Chapter 24

"Where is he? Where the hell is he?" a voice demanded loudly from out in the hall. Despite the door to the corridor being closed, the voice could be heard in the lab as clearly as if its owner was in it.

Sitting at the workbench in the lab, the Doctor and Pete Tyler looked at each other and cringed.

"Jackie," they said in unison.

Jackie Tyler burst into the lab, a woman on a mission. She looked as if she had just gotten out of bed and had thrown on the first track suit she could find. Her visitor's ID swung wildly back and forth on a cord around her neck as she crossed the room and beelined straight for her husband. The security guard who had escorted her through the halls entered behind her looking mildly apologetic.

"I'll take it from here," Pete told the guard. "Would you mind unlocking the door on your way out? Mrs. Tyler will need to be able to come and go without people unlocking the door for her all the time."

The guard nodded, and Pete turned to his wife. Jackie immediately began berating him.

"Peter Alan Tyler, where is our daughter?" she demanded, hands on hips. "And why are you in here instead of out there looking for her?"

"Jacks," Pete said, "what are you doing here? Where's Tony?"

"Did you really think I would stay home while my only daughter is missing?" Jackie asked incredulously. "I came as soon as you called and told me. And Tony is with Mrs. McDonald."

"The housekeeper," Pete told the Doctor, who nodded.

"Jackie, everything that can be done is being done," Pete tried to assure her. "We will find her."

Jackie whirled on the Doctor.

"And you…" she said.

Outwardly, the Doctor stood motionless, his face an expressionless mask; inwardly, he cringed again, his stomach a knot of guilt.

"Come 'ere," Jackie said more gently. To his shock, she pulled him into a hug. "Don't you worry. Rose is gonna be alright. She can take care of herself. Do you really think she'd let a little thing like being kidnapped separate the two of you after she just found you again?"

The sound of voices arguing slowly dragged Rose back to consciousness. They sounded far away, and she couldn't tell what they were saying. As she became more aware of her surroundings, she felt a wave of nausea and she realized her head was pounding. She wished the voices would just shut up so she could go back to sleep.

"She's coming to. It's too soon, I'm not ready yet. Give her another dose," said one voice sharply.

"No, it's too dangerous. Too much could kill her." That was someone else, Rose thought.

"Getting squeamish now, are we? Give her another dose," the first voice ordered.

Rose tried to open her eyes. Her vision swam in front of her. Beige, everything looked beige. She closed her eyes tightly and then reopened them, but it didn't help. That slight motion caused a shock of pain to go through her head and the disorientation it caused brought on another wave of nausea. She fought not to be sick. The pounding in her head was threatening to split her head in two. Forcing herself to fall back on her Torchwood training, she knew she needed to figure out where she was and what was going on. Trying to concentrate on what was in front of her, she saw two… people, probably, and probably the ones who had been arguing, but she couldn't make out anything about them, not their genders, not even race or hair color. Across the room, she saw something that looked like a body lying on the floor, but it was so blurry she couldn't be certain.

"Oh, for heaven's sake, give it to me. I'll do it." That was the first voice again.

Rose saw a blur of motion and then felt a cool mist being sprayed in her face. Her vision again faded to black.

"So what are you doing to get my little girl back, Doctor?" Jackie asked him.

The Doctor shook his head. He was sitting at the workbench, head in his hands, having absolutely no idea what he could be doing.

"Jacks, there's nothing the Doctor can do," her husband pointed out. "We know who took her; it's just a matter of finding her at this point."

"Yeah, but why'd she take her?" Jackie wanted to know. "Neither of you have explained that to me."

"Jacks," her husband answered. "Near as we can figure, Rose found out something about Lisa Hallett or this situation, or maybe Lisa just thought she did."

"Yeah, but what?" Jackie asked. "What could have been so important that would have been worth kidnapping Rose over?"

The Doctor's eyes widened and he whirled to stare at her openmouthed. He could have kicked himself. In his worry for Rose, he had been overlooking the obvious. And then for the second time, the Doctor said something he never thought he'd ever say, something he would have sworn he'd never say even once.

"Jackie's right."

