28.05.2009

Two days of meetings flew by, down in the depths of Angel City. So far underground, with no natural connection to the passage of time and scant connection to the outside world, it was easy to get dragged along and caught up in the whirlwind of ideas and plans. People came and went, popping from one group to another with updates, drawing together the different threads into something that was starting to look like a cohesive structure for the development and defence of their planet. The Shadow Proclamation's guidelines were pored over in detail, idealised models from other planets both real and fictional proposed, amended, discarded and merged. People worked on the things they were interested in and knowledgeable about, slept and ate when they needed to, threw ideas into the mix whenever they occurred. It was, strangely, the most productive couple of days Ianto had ever had.

It helped that he'd barely thought about Jack, as much as that admission hurt to admit.

They'd just finished off a marathon session about the spread of social networks and the opportunities and challenges they presented when one of the Angel City resident researchers edged her way into the room. Some of the residents had been bussed in from other locations to do their stint in the desert, but many of the researchers were shy, nervous types who weren't at all happy with their secluded world being filled suddenly by this many egos. They were the sort of people who were offered a job in a secret underground laboratory miles from civilisation and went "Sign me right up". The one who'd been delegated to interrupt the meeting, and looked like she would rather be anywhere else on the planet, had a sheet of paper clutched tightly in one hand.

"Director Jones?" she asked, in a voice that was far more confident than her body language would have suggested. "Fax for you sir."

He was young enough that he had literally never had someone say that to him, and he realised that he actually had no idea what receiving a fax entailed. She offered him the sheet of paper, though, and then scuttled off back to her research whilst he read it and groaned. "John Hart sighted in Las Vegas. Requesting advice on how to proceed."

"Oh... fuck," he muttered. Just what he needed. There was no way he could coordinate a response from Angel City, that was the whole point of the place. "Do excuse me," he said as he got to his feet, "I need to deal with this. Somehow."

The security facility at the very entrance to the complex was where all communication, such as it was, flowed in and out of the city. There was a cluster of guards there waiting for him with grim expressions. "You here about John Hart, Sir?"

"Unfortunately so." He skimmed the fax again and found that it was still irritatingly devoid of anything useful. "Do we have any more information on him?"

"Some chatter on the radio, but nothing much. They've requested your backup at the last on the outskirts on the city. We're ready to go if you are."

"You can arm me on the go? Good. Can someone sent a message back to Analyn Craig, tell her that I'm dealing with this and she's to take my place in the negotiations." He thought through his usual arsenal and decided there was nothing that they couldn't supply him with. "Let's go."

# # #

The Liberty Towers base on the outskirts of Las Vegas was more like what he was used to, squat breezeblock huts hunkered down in the dusty scrub surrounded by a chainlink fence and bordered on one side by a sex shop and on the other by a run down car repair place. It was just far enough from the junction for it to go mostly unnoticed, whilst close enough to be convenient. The houses ran out a few hundred yards down the road, although there were signs of development that suggested that soon enough the base would have the same problem that Torchwood were having in Cardiff. The city was sprawling, uncontrolled, into the desert.

A scrawny dog sloped across the empty car park of the sex shop and sat down beside the fence to scratch itself, knowing full well that the guard who came to open the gate would give it a scratch behind its ears and fill up the water bowl at the side of the road.

The facility was one of the rapid response ones, just a command room and armoury with two cells at the back in the style of a wild west sherrif's office. There was a flurry of activity in there and a mish mash of uniforms, from a couple of burly security guards to a police officer and plenty of hunting store camouflage suits. Like many bases of its kind across the world but particularly in America, the core team here was only a handful of people who relied on a well armed militia of locals who'd crossed paths with weird shit and lived to tell the tale. Despite their evident preparation, Ianto was Torchwood through and through and uncomfortable with having what he thought of as civilians being the ones standing between the world and certain doom. Not that Torchwood had been doing a very good job of that lately.

The Liberty Towers captain in charge of operations was the calm in the sea of chaos. He greeted Ianto with a firm handshake and drew him through to the map pinned up on the board. There were a scatter of brightly coloured drawing pins across it already, perhaps relating to an ongoing case, and a big one just to the left of the centre that held a post-it note in place. "Director Jones, glad to have you on board for this one. I'm Captain Galbraith, been with Liberty Towers ten years. I understand you've crossed paths with this guy before?"

"Twice, which is two times too many." He studied the map and gestured at the big pin. "Is that him?"

"That's him. One of my girls is a croupier there, recognised him from the warrant. Called it in but we couldn't even get a good picture of him. Figured it was worth a look and sure enough, there he is. Bold as brass." He huffed. "You reckon he's showing off?"

