigned to do compliance logging on Harkness's interrogation, and Ianto couldn't very well object at being given a reprieve from such an undesirable assignment without causing a certain amount of raised eyebrows. So he commiserated appropriately with his replacement, and went to get his day's assignment from Doctor Swan. He was given the task of decrypting an info-block downloaded from Asen's computer system, and he was rather glad of the task, since he could legitimately claim it was being difficult, and work on something else at his station in the labs. His computer terminal was set towards the window, so there was no chance of anyone looking over his shoulders as he hunched over the keyboards, intent on his self-assigned task. Even Doctor Swan grudgingly admitted that he was being “unusually attentive”.
It took him skipping lunch, but by late in the afternoo, he'd finally come up with something he thought would do the job he wanted. He waited until everyone else had gone home, and the only other people in the tower were the night-time security staff and anyone who was running experiments that required 24 hour supervision. He took a moment to contemplate what it was he was about to do. At the very least it would get him fired, but the more likely result, if he was caught, was being 'disappeared' and never heard from again. The rumours always suggested that being officially 'disappeared' was a fate very much worse than death.
He could justify this foolishness as simple curiosity, a mysterious puzzle that would simply not leave him alone. But if it really was that simple, it would have been easy to brush off and dismiss from his mind. Chafing under the necessity to always obey the rules would be another good excuse, but then the consequences of his failure to obey the Institute had been impressed upon him from day one. Then he remembered the look on Harkness's face, the one that had been set in place throughout his interrogations, that look of wariness, and slight fear. Something was going on, and Ianto couldn't help but feel that Yvonne wasn't looking in the right place, and Harkness was keen to make sure that continued to be the case.
Lisa would kill him. It was the last argument he could think of to stop himself.
No, he decided. Lisa would understand. Although, if she ever found out, she would definitely make him suffer.
He carefully shut down his console, and headed for the lifts. He felt his palms sweating as he pressed the call button, waiting impatiently for a lift to arrive. When it opened, and he saw that it wasn't empty, he bit back a curse.
Doctor Miriam Bell looked at him, and smiled vaguely. “Going down, Ianto?”
There was no way he could refuse, but even if he hadn't been sneaking around, about to sacrifice his career and possibly his life, he still wouldn't have wanted to get into a lift with Miriam Bell. She was the head of the Psi Division, and had been the one to lead him through the exercises that every Torchwood employee was required to participate in, the ones designed to unlock any possible psychic potential. She had been the one to teach him how to shield his mind from subversive influence, or detect when someone was trying to deceive using psychic paper. It had been a short course, and nothing painful had come out of it except a rather uncomfortable awareness of how people liked to take their drinks (Lisa's side effects included the ability to correctly identify anyone's favourite colour, a skill which was of little use except as a party trick), but whenever he saw Miriam, he had the memory of her creeping around inside his brain, like tiny, slippery fingers rifling through his brain. It was an eerie sensation, and he was always paranoid that she was trying to read his mind.
And if that was the case at that moment, he was completely screwed.
“Ah yes, please,” he said, uneasily, stepping inside.
Miriam smiled, and pressed the key for the seventh floor. It had been the one he'd been aiming for. He shot her a look that probably showed how freaked out he was feeling, but she just smiled at him again in that way that made him think she was permanently stoned. She leaned back against the wall of the lift, hands in the pockets of her lab coat. Unlike Ianto's plain white affair, it was threaded with green piping, denoting her connection with the medical division. He didn't look at her, but he could feel her eyes burning into the back of his head.
He fought the urge to scratch his scalp.
The lift seemed to be crawling, but eventually it stopped, and the door slid open. Ianto started forward, grateful to be escaping, but he was brought to a sudden sharp halt as Miriam's hand lashed out, and grabbed his wrist. She was startlingly strong. “The seeds you plant, the harvester does not know he shall reap.” Her smile didn't falter, but, after a moment, she blinked, looked slightly puzzled, and glanced at her hand, still holding his arm tightly. “Sorry,” she said, mildly, “Did you say something?”
Ianto stared at her, wide-eyed. He didn't know whether this was something that he should take seriously, or if Miriam was just trying to mess with him. Either way, he thought, he was just a little bit terrified. “Ah... no,” he said, after a long moment.
“Oh,” she let go of his arm. “Must be hearing things. Long day, you know. See you tomorrow, Ianto.” The lift doors slid shut, hiding her from view.
Ianto stared at the closed doors for a long moment. Some days he did rather think he should have listened to his grandfather, and become a banker. Surely there would be less of a chance to be accosted by borderline psychotic co-workers in lifts. He took a deep breath to calm his nerves and turned back to his task.
The room he was looking for was one that was deliberately hard to locate, although it did take up a large portion of the whole seventh floor. It was innocuously labelled “Hard Storage”, and the door was protected by a biometric scanner. The locking system for the Torchwood Tower was supposedly impossible to break. Impossible, of course, unless you happened to have administrative level server access, which Ianto had figured out a way to give himself (with some help from a very pretty young technician who had gone to pieces at the sound of his accent) not long after he'd started working for the Institute. It also required a certain level of coding expertise, but then Torchwood trained its researchers very well.
He pulled a slim needler probe out of his pocket, exactly the sort the investigative team had used on the Asen computer system, and jammed it into the sensor. The probe would deliver a retinal pattern to the scanner, and convince it that it was attached to a real Human, rather than being dead or fake. It would have all fallen over there, given that the scanner would query the central database for authorisation. But the program that Ianto had slaved over all day provided a database entry that matched the retina print the needler was inputting. The real key lay in the corners that the system cut to work with any speed. If the system examined the retinal pattern and then went through the entire personnel records system looking for matches, it would throw up the fake. He'd been forced to copy an existing retinal pattern from the records (Yvonne Hartman's, since Ianto had felt that a particularly amusing choice), not having any other way to get a scan at short notice, and that scan obviously already existed in the database. But that would take a long time, and the security system would be scanning the entire database several times a second with all the people moving around the building. So instead, the scanner looked at the retina print, and the name with it (in this case: Ann Other) and looked to see if there was an Ann Other in the database with that retinal print.
As he'd known it would, the system found a match, and unlocked the door.
He slipped inside silently, and found himself in a room that smelt slightly of sour milk. He grimaced, breathed through his mouth, and walked into the room proper. Stretching off as far as one could see in the poorly lit confines of the room, were shelves upon shelves of files, all neatly stacked and labelled. This was Hard Storage, the place where Torchwood kept documents that were so sensitive they couldn't risk keeping them on the servers for fear of hacking, either from the outside or from employees like Ianto, who wanted more information than Torchwood was willing to provide. Once a week, on a Monday morning, the files were updated, and then the room was left alone for the rest of the week, unless someone desperately needed access to the files. Ianto knew he wouldn't be disturbed.
He started searching through the shelves. They were arranged the same way as the Torchwood database, the cataloguing system almost identical, and so it didn't take him long at all to find what he was looking for.
An innocent looking file sat on the shelves, tucked in front of “Harpie, alien”. The spine read: “Harkness, Jack”.