Jackie's jaw dropped in amazement and even Pete looked surprised.

"We really don't know why she was taken," he continued. "We still don't know exactly what Hallett's involvement in this is. If I can just figure that out, if I could figure all of this out…" His mind raced as he considered the possibilities. He stood up and began to pace. "Pete, first I need to be able to access the maps showing the locations of the disappearances, you know, the ones from the meeting? And I need a chart that shows all the stars that are missing. And I'll need some equipment." When he described what he wanted to Pete, the other man nodded.

"I'll take you down to the archives. You may see what you need there." Pete got on his mobile and made the arrangements for everything the Doctor had requested. "And get one of those new interactive computer monitors up here, too," he said.

Jackie looked at the Doctor.

"What can I do?" she asked, fully expecting to be told to stay out of the way.

"Quite a lot, actually," the Doctor responded, to Jackie's surprise. "In Rose's office, she has a bulletin board on the wall. Go and get it and bring it up here. Please," he added gently. "I need some inspiration."

As she headed out the door, the Doctor called after her. "And Jackie, is there any chance at a cup of tea?"

In a neighborhood not far from Griffith Street, a stretch of row houses stood, scheduled for destruction. They, and the buildings surrounding them, had been built in a flurry of post-War construction more than a half century earlier and were now more than showing their age. In fact, they had been falling down around the ears of the lower class residents who had lived there most of their lives. The zoning commission of the local estate had recently decided to condemn the whole area, reclassifying it to become part of a modern, upscale shopping and housing complex on the edge of the revitalized district, and the residents had been forcibly relocated to newer housing two miles up the road.

Despite the residents being evicted, one of the row houses, the one on the east end, was not empty. In an upper bedroom, sitting at a table left behind by the previous occupants, Dr. Lisa Hallett typed into a thin laptop computer. An additional one sat on the table near her. Although she currently was working in the Alternative Energies Department at the Torchwood Institute, she had advanced degrees in astrophysics, electrical engineering and computer design and had aided in the design of the upgrade of the computer system at Torchwood. She could take over their computers from anywhere in the world. She didn't even need to hack the system. She only needed to use the backdoor she had built into the system when it had last been redesigned. And there was nothing that Pete Tyler could do about it.

Hallett scoffed. Tyler didn't belong at Torchwood, she thought to herself. He was nothing more than a third-rate political hack whose main claim to fame was selling energy drinks. He was only given the position for the small role he played in fighting the Cybermen. He no more belonged in charge of an organization like Torchwood than her senile old grandmother did. That was no more evident than in his decision to appoint that boyfriend of his daughter's, John Smith, to lead the investigation into the disappearances. What kind of a name was John Smith anyway? Obviously an alias. And he called him 'Doctor', as if there weren't at least a hundred others at Torchwood with multiple doctorates. He was probably no more a doctor than Tyler was.

Lisa Hallett entered the Torchwood computer system for the second time that evening. The first time she had linked into the system to wipe out any records of her sudden departure from Torchwood on the CCTV and to delete records of her drive through London. This time she searched the personnel records for Dr. John Smith. No such employee existed. She searched under 'new hires'. The last employee hired was a nineteen year old girl who worked with the custodial staff in Glasgow, and she had been hired three months earlier. She widened her search to include any and all references to anyone called John Smith in Torchwood history. She also did a Boolean search for anyone who was simply known as 'Doctor' at Torchwood, excluding anyone who used the title with any other name. There was a brief medical file on a John Smith: normal heart rate, lung capacity, a brief notation of the need for corrective lenses. The only other reference to John Smith was a request on the same day to the department in charge of falsifying documents for Torchwood agents to provide identification in the name of John Smith as a Torchwood agent, a Torchwood Institute chief scientist, a Deputy Chief Inspector of the Greater Manchester Police, an aide to Congresswoman Mary Todd, and, oddly, a Professor of Astrophysics at Cambridge. She shook her head. Other than the University identification, these were the types of identification that were typically provided to agents.

There had to be something else.

She read further into the file. At the bottom there was a link to an attached file. She opened it.

