Torchwood: Fanfic: Nothing but the truth
May. 16th, 2021 09:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
m_findlowTitle: Nothing but the truth
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, Ianto
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 3,177 words
Content notes: Spoilers for Big Finish audioplays "The Conspiracy" to "The Torchwood Archive" and minor spoilers for Torchwood book "Pack animals"
Author notes: Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
badly_knitted's prompt "Any, Any, The Illusion Of Truth (Babylon 5 Episode Title)" at fic_promptly
Summary: Jack is faced with an enemy he can't fight.
Jack couldn't recall the last time he'd hated anyone as much as he hated journalist David Brigstocke. The man had been a serial pest trying to get the story on Jack and on Torchwood for the better part of two years. He turned up at all the worst times, trying to lull Jack into giving him something, or just outright accusing Jack of covering up serious instances of alien intervention. Until now he'd had nothing to say that was of any consequence to his readership, but seemingly out of nowhere he'd thrown Jack into the media spotlight with devastating consequences.
Ianto had once kicked Brigstocke up the backside, sending him sprawling face first into the dirt, merely because he'd become annoying to a point where something had to be done about it. Jack hadn't been able to do anything to stop him, sitting there in a wheelchair with half his leg chewed off and still missing from an altercation with a Brackanee which had ruined their date at the zoo. He felt about as helpless as he'd looked, there with a blanket covering the fact that he was missing his foot and half of what it was usually attached to, as the journalist had been berating him with questions he wouldn't answer.
It took a lot for Ianto to get riled up enough to throw a fist at someone, but he must have felt a rush of satisfaction giving him that kick up the backside he so rightly deserved. It probably hadn't hurt that he'd been invisible at the time either - a by product of the alien technology that had so rudely ruined their date - aiding his courage to give the insufferable git what for.
Today though, Jack was the one who wouldn't have hesitated to give the man his best knuckle sandwich, without the bread. He deserved more than a fist. A night locked in a cell with a weevil would have been better, but then that was cruel and unusual punishment for a weevil. BBC journalists probably gave you indigestion and then days of painful constipation. Just thinking about it gave Jack ghost pains. David Brigstocke was the kind of pain in the arse that Jack didn't enjoy.
Jack skimmed the latest article on the website, trying to hold his anger in check. It was the fifth article in nine days, and since there'd been nothing to report yesterday, Jack just knew that today he'd be in the headlines once more. Each day he'd assumed he'd get more desensitised to it, but when he saw it come up, his stomach still writhed full or worms.
He didn't even notice Ianto step into his office, catching him out reading the latest pack of lies levied against him.
'I thought things were bad when the media had me down as a child killer,' Ianto said, recalling the shootout in a local cafe with an alien hell bent on blowing up the entire planet with a warp star. It had taken on the facade of a small girl, with its big burly bodyguard taking on the role of dad. The media had roosted in Cardiff for weeks, rehashing the story on a daily basis until Ianto couldn't go anywhere without being harangued, his house staked out, and graffiti splashed across the entrance of the tourist office.
'Ianto, that was bad,' Jack said, reminding him not to belittle what he'd been through. No one should have to put up with that kind of treatment, guilty or not.
Ianto nodded thoughtfully. 'I know. But this is worse.'
Jack sighed, leaning back in his chair. 'Outside the government and beyond the police, but still can't get any protection from the media.'
Ianto pursed his lips. 'Tosh is doing the best she can,' he said.
'I know she is.' She'd scarcely done anything else, trying to take down associated articles and podcasts, photos and blog posts. Jack almost begrudgingly had to give the man credit for having so many connections. One man publishing articles could be shut down, but now there was a whole underground network of people proliferating dangerous information. They weren't just conspiracy nuts anymore because now they were talking to a man who had the world's best credentials: three little letters - BBC.
Jack could almost live with them taking shots at him personally. If people thought he was dangerous then they'd be right. They just didn't understand the context. He was only dangerous if you stood between him and what he wanted, and if that was the safety of the city and its citizens, then he was very dangerous indeed.
