Torchwood: Exodus Code

making eye contact with each one of them, then he nodded. ‘Most of my technology is alien.’
    ‘Fuck me!’ He waved his hand at Shelley before she could respond. ‘I know. I know. Not operational yet.’
    ‘I predict,’ said Shelley, ‘that it will be another three days before the world will be fully aware of its predicament, and at the rate of evolution of the hydrothermal chimneys, by then it will be too late.’
    ‘Someone else must realise we’re facing an apocalyptic event and know what to do to stop it, right?’ asked Eva, the full force of what was happening finally, incontrovertibly sinking in to her consciousness. She began to cry.
    Jack and Cash glanced at each other. Jack shook his head.
    ‘That’s not fair,’ said Eva, tears running down her cheeks. ‘Why should we have to be the only ones who know the Earth is a turning into a big, stupid, awful bomb? I never asked for that responsibility. I don’t want that responsibility.’
    ‘Hey,’ said Jack, ‘I’m taking most of the responsibility and I really do have a plan, but—’
    ‘But you need our help,’ said Vlad.
    ‘I need your help. All of you. Because there are a few other events at play that need to be handled before I can implement my plan.’
    ‘Are you sure we can’t just throw you into the stupid mountain and get it over with?’ asked Eva, wiping her face with her sleeve.
    ‘Not going to be that easy,’ laughed Jack.
    ‘Of course, it’s not.’
    ‘The helix needs my consciousness, my humanity, as one of the pieces to initiate its big bang and to seal the chimneys. I’m going to give her exactly what she wants, but with a slight change in the code.
    ‘You’re going to fool Mother Nature?’
    ‘That’s the plan.’
    ‘Well,’ said Hollis, ‘I’m tired of being the chief cook and bottle washer on this ship. I’d like to earn a little respect. Think savin’ the world might be the thing to do.’
    ‘If my plan works, Hollis, no one is going to know what you or any of us have done.’
    ‘Trust him,’ said Gwen. ‘It’s better that way.’
    Jack tapped the map on the screen until it zoomed in on the southern coastline of Peru. ‘This is where it all began. And this is where it will end.’
    He smiled at them all. ‘One way or another.’

Part Four
    ‘All the earth is a grave and nothing escapes it’
    Ancient prayer

59
    Langley, Virginia, present day
    ‘HOW COULD IT get any damn worse?’ yelled Rex Matheson, pacing in front of the screen.
    ‘Watch.’
    Darren forwarded the tape until he found the image on the screen that had brought him running from his office in the first place. He paused and zoomed.
    Staring up at the flat screen, Rex started to laugh. He couldn’t help himself because frozen on the screen was a picture-perfect close-up of Captain Jack Harkness sipping an espresso at a table in the piazza in front of the Hacienda Del Castenado in the middle of one of the most important raids of Rex’s rising career.
    And Jack was smiling at the camera.
    ‘How the hell did he get in there. We’ve had that hacienda under surveillance for days. Only our guys getting in.’
    ‘Not sure, sir, but there was a bad storm the night before. I’m thinking, maybe then?’
    ‘And how the hell did he get wind of our operation?’ asked Rex, impressed with Jack’s intelligence capabilities despite being furious that he was interfering with the closest any agency anywhere in the world had come to even a distant cousin of one of the three families.
    ‘I don’t know, sir,’ said Darren, one of only a small group of agents on Rex’s team who knew anything about Jack and Torchwood, and who had been tasked to monitor his movements on a regular basis. ‘Must be a leak on the Peruvian end.
    ‘Or else Harkness knows something we don’t about what’s going on in that village.’
    ‘What’s going on in that village is a multi-billion-dollar kidnapping-for-hire business,’ said Darren. ‘One we got lucky enough to uncover in time to blackmail Donoso’s wife into letting us take her husband instead of the kidnappers. Why would Harkness care about any of that?’
    ‘Unless,’ said Rex, wiping Jack’s image to the corner of the screen and changing the source to CNN where the geysers and the impenetrable rock chimneys forming around them were now getting continuous coverage from every major news outlet, ‘unless being in that village in Peru has something to do with these geysers. And given