Ianto swallowed, and pulled the file down from the shelf, grimacing at the weight of it. He'd not come this far not to take a look through. He sat down on the floor and opened the file. Inside were dozens of neat sheets. There was no point trying to take copies of them and get out before he was found. The security system that allowed Hard Storage to remain secure was twofold. Firstly, all the paper inside was made out of a sort of compressed algae that required a constant nutrient factor in the air to prevent it from drying out and immediately becoming dessicated - that was the smell that Ianto had detected on walking into the room. If he tried to walk out with anything, it would crumble to dust in his hands. The second part of the system, the one that prevented Ianto from even taking photos of the pages, was that everything on them was written in psychic ink. Unlike psychic paper, it didn't change depending on what someone wanted to say, but it was dependant on a Human, or at least something with psychic tendencies in its brain, to see anything at all. To cameras or scanners it would just look blank.
That was fine. Ianto didn't need to take any files out of the room. He only wanted to read them, to get a handle on exactly who Jack Harkness was, and try and figure out what was bothering Ianto so much about him.
Four hours later, he finished reading, his eyes burning with fatigue, and his back sending painful spasms all the way up his spine ever time he tried to move. He carefully gathered all the scattered papers together and put them back into their file. He let himself out, an easier affair than getting into the room. He went back upstairs to his lab workstation, and spent the next twenty minutes making sure his clandestine activities were thoroughly erased from the system.
And once that was finished, and he had nothing else to distract him, Ianto thought about what he'd just read, and contemplated getting very, very drunk.
**
The following morning, Ianto turned up to work, having failed to get drunk, unable bring himself to drown his worries in a bottle, and had instead managed to get very little sleep. Thus it was he appeared before Doctor Swan and the research team for the morning briefing looking rumpled and unkempt. It was an unusual look for him, and Swan clearly didn't approve. She frowned at him before she called the meeting to order.
“Alright,” she said as the team settled, quietening them with a sharp gesture. “Presuming you haven't all been sleeping for the last couple of days, you should have something to report.” She pointed a finger at one of the other researchers, a man named Hassan, and arched an eyebrow. “Start talking.”
Hassan was an officious little man, who tended to act like he ran the lab. What was especially galling to his colleagues was the fact that his attitude was matched by his competency. “Yes, right,” Hassan said, tugging on his jacket in a habitual motion. “Well, the most obvious point is that the cube is separated from our reality by some sort of subspace field. We've been trying to ascertain it's mass, but our readings are skewed. It's clear that the cube has off-set its mass into other dimensions.”
Swan frowned thoughtfully. “By how much?”
Hassan cleared his throat. “We're still investigating,” he said.
Swan nodded. “So we don't know. Find out.”
Ianto fought the urge to roll his eyes, masking his expression by taking a large gulp of coffee. As if it was that easy.
“What about the Asen database?” Swan asked, directing her attention to another researcher. “How far along are we with cracking it?”
“Progress is... slow,” Michaela admitted, tugging on one of her plaits nervously. “We've gotten through the first layer of encryption, but there seem to be at least six more layers to hack through before we get any useful data.”
Doctor Swan sighed dramatically. “Wonderful. So when Yvonne Hartman calls me up to her office later and asks about our progress, I can tell her that my research team are apparently a load of nitwits who couldn't find their arses with both hands and a map.”
The mood amongst the assembled researchers was definitely 'sulky'. Ianto hesitated, and glanced around. It seemed no one else was about to speak, so it was a good a time as any to ask.
“The dead bodies,” he started, hesitating when every head in the room suddenly swivelled in his direction, but did his best to ignore it and carry on, “Do we know what happened to them? What killed them, I mean?”
Doctor Swan shrugged. “I have no idea, and I don't much care anyway. It has no bearing on our investigation.”
That, to Ianto, seemed like an especially stupid point of view. “There was an alien artefact surrounded by a lot of dead bodies,” he said, “And we don't think the two are connected.”
Swan sighed impatiently. “Whatever happened hasn't reoccurred. Our own personnel are in no danger. We're interested in the technology and how it works, not what happened to these people.”
“That's not-” That's not right, he wanted to say. Ianto stopped himself. It wasn't right. Not in the slightest. But Swan had no problem with forgetting about all the people who'd died, and pressing her would only bring a lot of trouble down upon his head. He spent the rest of the meeting glaring moodily into his coffee, turning the situation over in his mind.
Why was Swan so convinced that there was no danger to the Torchwood team now studying the artefact?
**
Ianto was on his third coffee break of the morning by eleven o'clock. He genuinely had little reason to hang around the labs. He'd left his terminal chewing through a few code-breaking algorithms, and all he had to do was wait for them to finish. Usually he would have passed the time with the other researchers, helping them out, or perhaps working on one of the personal projects he had on the go. Torchwood was always very willing to encourage independent research, firmly of the opinion that such was the way new and exciting discoveries were made. None of those projects held his interest today, though. He'd stared at the archival indexing solution he'd been working at, on and off, for two months, and then banished it to the electronic ether when it had failed to prove sufficient distraction.
“Jack bloody Harkness,” he heard a female voice, Yvonne's voice, say heatedly.
He'd been wandering around the third floor, where the canteens and break rooms were located, and the voice had come from just around the corner. He peered around the bend in the hallway, and saw Yvonne glowering at a chocolate vending machine. Next to her stood her PA, looking sympathetic.
“That man and his team of social rejects manage to be the bane of my existence even while being trapped in the back end of beyond,” she continued, and gave the machine a good thump with her palm. The vending machine seemed unimpressed by her temper. “Threatening to get Her Majesty involved indeed.”
She was silent for a long moment, and, eventually her PA tentatively asked, “Uh, is there anything you'd like me to sort out, Yvonne?”
Yvonne sighed, sharply. She seemed resigned. “Get his clothes back to him, and release him. Then call the Chief and tell him to make sure that Jack Harkness stays the hell away from Asen Industries. I don't want him getting in the way, whatever it is that he happens to be up to. Have him followed.”
Ianto drew back around the corner as the PA nodded and walked away. An idea came to him, and before he could change his mind, he ran off down the hallway, in the direction of Stores.
**
Alexis Cole, Yvonne Hartman's personal assistant, was used to being treated as a general dogsbody. He regarded it a compensation for working so closely to the heart of Torchwood. Still, he would rather not have been retrieving a prisoner's personal effects, and discharging said prisoner. It was long, boring, and beneath him, and he had better things to do than hang around in the underground interrogation centre all day. So, all things considered, he was rather grateful when a disinterested looking man came up to him in the corridors and said,
“Yvonne wants you back upstairs.”
He was grateful, but felt compelled to disagree for appearances sake. “She asked me to sort some things out...”
“Harkness, right? I'll sort of the paperwork to get rid of him, no worries.” The man nodded to the sealed plastic bag in Alexis's hands. “Those the clothes?”
“Yeah,” Alexis handed them over without a second thought. “Thanks, mate”
“No worries,” the man said again, and started heading in the direction of security, swinging the bag with the clothes inside as he walked, apparently absent-mindedly.
Alexis promptly forgot all about him, and headed back upstairs.
**
II: The Book of Voices
Author: Jewels (bjewelled)
Web Link: http://www.bjewelled.co.uk/fanfic/twfic.shtml
Fandom: Torchwood
Disclaimer: Torchwood belongs to the BBC and is the brainchild of Mr. Davies.
