Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (19 page)

David couldn’t see her face pale behind the
plastic face guard, but he could tell from her tone of voice that
she was worried. “Well, find them!” She hung up.

“Where are they?” David said.

“Driscoll ate with them in the cafeteria not
long ago. He told them to stay put while he saw to—” Natasha cut
off what she’d been about to say, “—some other business, and they
disappeared.”

“Surely you have cameras everywhere?” he
said.

Natasha paused before speaking. “Not enough,
apparently, since they aren’t on any of the video we do have.
Security is backtracking through it now to find where they were
last seen.”

“Where’s Director Cooke in all this?” David
said.

“She and Smythe will meet us at the
hospital. They weren’t on-site when this happened.”

David nodded, surprised she was telling him
all this. “This could have been handled better, you know.”

“I know,” Natasha said. “Believe me.” She
gazed out the rear window of the ambulance.

David reached out a hand and touched her
knee. “Can you tell me what’s really going on?”

But Natasha had turned to look towards the
front seats. “What’s the hold up?”

“Rush hour traffic,” said the driver.

David craned his neck so he could see
through the gap that led to the front seats of the ambulance.
Except for Natasha, who was several inches shorter than the men,
everyone looked the same in their hazmat suits. He knew only that
the man who’d spoken was the American.

“So find another route,” Natasha said.

“We have to get all the way up to the
Heath,” he said.

“What about using the siren?” David
said.

Natasha stood to peer into the driver’s cab
and then sighed, looking down at David. “Too many cars in too small
a space.” She sat back beside him and made a motion as if to put
her chin in her hands but was stymied by her helmet.

“You might as well talk to me while we’re
waiting,” David said. “Who am I going to tell?”

“You never know,” Natasha said, but then she
leaned forward, her hands dangling next to his IV drip. “Ever since
last November, we’ve been on alert to any change in our readings.
Since I was promoted to head of Cardiff station, we’ve been working
on your case full time.”

“Up until today, everyone must have been
pretty bored,” David said.

Natasha shrugged. “It’s typical for us to
work a case for many months without a lead. Anyway, when Callum
called, we already knew where you were, though admittedly, finding
you in the middle of the Bristol Channel was a bit of a shocker.”
Natasha leaned even closer. “Within two minutes, Director Cooke
knew as much as I knew. Our response was out of my hands,
especially after the disaster of last winter.”

“It wasn’t Callum’s fault that my parents
escaped him,” David said. “Didn’t someone else botch their capture
at that hotel?”

“That someone else is now Director Cooke’s
second-in-command in London,” Natasha said. “A man named Smythe. He
convinced Director Cooke and her superiors that if she’d left your
parents in his hands, he could have salvaged the situation. Since
Callum wasn’t here to defend himself—”

“It looks like he screwed up,” David
said.

“That was true until today,” Natasha said.
“Director Cooke spoke to me after her conference with Callum and
admitted, not even grudgingly, that bringing you back here,
convincing you that he was on your side the whole time when he was
really still working for us, was an impressive piece of
tradecraft.”

“That’s what Callum told her?” David was
feeling much better, not necessarily because the drugs had kicked
in, but because things were happening now and he was out of that
interrogation room. As far as he was concerned, the ambulance could
take as long as it wanted to get to the hospital. For the moment,
he was a tiny bit free.

“I was meeting with you at the time, so I
wasn’t present myself,” Natasha said, “but she seemed pretty
pleased with him. Smythe, on the other hand, wasn’t looking too
chuffed.”

Which could hardly be more excellent if
David had thought of it himself. That Callum was such a convincing
actor had to be the reason Callum and Cassie had been allowed to
wander freely throughout the MI-5 building—or freely enough that
Driscoll couldn’t find them. Not for one second did David believe
that Callum had been working for him only because he hoped one day
to return to MI-5 with David in tow. That might have been his
thought initially, and quite honestly, it was a good one. But David
knew Callum better than Natasha did, and he was pleased to learn
that his friend was such an impressive liar.