"Yep. If I were a gambling man, I'd put money on his plan being to push his luck here, see how long he can go before he draws attention to himself, then move on. If we're lucky, he hasn't factored your agent into his plans." He turned around to look back at the team. "It's your patch. Do you have a plan?"

"Pretty simple one, really. Get his attention, then nab him. You know him better than us, what do we get his attention with? High stakes poker? We could throw an illegal boxing match at him, there's one of those going down tonight."

Ianto mused over it. "Go with the boxing match. That gives us time to plan for it. I'm going to go down there and keep an eye on him. First time he came to Cardiff he shot up a bar just for the fun of it. I don't want that happening again."

"Jesus. Yeah, I could live without that on my patch. Is he just some sort of psychopath?"

"Oh, he is entirely some sort of psychopath. He dropped a guy off a roof just because he could." Every eye in the room was turned to him now with an intense focus. Some of them were starting to look nervous. "This is not going to be as simple as you want it to be. He shoots first and asks questions later, so you're going to have to do the same. We arrest if we can, but the second he puts anyone's life in danger you have full authority to take him out. He has killed before and will kill again. Our one advantage is that he's a show off who loves an audience, and the audience he wants isn't in the USA. We're going to have to let him play his games if we're going to trap him."

Captain Galbraith tapped his finger on the map on the wall. "They're in the Significant Pineapple. Off Strip dive bar and casino about fifteen minutes from here. I want a team out front and back and snipers on the roof. Director Jones, are you sure you want to go in there?"

He smiled grimly. "I'm his ticket to the audience he wants." Their eyes met and he nodded. "I need a stun gun and comms. That's all. Oh, and a lot of heavily armed backup."

"You'll have it all, sir. You'd better have the luck to go with it."

# # #

"I've got line of sight," Ianto murmured into his drink, knowing that Liberty Towers' ridiculously sensitive bugs would pick it up clearly, but also knowing that John Hart might well do too. He let his eyes drift across the crowd around the poker table again with a forced expression of polite curiosity. "He's attracting interest. You got this? I'm going to lose sight of him soon in this crowd."

"We've got him," his handler confirmed. "Just digging into him now, trying to find his fake ID. With any luck we'll be able to get you a hotel room number and then we can move in and wait for him."

He raised an eyebrow. "Tell me more." Two girls in very short dresses with very low necklines walked past him arm in arm, and he watched them go because he could.

"Good cover, sir. The casino register their chips, so they can track them through the system. They know when each chip is used, and how long it's been sitting in someone's pocket before it comes back to them. If I can find out who bought that chip and how, I might be able to track it back to a credit card or name that was also used to book a hotel room for tonight or last night in Las Vegas."

"Might?"

"If it was paid for with cash I've got no card to track, and if it's stolen or he won it on another game I don't have an opening and we'll have to rely on the face recognition, which is hard with him because he seems to distort the cameras."

Ianto nodded to himself. "It'll be his wriststrap. It creates a personal perception filter. Once you know he's there you can't miss him."

"He can only fool the human brain so much. Computers, though, he completely mangle. I only know where he is because he's the only person who doesn't resolve on camera."

He turned back to the bar to order another drink. "Well, that will have to do. He's completely obscured now."

The Singificant Pineapple was a riot of colour and noise. Row upon row of one armed bandits and fruit machines rang and flashed whilst a hoard of single-minded gambling addicts poured ever more money into their bottomless coffers. Waiters and waitresses hurried up and down the rows, bringing people drinks and mountains of junk food. Ianto swayed out of the way of a pile of chicken wings over a foot high that was being delivered to an elderly couple near him. Dressed in matching polo shirts that stretched across broad chests and with the ubiquitous bum bags wrapped around large waists, they stared dead-eyed at the machines in front of them and didn't look away as they reached out for pints of weak, acidic beer or another wing from the massive pile. The pineapple theme was prominent throughout the room. Many of the machines had a tropical theme, as did the entire drinks menu, and although the waitresses weren't dressed like something out of a Barry Mannilow music video, their low cut blouses and the shirts that gaped open over the waiters' bare, sculpted chests were covered with a lurid print of pineapples and palm trees, bright pinks, greens and yellows on a sky blue background that drew all attention from anything the shirts might have hoped to reveal. Ianto's waiter, whose name badge cheerfully proclaimed him to be called Rupert and happy to help, gave him a look that was anything but happy and leaned in. "Can I get you another drink, sir?"

