Skypoint

FIVE

The blonde with the legs who had earlier that afternoon adjusted her neckline for impact had been replaced in the SkyPoint lobby by a grey-suited concierge who probably weighed the equivalent of a fully loaded catering freezer and had the same kind of build.

Jack had checked the guy out as he and Toshiko sat in the SUV parked outside SkyPoint. They could have got past him, but Jack didn’t see the sense in drawing attention to their presence when there was always going to be a back door.

As back doors went, when they found it, it was probably one of the most secure Jack had ever seen, with the kind of digital lock you normally found on the airlock of a biohazard lab.

‘If I was a burglar, I’d look somewhere else,’ Toshiko muttered as she ran her eye over the lock, then placed a gadget from her messenger bag against it.

The back door sprang open.

‘If the Rift ever closes down, I can see a whole new career for you,’ smiled Jack.

Toshiko glanced at Jack. ‘Yes. Well, I have form, don’t I?’

Jack felt his smile shrivel. He had recruited Toshiko into Torchwood from a UNIT cell that hadn’t been big enough to lie down in after she had stolen classified plans for an experimental weapon. She had been coerced into the theft by terrorists who kidnapped her mother, but the price of springing her from the military jail had included severing contact with her family. He had given Toshiko her freedom, but freedom was a relative concept when you worked for Torchwood.

He led the way into the apartment building and Toshiko followed, closing the door gently behind them. They found an elevator and rode it to the tenth floor.

As the doors opened on the passageway, Toshiko took out another hand-held piece of tech. It flickered with liquid-crystal graphics.

‘No sign of Rift activity,’ she said, as they moved along the passageway and Jack scanned the doors for the apartment Gwen and Rhys had visited earlier that day.

‘What about residual energy?’

‘Nothing showing.’

Jack frowned. ‘Well, I don’t have a whole lot of experience in real estate, but the way I hear it those guys don’t generally walk out on a potential sale.’

‘I can only tell you what my instruments are showing, Jack.’

He nodded, accepting Toshiko’s findings, but not in the least bit comforted by them. They had reached the door they were looking for, and Jack stood aside to let her work her magic on the lock. Moments later, they were inside, the apartment’s movement detectors activating the lights for them.

‘Wow. This is nice,’ Toshiko purred, taking the apartment in.

‘Sure beats my place,’ Jack smiled, moving to the window and looking out across night-lit Cardiff. Home for Jack was little more than a cell in the bowels of the Hub. But then he wasn’t big on home comforts.

He spun away from the window and headed for the master bedroom. ‘Gwen said the guy vanished from the en suite bathroom, right?’

Toshiko followed, just two steps behind and reached the bedroom as Jack dived onto the massive bed in there like a big kid.

‘Now this is something I could use,’ he grinned.

Toshiko smiled. Jack was a big kid sometimes, all right, but he didn’t play kids’ games. She bet he could come up with some pretty interesting and enjoyable ways to use the bed.

For a nano-second she wondered if he was about to invite her to try out a couple, and she wondered if she would agree. Then he was off the bed, and springing towards the bathroom where the estate agent had vanished.

‘No obvious escape routes,’ he said, running his eyes over the stylish slate and granite. ‘Apart from the obvious,’ as he looked at the toilet.

He raised the seat and glanced into the bowl. ‘Nope. Nothing here.’

Toshiko ran her instrument around the bathroom. Again, the graphics gave no indication of Rift activity.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ she said. ‘People just don’t disappear.’

‘Actually people disappear all the time, Tosh. But there’s always a reason for it.’

‘Well the reason for this can’t be the Rift.’ She stowed her kit in the messenger bag.

‘So what do you suggest?’

‘There are possibilities. Teleportation.’

‘And who would want to teleport an estate agent?’

‘OK, then… Maybe he was never here.’

‘Gwen and Rhys imagined him? You’re going to have to try harder than that,’ Jack smiled as he headed back into the bedroom.

Toshiko followed him. ‘I’m just going through the logical-’

She didn’t get any further. The sight of the concierge built like an industrial freezer stopped her.

He was standing in the bedroom, waiting for them.

‘What are you doing in here?’ the concierge asked with a voice that sounded like ice cubes being crushed.

Jack shrugged and gave the industrial freezer guy one of his smiles. ‘Looking for an apartment.’

The smile didn’t work, neither did the answer. The concierge looked at Jack with steel grey eyes that had about as much life in them as a mortuary slab.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

Toshiko noticed a thin curled wire that fed upwards from the concierge’s collar into an earpiece. She decided that the questions were coming from someplace else. He obviously didn’t draw his pay cheque on his intellectual qualities.

Jack gave the guy another smile. Not the high-beam dazzle-and-run smile; this one was lower intensity, the kind that drew you in and suckered you. Jack had a million smiles. One time, somewhere, Jack had been some sort of con man. She guessed that was how he came by the Smiles.

As he smiled at the industrial freezer guy, he also moved towards him, his hands opening wide in a gesture of coming clean. His voice came down a little, like a guy with something to admit, guy-to-guy.

‘Thing is,’ Jack was telling the concierge, ‘my girlfriend and me, we have this thing. About doing it in show homes. You get me?’

The concierge looked from Jack to Toshiko.

Toshiko tried her best not to look shocked by Jack’s suggestion. And she saw the slightest kink of a smile on the concierge’s thin lips. It didn’t make him look any more friendly.

‘I’m telling you, we’ve done it everywhere. Not just show homes, either. A couple of times we’ve let people selling their house show us around then asked for a few minutes alone just to talk it over, you know? And…’ Jack gave the concierge a friendly nudge.

‘So this place… well, this is like the Mile High Club for us. Anyway, we’re done now, so we’ll get off the premises. OK?’

Jack started to head for the door, but the concierge dropped one big hand on his shoulder.

‘No. You’re coming with me.’

‘Look,’ Toshiko said, ‘there’s no need to involve the police. We’ll just leave quietly.’

The concierge looked at her with his mortuary steel eyes and she knew he wasn’t about to involve the police anyway.

‘You’re coming with me,’ he said again.

‘Whatever you say,’ Jack told him, and took Toshiko’s hand, playing the boyfriend. ‘Come on, babe.’

Toshiko shot him a glance – babe?! – and Jack felt the concierge’s hand between his shoulder blades push him towards the door.

As he and Toshiko stepped through it, the bedroom door slammed shut behind them with a sound like a gunshot.

Jack and Toshiko spun around.

The door trembled on its hinges for a moment, as if someone on the other side were hammering and kicking on it.

But there was no sound.

And then the trembling stopped. Toshiko and Jack looked at each other.

Jack drew the Webley service revolver from his belt.

Toshiko pulled the Glock automatic from the shoulder holster hidden beneath her jacket. At the same time, she removed the Rift detector from her bag.

Jack threw her a glance. Her eyes told him she was ready. His hand twisted the door handle. And together they stepped back into the bedroom.

The empty bedroom.

Toshiko checked the bathroom, and Jack checked the dressing area. But there was no sign of the freezer-sized concierge. And there was nothing registering on Toshiko’s equipment.

‘I say we get out of here,’ said Jack.

And they did.

And in his penthouse Besnik Lucca watched it all.