Skypoint

EIGHTEEN

The sudden silence was deafening; the darkness, blinding.

Jack and Gwen threw themselves against the walls. It was an instinctive reaction. Made them a harder target. It was only a half-second later that they both realised that this time, in this building, the walls might not be such a good place to go for cover. They looked at each other from opposite sides of the dark passageway as their eyes grew accustomed to the night light that fell through a window further along.

‘Maybe not,’ said Jack.

Together they stepped away from the walls and went back-to-back, their eyes searching the darkness.

‘What happened?’ Gwen whispered.

‘At a guess, we just lost power.’

As he spoke, emergency strip-lights at the bottom of the walls started to flicker into life, giving the passageway a muted green illumination.

‘Yeuch,’ said Jack. It sounded like he’d just stepped in something.

‘What?’ Gwen hissed.

‘I do not look good in green.’

‘Jack?’ It was Ianto’s voice in his ear. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Where are you, Ianto?’

In the elevator cabin, Ianto ran his eyes down the string of floor numbers.

When the power had gone the lift had lurched to a stop and for a few seconds they had been plunged into total darkness. Andrew had squealed with fright, and Simon told him to grow up. Then a small emergency light had come to life on the ceiling, so Ianto could make out the numbers.

‘I think we’re between the sixth and seventh floors,’ he said at length. ‘That’s just a guess.’

‘Everybody OK?’ asked Jack.

Ianto looked at his cabin mates. Andrew’s eyes behind his red frames looked like they’d been drawn by Chuck Jones, but he was OK. Simon had an arm around the silently heaving shoulders of the fat man that he occasionally called Ryan. The fat man was the only one Ianto worried about: he was already stressed, having seen his wife get pulled through the wall, now he was trapped in a lift between floors. He could have a heart attack. Or he could turn crazy.

‘So far, so good,’ he told Jack.

‘Sing a few campfire songs. We’ll get to you soon as we can.’

Jack turned to Gwen, she had taken a hand-held module from her jacket pocket and was running quickly through screens.

‘What have you got?’ he asked.

‘The SkyPoint blueprints. Besnik Lucca has the whole of the twenty-fifth floor, penthouse suite, roof garden…’

‘Has he got a jacuzzi? I bet he’s got a jacuzzi. Maybe if we get this sorted in double-time…’

‘Doesn’t say anything about a jacuzzi. What it does say is there’s no way up there other than the lifts.’

Jack wiped his mouth with the back of his gun hand, feeling the humour drain out of him. ‘So we can’t reach Tosh while the power’s down and, you know, that gives me a really bad feeling about what’s going on here.’

Jack spoke into his comms again. ‘Owen. Are you there?’

Owen and Toshiko had decided not to wear their comms while they’d been playing Mr and Mrs in case someone had noticed them, but he had taken the earpiece from his pocket when the lights went out. He was there when Jack called him.

‘Here, Jack.’

He was two floors below with the Lloyds. And Ewan had a broken ankle. When the power went they had been hurtling down the concrete steps, in the sudden darkness Ewan had lost his footing and gone down heavily. The emergency lighting on the stairs wasn’t up to a glow-worm’s arse, and together they had managed to help Ewan into the passageway on the eleventh floor, where Owen had quickly examined the injury. There was no way Ewan was going to make it down another twenty turns of the staircase down to the ground.

He told Jack all of this quickly, uncomfortably conscious that Ewan was sitting on the passageway floor with his back against the wall, and that Wendy and Alison were crouched around him. Owen’s eyes flickered from one wall to another. The spacious hallway of the eleventh floor had become strangely and insidiously claustrophobic.

He missed the comforting weight of the automatic in his hand. He wasn’t sure how much good it would be against something that could slip through the atomic structure of a brick wall, but it would have felt good anyway.

‘Listen, Owen, I think Lucca has cut the power. It puts the elevators out of commission and that makes him unreachable.’