Torchwood still relied on an element of secrecy. Yes, people around Cardiff had heard the name and knew it was special ops or secret police or paranormal investigators, depending on who you asked, but ultimately, what they did could never be revealed. The twenty-first century wasn't ready for that, Jack knew. He also knew that Torchwood existed on a premise that it could maintain its remit under that veil of secrecy. Without it, the Crown could pull the plug. He didn't think they would, but the government agencies they were forced to deal with had absolutely no qualms about throwing Torchwood under the bus and having their license to operate revoked. They might even go so far as to publicly denounce the Institute. No other Torchwood leaders in history had given the organisation as much visibility as Jack had, though not through any fault of his own. One of the drawbacks of living as long as he had.
David Brigstocke however had been relentless. His editors must have been tearing their hair out each time he came to them with his latest cockamamie expose on Torchwood, but somehow he'd worn them down. He'd contributed to every conspiracy blog, done interviews on podcasts with people who lived for secret societies and public cover-ups. He'd managed to foster a whole network of people whose sole purpose it was now to uncover the truth about Jack Harkness, the ageless man who kept appearing throughout the twentieth century under the guise of a mysterious organisation called Torchwood.
They'd become obsessed, scouring public library microfiche for photographs of him, watching him from behind their lattes on the high street, snapping pictures with their phones, and spreading propaganda around the city warning people not to drink anything they hadn't bought or made themselves because Jack was heading a organisation that drugged people. What happened to them after they were drugged was left to the imagination. Some said they experimented on people, others suggested it was altering people's DNA and making them more susceptible to mental manipulation. Others still went down the old fashioned path of physical abuse. No one seemed to have put forth the suggestion that what Torchwood did - what Jack did - was to protect the minds of that people who'd seen things they couldn't ever comprehend.
Jack could almost have lived with all of that, but now things were bad. Really bad.
After the murder of George Wilson, Jack had been forced into hiding, not because of the murder so much as it was to slip under the radar of the Committee. They were more than just a conspiracy theory after all it turned out, and the single greatest danger to planet earth. In the months he'd hopped all over the globe, trying to trace how deep their roots went, he'd gotten no further than just scratching the surface. After Neil Redmond's death, he'd returned home to his team, knowing this was too big for him to handle on his own.
It had been months since and all had gone quiet. The Committee had disappeared again and Jack assumed that whatever he'd done must have scuppered some of their plans. How wrong he'd been. They'd simply been devising new plans. Ones to bring him down, Torchwood and all.
George Wilson, Neil Redmond, and now a name name, Eve Trent - a woman who reportedly worked for a large corporation focused on providing sustainable living solutions for underdeveloped nations. They were containers made to look like bomb shelters - The Habitat Project, so they called it - but that wasn't what it was for. The story went that George Wilson had known who the head of the Committee was, and that they were planning to wipe out the planet's population using missile technology from Neil Redmond's company - a project called Gallotyne. In fact, George Wilson was the largest single benefactor for Ms Trent's company, preparing in secret for the worst case scenario, building nuclear proof shelter for the world's leading doctors, scientists, political leaders and other great minds. The Committee, so it concluded, discovered the secret partnership and had murdered all three in a bid to keep their plans on track. And who was this mysterious leader of the Committee? None other than Captain Jack Harkness. He'd reportedly committed all three murders personally.
Of course, Jack had met all three - the last of them in the most incongruous of places, a ladies bathroom in an airport in Aberdeen - but whilst their deaths were connected to him, he hadn't been the killer.
Eve Trent, at last record, had been drugged and her memories erased, now the proprietor of a small second hand bookshop in a tiny little town in Cornwall. That had seemed a safe enough place to hide her, yet the Committee had still found her and had her murdered. It turned out that her dog, Tavistock, had been microchipped. Jack regretted having let her keep the dog. If he hadn't, they might not be in this mess now. He hadn't pulled the trigger on any of them, yet he was responsible for their deaths all the same. It was a fine distinction, but one that the media didn't care for. Murder was still the biggest headline drawcard, and Jack had three against his name.
Jack caught the troubled look on Ianto's face as he stood there watching his lover and boss. 'They don't have enough to arrest you, do they?' He knew Ianto would have pored over every single word that had been written, even if it broke his heart. He would have deleted any that looked legitimate or risky, and only instructed Tosh to leave those that appeared to be nothing more than desperate mud flinging, doing more to damage their own credibility than they did to promote the story.
