Torchwood: The Men Who Sold The World (3 page)

‘It’s going to be OK,’ he said to her. Though he
was damned if he knew quite how.

He walked over to a standard lamp that stood in the corner of the room, stuck his head beneath the lampshade and said, ‘As you may have guessed, we have a slight problem.’

‘A slight problem?’ Rex winced at Esther’s slight air of panic in his phone headset. ‘A dead asset, a pimp with concussion and a 12-year old with years of therapy ahead of her?’

‘Less now,’ Rex said.

‘Not to mention a high-class hotel room now in need of a deep clean.’

‘Not that high-class.’

‘I couldn’t afford it, so it’s high-class to me. Luckily, we think the hotel owner wants to be friends with the United States.’

‘Wants paying to let us bug his damn rooms, you mean. Listen I’ll get enough crap today from people way above your pay grade, so if you’ve quite finished?’ He felt slightly guilty at the couple of beats of silence in his ear, but Esther Drummond was easy to dominate and he really wasn’t in the mood.

‘Watch Analysts are people too,’ she said.

Trying to turn it all into a joke, thought Rex, not wanting any suggestion of there being an issue. Next will come the friendly reassurance.

‘This’ll blow over. You’ll be golden boy again soon enough.’

‘Damn right,’ Rex replied with a smile at how easy he found it to predict her. ‘A genius like me can rule the world.’

‘Want to prove it?’

Rex could hear the shift in Esther’s tone. This was going to be good. ‘What have you got for me?’

‘Officially? Not so much. Unofficially?’

Rex sighed. ‘OK, talk to me.’

‘You know Penelope?’

‘Penelope who?’

‘Lupé. She’s worked here for a few years, doesn’t matter. It’s about her husband, Oscar.’

‘This isn’t starting well…’

‘Patience! He was CIA too, S.O.G.’

‘Special Operations? I don’t want to know…’

‘He’s dead.’

‘Not the first, won’t be the last.’

‘He died in a plane crash. A plane he wasn’t scheduled to fly on in fact, wait… I can go one better than that – a plane he
wasn’t
flying on.’

‘That makes a lot of sense.’

‘I’ve sent video to your phone, lifted from the flight-deck camera. Watch it.’

Rex pulled his phone out of his jacket and scrolled through to his email. He double-tapped the video file. The footage was silent, the two pilots going casually about their work, checking readings, flipping switches, chatting. All of a sudden, a shadow was cast across the flight deck as something appeared in shot. Squinting at the small screen, Rex could just make out the upper body of a man now hanging in front of the two panicking pilots.

‘What the hell?’

‘Freaky, huh?’ said Esther in his ear.

‘H.A.L.O. jump?’

‘No way. Throw a man at the nosecone of a Boeing cruising at 45,000 feet and he would make a dent, yes, maybe even crack the glass. But he wouldn’t end up embedded in the instrument panel. And he stayed there, right up to when the plane hit the water.’

‘So how did it happen?’

‘Who knows? It’s completely beyond anyone’s best guess. Even if he had been shot through the glass of the windscreen, the loss of pressure would have sucked him straight back out again. Interested?’

‘Intrigued, but what’s it got to do with us? If he died on S.O.G. business, they don’t need me poking around.’

‘Unofficially, his unit’s gone off the map. When the flight dropped out of the sky, we flagged it as possible terrorist action. S.O.G.’s not talking – nothing new there – but in the meantime Penelope’s left wondering what happened to her husband and the 450 passengers on flight AA2010.’

‘I sympathise but, still, what business is this of Clandestine?’

‘The S.O.G. unit are still out there and look intent on causing more fatalities.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Penelope had a phone call…’

Mr Wynter wakes to a glorious morning. He steps out onto the front porch. Fresh sun hits old bones, and he thinks it’s like the touch of God. Picking up his copy of the
Washington Times
, he heads back inside to brew coffee. The name on the newspaper
delivery label is not Wynter. But then Mr Wynter is not a man constrained by names.

While the coffee machine percolates, he skims through the leader articles and microwaves a bowl of oatmeal. He eats his oatmeal with syrup. It is an indulgence, but Mr Wynter is a believer in giving in to indulgences. Without indulgence, life can seem endless.