Summary: Pre-series, in the days of Torchwood One. Torchwood London uncovers a mysterious alien artefact and a building full of dead bodies. Imagine their surprise upon finding that Jack Harkness, self-declared head of Torchwood Three, is the only survivor. What happened, and what's a young researcher at London supposed to do to help?
**
I: The Book of the Troublemaker
Most commercial districts, on a weekend, tended towards desertion. At three in the morning on a Sunday, their abandonment was even more complete. The air was still and silent, the world decorated in various shades of sodium-orange as the streetlamps cast ghostly shadows on the ground. For the squat building with the words “Asen Industries” spelled out above its glass and chrome entryway, this should have been a normal silent weekend. But on this particular night, anyone watching would have seen three black and unmarked vans screeching into the courtyard in front of the building with a squeal of distressed breaks, before disgorging six men from each, all dressed head to toe in black, complete with breathing masks. Every one of them carried a rifle and looked ready to use it.
Their entrance was dramatic, but mostly silent. For a few moments the only sound breaking the stillness of the night was heavy footsteps, and the sound of the van engines idling. The team rushed up to the doors that separated Asen Industries from the outside world, and the commander of the unit, a man who those who served with him mostly called 'the Chief' but whose real name was John Mathers, shone his torch through the glass, peering inside.
Dotted around the lobby, in poses that indicated that they'd simply dropped wherever they happened to be, whether that was sitting on the comfortable waiting chairs, or draped over the reception desk, or waiting for the lifts, were bodies, all of them pale and none of them moving.
Under his mask, the Chief's mouth flattened into a thin line. They'd known it was bad, but they hadn't quite expected this. “Louis?” he subvocalised, the movements of his throat muscles picked up by the mic pressed against his throat, transmitted to his team as clearly as if he'd spoken aloud. But it was only his team that heard him through their earpieces. No sound was utterd.
Louis didn't immediately acknowledge him, only raising a hand to press a small disc against the glass. There was a tiny flash of light, easily missed if one wasn't looking for it, and when Louis removed his hand the disc stayed there, attached to the glass. The flash had been the disc, a small probe, burning a hole in the door and extending a microscopic probe through. Louis looked at a small readout screen built into his sleeve as the probe started sending information.
“Air's clear,” he reported, tersely, “The building's locked down, but no other security countermeasures are in place.”
The Chief nodded, and gestured to one of the other team members. “Open it,” he ordered.
It was the work of a few moments and a small line of microexplosives that made mincemeat of the locks, and then the doors were swinging open. There was no sound of an alarm, the security systems were as dead as anything else in the building, and that included its occupants. Louis gave them a quick scan as the team stepped over the bodies, confirming the readings by pressing his fingers to the neck of the woman who had probably been the receptionist, now slumped over a computer screen that was dark and unresponsive.
“I'm not getting any body heat anywhere in the building,” he said, via the subvocal communications.
The Chief nodded, though the movement was mostly suppressed by the bulky clothing he wore. “Where's the target?”
Louis tapped his scanner again. He gestured in the appropriate direction. “Top floor,” he added.
The Chief gestured sharply, and the team fell silent once more. They stepped across the dead bodies, ignoring them, as they made their way through the building.
They encountered no resistance on their way up. The only difficulty they had to contend with was the occasional locked door, easily taken care of through the placing of super-hot microexplosives or a well-placed kick. The only thing they found at first was more bodies, crumpled in various positions, no signs of struggle, injury or pain. It might have been a fast acting gas that killed them, but that was for other people to worry about. The Chief's job was just to make sure that what they came for was here, and that the way was clear and safe.
They reached the top floor sooner than expected, a long way from the very top of the stairway. But all the other doors beyond what was the sixth floor were boarded up, and there was no sign that they'd been tampered with. They broke through that final door, and knew immediately that they'd found what they were looking for.
It didn't take long to sweep the area, and then the Chief reached up and tapped his radio, switching carriers. “Artefact secure. Building clear.” He gestured to his team to take up guarding positions. “Send in the team.”
Outside, two more vans pulled up. These two, unlike the first team, had a single marking on the side, a stylised T drawn in hexagons. The people who exited were dressed head-to-foot in white protective gear, with matching gloves and filter masks. The only exposed skin was at the eyes, and those were protected by plastic goggles. They each carried one or two heavy black cases, and followed men left at the entrance into the building. Unlike the guards, they weren't as militarily minded, and one or two gasped and muttered in dismay as they caught sight of the bodies.
“Later,” was all Doctor Swan, leader of the Research team, said. She was only distinguishable from the rest of her white-garbed colleagues by the fact that she was overly well-endowed in the bust, which was clearly visible even through the baggy clothing.
The scientists and researchers that followed her fell into an uncomfortable silence, and they trailed after the security men who led them up through cramped stairways, past bodies that had been unceremoniously dragged out of the way, and all the way up to the reason that they had been brought here.
The sixth floor, it was easily to see on entrance, had once been the sixth, seventh and eighth floors. But the dividing ceilings separating these had been knocked through to create a cavernous environment, more like a warehouse than an office building. It had clearly been done hastily, with extra steel bracing brought in to shore up a building which had suddenly been deprived of a lot of its supporting structure. There were doors and windows visible higher up on the walls that had been hastily boarded up.
It was all to make room for what had been given the name of the “Artefact”. No one had been told if there was a proper name for it, it was simply that no one else knew what to call it. They'd had very little intelligence to work on when they'd decided to make their move, and it was agreed by all that calling it a 'Thing' lacked gravitas. It was cubic in shape, nearly reaching to the roof of the three stories that had been cleared out, and glowed with rippling neon light. The strangest part was that that light didn't seem to extend beyond the cube. The rest of the room was still pitch dark, only lit up by the torches that the team had brought with them.
As the research team began to set up their equipment, small power generators and lighting going up quickly and efficiently, one of the researchers, couldn't help but step towards the cube. It was unlike anything he or anyone else he had worked with had ever seen, he was sure. It was... hypnotic... the way the lights danced and swirled, and if he concentrated hard enough, he was sure he could hear something, some alien noise, just out of his range of hearing-
“Jones!” Doctor Swan's voice, muffled by her face-mask, nevertheless resounded like a whipcrack.
Ianto Jones drew back sharply, turning away from the Artefact. He hadn't even realised he'd been reaching out, as if to touch it. Doctor Swan eyed him disapprovingly.
“How about you find an interface unit for whatever they were using for data-processing on this thing?” she said, “And quickly, please. We don't have all night.”
Chastised, Ianto nodded, and hefted his torch. “Yes, Doctor,” he said.
Swan grunted, and turned away. Ianto frowned, and started hunting around. It was a cold room, the heating and plumbing all ripped out to make way for the huge cube, and he could see his breath misting whenever he crossed through the torchlight of one of the security staff. Of all the places he wanted to be at three am, in a cold corporate building surrounded by dead bodies and armed guards wasn't what he would have chosen.
