Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (20 page)

“Technology never stops. We’ve come a long
way since chain mail.” If he’d been wearing armor, Cassie would
have had to haul it over his head to get it off of him. Sometimes
when Callum was particularly tired, he needed two assistants to
accomplish the task. As expensive as it was, and as difficult to
fit exactly right, it was good that he’d left his armor on the
ship. Since he was kneeling in the rear compartment, and Cassie had
remained in the back seat, it would have made undressing him even
more awkward.

He got himself together, a twin to Cassie,
both looking like police extras, and then he plopped into the
driver’s seat with Cassie next to him. “You’re not driving because
you’re the man, you know,” she said as she buckled her seat belt.
“It’s just that I can’t see me having much success driving on the
wrong side of the road after five years without driving at
all.”

Callum laughed. “I love you.” He pressed the
start button on the vehicle, glancing out of the corner of his eye
at his wife as he did so.

She looked very pleased with herself. “You’d
better.”

In the moments they’d spent putting on the
gear, the agents and people in the hazmat suits had dispersed.
They’d deposited David in one of the ambulances—the second and
closer of the two—and now the police cars lined up to escort the
ambulances out of the car park, along with yet another black van
full of Security Service personnel.

“Let them get ahead of us,” Cassie said.

Callum nodded, the thought having occurred
to him too. “We need to keep the right distance behind them so they
don’t think anything of our presence, but the guard assumes we’re
with them.”

If Natasha, or whoever was organizing
David’s interrogation, was thinking straight, she should have told
the security station the total number of vehicles accompanying the
ambulances. Callum was counting on her not to think straight, given
how urgently she seemed to be treating whatever was wrong with
David. For all that he had been lying on a stretcher, the glimpse
Callum had seen of David indicated that he was both coherent and
calm.

Cassie and Callum waited in their parking
space until the first police car and the lead ambulance had gone
through the checkpoint at the exit. Then they pulled into the
narrow lane between the cars. Callum maneuvered into line behind
the last police car, keeping about twenty yards behind it. The
security guard stood in the doorway of his box, waving the vehicles
through one by one. Callum merely held up his badge as he drove
past him and through the raised security barrier, which slowly
lowered behind him.

September, 2017

Cassie

C
assie was acutely
aware that not only was she homeless, but she didn’t have a badge,
money, or any form of ID whatsoever. As they swerved through the
lanes of traffic, Callum gunning the engine to keep up with the
police vehicles and David’s ambulance, she catalogued the number of
car chases she’d seen in movies and on television. In almost every
instance, the hero and heroine had found themselves beyond
desperate, with a stream of police cars behind them. In this case,
however, it was they who were doing the chasing of what she had
come to think of as ‘the bad guys’. She was sorry that they’d been
Callum’s friends—or at the very least, his colleagues—but she
didn’t see how anyone could think well of them now.

Betrayed
was the word that came to
mind. The powers that be had turned them loose in the building
itself, but Jones’s fears had sparked new ones in Cassie. The hours
they’d spent in the Office had shown to Cassie how tightly
controlled this world had become in the five years she’d been
absent from it. She really hadn’t wanted to know the number of
cameras in Britain. The only good news about that, as Meg and
Llywelyn could attest, was that there seemed to be fewer overall in
Wales. Meg had made an offhand comment the other day that modern
Wales was like the Appalachia of Britain: treated badly by the
larger system, with fewer resources and wealth because England had
strip-mined it of everything worthwhile long ago. And sheep
outnumbered people in Wales ten to one.

“Do you think Jones was playing us?” Cassie
said.

“No,” Callum said. “I’m sure Driscoll was,
even without Lady Jane’s warning. If it turns out he was telling
the truth, I’ll apologize for mistrusting him and his motives.
Meanwhile, I’m just glad to be out of that building.”

“Not that we’ve come very far,” Cassie said
as Callum cursed and pounded the wheel. The last ambulance and
police car were almost a full block ahead of them, stuck with them
in rush hour traffic. When they’d come out of the MI-5 building, in
short order they found themselves in a long line of cars stretching
in both directions. The sirens on the police cars were going, but
they weren’t making any headway. Both sides of the streets were
lined with parked cars, and unless they drove up onto the sidewalk,
they weren’t going anywhere. “A horse could make it to the hospital
faster than we will.”

Callum looked over at her. “Missing home,
are we?”

“Oddly, yes,” she said. “More than that, I
don’t like seeing David helpless.”

“That’s what he has us for,” Callum said,
“to watch his back.”

“I have to confess that what Jones talked
about—the monitoring and trying to build a time travel
device—scares me,” Cassie said.

“Me too,” Callum said with another glance at
her. He hardly had to focus on his driving since they were moving
at a snail’s pace. They’d made it four blocks in the last five
minutes. “What worries you in particular?”

