LOVE

EIGHT

"Are you sure, Rhys," Ianto was asking, "that you're not wrong? That Gwen isn't home? That maybe you missed her somehow? You know, like two ships passing in the night? Or perhaps she went to visit a friend at the spur of the moment. Or…?"

Rhys shook his head adamantly. "Come on, Ianto, you know Gwen better than that. If she said she was on her way home that's where she'd go, no question about it. And no, there's no way she could be back at the flat now without us knowing. After all, I left her a note to call me," he pulled out his mobile and waved it through the air. "And she's not phoned, has she?"

"No… no she hasn't," Ianto tried to keep his voice calm in light of Rhys' understandably increasing level of agitation. He walked around to the back of Gwen's desk, rolled the chair out of the way and rifled through the papers that were piled in neat little stacks on the workspace's surface. He spread out the documents and glanced at each one as Rhys looked on.

"Well, I don't see anything here that is helpful," the Welshman eventually acknowledged with a sigh. "There's nothing out of the ordinary, just the usual boring invoices and requisitions and expense accounts and field reports." He pulled open one of the desk drawers, took out a remote and pointed it at the big-screen monitor on the wall. The display flashed to life, "Let's have a look at the CCTV shall we?"

Ianto proceeded to click through a couple of menus. "We'll start the feed at 7 a.m. yesterday morning when I got here and opened the facility." He fast forwarded the video, accompanying it with a running commentary, "And there's Gwen coming in around 8:15, as usual." The two men watched as Gwen made a few phone calls, spent some time on her computer, and then walked out of the office. "So far everything appears typical," Ianto's narration continued. "Gwen then left the building around 10 a.m. and got back a little after 1 p.m. At 2:30 p.m. I walked into her office and sat down and we talked until about 3:15 p.m. At that point she sent me out on an assignment that would take me away from Torchwood for the remainder of the day. This is normal protocol. I got home a little after 9 p.m., checked my email, had dinner, took a shower, watched some television and went to bed."

Ianto paused the video and looked at Rhys, "After I left the Hub at 3:15 p.m. Gwen was alone and on her own. I had no further contact with her – there was no reason to have any further contact with her – for the remainder of the day. Did you talk with her?"

"You mean other than when she phoned me to say she was coming home? No."

"Was your one exchange with her normal?"

Rhys frowned, "As normal as ever. The conversation lasted all of thirty seconds, if that. Like I told you, she said, 'I'm coming home. Do you want anything?' and I said, 'No, thanks. See you soon. Bye!' and that was it."

Ianto nodded thoughtfully and resumed the video, again fast forwarding it as he once more began his attendant narrative. "So after I left she spent quite a lot of time shuffling paper. She got up once, and then a second time and left her office but came back fairly quickly in both instances with coffee. Then she spent some time on the computer interspersed with a number of phone calls. It looks like maybe she made half-a-dozen outgoing calls, I haven't seen any incoming, but again that's not particularly abnormal. Around 10:30 p.m. she logged off her computer, organized her desk, stacked the paperwork into neat piles, and wrote herself a couple of post-it notes which…" the Welshman glanced around the desk and shuffled through a few of the documents, "still seem to be in place. Then just before 11 p.m. she made another phone call. I suspect this was her call home to you. Do you concur?"

Rhys nodded but said nothing.

Now Ianto slowed the video to normal speed. "Okay, so now here we are. You're right; the call is a short one. She puts the phone down, pushes her chair back and looks around. And then…" With this the narration stopped as the two men watched Gwen stand up, slowly walk to the secure storage locker, enter the safe's combination, open the outer doors, and crouch down so that her face was level with the compartment located in the lower left-hand corner of the unit.

"Oh my God," Rhys whispered. "What in the hell is she doing?"

Ianto was wondering the same thing and about to respond to Rhys' question when the video went dark. "Huh?" he said instead.

"What happened?" asked Rhys.

The Welshman pressed a few buttons on the remote, reversed the video and then played it again, to the same distressing result, "I probably don't have to tell you this but it looks like we lost the feed," he muttered. He spent a few more minutes trying several other cameras; but the effect was always the same no matter which angle. Ianto shook his head, looking more and more miserable as he fast forwarded the fifth or sixth feed to approximately 11:03 p.m. on the previous evening and was met by nothing but black.

"Well this can't be good," Rhys commented; his voice sounding very worried indeed.

"You have a penchant for understatement as well as a way with words." Ianto pulled out his cell phone and started punching in a number.

"What are you doing now?"

"Shush, Rhys. I'm calling Martha."

There was a few seconds wait before Martha Jones picked up the phone. The conversation was exceedingly brief. "Martha, this is Ianto. Gwen is MIA and I suspect Gray may be on the loose. I need you to call The Doctor and Jack on that magic phone of yours. Advise them we request their immediate presence here in Cardiff." Without a further word Ianto cut off the call and turned to look at Rhys. He paused for the better part of a minute before revealing his thoughts, his face grim. "I have a bad feeling about this and if what I think happened actually has happened, I'm not overly anxious to deal with it in the absence of adequate reinforcements…"

He was interrupted by his mobile ringing, "Jones here," he said when he answered. "Yes, hello Martha. What? You're kidding! Okay…" There was a delay as he listened carefully to whatever it was Martha was saying; then he shook his head. "No, you know protocol. For now you must stay where you are, but I need you to keep your eyes and ears open, okay? Go ahead and poke around all you want, but just be careful, you understand full well what it is we might be up against."

Again he rang off the call and looked at Rhys. The latter shook his head, "Well, why not bring in Martha and Mickey?"

Ianto sighed, "Other than the fact they've both been seconded to UNIT, you know the answer to that already. It's because we have strict rules of procedure in place. When one of us has been compromised or co-opted – and I'm sorry Rhys but Gwen's behavior on the video is worrying to say the least, and her apparent disappearance is of tremendous concern – then the team is required to geographically disperse itself if it is not already so separated. That way we don't present a convenient single target. But hey, that's not the bad news… the bad news is that Martha didn't get through – she got The Doctor's voicemail instead. He must be away from the cell phone she gave him. So she left a message…" He glanced around the office angrily, "Damn it!" he frowned. "It is a fine mess Jack has gotten us into. And where the hell is he?"

This time it was Rhys' turn to play the cool, composed one. "So what's next, boss?"

"Well…" Ianto's brain was working furiously, weighing options and evaluating strategies. "Jack occasionally invokes an aphorism that I've never forgotten. Sometimes if you find yourself in a threatening situation like this, the thing to do is start a fight – start a fight, even if you do not know how you are going to win it, because it is only when a fight is on, and everything is in motion, that you can hope to see your way through."

The young man nodded to himself, a plan slowly forming in his mind. "In other words, Rhys, you have to start a war to discover how to be victorious. I have a couple of ideas how to get Gray's attention. But first, we need to go down to the armory and get ourselves weaponed-up, because if we do manage to pique Gray's interest, I'm thinking things are going to get real ugly in a big hurry."

-00-

They say to love is to bury
those demons from which we all hide.
Margo and Michael Timmins