He'd been quite happily engaged in supervising an overnight experiment with one of the others from the research department, supervision which required them to do nothing more than sit around one of the labs trading bad jokes and coffee-making duties, when Doctor Swan had barged her way in and ordered them to suit up for a field trip. They'd been given no guidance on what to expect, and it was so rare that researchers got out into the field that he only just remembered what gear to pack and where to find the anti-contaminant clothing.
The only reassurance he had was that Doctor Swan was as clearly in the dark as the rest of the staff that she'd hauled out of bed in the middle of the night. Ianto was starting to think that no one in the Torchwood hierarchy quite knew what they had on their hands, but they knew they had to control it.
It wasn't something he had to worry about, he told himself.
He stopped.
He'd been sweeping his torch from side to side, scanning for anything that looked like a computer access point, when his beam had landed on one of the bodies. The security team that had cleared the way were slowly moving the corpses out of sight, but they'd not gotten to the far side of the cube, where Ianto stood, just yet. He lifted the beam of his torch to look at one of the other bodies. It was wearing, like the other dozen or so bodies that littered the room, a lab coat. Ianto looked back at the body the had caught his eye.
It was male, and not wearing protective clothing like the others. Instead, he was covered by a long woollen coat, either blue or grey in colour, it was hard to tell. And he...
... was he moving?
Ianto crouched down and reached forward to roll the corpse onto it back, grunting slightly at the dead-weight, and was scared almost out of his skin when blue eyes, hazy and unfocused, but definitely alive fixed on his, and he had time to take in the confused and panicky expression before the man lunged upwards, wrapping his hands around Ianto's throat.
Ianto made a strangled noise and would later think that he would never say a bad word about security again as two officers nearby sprung into action in seconds, yanking the man's hands away from Ianto's throat and pinning him to the ground. Ianto coughed, his pride more injured than his throat; the man's grip had been weak and kittenish.
The man was looking around, confused, “What... what happened?” he was saying, shaking his head as if to dispel some confusion, and struggled against the grip of the burly security men.
Ianto looked up. The ruckus had attracted the attention of one of the other researchers. “Get Doctor Swan,” he barked.
The researcher - who it was he wasn't sure - nodded, and ran off.
Ianto looked back at the man, and realised he should probably do something. He fumbled in the breast pocket of his overalls and retrieved a small penlight. “Can you tell me your name?” he asked, loudly, shining it into the man's eyes. “Can you tell me what happened?
The man shied away from the light, but not before Ianto could see his pupils reacting normally. “Wha...?”
Ianto realised that 'what happened' had been the man's own question and, given his confused state, he was probably a little unclear on the issue. He tried to stick to the simpler question. “What's your name?”
The man stilled somewhat, no longer fighting the security men. “Jack... Harkness...” he said, sounding a little uncertain on the issue. His eyes met Ianto's, and Ianto took a breath, to ask if he was alright, but just when he would have continued questioning, but Doctor Swan arrived, and imperiously tapped him on the shoulder, wordlessly instructing him to move out of the way.
He stood, standing off to the side, and watched silently as Doctor Swan made her own assessment, punctuated by sharp questions that Harkness didn't seem able to answer. After a moment, she stood, and ordered the security men to take him back to Torchwood Tower. Ianto watching them go, and then realised that Swan was glaring at him.
“I believe I asked you to look for an access point,” she said, sharply, eyes piercing even through the perspex glasses.
Ianto didn't need telling a third time. He got back to work.
**
The interrogation rooms of the London branch of the Torchwood Institute, labelled on its official documentation as “Torchwood One”, were buried in the building's underground levels. The theory was that it would be much harder for any prisoners to escape from convoluted underground passageways, and those same corridors would be much easier to seal off in an emergency. The rooms themselves were plain, white, and utterly lacking in any sort of personality. At first glance, there was only a table and three chairs, each bolted to the floor.
They were designed for to allow others to observe though, and one wall of the room was designed to be transparent from an adjoining area. There were no obvious mirrored windows, like those to be found in American crime television, they looked instead like a plain concrete wall, covered in off-white paint. There was no indication that that an apparently solid wall was anything other than what it looked like.
But on the other side of that wall was a room filled with computer monitors and screens a plenty, all of them constantly spewing readouts. Sensors inside the cell were trained on the occupant all the time, delivering real time information regarding heart rate, blood pressure, neural activity, displaying it alongside a video field. There were computers set up, constantly humming and chewing through data, and a long desk designed for other observers who simply wanted to watch the prisoner squirm.
Ianto sat along that desk, which was pressed up against the fake wall, along with two other researchers, and two members of the upper echelons that he dimly recognised enough to know that their presence was bad news. He hadn't said anything to them on their entrance as they sat down next to him at the long observation desk, only fixed his attention on the laptop he'd brought down and set up to piggyback on the video and bioscan feeds.
Doctor Swan had given him the task no one else wanted, which was to come down and 'take notes', which essentially meant writing down everything that happened in addition to all the logged data. There would be no difference between his notes and the computer files - it was a duplication of effort - but the official reason was that if there was anything that influenced the Human mind and not machinery (or the other way around) it would show up by the two reports being different.
In all the time that Ianto had worked in Research, that had never happened, and so it was a boring, thankless task that no one wanted and that he could, by this point in time, do in his sleep.
There were three people inside, two interrogators, their bioscans, also picked up by the sensors, scrolling by on a small monitor, just out of Ianto's immediate line of sight, and the man they'd recovered from the Asen building, Harkness, he'd said his name was. He was wearing a thin hospital gown, but it didn't grant him the uncomfortable, small appearance that most people gained on donning it. In fact, he was looking rather relaxed.
“What were you doing in the Asen Industries building?” One of the questioners, a woman whose name Ianto didn't know, asked the question. Her colleague sat next to her, taking notes with a pencil and a studious expression.
“You know,” Harkness said, with a smile that could only be described as 'blinding'. “I'm about as averse to taking my clothes off as the next free spirit, but you could at least turn up the heat.”
American. Ianto hadn't noticed that before. His fingers tapped out his notes, writing out what he saw, what he heard, the process so automatic he only gave it half his attention.
The woman didn't seem perturbed at the lack of an answer. “What were you doing in the Asen Industries building?” she repeated.
“After work sex with the CEO,” Harkness said, and gave his interrogator a distinct leer. “Blonde bombshell with legs up to here. Bit like you. Only with a personality.”
A small laugh, more of a snicker, escaped Ianto's lips before he could stop himself. One of the senior execs glanced at him, and he quickly focused his attention on his laptop screen.
The woman seemed to realised the wisdom of changing tacks. “You were found in a room with an artefact of obviously alien origin, surrounded by dead bodies,” she said, flatly, “You consider that an appropriate venue for a romantic liaison?”
“You'd be surprised at what I consider appropriate,” Harkness said.
“Why were you at the Asen building?” The woman said, again. “How did you find out about the artefact?”
Harkness abruptly looked tired. Ianto realised that the man had probably hadn't had any rest since he was dragged out of the building over a day earlier. Ianto at least had slept a little Sunday night, after spending the whole day picking through what what left of the building with the rest of the research team. Everyone else was back in the labs, combing through the data, while Ianto was here, playing typist. He wondered if Harkness had managed to get any sleep at all.
