Torchwood: The Men Who Sold The World Read Free Page B

this.
    The sound of crying intruded on his thoughts. In the corner of the room, huddled and afraid, sat a young Bahamian girl.
    Rex holstered his gun, and dropped the pimp’s switchblade into his jacket pocket. He yanked a blanket off the bed and walked over to the girl. He draped the blanket around her, wrapping it several times to try and cover her tiny body.
    ‘It’s going to be OK,’ he said to her. Though hewas 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