Next door, the volume on the TV is turned up loud and the windows are open. The fat librarian who lives there is watching
Good Morning America
. It feels like George Stephanopoulos is sharing his damned oatmeal. Mr Wynter does not watch the morning news programmes. He knows better. He doesn’t close his own windows either, that would be a concession, and he does not tolerate those anywhere near as much as indulgences.

After breakfast, he does half an hour on the treadmill. Nothing too drastic, a fast walk for a couple of miles. He listens to Benny Goodman loud enough to drown out next door’s TV and imagines a smaller world. A world where, as a black man blows into a trumpet in Carnegie Hall, a dictator invades Poland and plans the eradication of all but his master race. It is a simple world, he thinks. Not his world.

He switches off the treadmill and takes a shower. He looks at his old, old body in the bathroom mirror and remembers when it wasn’t covered in liver spots. He remembers when the skin didn’t hang off him. It looks like it’s melting, pouring off him, like the skin poured off the men in the jungles of Vietnam all those years ago.

He is selecting his clothes for the day, fawn slacks and a cream-coloured shirt, when the phone rings. He answers it, giving an irritated glance through his bedroom window towards next door where the TV is as loud as ever. He can see the big plasma screen flickering through the net drapes that hang in the fat librarian’s windows. It’s advertising Japanese motor cars.

‘Yes.’

‘Mr Wynter, I’m afraid we have a situation.’

Wynter listens for a few minutes and then replaces the receiver with a polite ‘thank you’.

He puts away his fawn slacks and cream shirt. Today will not be the day he had expected. He takes out his light-grey three-piece, a tie and a white cotton shirt. Today is a day for uniform. It will also be a day for travelling, so he packs his small black holdall with a change of clothes (an identical change of clothes so really no change at all) and his washbag.

Next door, the TV continues to shout while Mr Wynter selects a book to take on his journey. He picks
Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad. He has read it many times, but it fits neatly into his jacket pocket.

He calls for a car to take him to the airport. The car will be fifteen minutes.

He sits at his kitchen table, the sound of next door’s TV still seeping through, even though he has now closed and locked his windows in preparation to leave.

He checks his watch. Still ten minutes until the car arrives.

He gets up, takes a small parcel from his holdall and slips it into his pocket. He leaves his holdall on the kitchen table and walks next door.

He knocks on the door. Loudly because of the goddamned TV.

‘Yes?’ The fat librarian answers, scooting her cat out of the way with a slippered foot. She pulls her house coat tighter (the belt bisecting her fat like string around a joint of beef) and looks at him suspiciously. But not that suspiciously, because he is just an old man in a grey suit.

‘I’m from next door,’ says Mr Wynter, cradling his left arm and wincing as if in pain. ‘I fell. I think I broke my arm.’

The fat librarian’s face wobbles into life. ‘Oh, you poor thing!’

‘I wondered if I might be able to use your phone? Mine seems to be dead.’ Mr Wynter offers a pained smile. ‘Knowing me, I forgot to pay the bill. My memory’s not what it was.’

‘Of course, honey,’ says the fat librarian. ‘Come in, come in.’

Mr Wynter does so, reaching behind him to close the door. As she walks over towards the phone, he reaches into his jacket pocket and opens the small case he has put there. Pulling out a syringe, he plunges the needle into her fat ass and steps back as she spins around flailing those thick arms of hers.

‘What was…’ She falls onto her baby-shit brown carpet, eyes wide and staring.

He doesn’t bother to answer. Just watches as she lies there, the chemical working its way
through her bloodstream. She gives a sudden, spastic thrash, her back arching against the carpet, her house coat falling open to show him the sort of flesh he hasn’t glimpsed for many long years.

Finally she is still. When examined, it will look to all but the deepest of toxicological examinations as if she has died from a heart attack. Mr Wynter pulls on some gloves and turns the TV volume down on the remote. He leaves it at what he considers a sensible level; he is not, after all, an unreasonable man. The cat meows from where it watches him through the uprights of the stair rail. He checks his watch. Still plenty of time. He goes back into the kitchen and searches through the fat librarian’s cupboards until he finds the kibble. He fills the cat’s bowl, replaces the sack of food and lets himself out.

No need to be cruel.

Angelo sat in the long grass and watched the Hernandez House. All the years he had known it – which wasn’t many, but time moves with greater weight for a 12-year-old – it had remained empty. His mother said it had once belonged to a rich family, had been a place of parties and music that had gone on late into the night. Then the revolution had hounded them out and the building became home to crumbling stone, graffiti and splintered window shutters.