“I don't...” He broke off, looking away, towards the wall behind which the observation team sat. Harkness unknowingly made eye contact with Ianto, and he shivered, trying to mask the motion as discomfort from the air conditioning system. He really did have the most remarkably piercing eyes. “Was there really no one else alive?”
“You were the only survivor,” the woman confirmed. She leant forward, hands down on the table, her body language screaming “openness”. “Why don't you tell us what happened? Tell us how you found out about the artefact.”
Harkness's expression locked up tightly again. “I don't have to answer any of your questions,” he said, firmly, “Torchwood One's nothing but trouble.”
“You work for us,” the woman said, convincingly. “You do have to answer.”
Ianto, surprised, stopped typing. He'd not realised that Harkness was a Torchwood employee. From one of the other branches, maybe? He'd certainly never seen him about Torchwood Tower, not that that was surprising, given the number of people that worked in the building.
What had someone from Torchwood been doing inside that building? Asen hadn't been one of the Institute's shell companies, as far as he knew, and had been a perfectly legitimate research outfit in its own right. He didn't know much beyond what he'd heard in the break rooms, as people gossiped madly about the new investigation, but it had been a technology company whose biggest product until now had been a new type of microprocessor for putting inside talking dolls.
And yet Asen had managed to strip out half its building to accommodate an apparently alien piece of technology. Ianto frowned. Something wasn't adding up. He wasn't supposed to sit there thinking about the situation, only take notes, but he couldn't stop himself from wondering about the mystery of it all.
“No,” Harkness folded his arms, and smirked. “I don't.”
There was a gusty sigh from one of the execs, a balding man with a distinct pudginess about his middle. “Jack fucking Harkness,” he said, heatedly, to his companion, a thin man with even less hair than he had. “Thorn in our side for years. Why haven't we got rid of him yet?”
Ianto pretended not to hear. In Torchwood it was best to pretend that you didn't notice that sort of conversation between very senior people.
The other man offered up an unreadable look. “Her Majesty's very fond of him,” he said, “Something about the Corgis.”
Inside the interrogation room, the woman sat back, and smiled tightly. “What,” she said, enunciating every word clearly and precisely, “Were you doing in the Asen Industries building?”
**
Ianto wandered along the corridors of the fifth floor, rolling his neck from side to side, hearing the bones pop and crack. He'd spent all day, on and off, hunched over a keyboard, typing, and he was glad of the reprieve. The interrogators had finally called an end to Harkness's questioning, no further along than when they'd started. They'd spent all day asking the same questions over and over, to which Harkness responded to with increasing lasciviousness. He'd hit on his female interrogator, then his male one, and then suggested a threesome, then offered an open invitation to anyone in the observation room to join in, proving that he knew exactly that he was being watched.
The mental images had meant that Ianto's typing went to hell for several minutes, and he'd have to rewrite his notes later. In fact, that was what he'd have to spend the evening doing. He sighed, and reached into the pocket of his lab coat, the one he always wore around the Tower. It was the easiest way to identify what level of the hierarchy you were in. If you weren't a manager, you were permanently wearing a lab-coat, even if you didn't work with anything that required you to protect your clothing. Ianto's lab coat was plain, unadorned by coloured piping, as the specialists were. Just another one of the faceless masses.
Ianto privately thought that the reason behind the dress code was because someone in Personnel had a white-coat fetish, and wondered if it would help getting his timesheets processed faster if he turned up in the office one day wearing nothing but a lab coat. Lisa, doubtless, wouldn't approve.
Thinking of Lisa...
He pulled his mobile out of his pocket, and thumbed through the contacts until he found Lisa's name. He leant against the wall as it rang. She'd be at home, he knew, her day having finished hours earlier.
“'lo.” She sounded cheerful, if a little out of breath.
“It's Ianto,” he said, unnecessarily. His name had doubtlessly come up on her phone as soon as he'd rung.
“Hello, babe. Still at work?”
“Unfortunately,” he said, glancing down the hallway. Making personal calls during work hours wasn't forbidden, as such, but it wasn't a good idea to get caught doing it. “Shouldn't be more than another couple of hours, though.”
“Oh,” Lisa said, breezily, “Don't hurry on my account.”
“You're not having an affair and trying to keep me out of the house,” he said, mock-threateningly, “Are you?”
Lisa laughed. Her voice, coming down the phoneline, made him feel as warm as if she were standing in the room with him. He always felt just that little bit happier in her presence, even if it was only an electronic version of it. “Oh no, no. And if I were, I'd just wait until you were off on some late night experiment. No. I'm cleaning.”
He blinked. “The house was spotless when I left this morning. What did you do?”
“Nothing!” She protested, though she sounded nervous. “I just thought it could be cleaner.”
That sounded somehow ominous. “Lisa...” he started.
“You should get back to work. Doctor Swan, isn't it? Total bitch that one. Work hard, my dear. I'll see you later.” And with a click, the call ended.
He eyed the phone, but realised that if Lisa really was up to something, there was hardly anything to be done now, while he was stuck here in the Docklands and a fair distance from Lisa. He scowled and put his phone away, reaching for the memory card with the notes he'd been making all day. With luck he could get it done quickly and then be home before midnight for once.
He rummaged around his pockets, both his lab coat, and his trousers, and then swore profusely. Somehow he'd managed to go and leave the files back in the interrogation centre.
“Well done that man,” he muttered to himself, as he stomped off towards the lifts, swiping his card viciously in the security scanner, as if to impress upon the device how unhappy he was about having to make the return trip. On the other hand, the alternative was explaining to Doctor Swan why he'd left research materials just 'lying around'.
The observation room was empty when he arrived back, the researchers and observers having long since left. He was expecting the interrogation room to be equally abandoned, but he realised, as he crossed over to where he'd left his laptop, about to retrieve the memory card from where he'd forgotten to unplug it, that Harkness was, in fact, still sitting in the interrogation room, this time on his own.
Ianto hesitated, wondering whether the man had simply been forgotten, and if he should inform one of the guards, but then he realised that the man was sitting calmly, staring at the door. He was waiting for something.
Without quite understanding why, Ianto sat down in the chair he'd been using all day to wait as well. He'd been staring at the man's face all day, via video screens, with occasional glances at the transparent wall, but he hadn't really sat down and examined him. He looked every inch the square-jawed American hero, and Ianto wondered how an American wound up working for such a British-centric Institute. He didn't have the sedentary look of the high ranking execs that frequented the Tower. He looked like a man who was active, and the watchful glint in his eyes was one that Ianto had seen mirrored in the faces of a lot of the field ops, the one who'd been around the longest and gone on the most missions.
He looked at Harkness's hands, where they were resting lightly, palms down on the table and slightly curved so that only the heel of the palm and the fingertips touched the surface. He could see the index finger of the left had absently rubbing the clear plastic surface, and Ianto wondered for a moment whether, if he was an active field agent of some description, his hands had the gun callouses that Lisa had complained about developing, the inevitable result of handling weaponry day in and day out. He imagined the gentle abrasiveness, how it would feel against his own skin-
The door to the interrogation room opened with a bang, and Ianto jumped, pathetically grateful for the interruption from his own thoughts. Fantasising about prisoners now? Maybe he ought to check the rosters and see how much time off he was due.
Harkness hadn't flinched as the door opened, and offered the intruder a sunny smile. “Ah, Yvonne, how nice to see you again.”