Jack honestly didn't know the answer to that. David Brigstocke wasn't putting all his eggs in one basket this time. It was article after article, each mostly a rehash of the last, but with one new damning accusation thrown into the mix just to keep the media circus swarming. It wasn't Brigstocke's usual style, which meant Jack knew someone was coaching him. The Committee. Nobody wanted Jack taken down as much as they did, not even some lowly, bottom-feeding journalist. The most the police could probably do at this stage was haul him in for questioning over the allegations, but since he was Captain Jack Harkness of no fixed address, they didn't know where to go to find him. Being under house arrest at the hub wasn't how he wanted to spend the next few months, or maybe years. He still had a job to do and he couldn't just stay behind and coordinate.
'You've got nothing to worry about,' he lied, wishing that he knew that for certain.
'They claim they have new evidence. Witnesses. People who saw you in the hours before each died.' More lies, but troubling ones at that.
Jack tried to look more confident than he felt. 'And if you chopped off their heads you'll find they're just more of Ovid's androids.' And God alone knew how many of them were still out there.
Of course people had seen him before George Wilson's murder. He'd been at Wilson's conference, albeit under the guise of some half-baked conspiracy theory magazine journalist, itching to the get a one on one interview. Wilson's so-called daughter Kate had done several interviews with Brigstocke after her father's murder, claiming that Jack had been angry after the interview and demanding another, citing Wilson's failure to answer his questions. Kate had regrettably denied the interview, which she believed had led to Jack taking matters into his own hands. "If only I'd said yes," she weeped, "I would have been there with Dad to keep him safe during the exchange."
Neil Redmond was an easy one too. He was constantly surrounded by dozens of people, mostly influential business and political leaders, any of whom could be paid off to say they'd seen Jack at this event or that. Documents apparently showed that Jack Harkness, director of a company called the Torchwood Institute, had bid for the Gallotyne technology and had that bid rejected on ethical grounds. Jack had been reputedly seen having heated discussions with Redmond that had continued after his return to Wales, culminating in a planned hit and run that was perhaps hoped to look like nothing more than Redmond skidding off the road in the torrential rain.
'I don't think they'd let you do that in court,' Ianto replied, trying hard to make light of Jack's suggestion about beheading suspicious witnesses. Jack could tell how much it was killing him trying to put on that brave face.
At least no one had gone after the rest of his team. They seemed to only be interested in taking out Jack. That was something at least. They clearly thought that removing Jack would bring down Torchwood along with it. They were right to some extent, but Torchwood could carry on without him. They would because Jack would demand it of his team. Team Torchwood would stand strong.
'It'll be fine, Ianto,' Jack assured him, lying again.
There was a pregnant pause. 'I could deal with him,' Ianto said. 'Brigstocke,' he added, as if it needed clarification.
Jack shook his head. 'Don't.' He didn't want any of his team having blood on their hands on his account. Perhaps that was what the Committee were hoping for. Prominent BBC journalist silenced by former accused child killer from rogue government organisation. That was a headline assured to grab people's attention, and a perfect way to take out yet another of Jack's allies. He should have run over David Brigstocke the first day they'd met, saving everyone the trouble. What Jack wouldn't give to have him in a cell right now, breaking every one of those fingers one by one with his bare hands, listening to those satisfying nasally, whining screams.
Jack didn't know what real evidence they had. George Wilson had been shot with Jack's own gun it was true - a uniquely large and unusual calibre - but his blood profile and fingerprints had been erased from police databases by his team. The pool of blood he'd left behind, considerable and quite clearly enough to be fatal, would come back as "no known match".
Neil Redmond was a similar case. Trashed car impounded by the police, but stripped of Jack's fingerprints, the android body of Neil's duplicate stolen from the morgue by Torchwood. The original body had gone missing from his country mansion, presumably taken by the Committee so that no one would ever discover that the real Neil Redmond had in fact been a cripple, throwing into doubt who the hell it had then been attending all those public events.
Eve Trent he'd personally bungled, but he'd been in Cardiff, some three hundred miles away, when she'd been reportedly murdered in her home, innocent dog included, taking a break from her busy schedule in Scotland where the company she worked for was based.
The Committee normally operated at the upper echelons of secrecy but in this instance they'd found the power of the media a blunt yet effective weapon. Whichever way Jack ducked and weaved, they had a contingency. Well played, Committee, well played, Jack thought, hating them with every fibre of his being.
