Pack Animals (17 page)

‘Yes,’ admitted Toshiko, sounding a bit disappointed to have her analysis so comprehensively summarised. ‘I’ve done a deep-dive analysis of the available data. Looked for a possible further link. And I think I found one. Remember this?’ She indicated the alien tech on the table. ‘It was unearthed in the archaeological dig around the motte at Twmpath.’

The device lay on its soft velvet cover. The closer Gwen looked at it, the more the velvet appeared iridescent under the Boardroom lights. Like the lining of a coat her mum used to have. Toshiko cupped the device in her hands and closed her eyes.

‘The usual question, then,’ Owen said. ‘What is that?’

Toshiko raised her hands, like a votive offering. ‘It’s a kind of catalogue.’ The image on the wall-hanging flat-screen smoothly transitioned into a matrix of alien glyphs and images.

‘Monster hotline?’ sniggered Owen.

‘Two large Weevils, please. Make one of them extra spiky,’ Ianto suggested.

The image flickered. ‘Be nice to me,’ said Toshiko quietly. ‘It’s controlled by strong emotions.’

‘Er… find your happy place, Tosh,’ suggested Jack quietly. ‘Put them on the screen, and not on the table.’

Toshiko concentrated. The illustrations on the flat-screen whirled and rearranged themselves. ‘Recognise these?’

‘Hey, the gang’s all here,’ said Jack. ‘Kiroptan, Mahalta, Weevil… ooh, Hoix and Vondrax too, I see. All our boys, and some others to make up numbers.’

The image flickered back to the original display when Toshiko opened her eyes. She lowered the device to the desk. ‘Twmpath Castle is on the northern edge of Rhiwbina. Isn’t that where you said Gareth Portland lived?’

Gwen nodded. ‘Maybe Gareth has a device just like that. Used it as the basis for these cards he’s been creating?’

‘Interesting,’ said Ianto. He’d been shuffling the scattered MonstaQuest pack around on the table. Now the cards were sorted into neat piles. Typical Ianto, thought Gwen. ‘There are more Weevils in this pack than all the other creatures put together.’

Gwen had a thought: ‘Like pawns in chess?’

‘There are thousands of other creatures listed in this catalogue.’ Toshiko held up the squarish device, and its curved edges caught the light in the Boardroom. ‘A whole menagerie. We could barely cope if just one of each kind came through.’

‘An alien zoo,’ said Ianto.

‘With the gates wide open,’ snapped Jack. ‘The predators are escaping. And in Gareth’s hands, they’ve got a season ticket to Cardiff.’

Owen sounded less convinced. ‘C’mon! This is just one guy toying with us, isn’t it? We find him, give him a smack, and confiscate it. He’s stumbled on this bit of tech, found he got more than he bargained for.’

‘Could that explain all these?’ Toshiko had stood up to point at the flat-screen. It showed her original analysis of unexplained deaths across South Wales. ‘The device may bring the creatures through the Rift. But each set of MonstaQuest cards is like a tarot pack. They focus the mind of anyone near a Rift fault line who is enthusiastic, creative, or highly emotional.’

Gwen recalled the games shop owner, and how he’d unwittingly conjured up a fire creature. ‘And when it appears?’

‘The victims reinforce it,’ said Toshiko. ‘Their surprise or horror makes the manifestation corporeal. And deadly.’

‘Like those people on the bus,’ recalled Owen. He looked more worried now.

‘It can’t be just one guy.’ Jack stared at each of them in turn.

Gwen recognised it as the way he commanded their attention, got their respect. Through the urgency of his words and the fierce passion in his eyes when he looked at you, looked into you. Or, in Ianto’s case at the moment, through you. Gwen saw Jack’s gaze falter as it reached the empty suit. Was that confusion or tenderness? Maybe a bit of both.

‘Achenbrite are involved in this, too. They must be. Their operatives disrupted our comms at the mall and during the bus attack. They were on the scene at both the mall and the zoo. And it was their device that injured Ianto.’ He pushed his wheelchair back from the desk. ‘We reconvene here in half an hour. Gimme information, and gimme options.’

Jack was on crutches when they got back to the Boardroom. The metal sticks were propped against his chair. He had his damaged foot up on the desk, and was perusing it with the curiosity of a kid examining a scabby knee. Gwen winced when she saw the savage scoring in the skin of his lower leg. His foot still seemed to be attached only by chunks of raw flesh, like hammered steak.

He lifted the leg back below the desk. ‘Sorry.’

‘You must get used to it.’

‘Never do,’ he said. He tested his forehead with an exploratory finger, and checked his reflection in the shiny surface of the desk.