Ianto held his breath. Yvonne Hartman, Director of Torchwood London and universally feared by her staff and Whitehall (something which was only made worse by the way she went out of her way to remember everyone's names and exactly what they did at Torchwood), was standing in a pristine business suit, as if it wasn't eight at night, a smile on her face that could only be described as brittle.
Ianto swallowed convulsively. If Hartman caught him watching the prisoner unsupervised, when he was clearly supposed to be elsewhere, and when she had obviously thought he was alone, he'd be lucky if he only vanished into one of the bioresearch facilities. Torchwood was very unforgiving of betrayal.
He should leave. He should leave right now.
He stayed.
“Jack,” she said, and took a seat opposite him. She laced her fingers together in front of her. “I hope you're being treated well.”
Harkness shrugged, the motion causing the hospital gown to flap about. “I could murder a decent cup of coffee. But no one seems to take the time to make coffee properly any more. It's all instant-this and Starbucks-that. True coffee,” he said, “Is an art form.”
“I'll put it into our training schemes,” Yvonne said, dryly. “It's nice to see you've retained your sense of humour.”
“And it's unpleasant to find out that your draconian habits of prisoner incarceration haven't changed,” Harkness said. His smile, Ianto could see, wasn't as bright as he'd first thought. The skin around Harkness's eyes was tight, and he showed just a few too many teeth.
Yvonne spread her hands apologetically. “Come now, Jack. It's standard procedure, you know that.”
“Standard procedure for London,” Harkness corrected.
“Yes, and how are things going out in Cardiff these days?” Yvonne said, “It's you and, what... two other people these days? Three?”
“Enough for the job,” Harkness said.
Cardiff. Ianto realised with a start that they must be talking about Torchwood Three. The other branches weren't discussed much in Torchwood, the Londoner belief that the capital was the centre of the universe stretching to the people who worked there. Four disappeared, Two was a glorified library, and Three was just some monitoring post that absolutely no one talked about.
In retrospect, Ianto should have perhaps wondered why there was such an official reluctance to talk about the sister branches.
“And don't think,” Harkness continued, “That just because I'm locked up in here, you can send another assault team in to take the Hub. You think it was bad with just me? You won't stand a chance against my team.”
Ianto frowned. Another assault team?
“I've no interest in your hole in the ground,” Yvonne said, betraying her distaste for the first time in the conversation. “And since you managed to get Her Majesty on your side, that is an official disinterest as well. If you want to sit on the shores of reality and collect the rubbish that washes up, you can. But,” she leaned forward, “I'd like you to remember that even if we have not always seen eye-to-eye that we do still both work for Queen and Country, and the Torchwood Institute. Surely we can work together better than we can apart.”
Harkness shook his head, looking amused.
Yvonne narrowed her eyes. “What were you doing at Asen Industries?”
Jack leaned forward. “What were your guys doing there?”
Yvonne looked thoughtful. Finally, she seemed to come to a decision and nodded. “We detected a burst of naderon radiation, the sort of energy one normally associates with protonic fusion.”
Harkness frowned. “Protonic fusion.”
“Yes,” Yvonne said, “Which would rather indicate that someone had built and activated a protonic fusion generator, except the people who should have that sort of technology are us. We sent a team. Imagine our surprise when we found a building full of dead bodies, a mysterious alien artefact which is not all that forthcoming about its nature, and a not-so-dead agent.” She smiled. “Which is even less forthcoming about it's nature.”
Harkness smirked and dropped his voice into a seductive purr. “Maybe if you just asked the right questions, in the right way...”
Yvonne tried not to look perturbed, but Ianto, watching carefully unseen, she licked her lips, quickly. From Harkness's satisfied grin, he knew he'd gotten to her as well.
Ianto wasn't even in the room with him, but the man's charisma, or rather, his utter confidence in his irresistibility was overwhelming. He watched as Harkness leaned forward, reaching forward to touch his fingertips to the back of Yvonne's hands, still carefully laced together. “Surely you've heard some stories,” he said, voice now so soft that Ianto had to use the microphones in the interrogation room to listen. “Your predecessor and I, for instance,” he chuckled, “She was lovely. I taught her some things that would amaze you, things that would make your toes curl and your breath quicken. Haven't you ever wondered? Here's a Torchwood legend, complete with a reputation that would make your mother blush, willing and... eager.”
Yvonne's breath had hitched slightly. Harkness leaned in towards her, and Ianto wondered exactly what he'd do if he was about to be subject to seeing a side of Yvonne he'd never wanted to see, but, a heartbeat before their lips touched, Yvonne drew back sharply, her face flushed, and her eyes flashing angrily. “Your reputation does indeed precede you,” she said, icily, and slightly breathless.
Harkness leaned back in his chair, all traces of seduction gone from his face. Instead, he wore a satisfied smirk. “Of course it would,” he said. “I promise it's well earned.”
“No doubt,” Yvonne snapped. Ianto thought he'd never seen her quite so unbalanced. She stood, hands pressed against the tabletop. “I'll have someone escort you to secure quarters,” she said, and smiled unkindly. “I'm afraid your lack of cooperation means I'll be forced to keep you here for a while. Protocol, you understand.”
Jack Harkness watched her go, and after the door closed, he shook his head, and uttered a short laugh, shaking his head ruefully. There was no way to know what he was thinking, and a few moments later, two guards entered the room. They escorted Harkness out, presumably to the cells that lay even deeper underground than the interrogation room.
Ianto sat in the silent observation area for several minutes, gathering his thoughts. He ejected the memory card from his laptop, which had contained not only the days recordings, but the exchange of barbs that had just taken place. It took several moments of staring contemplatively at the card before he realised that Harkness had neatly avoided Yvonne's question about what he'd been doing when the Torchwood investigative team had found him, half dead, on the floor in the Asen building.
It took several more long moments before Ianto could stand up without embarrassing himself. Jack Harkness definitely had an undeniable charisma.
**
Later that night, after finally finishing his compliance report for Doctor Swan, Ianto asked Lisa, “Have you ever heard of Jack Harkness?”
He asked while they were having sex, which was perhaps not the best time to start quizzing her, but it was a thought that had rather been preying on his mind.
Lisa paused in the attentions she had been lavishing on his chest, and looked at him speculatively. She did not, at least, appear offended at his distraction. “I told you,” she said, with a wicked smile that he adored, “No threesomes. Not unless there's tequila involved and it's all about me.”
He couldn't deny the appeal of that thought and was successfully distracted for a few moments, until Lisa straddled him, lowering herself down onto him with a low throated noise and then stilled for a moment, both of them enjoying the sensation.
“Seriously,” he said, “The name's familiar for some reason.”
Lisa looked at him as if to say 'you're thinking about this now?' and started to move. “Probably is,” she said, as she smirked in satisfaction at eliciting a moan from him. “Captain Jack Harkness is the name of the head of Torchwood Three. Don't tell me you're that isolated up in Research.”
Not just some nameless field agent, but the Commander of Torchwood Three, Yvonne's equal, and her apparent nemesis. And yet, for some reason, he'd been found in a London business with an alien artefact, and was refusing to say what he'd been doing there.