"Oh, yes," she whispered. She knew that John Smith was an alias. Why else would Pete Tyler be requesting a birth certificate, a driver's license, and a National Insurance card under Smith's name?

She noticed that one other file, the only result in reference to her search for 'Doctor', had popped on the screen. It was coded Confidential, Restricted, and Top Secret. Although her clearance wasn't that high, that was irrelevant since she wrote the code. She opened the file. As she read, her eyes narrowed. It was a report on an alien called 'the Doctor' and his role in aiding the Preachers in their defeat of the Cybermen.

Her fingertips flew across the keyboard. There was something else for Dr. John N. Smith. A deleted file from Torchwood Three. As if deleting a file would stop her.

It was a medical file. Her eyes widened as she scanned the information in it. She hadn't had any medical training beyond the required first aid training she had received when she joined Torchwood, and she hadn't had any biology since her undergraduate days, but even she knew what human DNA looked like. And what it didn't.

When she had finished, she pulled out the new burner phone she had just purchased and typed in a number that only she knew.

The other number was answered before the end of the first ring.

"We have a problem," Lisa said.

Located in the lower levels of the main building of Torchwood Four, the archives were a long chain of rooms interconnected by a set of corridors and secured by both technology and armed guards. Most people at Torchwood didn't have the clearance to enter the storage area; instead they had to submit requests, either in writing or electronically, to the archive staff to examine any item that had been stored in the archive. In fact, the only place at Torchwood Four that had higher security than the archives was the room that held the dimension cannon.

Pete Tyler, Director of Torchwood, led the way through the secured doors and past the guards, the Doctor closely following him.

"Now what are we doing again?" he asked him.

"Richard Bradford and his crew built some energy collectors," the Doctor answered, "I'm guessing to somehow 'collect' the aliens that have been causing all the disappearances. I'm hoping that there will be some trace of the aliens on them. If there is, and if I can build a strong enough alien detector, I may be able to track them down. I'm hoping that Lisa Hallett's hideout is nearby, and if it is, then maybe we can find Rose."

"That's an awful lot of ifs," Pete said dubiously.

The Doctor shrugged. "At this point, it's our only lead."

"So what exactly do you need?" Pete asked.

"Something that can detect energy at specific wavelengths, specifically at the wavelengths associated with blue light. Or any type of equipment that can detect aliens, of course. I built one, but it wasn't nearly powerful enough, and it wasn't specific to energy creatures." As the Doctor answered, he looked around him. They were walking through an area that held tall, metal utility shelving. Although a number of items were in secured boxes made of a clear, Plexiglas-like material, others were just lying on the shelves out in the open, and all were labeled with a name of the item, a code to identify the item, and a brief description of what it did. He picked up things at random and wasn't surprised to find that most of the time, the description of each device he touched in no way matched the actual function of the item in question.

Rose was right, he thought. Torchwood's storage archive was enormous, and if there was some sort of rhyme or reason to the way things were stored, it wasn't immediately apparent to him. He could be down here weeks and not find what he was looking for. On the other hand, the shelves were filled with both the useful and the completely, utterly useless. There was plenty of the latter on the shelves, but there was enough of the former that he could build what he needed many times over, and just from the items in this one aisle alone. He pointed out several objects to Pete and the other man left to get some staff members to bring the items up to Bradford's lab.

After Pete was gone, the Doctor continued to explore. His eyes widened when he saw one tiny object tucked into a corner on a bottom shelf two aisles over. It only had a numerical code identifying it; evidently Torchwood scientists had either not bothered to try and classify it, or had been unable to. Ironic, of course, because it was easily the most useful, and most powerful, item down here. Taking a look around to make sure no one was watching, he surreptitiously picked up the item and placed it in his pocket.

When the Doctor and Pete Tyler arrived back at Bradford's lab, it was a scene of organized chaos. Technicians were everywhere, setting up what looked like flat screen televisions on every free space on the walls. Others were rolling in something that looked like a large glass window on a stand.

"We're putting up the same setup in here as we had in the conference room," Pete told him as they stood in the doorway. "I thought it might be helpful to view everything on separate computers rather than have to switch between screens."