Jack looked up at Ianto again, unsure whether he'd heard or heeded Jack's words. His loyalty was unwavering and Jack's heart ached at the sheer love and determination expressed without words. He wasn't always sure he deserved it, but he appreciated it nonetheless. Ianto would have razed the city to the ground if Jack asked it of him.
'Stay away from Brigstocke,' he warned. 'It's what they want, for us to feed more fuel into their fire.' Torchwood didn't have lawyers or a PR department that could tangle these things up in red tape and paperwork for months and years until it all blew over. They had just the five of them against an enemy of unknown size, power and influence. Jack couldn't even be certain that the person at the corner-store who sold him a pint of milk for the office wasn't connected to them, keeping a watch on him until the Committee could deal its fatal blow against him.
The police were treading a murky path of not wanting to engage until they had no choice. Brigstocke wasn't prepared to give up his sources just yet, still milking them for all the journalistic glory he could, making Jack squirm under the indefensible scrutiny. Jack had contacts in the force these days, but none of them were willing to stick out their professional necks for him. They knew him, but only enough to let Torchwood do their thing. Stymying an official investigation was a bridge too far.
'Just keep pressure on all those hangers on,' Jack instructed him. If they could discredit most, and make the others look so lunatic that they in turn made Brigstocke look like he was just one of them - a conspiracy nutter barking up all the wrong trees - then that might be enough to have the media bigwigs suggest he retract some of his claims. They'd completely missed the bigger picture, that there were far more deadly threats to the planet, and that they were the ones pulling the strings. That should have been the story. The Committee should have been splashed across the front page of every newspaper worldwide.
He stood up and grabbed his coat from the rack by the wall, unable to sit there idly a moment longer.
'Where are you going?' There was a genuine undercurrent of fear in the question. Jack imagined Ianto's head filling with images of a swarm of police cars, flashing blue and red lights surrounding him and hauling him away the moment he stepped outside.
'We're out of milk. I'm just going to pop round to the corner store and get some more. Won't be long, I promise.' Whilst he was there he might lean on the guy behind the counter and find out whether he really was a lackey for the Committee. Perhaps he'd get his chance to break a few fingers after all. He was out of practice and it would be good to sharpen up those skills for when the time came. David Brigstocke would pay for what he'd done. The Committee would pay for what they'd done.
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, Ianto
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 3,177 words
Content notes: Spoilers for Big Finish audioplays "The Conspiracy" to "The Torchwood Archive" and minor spoilers for Torchwood book "Pack animals"
Author notes: Written for
badly_knitted's prompt "Any, Any, The Illusion Of Truth (Babylon 5 Episode Title)" at fic_promptly Summary: Jack is faced with an enemy he can't fight.
Jack couldn't recall the last time he'd hated anyone as much as he hated journalist David Brigstocke. The man had been a serial pest trying to get the story on Jack and on Torchwood for the better part of two years. He turned up at all the worst times, trying to lull Jack into giving him something, or just outright accusing Jack of covering up serious instances of alien intervention. Until now he'd had nothing to say that was of any consequence to his readership, but seemingly out of nowhere he'd thrown Jack into the media spotlight with devastating consequences.
Ianto had once kicked Brigstocke up the backside, sending him sprawling face first into the dirt, merely because he'd become annoying to a point where something had to be done about it. Jack hadn't been able to do anything to stop him, sitting there in a wheelchair with half his leg chewed off and still missing from an altercation with a Brackanee which had ruined their date at the zoo. He felt about as helpless as he'd looked, there with a blanket covering the fact that he was missing his foot and half of what it was usually attached to, as the journalist had been berating him with questions he wouldn't answer.
It took a lot for Ianto to get riled up enough to throw a fist at someone, but he must have felt a rush of satisfaction giving him that kick up the backside he so rightly deserved. It probably hadn't hurt that he'd been invisible at the time either - a by product of the alien technology that had so rudely ruined their date - aiding his courage to give the insufferable git what for.
Today though, Jack was the one who wouldn't have hesitated to give the man his best knuckle sandwich, without the bread. He deserved more than a fist. A night locked in a cell with a weevil would have been better, but then that was cruel and unusual punishment for a weevil. BBC journalists probably gave you indigestion and then days of painful constipation. Just thinking about it gave Jack ghost pains. David Brigstocke was the kind of pain in the arse that Jack didn't enjoy.