Ianto would have questioned her further on the matter of the mysterious Jack Harkness and the Cardiff branch but, really, he did have better things to be getting on with.
**
Some other poor unfortunate was assigned to do compliance logging on Harkness's interrogation, and Ianto couldn't very well object at being given a reprieve from such an undesirable assignment without causing a certain amount of raised eyebrows. So he commiserated appropriately with his replacement, and went to get his day's assignment from Doctor Swan. He was given the task of decrypting an info-block downloaded from Asen's computer system, and he was rather glad of the task, since he could legitimately claim it was being difficult, and work on something else at his station in the labs. His computer terminal was set towards the window, so there was no chance of anyone looking over his shoulders as he hunched over the keyboards, intent on his self-assigned task. Even Doctor Swan grudgingly admitted that he was being “unusually attentive”.
It took him skipping lunch, but by late in the afternoo, he'd finally come up with something he thought would do the job he wanted. He waited until everyone else had gone home, and the only other people in the tower were the night-time security staff and anyone who was running experiments that required 24 hour supervision. He took a moment to contemplate what it was he was about to do. At the very least it would get him fired, but the more likely result, if he was caught, was being 'disappeared' and never heard from again. The rumours always suggested that being officially 'disappeared' was a fate very much worse than death.
He could justify this foolishness as simple curiosity, a mysterious puzzle that would simply not leave him alone. But if it really was that simple, it would have been easy to brush off and dismiss from his mind. Chafing under the necessity to always obey the rules would be another good excuse, but then the consequences of his failure to obey the Institute had been impressed upon him from day one. Then he remembered the look on Harkness's face, the one that had been set in place throughout his interrogations, that look of wariness, and slight fear. Something was going on, and Ianto couldn't help but feel that Yvonne wasn't looking in the right place, and Harkness was keen to make sure that continued to be the case.
Lisa would kill him. It was the last argument he could think of to stop himself.
No, he decided. Lisa would understand. Although, if she ever found out, she would definitely make him suffer.
He carefully shut down his console, and headed for the lifts. He felt his palms sweating as he pressed the call button, waiting impatiently for a lift to arrive. When it opened, and he saw that it wasn't empty, he bit back a curse.
Doctor Miriam Bell looked at him, and smiled vaguely. “Going down, Ianto?”
There was no way he could refuse, but even if he hadn't been sneaking around, about to sacrifice his career and possibly his life, he still wouldn't have wanted to get into a lift with Miriam Bell. She was the head of the Psi Division, and had been the one to lead him through the exercises that every Torchwood employee was required to participate in, the ones designed to unlock any possible psychic potential. She had been the one to teach him how to shield his mind from subversive influence, or detect when someone was trying to deceive using psychic paper. It had been a short course, and nothing painful had come out of it except a rather uncomfortable awareness of how people liked to take their drinks (Lisa's side effects included the ability to correctly identify anyone's favourite colour, a skill which was of little use except as a party trick), but whenever he saw Miriam, he had the memory of her creeping around inside his brain, like tiny, slippery fingers rifling through his brain. It was an eerie sensation, and he was always paranoid that she was trying to read his mind.
And if that was the case at that moment, he was completely screwed.
“Ah yes, please,” he said, uneasily, stepping inside.
Miriam smiled, and pressed the key for the seventh floor. It had been the one he'd been aiming for. He shot her a look that probably showed how freaked out he was feeling, but she just smiled at him again in that way that made him think she was permanently stoned. She leaned back against the wall of the lift, hands in the pockets of her lab coat. Unlike Ianto's plain white affair, it was threaded with green piping, denoting her connection with the medical division. He didn't look at her, but he could feel her eyes burning into the back of his head.
He fought the urge to scratch his scalp.
The lift seemed to be crawling, but eventually it stopped, and the door slid open. Ianto started forward, grateful to be escaping, but he was brought to a sudden sharp halt as Miriam's hand lashed out, and grabbed his wrist. She was startlingly strong. “The seeds you plant, the harvester does not know he shall reap.” Her smile didn't falter, but, after a moment, she blinked, looked slightly puzzled, and glanced at her hand, still holding his arm tightly. “Sorry,” she said, mildly, “Did you say something?”
Ianto stared at her, wide-eyed. He didn't know whether this was something that he should take seriously, or if Miriam was just trying to mess with him. Either way, he thought, he was just a little bit terrified. “Ah... no,” he said, after a long moment.
“Oh,” she let go of his arm. “Must be hearing things. Long day, you know. See you tomorrow, Ianto.” The lift doors slid shut, hiding her from view.
Ianto stared at the closed doors for a long moment. Some days he did rather think he should have listened to his grandfather, and become a banker. Surely there would be less of a chance to be accosted by borderline psychotic co-workers in lifts. He took a deep breath to calm his nerves and turned back to his task.
The room he was looking for was one that was deliberately hard to locate, although it did take up a large portion of the whole seventh floor. It was innocuously labelled “Hard Storage”, and the door was protected by a biometric scanner. The locking system for the Torchwood Tower was supposedly impossible to break. Impossible, of course, unless you happened to have administrative level server access, which Ianto had figured out a way to give himself (with some help from a very pretty young technician who had gone to pieces at the sound of his accent) not long after he'd started working for the Institute. It also required a certain level of coding expertise, but then Torchwood trained its researchers very well.
He pulled a slim needler probe out of his pocket, exactly the sort the investigative team had used on the Asen computer system, and jammed it into the sensor. The probe would deliver a retinal pattern to the scanner, and convince it that it was attached to a real Human, rather than being dead or fake. It would have all fallen over there, given that the scanner would query the central database for authorisation. But the program that Ianto had slaved over all day provided a database entry that matched the retina print the needler was inputting. The real key lay in the corners that the system cut to work with any speed. If the system examined the retinal pattern and then went through the entire personnel records system looking for matches, it would throw up the fake. He'd been forced to copy an existing retinal pattern from the records (Yvonne Hartman's, since Ianto had felt that a particularly amusing choice), not having any other way to get a scan at short notice, and that scan obviously already existed in the database. But that would take a long time, and the security system would be scanning the entire database several times a second with all the people moving around the building. So instead, the scanner looked at the retina print, and the name with it (in this case: Ann Other) and looked to see if there was an Ann Other in the database with that retinal print.
As he'd known it would, the system found a match, and unlocked the door.
He slipped inside silently, and found himself in a room that smelt slightly of sour milk. He grimaced, breathed through his mouth, and walked into the room proper. Stretching off as far as one could see in the poorly lit confines of the room, were shelves upon shelves of files, all neatly stacked and labelled. This was Hard Storage, the place where Torchwood kept documents that were so sensitive they couldn't risk keeping them on the servers for fear of hacking, either from the outside or from employees like Ianto, who wanted more information than Torchwood was willing to provide. Once a week, on a Monday morning, the files were updated, and then the room was left alone for the rest of the week, unless someone desperately needed access to the files. Ianto knew he wouldn't be disturbed.
He started searching through the shelves. They were arranged the same way as the Torchwood database, the cataloguing system almost identical, and so it didn't take him long at all to find what he was looking for.
An innocent looking file sat on the shelves, tucked in front of “Harpie, alien”. The spine read: “Harkness, Jack”.