It sat in overgrown grounds, surrounded by a wall designed to keep people out but better at encouraging children in. There’s nothing kids love more than a ‘Keep Out’ sign. Of course, people said it was haunted. People of a certain age always did. Whenever he mentioned the place to his grandmother, she would suck on the damp end of her cigar and cross herself. ‘It is a house of devils,’ she would say around fat, blue golf balls of tobacco smoke. ‘To go there is to stain your soul.’ But then Angelo’s grandmother thought everything stained
your soul, so Angelo didn’t take her warnings seriously. Nor did he think the Hernandez House was a house of devils. Though
something
had recently taken up residence there.

The night before, Angelo had lain in his bed listening to his grandmother’s TV. She was deaf, so she turned it up loud enough to shake the walls. She liked action movies, so the walls shook a lot.

Despite the TV, he had heard the sound of a truck coming down the track towards the Hernandez House. He knew his grandmother wouldn’t hear it, she was too distracted by the adventures of Vin Diesel or – her favourite – Wesley Snipes. ‘Siempre se apuesta por negro!’ she would cry when she saw one of his movies listed in the TV Guide.

Angelo had got out of bed and peered over the windowsill of his room. The truck was driving slowly down the track. Likely they thought that nobody would see them. Most people thought Angelo’s grandmother’s house was as derelict as the mansion. In truth, she’d just let the place go. There were no other houses around.

Angelo had watched the truck stop outside the gates of the Hernandez House. A man had jumped out, ran to the gates, opened them and then stood back to let the truck drive through. Once clear the man had swung the gates closed and begun to wind a length of chain around the bars to lock them. ‘The way to keep something safe is not to shout about it,’ Angelo had whispered, but knew that this bit of wisdom would be lost on the stranger by the gates. Truth was, a big padlock just told the world that there was something worth stealing.
Tomorrow, he had thought, I’ll see if I can find out what it is.

Now, having spent an hour or so chasing snakes in the grass, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to know. He figured these people were hiding. You wouldn’t live in a place like that unless you didn’t want to be found. That was OK, Angelo often didn’t want to be found either. He wouldn’t tell. But he wouldn’t get too close. Hidden people were usually scared, and scared people could get angry.

Shaeffer sat on the closed lid of the toilet and weighed the phone up in his hand. If Gleason caught him with it, he honestly didn’t know what the man would do. He’d never doubted his commanding officer before. Gleason’s rage was usually pointed squarely towards the enemy. But ‘the enemy’ no longer had the simple definition it used to have.

He tapped on the phone’s screen, scrolling through the photos of Oscar and his wife, Penelope. Pictures of them laughing, kissing, raising their glasses towards the lens. Oscar felt like a spy, looking down on them from the veered perspective of the photographer’s outstretched right hand.

Oscar shouldn’t have kept his phone with him. It was against orders. Shaeffer proved why as he scrolled through the dead man’s life. Everything from his taste in music and TV shows to messages from friends and family. The phone was a window onto its owner. And the longer that Shaeffer looked, the more he realised he hadn’t known Oscar at all. We all hide behind masks, he thought, in this
game more than any other. But if I wasn’t looking at Oscar’s face in these photos, I’d swear this phone belonged to someone else entirely. Someone happy and normal. Someone with Gloria Frigging Estefan on their Favourites playlist.

The phone had been in Oscar’s bag. Gleason had made it Shaeffer’s responsibility to clear away Oscar’s stuff, dumping it over the side of the boat as they sailed away from the scene of the crime.

The scene of the crime… Jesus what had they become?

Shaeffer wasn’t a stranger to moral grey areas. His career had been built on acts he couldn’t comfortably discuss. But however bad it got, however much blood ended up on his hands, he had always been able to convince himself that he was acting for the greater good. That they were the grunts who got their hands dirty so that others could sleep safely at night.

He stared at a photo of Oscar and Penelope, heads pressed together, the familiar shape of Manhattan bridge over her shoulder. They gazed at the camera as a Brooklyn sun warmed their cheeks. Had Oscar ever told Penelope about the things they’d seen and done? About the villages they had left burning in Afghanistan, the bodies they had sent floating down the Hari? No. Shaeffer looked at the smiling face of the woman resting her head against Oscar’s and decided that she knew nothing. People only looked that happy in the company of heroes.