Ashes of Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (15 page)

In theory, that would have been just fine
with Meg, but David would be disappointed that they hadn’t managed
to gather anything on his list except for Cassie and Callum. Though
even he would have to admit that finding them was a pretty amazing
thing for Meg and Anna to have accomplished within two hours of
their arrival.

But for better or for worse, they didn’t
crash. Cassie safely navigated the highway interchanges in
Portland. As they passed the city, Meg thought about her life and
friends there and then put them from her mind. They couldn’t help
her.

As the hour approached midnight, they passed
the sign marking the city limits of Eugene, Oregon. Cassie pulled
off the highway to get gas for the second time, and after Callum
paid the attendant, drove to the twenty-four hour Wal-Mart.

Never mind that it was midnight on
Thanksgiving when all sane people should be sleeping off their
turkey and pumpkin pie, the parking lot was packed with Black
Friday shoppers. It seemed they’d just missed the midnight crush to
get inside the doors. Last Meg had heard, ‘Black Friday’ had been
pushed to as early as four A.M. That appeared to have changed since
she lived here. Pretty soon the stores would open on Thanksgiving
Day, and everyone could skip the turkey entirely.

Callum slung his backpack over his shoulder
and handed a second backpack to Cassie. He saw Meg looking at him
and said, “I know it’s paranoid of me, but I don’t want to leave
anything in the truck that will identify us. What’s in here—” He
raised the backpack, “—is too precious to lose to a sneak
thief.”

“
Or Homeland Security,”
Cassie said, shrugging her pack onto her shoulders.

“
Is that all you brought?”
Meg said. She and Anna owned only what they stood up in, but Meg
had thought she’d seen a suitcase in the hallway before they left.
Cassie had taken their medieval clothes, and Meg’s stomach sank to
think they’d left them behind.

“
We left our bigger bag at
Cassie’s aunt’s house, so we wouldn’t be burdened with it,” Callum
said. “It just contained clothes, and we can buy new if we need
them.”

Cassie saw Meg’s crestfallen face and made a
sad face of her own, “I’m sorry, Meg.”

“
They’re just things,” Meg
said. “They aren’t worth our lives. I suppose if we had them with
us and were caught, they would be a huge giveaway.”

“
Which we wouldn’t want. We
want to keep you under wraps.” Cassie touched Meg’s shoulder
sympathetically.

But Anna leaned close to her mother. “My
belt knife is in my boot. How about yours?”

Meg had left that behind too. She shook her
head.

“
I should have said
something.” Anna frowned. “Does Wal-Mart have metal
detectors?”

“
I guess we’ll find out,”
Meg said.

“
Are these people mad?”
Callum said as he bulldozed his way through the crowded entryway,
the three women in his wake.

The companions popped out to the left of the
entrance, in front of the endless row of cash registers. A wave of
heat blew over Meg, so she pulled off her hat and unbuttoned the
black wool coat she’d borrowed from Cassie’s aunt’s house. Anna
shrugged out of her bright purple parka and hung it over her arm.
The store was lit up as if it were already Christmas—which Wal-Mart
clearly hoped it was—and Meg averted her eyes from the blinding
fluorescent lights.

The colors and variety of items for sale
were almost too much to take in. People like to have choices, but
they were actually happier with fewer choices than more, which
might explain the intent and grim expressions on everybody’s faces.
Shopping was definitely a serious business in Eugene, Oregon on
Black Friday. Meg had been hoping it would be merrier—like a
party.

“
Over here, Mom.” Anna
hauled her mother to where Cassie was standing in front of the
eyeglasses machine.

“
It says it takes forty
minutes, all told. Thirty if you choose one of the eight standard
frames,” Cassie said.

“
That I can do.” Without
hesitating, Meg put her face up to a rubber sleeve that strongly
resembled a diving mask and did everything the machine told her.
Beside her, Cassie punched numbers into a keypad, and then Meg
heard the distinct sound of a card being inserted. The lights that
flashed in Meg’s eyes had momentarily ceased, so she pulled out her
head. “I can’t let you pay for this.”