Ianto swallowed, and pulled the file down from the shelf, grimacing at the weight of it. He'd not come this far not to take a look through. He sat down on the floor and opened the file. Inside were dozens of neat sheets. There was no point trying to take copies of them and get out before he was found. The security system that allowed Hard Storage to remain secure was twofold. Firstly, all the paper inside was made out of a sort of compressed algae that required a constant nutrient factor in the air to prevent it from drying out and immediately becoming dessicated - that was the smell that Ianto had detected on walking into the room. If he tried to walk out with anything, it would crumble to dust in his hands. The second part of the system, the one that prevented Ianto from even taking photos of the pages, was that everything on them was written in psychic ink. Unlike psychic paper, it didn't change depending on what someone wanted to say, but it was dependant on a Human, or at least something with psychic tendencies in its brain, to see anything at all. To cameras or scanners it would just look blank.
That was fine. Ianto didn't need to take any files out of the room. He only wanted to read them, to get a handle on exactly who Jack Harkness was, and try and figure out what was bothering Ianto so much about him.
Four hours later, he finished reading, his eyes burning with fatigue, and his back sending painful spasms all the way up his spine ever time he tried to move. He carefully gathered all the scattered papers together and put them back into their file. He let himself out, an easier affair than getting into the room. He went back upstairs to his lab workstation, and spent the next twenty minutes making sure his clandestine activities were thoroughly erased from the system.
And once that was finished, and he had nothing else to distract him, Ianto thought about what he'd just read, and contemplated getting very, very drunk.
**
The following morning, Ianto turned up to work, having failed to get drunk, unable bring himself to drown his worries in a bottle, and had instead managed to get very little sleep. Thus it was he appeared before Doctor Swan and the research team for the morning briefing looking rumpled and unkempt. It was an unusual look for him, and Swan clearly didn't approve. She frowned at him before she called the meeting to order.
“Alright,” she said as the team settled, quietening them with a sharp gesture. “Presuming you haven't all been sleeping for the last couple of days, you should have something to report.” She pointed a finger at one of the other researchers, a man named Hassan, and arched an eyebrow. “Start talking.”
Hassan was an officious little man, who tended to act like he ran the lab. What was especially galling to his colleagues was the fact that his attitude was matched by his competency. “Yes, right,” Hassan said, tugging on his jacket in a habitual motion. “Well, the most obvious point is that the cube is separated from our reality by some sort of subspace field. We've been trying to ascertain it's mass, but our readings are skewed. It's clear that the cube has off-set its mass into other dimensions.”
Swan frowned thoughtfully. “By how much?”
Hassan cleared his throat. “We're still investigating,” he said.
Swan nodded. “So we don't know. Find out.”
Ianto fought the urge to roll his eyes, masking his expression by taking a large gulp of coffee. As if it was that easy.
“What about the Asen database?” Swan asked, directing her attention to another researcher. “How far along are we with cracking it?”
“Progress is... slow,” Michaela admitted, tugging on one of her plaits nervously. “We've gotten through the first layer of encryption, but there seem to be at least six more layers to hack through before we get any useful data.”
Doctor Swan sighed dramatically. “Wonderful. So when Yvonne Hartman calls me up to her office later and asks about our progress, I can tell her that my research team are apparently a load of nitwits who couldn't find their arses with both hands and a map.”
The mood amongst the assembled researchers was definitely 'sulky'. Ianto hesitated, and glanced around. It seemed no one else was about to speak, so it was a good a time as any to ask.
“The dead bodies,” he started, hesitating when every head in the room suddenly swivelled in his direction, but did his best to ignore it and carry on, “Do we know what happened to them? What killed them, I mean?”
Doctor Swan shrugged. “I have no idea, and I don't much care anyway. It has no bearing on our investigation.”
That, to Ianto, seemed like an especially stupid point of view. “There was an alien artefact surrounded by a lot of dead bodies,” he said, “And we don't think the two are connected.”
Swan sighed impatiently. “Whatever happened hasn't reoccurred. Our own personnel are in no danger. We're interested in the technology and how it works, not what happened to these people.”
“That's not-” That's not right, he wanted to say. Ianto stopped himself. It wasn't right. Not in the slightest. But Swan had no problem with forgetting about all the people who'd died, and pressing her would only bring a lot of trouble down upon his head. He spent the rest of the meeting glaring moodily into his coffee, turning the situation over in his mind.
Why was Swan so convinced that there was no danger to the Torchwood team now studying the artefact?
**
Ianto was on his third coffee break of the morning by eleven o'clock. He genuinely had little reason to hang around the labs. He'd left his terminal chewing through a few code-breaking algorithms, and all he had to do was wait for them to finish. Usually he would have passed the time with the other researchers, helping them out, or perhaps working on one of the personal projects he had on the go. Torchwood was always very willing to encourage independent research, firmly of the opinion that such was the way new and exciting discoveries were made. None of those projects held his interest today, though. He'd stared at the archival indexing solution he'd been working at, on and off, for two months, and then banished it to the electronic ether when it had failed to prove sufficient distraction.
“Jack bloody Harkness,” he heard a female voice, Yvonne's voice, say heatedly.
He'd been wandering around the third floor, where the canteens and break rooms were located, and the voice had come from just around the corner. He peered around the bend in the hallway, and saw Yvonne glowering at a chocolate vending machine. Next to her stood her PA, looking sympathetic.
“That man and his team of social rejects manage to be the bane of my existence even while being trapped in the back end of beyond,” she continued, and gave the machine a good thump with her palm. The vending machine seemed unimpressed by her temper. “Threatening to get Her Majesty involved indeed.”
She was silent for a long moment, and, eventually her PA tentatively asked, “Uh, is there anything you'd like me to sort out, Yvonne?”
Yvonne sighed, sharply. She seemed resigned. “Get his clothes back to him, and release him. Then call the Chief and tell him to make sure that Jack Harkness stays the hell away from Asen Industries. I don't want him getting in the way, whatever it is that he happens to be up to. Have him followed.”
Ianto drew back around the corner as the PA nodded and walked away. An idea came to him, and before he could change his mind, he ran off down the hallway, in the direction of Stores.
**
Alexis Cole, Yvonne Hartman's personal assistant, was used to being treated as a general dogsbody. He regarded it a compensation for working so closely to the heart of Torchwood. Still, he would rather not have been retrieving a prisoner's personal effects, and discharging said prisoner. It was long, boring, and beneath him, and he had better things to do than hang around in the underground interrogation centre all day. So, all things considered, he was rather grateful when a disinterested looking man came up to him in the corridors and said,
“Yvonne wants you back upstairs.”
He was grateful, but felt compelled to disagree for appearances sake. “She asked me to sort some things out...”
“Harkness, right? I'll sort of the paperwork to get rid of him, no worries.” The man nodded to the sealed plastic bag in Alexis's hands. “Those the clothes?”
“Yeah,” Alexis handed them over without a second thought. “Thanks, mate”
“No worries,” the man said again, and started heading in the direction of security, swinging the bag with the clothes inside as he walked, apparently absent-mindedly.
Alexis promptly forgot all about him, and headed back upstairs.
**
II: The Book of Voices