"Thank you, Pete," the Doctor said gratefully.

"She's my daughter, Doctor," Pete responded. "Let's just get this thing solved."

The Doctor nodded resolutely.

When he walked into the room, the Doctor began coordinating the technicians' efforts like the conductor of a symphony orchestra.

"No, not there," he told one man. "Over there, on that wall. And this should go here." He looked around the room. "From where I'm standing, I want to be able to see everything at a glance."

"Are these computer monitors?" the Doctor asked another of the technicians as the man was struggling to hang one on the wall next to the door to the office.

"Actually, no," was the answer. "These are completely self-contained computers, similar to large scale EPads, only much more powerful. They have touch screens and we are setting them up to be integrated together wirelessly. You will also be able to access the Torchwood main computer network from these."

"Excellent," the Doctor said. "And that?" he asked, pointing to the stand that held the window-like object.

"That is brand new," Pete said, coming up behind him. "We call it a smart board. Half computer, half electronic bulletin board. It's designed to be used to display an extensive amount of data and allow a user to interact with it and manipulate it much more easily than even a touch screen. For example, satellite imaging of London." Pete turned it on and brought up one of the maps of London on the display. The Doctor walked to the other side of the smart board. Through the map, he could see Pete standing on the other side. He walked back to stand next to Pete and work with the board. With just a touch, he was able to rotate the map, zoom into locations he wanted to see, and then withdraw far enough away that all of southern England and Wales could be seen.

"Now I know all of this must seem very primitive to you…" Pete said apologetically.

"Well," the Doctor started, and then saw the look of almost nervousness on Pete's face. "This is perfect," he said. "Just exactly what I need. Thank you."

A young woman rolled in a trolley full of both the equipment from the archive as well as some used and outmoded equipment he had also requested from Pete. "Is this what you want, sir?" she asked.

"Yes! Brilliant," he told her. "Just put the whole trolley next to the workbench. What's your name?"

"Sally," she replied shyly.

"Well, Sally, I'm the Doctor. Just the Doctor. Or Doctor Smith," he corrected himself. "Or just John. But never sir. Alright?"

She nodded and rolled the trolley in place.

Pete Tyler's assistant, Todd Richards, poked his head in the doorway to the lab. "Sir, security at the gate reports that Ianto Jones has just arrived."

"Excellent," Pete responded. "Get him in here."

"Oh, and sir?" Richards continued. "I thought you might want to know. The driver of a lorry belonging to the Burpee's Baby Formula Company accidentally lost control of his vehicle and managed to ram into the Griffith Street substation." Richards tried to hide a grin. "No one was hurt, but the local news is reporting that a quarter of London is without power."

Pete grinned. Maybe things were starting to look up.

"Where do you want this?"

The Doctor turned to see Jackie had returned. She was carefully carrying the small corkboard full of Rose's photos. He gently took it from her hands. As he held it, he allowed himself the luxury of getting lost in his memories for a moment.

Jackie saw him stare at the photos. For just a second, she saw an expression full of both longing and fear cross his face. He looked so lost without her daughter. And suddenly her eyes widened as Jackie realized the truth.

"You're him, aren't you," she said softly, shock evident in her voice. "I mean, you're not just a parallel him or a duplicate of him, you're really, really him, in some sort of weird, alien way."

He laughed wryly at her description of the meta-crisis. It seemed to make as much sense as anything he'd been able to come up with.

"Yeah, Jackie, I am," he said. "I really am him. In a weird, alien way."

"Does Rose know?" she asked, wondering why Rose hadn't said anything.

He shook his head.

"Well, when exactly were you plannin' on tellin' her?" she demanded, hands on hips. "I think she needs to know."

"It's not like I haven't been trying, Jackie," he said defensively.

She shook her finger at him. "You tell her the instant we get her back, or I will," she threatened.

The Doctor inwardly cringed. He couldn't imagine a single scenario where Jackie telling Rose would end well for him. "I will," he promised.

"We're gonna get her back you know, Doctor," Jackie said, trying to convince herself as much as she was him.

"Yes, we are." There was a steely determination in his voice, and Jackie believed him.