He looked down at the half finished martini he'd been sipping at for the last ten minutes and shook his head. "I'm good, thank you."

"Well, if you need anything. You've got quite the James Bond thing going on there. With the suit and the watch and the martini. You know, there's a James Bond themed bar down the Strip."

"I know. I've been," he lied. "It's not bad."

The waiter eyed him up again. "You dressed to impress anyone?"

Ianto sighed and held up his left hand so that the engagement ring was clearly visible. "I'm here on work."

"Well, can't blame a guy for trying." Rupert shrugged and looked past him. "Your man's on the move again."

"What?"

He raised his eyebrows and nodded towards where Hart had been playing, behind Ianto. "Your friend, or maybe not your friend, has finished his game. Looks like he's moving on to play with the big boys." He shook his head. "Honestly. You think you're the first undercover agent I've seen in here? We get all sorts. You want to try Pablo's if you lose him. All the big players end up there if they're not careful, and he's anything but careful."

Ianto slid a large tip across the bar with his card. "Call me if he comes back."

"And what if he doesn't?"

"Then don't. Honestly kid, you do not want to know what's about to go down." He got up from the bar and left his drink behind. He'd spent too long giving Hart the head start, and his only real hope was his handler on the comms. "Any luck?"

The device crackled back into life. "He's waiting in the main foyer," she told him. "Looks like they're waiting on a taxi or something. Turn left as you come out of the hall and there's a service corridor three doors down. It comes out onto the street and into the foyer behind the counter. I'll make sure the doors are open for you."

"You're a star."

He strolled through the hall with his hands in his pockets, one of them toying with the compact stunning device he'd chosen for the mission. Even in Vegas, a gun would have made him more noticeable than he wanted, although now it came to the crunch he found he missed the opportunity to just put a bullet straight between Hart's eyes. That wasn't how they were going to do this, though. He reached the door and just kept going, like he was meant to be there. "I'm in."

"Good. Go straight to the end. The extraction team are on their way to join you. I'll keep him on camera."

Now he was out of sight, he picked up speed and hurried down the corridor. His footsteps rang on the tiled floor echoed off the stark white walls, and behind the wall he could still hear the cacophony of the casino and, distantly, the clash of crockery and shouting from the kitchens. He passed a door on his left that led back into the hall, and had nearly reached the door that led into the lobby when it opened and Hart stepped out. Ianto wrenched his weapon out of his pocket, but before he'd even brought it up to aim his earpiece let out a piercing whine that caused pain to lance through him and make light flash behind his eyes. He felt his arm being wrenched up behind his back and he was forced to his knees. "Eyecandy," John crowed with glee, lips almost pressed to Ianto's ear. "Nice of you to join me on my little holiday. I was hoping you could."

"Oh fuck."

He chuckled. "If we had time, I'd consider it. But as it is..." He tangled his fingers in Ianto's hair and yanked his head backwards, exposing the line of his throat. "We've got places to be."

Ianto tried to growl out a threat, but before he could formulate one that didn't sound hopelessly toothless or impossible, John had leaned down and kissed him hard. He gasped and tried to push him away, only to have Hart push him to the ground and start laughing. "Get away from me," he snarled.

"Oh, I will soon enough." He watched Ianto for a moment longer and then reached down to pull out his ear piece, despite Ianto's increasingly cumbersome attempts to stop him. "Places to be, pretty boy," he said, as he dropped the earpiece on the floor and crushed it under his boot.

The poison had spread through Ianto like wildfire, and by the time Hart bent down to pick him up, he couldn't move a muscle. The vortex manipulator ripped them away from the corridor to a hotel room, where Hart threw him onto the bed. Neutral walls with an artsy but anonymous photo of the Strip gave him no hint of where he was, and before he could hope to get a clue from the scant view outside the window, Hart had tipped his head to face the other way almost gently. Now he could see white bedding, a beige carpet, and more off-white walls.

"I can think of a dozen things we could do now," he said, stroking a finger down Ianto's cheek. "But I have places to be, people to con. Maybe if you're still alive when we come back, we can have some fun. What do you say?" He paused as if to let Ianto comment, but all he could do was glare at the wall. "Oh, that's right. You don't get a say, do you?" He patted Ianto's cheek. "I didn't use the full strength one, so you've got a few hours before the poison really starts to do permanent damage to your internal organs. We can have our fun later."

He cuffed Ianto's hands behind his back, settling them at a painfully uncomfortable angle, and dropped the key onto the bed next to his face. "There you go. See if you can pull off a miraculous escape."

Ianto managed to wait until Hart had left before the tears started to fall.