“We’ve learned—”

But David never learned what Natasha was
going to tell him, because the driver of the ambulance chose that
moment to jerk the vehicle out of place, the ambulance careening
forward, half on the sidewalk, half on the road. Given the way the
streets were parked up on both sides, that couldn’t last long.
Natasha had to grasp a handle above her head, and the third
technician who’d been sorting through the contents of the ambulance
on David’s right let out a yelp.

The ambulance crashed back down to the level
road and then swung around a corner to the right. The driver
finally turned on the sirens and he wove the ambulance in and out
of traffic, heedless, as far as David could tell, of anyone’s
safety, even their own. David had never driven a car in the modern
world, but when he was young, his mom would often take a circuitous
route rather than wait in a traffic jam. She’d insist that even if
they arrived at the same time as they would have otherwise, some
movement was better than no movement, especially with a sleeping
kid in the car. The ambulance driver must have decided having a
medieval king with scarlet fever qualified too.

Natasha gasped as the ambulance swerved
again, but then it steadied. Natasha didn’t say anything else to
David. Perhaps she’d thought better of her confidences.

David rested his head back on the pillow and
closed his eyes. It seemed Callum had a plan too. David was looking
forward to seeing what it was.

September, 2017

Callum

A
s they listened to
the warning bell, sirens sounded from outside too. Cassie crossed
into the office opposite and looked out the window to the street
below. Callum followed and looked with her. Two ambulances and four
police cars pulled down the ramp into the underground car park.

“Do you think all that’s for David?” Cassie
said.

Callum found himself shaking his head in
disbelief. “I want to say that it couldn’t be, but given the
Office’s preoccupation with him and his family, I fear it is. We
need to get to him now.”

Cassie pressed her lips together. “Could
they have tortured him to the degree that he needs emergency
medical care?”

“Christ, I wouldn’t have thought so. Let’s
go.” Callum hit the door to the stairs with his shoulder and led
Cassie down them at a run. Along the way, Callum pulled out the
paper Jones had given him and opened it, hiding it in the palm of
his hand.

“What does it say?” Cassie said. She’d taken
Jones’ warning about cameras to heart and looked down as she spoke;
the cameras were programmed for visuals but not sound.

“Jones has promised to wipe our movements
since we left the cafeteria,” Callum said. “And he’s arranged for a
vehicle.”

“I thought he didn’t want to help us?” she
said.

“Jones has always been an odd bird,” Callum
said. “But thank God for him.”

At this hour of the day, Callum hoped they
wouldn’t run into anyone coming up the stairwell. He had to trust
that Jones was continuing to track them and would scrub their
presence if he could. Other than worrying about the danger
involved, if he had to share this adventure with anyone, he was
glad it was with Cassie. She never panicked; she rarely became
angry; and she knew him so well that she could guess what he was
thinking almost before he thought it himself.

They came out of the stairwell into
sub-basement one at the same instant that the second ambulance
pulled into the underground car park. A dozen men in black jackets
faced the entrance but none turned around to see them. Callum
caught Cassie’s hand and pulled her down the long line of parked
vehicles to an older model SUV second from the end, which had been
backed into its parking space.

“I can’t see what’s happening from here!”
Cassie said.

“You don’t need to.” Callum traced with one
finger the narrow dent in the left fender; this was the very
vehicle he and Natasha had ridden in when they’d driven to Chepstow
Castle ten months earlier. He moved at a crouch to the driver’s
side door.

“What are you doing?” Cassie said.

“I still have my ID, which I can show to the
guard at the exit. In this vehicle, I can get us out of the car
park.” Security was designed to prevent unauthorized personnel from
getting into the car park, not out of it. Only a person who’d
already passed through security, either in the lobby or at the car
park’s entrance, had access to the cars. Once this was over, this
station needed to address that weak point in its defenses.

“Isn’t the car locked?” Cassie said.