“
You can, and you will,”
Cassie said. “That’s what we’re here for. Besides, Callum left a
wad of cash with my grandfather. If we return to the Middle Ages,
my grandfather will pay the bill. You’re not to worry about
it.”

The machine was beeping at Meg, ready to
start again. She didn’t feel so guilty that she didn’t put her face
back into the headrest and let the machine continue its
calculations. She needed glasses.

Anna said, “Are you using a fake ID?”

Cassie laughed. “Of course.
Credit cards are the worst for sending up red flags. Nobody can buy
anything without the government knowing because both the store you
bought it from
and
the credit card company know. This machine won’t take cash, of
course, so we have no choice but to use a card. Callum will use a
different card to pay for what he’s getting.”

Callum had wandered off and came back just
as the machine was finishing with Meg’s eyes. He’d lined his cart
with an open duffle bag. “Let’s see the list again, Anna,” he
said.

Meg pulled out her head. “You’re thinking we
should get started?”

“
We have half an hour until
your glasses are done. We might as well use the time,” Cassie
said.

Callum nodded. “Best to be prepared for
every contingency.”

They left the glasses machine to do its
thing and wandered the aisles of Wal-Mart with what seemed like
half the population of Eugene. Meg kept getting distracted by the
colors and the plastic, but Anna and Callum took to the project
with a will. Within fifteen minutes, they had worked their way
through the basics of David’s list, including the coveted potatoes
(three different kinds) and tomato seeds. It was too bad that
neither chocolate nor coffee beans (these were from originally from
Africa, but they hadn’t been ‘discovered’ and cultivated by 1290)
would grow in the British climate.

Meg knew, and had to restrain herself from
explaining in a David-esque manner, that some historians had even
suggested that the introduction of the potato as a staple of food
production in Europe after 1492 was enough to account for the rise
of Western Europe as a superpower. Meg wasn’t big on increasing the
population too fast, but greater population meant more minds at
work and could lead to more scientific advances and more hands to
do the work that needed doing. So, potatoes it was.

Cassie took it upon herself to organize the
items they were buying into categories. With a smile at Meg, she
took an entire box of SPF 15 lip balm and tucked it into the duffel
bag. “Bronwen specifically mentioned the blue kind.”

“
I believe you,” Meg
said.

“
Anything you want, Mom?”
Anna flourished the list in one hand.

Meg gazed around at the choices and—quite
frankly—the excess, and shook her head. “I’m sure I’ll want to
bring some things back, but I keep thinking about what it looks
like for us to have modern luxuries—plastic in particular—and so I
decide to do without. What I want most are the things that I really
can’t have: a cell phone, a ball point pen, a car, and—” she picked
up a novel with a picture of Stonehenge on the cover, “—something
to read.” Then she smiled. “I could do with some thick cotton
socks.”

Anna smiled back. “We’ll swing by and pick
up a couple pairs on the way to see if your glasses are done.”

While Callum paid for the
pile of goodies, Anna, Cassie, and Meg trooped back to the vision
center where a very helpful—and very tired—employee presented Meg
with glasses in a bright red case. Meg had chosen simple pewter
frames, more angular than round, which appeared to be the current
style. She put them on and about fell over. Meg had forgotten what
it was like to
see
.
She spent a few minutes alternating between looking through the
glasses and lowering them to look over the top of the
frames.

“
What do you think?” This
time it was Cassie bouncing up and down, clearly pleased with the
gift.

“
I don’t know what to say,”
Meg said. “Thank you just isn’t enough.”

“
My pleasure,” Cassie said.
“Truly.”

Callum had also bought four cell phones, and
once he joined the women, they all stood in an out-of-the-way spot
near the bathrooms and customer service, and he opened one of the
packages. It was so loud in the store that nobody was going to
overhear what they were discussing.

“
You got four phones?”
Cassie accepted hers. “Why?”