Jack skimmed the latest article on the website, trying to hold his anger in check. It was the fifth article in nine days, and since there'd been nothing to report yesterday, Jack just knew that today he'd be in the headlines once more. Each day he'd assumed he'd get more desensitised to it, but when he saw it come up, his stomach still writhed full or worms.
He didn't even notice Ianto step into his office, catching him out reading the latest pack of lies levied against him.
'I thought things were bad when the media had me down as a child killer,' Ianto said, recalling the shootout in a local cafe with an alien hell bent on blowing up the entire planet with a warp star. It had taken on the facade of a small girl, with its big burly bodyguard taking on the role of dad. The media had roosted in Cardiff for weeks, rehashing the story on a daily basis until Ianto couldn't go anywhere without being harangued, his house staked out, and graffiti splashed across the entrance of the tourist office.
'Ianto, that was bad,' Jack said, reminding him not to belittle what he'd been through. No one should have to put up with that kind of treatment, guilty or not.
Ianto nodded thoughtfully. 'I know. But this is worse.'
Jack sighed, leaning back in his chair. 'Outside the government and beyond the police, but still can't get any protection from the media.'
Ianto pursed his lips. 'Tosh is doing the best she can,' he said.
'I know she is.' She'd scarcely done anything else, trying to take down associated articles and podcasts, photos and blog posts. Jack almost begrudgingly had to give the man credit for having so many connections. One man publishing articles could be shut down, but now there was a whole underground network of people proliferating dangerous information. They weren't just conspiracy nuts anymore because now they were talking to a man who had the world's best credentials: three little letters - BBC.
Jack could almost live with them taking shots at him personally. If people thought he was dangerous then they'd be right. They just didn't understand the context. He was only dangerous if you stood between him and what he wanted, and if that was the safety of the city and its citizens, then he was very dangerous indeed.
Torchwood still relied on an element of secrecy. Yes, people around Cardiff had heard the name and knew it was special ops or secret police or paranormal investigators, depending on who you asked, but ultimately, what they did could never be revealed. The twenty-first century wasn't ready for that, Jack knew. He also knew that Torchwood existed on a premise that it could maintain its remit under that veil of secrecy. Without it, the Crown could pull the plug. He didn't think they would, but the government agencies they were forced to deal with had absolutely no qualms about throwing Torchwood under the bus and having their license to operate revoked. They might even go so far as to publicly denounce the Institute. No other Torchwood leaders in history had given the organisation as much visibility as Jack had, though not through any fault of his own. One of the drawbacks of living as long as he had.
David Brigstocke however had been relentless. His editors must have been tearing their hair out each time he came to them with his latest cockamamie expose on Torchwood, but somehow he'd worn them down. He'd contributed to every conspiracy blog, done interviews on podcasts with people who lived for secret societies and public cover-ups. He'd managed to foster a whole network of people whose sole purpose it was now to uncover the truth about Jack Harkness, the ageless man who kept appearing throughout the twentieth century under the guise of a mysterious organisation called Torchwood.
They'd become obsessed, scouring public library microfiche for photographs of him, watching him from behind their lattes on the high street, snapping pictures with their phones, and spreading propaganda around the city warning people not to drink anything they hadn't bought or made themselves because Jack was heading a organisation that drugged people. What happened to them after they were drugged was left to the imagination. Some said they experimented on people, others suggested it was altering people's DNA and making them more susceptible to mental manipulation. Others still went down the old fashioned path of physical abuse. No one seemed to have put forth the suggestion that what Torchwood did - what Jack did - was to protect the minds of that people who'd seen things they couldn't ever comprehend.
Jack could almost have lived with all of that, but now things were bad. Really bad.
After the murder of George Wilson, Jack had been forced into hiding, not because of the murder so much as it was to slip under the radar of the Committee. They were more than just a conspiracy theory after all it turned out, and the single greatest danger to planet earth. In the months he'd hopped all over the globe, trying to trace how deep their roots went, he'd gotten no further than just scratching the surface. After Neil Redmond's death, he'd returned home to his team, knowing this was too big for him to handle on his own.
It had been months since and all had gone quiet. The Committee had disappeared again and Jack assumed that whatever he'd done must have scuppered some of their plans. How wrong he'd been. They'd simply been devising new plans. Ones to bring him down, Torchwood and all.