Callum took out his mobile phone. In the
past, it had been an extension of himself. He never turned it off
and never went anywhere without it. Now, however, he felt like he
was carrying a parasite in his pocket.

Powering it off earlier hadn’t sent alarm
bells ringing throughout the building. With Jones on their side, he
hoped that turning it on for a minute so he could access the
program to unlock the vehicles wouldn’t either. Jones’s note had
been cryptic, probably for his own plausible deniability, but
Callum had taken it to mean that he would be able to unlock this
particular SUV through the program in Callum’s mobile, which Jones
could update remotely. Callum waved the screen in front of the
sensor pad on the door. The lock clicked. Jones even had the
foresight to deactivate the ‘beep’ that usually accompanied the
unlocking of a car door.

Powering off the mobile phone and pocketing
it again, Callum pulled open the driver’s door of the SUV, pressed
the button to unlock the rest of the doors, and then moved back to
the boot where Cassie waited. He opened the door, which swung wide
instead of up, and urged Cassie inside ahead of him. She pulled it
closed once he’d climbed in, and they crouched there for a second,
getting their bearings.

While they’d been occupied, the police cars
had pulled into the underground car park behind the ambulances.
Callum clambered over the rear seat and up to the front of the
vehicle so he could look through the front windows. The reflection
of swirling lights coming from the top of the ramp that led into
the car park from the road indicated that at least one other police
car had stopped there to direct traffic. He pressed the buttons in
the side door to open the front windows so he could hear what was
happening.

The police cars diverged from one another,
driving through the lanes of parked vehicles and eventually turning
around to face back the way they’d come, towards the ramp and the
street. Callum looked towards the door fifty feet away which they’d
come through. The stairwell doorway was to the right of a larger
opening through which the lift could be found. Callum heard a
distant
ping
, and a rush of men in Hazmat suits came through
the opening, pushing a stretcher. A tall man with sandy hair lay
upon it, with an oxygen mask pushed up off his mouth and nose so it
sat on his forehead like a Cyclopsian third eye. He was tall enough
to fill the bed from end to end.

“
David
.” Cassie breathed his name.
She’d poked her head between the two front seats and put her hand
on his shoulder.

“Get back.” He gestured with one hand, and
both he and Cassie moved into the rear seat of the SUV. The
darkened windows in the rear and back would hide them if any agents
bothered to look this way, though they were otherwise occupied at
the moment.

Cassie hunched down to peer between the
front passenger seat and its door, moving her head this way and
that so the retracted seatbelt didn’t block her vision. “They’ve
IV’ed him. I can’t see his face, but he’s talking to the people
around him. Could they have tortured him?” She glanced at Callum.
He’d started searching through the bags in the boot, looking for
gear that would make them look more like the agents outside the
vehicle.

“The hazmat suits tell a different story.”
Callum handed Cassie a Kevlar vest, along with a black jacket and a
baseball cap. “Put these on.”

“So, he
is
sick.” Cassie took the
vest and inspected it. It consisted of a chest and back pad held
together with Velcro. “What do you think? Scarlet fever?”

“Could be anything,” Callum said. “He never
complained to me about feeling ill, but then he wouldn’t have,
would he?”

“He must be really sick to have said
something to them,” Cassie said.

“They’d respond the same way regardless. If
it’s medieval, it’s going to scare them.” And then Callum thought
again. “Unless … unless he’s not really sick! Or not that
sick?”

“What do you mean?” Cassie said.

Callum beamed at her. “It could be our David
has a plan.”

Cassie smiled. “He always does.”

Callum grunted his agreement, preoccupied by
his Kevlar armor. Cassie hunched down among the second row
passenger seats and slipped on her Kevlar vest too. For a moment,
the vehicle was quiet except for the
snick
of Velcro sealing
and the snap of the vinyl windbreakers as they shook them out and
put them on. “This vest is way more flexible and far less bulky
than I imagined,” Cassie said, patting at her chest. “It’s almost
like I’m only wearing an extra sweater.”