“
One, the Black Friday sale
had these marked two for the price of one, so why not get four?”
Callum said. “And two, these mobiles work internationally. The odds
of anyone tracing them before we get out of the country later today
are very slim, and I want to be able to keep in contact in case we
get separated.”

“
They’re nice.” Anna turned
hers over in her hands. “Last I saw, touchscreens were
expensive.”

Meg squeezed her shoulder. “It’s the little
things that trip you up.”

Callum looked up from his phone. “Can you
keep driving, Cassie? I have work to do.”

“
Get me some coffee, and
I’ll be good to go,” she said.

Meg didn’t offer to drive again, even with
her new glasses. When she looked over Callum’s shoulder at his
phone, amazingly, she could read the small print on the screen,
even though it wasn’t two inches from her nose. Twenty minutes
earlier, she wouldn’t have been able even to see it. “What do you
mean, ‘work’?”

“
We’re on a blackout with
MI-5 due to the bombing, so I’m not expected to make contact with
anyone until I return to Cardiff. I need to talk to Jones, however.
He and I established a procedure—not just for me but for any agent
in distress or who’s been compromised—to fall back on pre-arranged
email accounts and new mobiles. Give me a second.”

Callum worked furiously on his phone for
five minutes while the three women unpacked their phones and turned
them on. Then Callum looked up at Anna and Meg. “Jones sent a
message to my account, giving me his new number. Before I ring him,
I need your photos.”

“
Our photos?” Anna
said.

“
ID, Anna,” Meg said. “I
think we’re about to see what technology can do again.”

Callum lined up Anna and then Meg against a
square of white wall in the lobby of Wal-Mart, taking photos of
each of them in turn. He texted them to Mark and then switched to
telephone mode and dialed Mark’s number that, as far as Meg could
tell, he’d memorized in the two seconds he’d been looking at his
email.

Mark picked up. Meg could hear his tinny
voice, even from a few feet away. “I received the photos. Where are
you?”

Callum brought the phone down, put it on
speaker set to a low volume, and the four friends huddled around
it. “About to start driving again. This is a big country and it’s
going to take a while. Where are you?”

“
Hang on.” There was a
pause, a flurry of conversation in the background, and then the
slamming of a door. “Good job I had a spare mobile ready to go
because I wouldn’t have had a chance to slip away. I’m in the
maintenance closet.”

Cassie and Callum exchanged a bemused look,
which Meg didn’t understand, and then Callum said, “What’s the
situation?”

“
It’s chaos in here right
now. We’ve been taken over by Signals.”

“
What’s ‘Signals’ again?”
Meg said.

“
It’s the nickname for the
agency that got bombed,” Cassie said.

“
Has there been any mention
of the Project?” Callum said.

“
Not so far,” Mark said.
“Earlier, I spent two hours orienting the techs who arrived.
They’re rebuilding the system from the ground up. They assume
Signals was compromised before it was bombed.”

“
That’s what Smith said
when he recalled me,” Callum said.

“
You’re still seen as lily
white, by the way. Incorruptible. Wish you were here to glare at
these people, because they don’t trust me,” Mark said. “I’ve been
twiddling my thumbs for the last half hour. They took over my whole
system.”

“
I can’t be sorry about
that,” Callum said, “because I need you.” He gave Mark a brief
rundown of the last few hours since he’d gone dark, and his
concerns regarding his ability to arrive safely in San
Francisco.

Meg looked sideways at the Black Friday
shoppers around them. No one even seemed to notice them.

Mark said that he couldn’t use the usual
channels because of the blackout on communication, but he could
still monitor the situation and see what the chatter was like at
other agencies. “My coffee shop has been open for two hours. I’ll
go there with my own laptop. And I’ll see what I can do about
getting Meg and Anna ID.”

“
We’ll call you when we get
closer to the airport in San Francisco,” Callum said.

“
I should have a better
grasp of the situation by then,” Mark said.

Callum ended the connection.

“
I thought we were going to
the consulate?” Anna said.