George Wilson, Neil Redmond, and now a name name, Eve Trent - a woman who reportedly worked for a large corporation focused on providing sustainable living solutions for underdeveloped nations. They were containers made to look like bomb shelters - The Habitat Project, so they called it - but that wasn't what it was for. The story went that George Wilson had known who the head of the Committee was, and that they were planning to wipe out the planet's population using missile technology from Neil Redmond's company - a project called Gallotyne. In fact, George Wilson was the largest single benefactor for Ms Trent's company, preparing in secret for the worst case scenario, building nuclear proof shelter for the world's leading doctors, scientists, political leaders and other great minds. The Committee, so it concluded, discovered the secret partnership and had murdered all three in a bid to keep their plans on track. And who was this mysterious leader of the Committee? None other than Captain Jack Harkness. He'd reportedly committed all three murders personally.
Of course, Jack had met all three - the last of them in the most incongruous of places, a ladies bathroom in an airport in Aberdeen - but whilst their deaths were connected to him, he hadn't been the killer.
Eve Trent, at last record, had been drugged and her memories erased, now the proprietor of a small second hand bookshop in a tiny little town in Cornwall. That had seemed a safe enough place to hide her, yet the Committee had still found her and had her murdered. It turned out that her dog, Tavistock, had been microchipped. Jack regretted having let her keep the dog. If he hadn't, they might not be in this mess now. He hadn't pulled the trigger on any of them, yet he was responsible for their deaths all the same. It was a fine distinction, but one that the media didn't care for. Murder was still the biggest headline drawcard, and Jack had three against his name.
Jack caught the troubled look on Ianto's face as he stood there watching his lover and boss. 'They don't have enough to arrest you, do they?' He knew Ianto would have pored over every single word that had been written, even if it broke his heart. He would have deleted any that looked legitimate or risky, and only instructed Tosh to leave those that appeared to be nothing more than desperate mud flinging, doing more to damage their own credibility than they did to promote the story.
Jack honestly didn't know the answer to that. David Brigstocke wasn't putting all his eggs in one basket this time. It was article after article, each mostly a rehash of the last, but with one new damning accusation thrown into the mix just to keep the media circus swarming. It wasn't Brigstocke's usual style, which meant Jack knew someone was coaching him. The Committee. Nobody wanted Jack taken down as much as they did, not even some lowly, bottom-feeding journalist. The most the police could probably do at this stage was haul him in for questioning over the allegations, but since he was Captain Jack Harkness of no fixed address, they didn't know where to go to find him. Being under house arrest at the hub wasn't how he wanted to spend the next few months, or maybe years. He still had a job to do and he couldn't just stay behind and coordinate.
'You've got nothing to worry about,' he lied, wishing that he knew that for certain.
'They claim they have new evidence. Witnesses. People who saw you in the hours before each died.' More lies, but troubling ones at that.
Jack tried to look more confident than he felt. 'And if you chopped off their heads you'll find they're just more of Ovid's androids.' And God alone knew how many of them were still out there.
Of course people had seen him before George Wilson's murder. He'd been at Wilson's conference, albeit under the guise of some half-baked conspiracy theory magazine journalist, itching to the get a one on one interview. Wilson's so-called daughter Kate had done several interviews with Brigstocke after her father's murder, claiming that Jack had been angry after the interview and demanding another, citing Wilson's failure to answer his questions. Kate had regrettably denied the interview, which she believed had led to Jack taking matters into his own hands. "If only I'd said yes," she weeped, "I would have been there with Dad to keep him safe during the exchange."
Neil Redmond was an easy one too. He was constantly surrounded by dozens of people, mostly influential business and political leaders, any of whom could be paid off to say they'd seen Jack at this event or that. Documents apparently showed that Jack Harkness, director of a company called the Torchwood Institute, had bid for the Gallotyne technology and had that bid rejected on ethical grounds. Jack had been reputedly seen having heated discussions with Redmond that had continued after his return to Wales, culminating in a planned hit and run that was perhaps hoped to look like nothing more than Redmond skidding off the road in the torrential rain.
'I don't think they'd let you do that in court,' Ianto replied, trying hard to make light of Jack's suggestion about beheading suspicious witnesses. Jack could tell how much it was killing him trying to put on that brave face.
