Are There Grapes in Your Glove-box?

"Jack?"

"Yep?" Jack clicks the comms onto loudspeaker for the PC's benefit. It's nice to be considered for once, Andy thinks. "How's the stake-out going?"

"Wonderfully. Where are you?"

"In a small room filled with crates of a drug that is outlawed on at least sixty planets, is used for lethal injections on two, and forms the main food source on Amaridnak's second moon. Very funny people there; I went once a…"

Andy is glad that Ianto cuts through what is doubtless going to become one of the Captain's long, painfully embarrassing (for his listeners) reminiscences. "Come out soon and find us. Front entrance is best."

Andy watches Jack scratch his head. He doesn't have much else to do. Tosh and Owen are busy cataloguing drug sachets, and he's feeling surplus, as usual. Why did he ever let Torchwood to take over the first proper case he's had in weeks? He'd be more use on the stake-out team, but he's stuck up here in a room full of alien narcotics overhearing top secret conversations instead.

"Are there any grapes in your glove-box?"

Andy pauses, realises this cannot be addressed to him, and wonders if the drugs can be inhaled.

"Nope. Why, are you hungry?"

"Got anything else?"

"I think we have some chocolate bars somewhere. Four. No, five, sorry. Full pack."

"With nuts?"

Andy has a suspicious feeling that it isn't food that's being discussed, but doesn't want to speculate too much on what is. Grapes in a glove-box?

"Of course. My favourite. Oh, and a carrot too."

"A carrot?" Jack echoes Andy's thoughts. Even Tosh and Owen have abandoned their little packets of white powder and are looking round at him now. Andy suppresses a strange urge to blush.

"Er, yes. For Gwen's diet? Jack, I'd better go. Just come out soon."

"Of course. Just give us a few minutes."

"Oh, and Jack?"

"Yep?"

"Don't forget we need more milk."

Jack clicks the earpiece off.

"Protocol 7b?" Owen asks.

"Yep."

"I'm sorry." Andy says amidst the sudden incomprehensible bustle around him, and not really sorry at all. "But what did you mean, 'grapes in the glovebox'?"

Jack is busy peering out of the tiny grimy window trying to catch a glimpse of the alleyway behind the building where they'd parked up. "I was asking whether the SUV had been hijacked."

Oh, well that was obvious. "In code?"

"Not much point just asking." Owen points out in his best two-add-two-is-four voice. "'Cos if the hijackers hear us ask 'have you been hijacked?' then things aren't exactly going to go very well for whoever they've hijacked."

"So grapes in a glove-box means they've been hijacked?"

"Nah, no grapes is hijacked. People'd get suspicious otherwise. Who keeps grapes in their glove-box?"

"Don't they get suspicious anyway?" Andy is definitely bewildered now.

"Hope not, or I'm going to be picking bullets out of people."

"We were a bit drunk when we thought the code words up." Tosh admits, busy with some device or other Andy doesn't know the name of. "Jack, the plans say there's a back exit."

"You and Owen take that route, we'll go round the front and distract them."

"So what was all that stuff about chocolate then?"

"Five nutty chocolate bars is five men with guns."

"Right. And carrots?"

Tosh shrugs. "I think he meant celery." Owen pronounces. "A knife, yeah? And there's some old joke that Tosh and Gwen get held hostage more times than most women go on diets."

"Ok." Andy accepts the stun gun Jack pushes into his hands. "So what your little shopping list actually means is 'help, we're being held hostage by five gunmen, Gwen's got a knife held to her throat again, and I'm being forced to lure you into a trap.'"

"Pretty much, yeah."

Andy feels confident enough to hazard a further guess. "So 'don't forget we're low on milk' means 'please come and save us soon'."

Jack looks back at him scornfully as leaves the room. "Nope. You don't think we do everything in code, do you?"

Andy shakes his head mutely.

"That was just Ianto reminding us we're nearly out of milk."