Jack settled himself into his seat between Owen and Toshiko. On the opposite side of the desk, Ianto’s suit made itself comfortable in the chair next to Gwen. The suit had brought a plate of freshly made sandwiches on wholemeal bread. ‘My special tuna mix,’ he murmured to Gwen.

Across the table, Jack was ready for the meeting to start. ‘All right. Tell me about Achenbrite.’

Toshiko sat up a little straighter in her chair, if that were possible. ‘Achenbrite is a shell company that sprang into new life over the past year. Someone’s done a good job erasing records and back-ups from Companies House. I did manage to pull a few details through a back door in the Compliance Unit in Natgarw, because one of the investing companies received a late-filing penalty. Parker Plastics, registered in Plas Hendre, and owned by the late Henry John Parker. Better known to us when he was alive as an enthusiastic collector of alien ephemera.’

‘That’s telling,’ mused Jack. ‘And now?’

‘No evidence of it manufacturing anything, nor providing services. Not enough history for tracing payroll through HMRC – no VAT, nor NI, no Income or Corporation Tax. They don’t even appear in Yellow Pages.’

Jack clutched his face in mock horror.

Toshiko tapped up the details on the flat-screen. A warehouse complex rotated on the display, a three-dimensional rendering in blue wireframe. Key areas were labelled or highlighted with brighter spots in the image. A translation key filled the lower left of the screen.

‘The Achenbrite facility is a single-storey unit,’ Toshiko explained. ‘Built on a place where there was significant Rift activity in previous years.’

Ianto snorted. ‘Where isn’t, these days?’ The suit of his sleeve was reaching out to the plate of sandwiches, but Toshiko slapped his hand away.

‘Difference is, now there is nothing.’

‘That’s not very likely.’ Jack frowned at the display as though this would disprove it. ‘There’s always some Rift trace around anything in Cardiff.’

‘Like background radiation,’ agreed Toshiko. ‘You could understand it might quiesce…’

‘Quiesce?’ interrupted Jack. ‘Is that even a word, Tosh?’

‘All right, fade away to nothing. Vanish. The complete absence of it makes the factory stick out like a sore thumb. Usually I look for evidence of raised energy levels, not gaps in the field.’ Toshiko flipped the display to an aerial shot of the Achenbrite offices. Three intersecting circles displayed over the top of it, like a Venn diagram. ‘Too regular to be accidental. They’re concealing themselves from detection.’

‘Too perfectly,’ noted Jack. ‘What else?’

‘All the other conventional evidence suggests that it’s empty. It has no apparent power requirements because it’s not connected to the National Grid, and yet you see that there are lights on. So someone’s home. I hacked the Royal Mail, and there’s nothing there either. What kind of business has no post in or out?’

‘Maybe they hate the taste of glue,’ suggested Owen. ‘Or they do everything electronically?’

‘No phones,’ revealed Toshiko. ‘No landlines, no cell signal. But there’s visible activity on-site. Including a daily visit by their MD.’ She displayed a blurred photograph of a woman with long, steel-grey hair. ‘Jennifer Portland.’

‘Have we heard of her?’ asked Gwen.

Toshiko shook her head. ‘No. But you’ve met her son.’ Another grainy picture appeared. A lank-haired young man with high cheekbones. ‘Remember Gareth?’

‘All right!’ Jack had that evangelical look of determination in his eyes now. ‘Now we’ve connected the guy who’s bringing these creatures through the Rift to the people who have recaptured at least two of them. We need to know what’s in that Achenbrite facility.’

‘On the case,’ said Toshiko. ‘I’ve already got into their external-access systems. But everything else in there – cameras, communications, business processes – they’re all on a separate, completely isolated server. Someone has to go in.’

‘They were able to disrupt our comms,’ said Ianto, reaching for a sandwich.

Toshiko slapped his invisible hand away again, and slid the plate away. ‘So it has to be a personal visit. You seem like the ideal candidate.’

‘Riiight!’ grinned Jack. ‘Unless you’ve eaten something, Ianto, because then you’d look like a floating mass of half-digested… what are those?’

‘Ianto’s Special,’ said Gwen.

‘I know that,’ said Jack. ‘But what’s in the sandwiches?’

‘Can’t I even have
one
?’ bleated Ianto. He pondered what Toshiko was suggesting. ‘Wait a minute. You’re suggesting that I walk into that place naked?’

‘I can get you into the building,’ Toshiko explained. ‘Owen just spent his lunchtime dropping computer memory sticks in the Achenbrite car park, and near their entrance doors. Places where they might plausibly have fallen out of people’s pockets. Several staff members came back after lunch and found them. And two people inserted them into their office machines to look for pictures or files that might give them a clue about who owned them.’