At least no one had gone after the rest of his team. They seemed to only be interested in taking out Jack. That was something at least. They clearly thought that removing Jack would bring down Torchwood along with it. They were right to some extent, but Torchwood could carry on without him. They would because Jack would demand it of his team. Team Torchwood would stand strong.
'It'll be fine, Ianto,' Jack assured him, lying again.
There was a pregnant pause. 'I could deal with him,' Ianto said. 'Brigstocke,' he added, as if it needed clarification.
Jack shook his head. 'Don't.' He didn't want any of his team having blood on their hands on his account. Perhaps that was what the Committee were hoping for. Prominent BBC journalist silenced by former accused child killer from rogue government organisation. That was a headline assured to grab people's attention, and a perfect way to take out yet another of Jack's allies. He should have run over David Brigstocke the first day they'd met, saving everyone the trouble. What Jack wouldn't give to have him in a cell right now, breaking every one of those fingers one by one with his bare hands, listening to those satisfying nasally, whining screams.
Jack didn't know what real evidence they had. George Wilson had been shot with Jack's own gun it was true - a uniquely large and unusual calibre - but his blood profile and fingerprints had been erased from police databases by his team. The pool of blood he'd left behind, considerable and quite clearly enough to be fatal, would come back as "no known match".
Neil Redmond was a similar case. Trashed car impounded by the police, but stripped of Jack's fingerprints, the android body of Neil's duplicate stolen from the morgue by Torchwood. The original body had gone missing from his country mansion, presumably taken by the Committee so that no one would ever discover that the real Neil Redmond had in fact been a cripple, throwing into doubt who the hell it had then been attending all those public events.
Eve Trent he'd personally bungled, but he'd been in Cardiff, some three hundred miles away, when she'd been reportedly murdered in her home, innocent dog included, taking a break from her busy schedule in Scotland where the company she worked for was based.
The Committee normally operated at the upper echelons of secrecy but in this instance they'd found the power of the media a blunt yet effective weapon. Whichever way Jack ducked and weaved, they had a contingency. Well played, Committee, well played, Jack thought, hating them with every fibre of his being.
Jack looked up at Ianto again, unsure whether he'd heard or heeded Jack's words. His loyalty was unwavering and Jack's heart ached at the sheer love and determination expressed without words. He wasn't always sure he deserved it, but he appreciated it nonetheless. Ianto would have razed the city to the ground if Jack asked it of him.
'Stay away from Brigstocke,' he warned. 'It's what they want, for us to feed more fuel into their fire.' Torchwood didn't have lawyers or a PR department that could tangle these things up in red tape and paperwork for months and years until it all blew over. They had just the five of them against an enemy of unknown size, power and influence. Jack couldn't even be certain that the person at the corner-store who sold him a pint of milk for the office wasn't connected to them, keeping a watch on him until the Committee could deal its fatal blow against him.
The police were treading a murky path of not wanting to engage until they had no choice. Brigstocke wasn't prepared to give up his sources just yet, still milking them for all the journalistic glory he could, making Jack squirm under the indefensible scrutiny. Jack had contacts in the force these days, but none of them were willing to stick out their professional necks for him. They knew him, but only enough to let Torchwood do their thing. Stymying an official investigation was a bridge too far.
'Just keep pressure on all those hangers on,' Jack instructed him. If they could discredit most, and make the others look so lunatic that they in turn made Brigstocke look like he was just one of them - a conspiracy nutter barking up all the wrong trees - then that might be enough to have the media bigwigs suggest he retract some of his claims. They'd completely missed the bigger picture, that there were far more deadly threats to the planet, and that they were the ones pulling the strings. That should have been the story. The Committee should have been splashed across the front page of every newspaper worldwide.
He stood up and grabbed his coat from the rack by the wall, unable to sit there idly a moment longer.
'Where are you going?' There was a genuine undercurrent of fear in the question. Jack imagined Ianto's head filling with images of a swarm of police cars, flashing blue and red lights surrounding him and hauling him away the moment he stepped outside.
'We're out of milk. I'm just going to pop round to the corner store and get some more. Won't be long, I promise.' Whilst he was there he might lean on the guy behind the counter and find out whether he really was a lackey for the Committee. Perhaps he'd get his chance to break a few fingers after all. He was out of practice and it would be good to sharpen up those skills for when the time came. David Brigstocke would pay for what he'd done. The Committee would pay for what they'd done.