‘And traps us with whatever that thing is,’ said Owen.

‘Maybe he’s hoping it will do his work for him,’ Gwen suggested.

‘In the old days in Eastern Europe there were noblemen who gave their enemies a sporting start, then set their hunting dogs on them. But this is the twenty-first century, and I have something that comes through the walls.’

Jack, Gwen, Owen and Ianto all froze. Besnik Lucca had whispered into their ears.

Above them, on the twenty-fifth floor, he stood in the monitor room that showed him the Torchwood team on three different screens, and spoke into the communications device he had found in Toshiko’s purse.

Jack hated the sound of the man in his ear, he felt contaminated by it. Biting down on his anger because he didn’t want to give Lucca the satisfaction of knowing he had got to him, he said, ‘What have you done with our friend?’

Lucca moved unhurriedly away from the monitors and into the lounge. He had Toshiko gagged there, tied to the arms of an armchair, but unhurt.

‘She’s a little tied up right now, but otherwise well,’ Lucca said.

‘What do you want, you bastard?’ Owen demanded.

Toshiko’s eyes followed Lucca around the room as he ambled through it, taking in the treasures of his art collection. Unlike the rest of SkyPoint, the penthouse remained drenched in light – it was clearly fed by a separate power supply.

‘I have a proposal for you, Torchwood. I have no real idea who you are, or who you represent, but I have had the fortune to study some of your equipment and your methods. You are clearly well resourced and also resourceful.’

‘Thanks for the compliments, Lucca,’ Jack scowled, ‘but I’d rather you got to the point.’

‘An Englishman’s home is his castle, don’t they say, Jack? I presume the dictum still stands in Wales. Perhaps not, as the English built their castles here to subjugate the natives.

‘Well, SkyPoint is my castle, my fortress. As perhaps you can imagine, a man in my position has many enemies – those from my homeland that are still looking for me – people here that would take from me what I have worked for.’

‘Don’t you mean stolen and killed for?’ said Gwen.

Lucca ignored her. ‘My castle has many fortifications but they are, as yet, untested. I have every reason to believe that they cannot be breached, but only the determination of a skilled and motivated force can prove that.’

Jack shook his head in disbelief. ‘You want us to prove your security systems? Take a hike, Lucca.’

‘If you can get to her, Toshiko will be waiting for you, unharmed and free to go.’

‘And if we don’t?’ barked Owen.

Lucca shrugged. ‘That won’t concern you. Because you will be dead.’

Jack looked at Gwen. He didn’t want to play Lucca’s game, and he sure as hell didn’t care for his rulebook, but he didn’t see what kind of an option they had.

‘At least put the power back on so that we can get the residents out of the building, Lucca. They don’t have to be a part of this, and there’s still something alien here that’s killing them.’

In his apartment, Lucca shook his head with a sick smile. ‘And if I restore power you have a twenty-second elevator ride to my front door. I doubt that you would get through it, but it would compromise the standards of our experiment. Everyone stays in the building. And, incidentally, you will find that the fire doors and stairwell doors are also locked.’

Gwen lurched towards the doors that led to the concrete emergency steps. They rattled noisily, but wouldn’t budge.

Jack boiled inside. ‘And what makes you think this thing that’s in here with us won’t come and get you?’

Lucca had found his way back into the monitor room now. He watched Jack on the screen. There was no anger in the man’s voice, but as he stood there in that long coat of his, unaware so far that Lucca could see him, there was no disguising the fury he felt in his body.

‘You’re clearly not a gambling man, Jack.’

‘I don’t know, I’ve played some pretty high stakes in the past.’

‘Then you should understand. I’m gambling that you are as good as you think you are. Just that you’re not as good as me.’

Jack found that the smile came to his lips easily. ‘Oh I’m good, Lucca. I’m very good.’

Lucca’s voice came back to him: ‘Then I have no need to wish you luck.’