Jack was impressed. ‘I’m glad you’re on
our
side.’

‘Of course, they didn’t spot the key-logging software that was automatically being installed on their machines,’ explained Toshiko, clearly pleased with the success of her ruse. ‘So I’ve also captured all their most valuable passwords and cracked their badge access. So while I can’t access their server, I have all the information you’ll need to do that when you’re on-site.’

‘Get yer kit off, Ianto,’ crowed Owen delightedly. ‘You’re going in! Tosh has programmed you into their access system under a false identity. We chose it from our porn names.’

‘Now I’m intrigued,’ said Jack.

‘Name of your first pet plus the name of the street you grew up in,’ Owen continued. ‘I had a dog called Bobby and grew up in Warren Drive, so I’m Bobby Warren. Gwen is Tiggi Locke. And Ianto,’ he concluded with a note of incredulity, ‘is Trevor Swanson.’

Jack roared with laughter.

‘Who the hell calls their pet dog Trevor?’ spluttered Gwen.

Toshiko took a dainty bite from a tuna sandwich in a futile effort to hide her amusement.

‘Come on, Trevor,’ said Jack. ‘Time you were going.’

The suit of clothes started to remove its jacket and tie at the desk. Ianto’s sullen reaction was evident through his body language alone.

SEVENTEEN

Jack said it would be funny to have Ianto drive the SUV to Achenbrite. ‘No, hear me out – the bandages, the sunglasses, the whole Claude Raines shtick.’

‘Too bizarre,’ Gwen told him.

‘Hey, a dead guy drove us to the Pharm—’ Jack began, but Gwen cut him off.

‘Ianto, you’re in the back, I’m up front, Owen you can drive. And you…’ She turned to Jack, still hobbling about on his crutches. ‘You stay right here with Tosh.’

‘Who died and made you Captain?’ complained Jack in a surly tone.

Gwen snatched a crutch off him and carried it away from his office and across to the lift platform. ‘Come and get it, boss.’

Jack didn’t even get as far as the walkway over the pool. He lurched against the rail, gasping and grimacing with pain.

Gwen propped the crutch against the base of the stainless steel tower for him to collect in his own time. She activated the exit lift, which began its ascent to Roald Dahl Plass. As it rose, she balanced by holding on to Ianto’s hairy, invisible forearm like some odd mime act. She could hear Ianto chuckling. Jack’s outraged expression grew smaller.

‘We know that Achenbrite can block our comms,’ Jack shouted up at them. ‘But we don’t know whether they can intercept them. If we’re adopting radio silence for this mission, I don’t want to be stuck here with Tosh.’

‘Thanks, Jack,’ Toshiko called from her workstation.

‘No offence, Tosh. I’ll just be kicking my heels.’

Toshiko pouted at him as she waved farewell to Gwen. ‘Well, your heel, anyway.’

A faint sheen of fine, clinging rain wafted off the Bay and across the Plass as Gwen and Ianto made their way to where Owen was to deliver the SUV. The rain meant there were fewer pedestrians to avoid, but it was still odd to hear the slapping sound of Ianto’s bare feet on the wooden boards.

Under the cover of the bus shelter, Gwen could make out the faint outline of Ianto’s head, shoulders and back from the fine covering of rainwater. A tell-tale patina of his whereabouts. She got him to stand still for a moment and, for want of anything else, slipped off her jacket and wiped his back with the lining. The cold November air chilled her to goose bumps. Gwen could feel Ianto shivering.

‘You poor thing,’ she said. When Owen drew up in the SUV, she banged on the driver’s window and urged him to crank the heating up. ‘We’ll try to park as close as possible to the Achenbrite place without drawing attention to ourselves,’ she told Ianto. ‘No point getting you any more frozen than absolutely necessary.’

The rear door of the SUV opened and closed by itself.

Gwen slipped into the passenger seat and buckled up.

‘Knowing that Owen is driving,’ said Ianto’s voice from behind her, ‘that’s a very wise precaution.’

Gwen laughed softly as she remembered what Rhys had said that same morning. ‘The difference between knowledge and wisdom. That’s one of Jack’s, isn’t it?’

‘Something to do with tomatoes?’ Ianto asked. ‘Yes, that’ll be one of Jack’s. Sounds more profound than it is, so he uses it when he’s trying to con you.’ He buckled himself incongruously into the seatbelt. ‘Ask me in an hour whether walking into the enemy camp naked was a wise decision.’