“What would happen if the government
actually made the machine a reality. We have to protect that world
from them.” And then Cassie added softly, “Our world.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Cassie saw
Callum swallow hard. She hadn’t heard him say that he was ready to
return to the Middle Ages, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t clearly
see the consequences of exposing those people to more visitors from
the twenty-first century.

“From that very first day at Windsor Castle,
I understood that general access to the medieval world would
destroy it,” Callum said, “not because the people wanted to on
principle, but because money would trump common sense. They’d sell
the rights to the highest bidder, who wouldn’t have anything but
his own interests at heart. Driscoll said as much to me while you
were talking to your grandfather.”

“Honestly, I think it’s a good thing we
haven’t discovered any other habitable planets in the universe.
We’d just muck them up too.”

“That’s a little random, but I don’t
disagree.” Callum returned his attention to the front, and then
Cassie gasped as the ambulance carrying David swung out of its lane
and turned down a side alley.

Callum hit the gas and pulled the SUV out of
line too, following one police car, which screamed down the alley
ahead of them. Cassie put one hand on the dashboard and the other
on the handle above her head to steady herself. The traffic had
kept the SUV three cars back of the pack of police cars and
ambulances, but that fact now allowed Callum to react in a way that
the other vehicles couldn’t. Concentrating fully on his driving,
Callum swung the wheel right and then left, avoiding a cluster of
trash cans the police car had gone right through.

Cassie moved her hand to the door handle and
gripped it tightly. “I hope David’s okay.”

“Me too.” The SUV screeched around a
corner.

“Maybe he’s all right but the driver just
got frustrated with the traffic,” she said.

“Right. That’s why the driver’s taking him
away from the hospital,” Callum said. “Something’s wrong, and I’m
not sure it’s with David.”

“He did look a little ill,” Cassie said,
“and he wasn’t struggling. In the garage, he looked like he was
okay with what they were doing.”

“I agree,” Callum said.

“Regardless, the policemen in the car ahead
of us will call this in to their headquarters and let them know
what’s going on, right?” Cassie said.

“Yes. If the men in the police car aren’t
in
on whatever’s going on,” Callum said.

When they reached the end of another alley,
the ambulance and police car cut across four lanes of traffic.
Callum gunned the engine to follow, but Cassie gestured for him to
slow down. “Let them get a bit ahead. I know we don’t want to lose
them, but if what you suspect is correct, we might want them to
think they’ve lost us.”

Callum nodded, waited a beat, and then shot
across the street during an infinitesimal break in the traffic
while Cassie covered her eyes and tried not to shriek. He turned
into the alley the ambulance had taken just as the police car
disappeared around a right turn a hundred yards ahead. Now Callum
floored it and followed, not wanting to lose them at the next
corner. “I know where I am at least. My flat wasn’t far from
here.”

“We turned north back there,” Cassie said.
“Are we getting near the hospital?”

“No,” Callum said. “Not one that I know of,
anyway. Cardiff has only one hospital equipped to deal with a
hazmat-level quarantine. On the other hand, in my absence, the
Security Service could have taken over one of the smaller clinics.
To send David to a place like that would all but eliminate the risk
of spreading whatever has made him sick. But I don’t know of any
clinics out here either.”

With the last few turns, keeping up with the
police car through a small miracle, they’d left the traffic behind
them. All three vehicles drove northeast at a good clip, away from
the city center.

“We could get closer to them if we could
change cars,” Cassie said.

“Even if we could take the time to steal
something less noticeable, it’s hard to tail a suspect with only
one vehicle.” Callum shot Cassie a grin. “I’m doing my best.”

Cassie stared at her husband for a second.
“You’re enjoying this!”

“A little bit.” Then Callum pulled sharply
to the left-hand curb as four hundred feet ahead of him the
ambulance turned into the parking lot behind a ten-story
yellow-brick apartment building. Above the first floor, each
apartment had a balcony that overlooked the cars.

“Not much of a view,” Cassie said.

“I’ll get us closer.” Callum said,
misunderstanding her. Cassie had meant that the apartments didn’t
have a view, not that she and Callum couldn’t see the parking lot,
but it was a silly joke to make at a time like this.

The police car entered the lot behind the
ambulance, and then Callum pulled back onto the road. He drove
forward until he found a space to park on the other side of the
street from the driveway, almost directly across from the entrance
to the lot. This vantage point gave them a narrow line of vision
between the building and a tall hedge that surrounded the whole
complex to see what was happening in the parking lot.

The street was tree-lined on both sides,
giving them a bit more cover, and mostly residential, with a
dentist’s office on one corner and a convenience store kitty-corner
to it. Otherwise, the neighborhood consisted of small houses,
duplexes, and other apartment buildings further down the
street.

Cassie and Callum remained in the SUV,
scrunched down in their seats. They watched as two men, having
discarded their hazmat suits, unloaded David from the ambulance,
which they’d parked crossways across three parking spaces. It was
the emptiest parking lot Cassie had seen in her brief tour of
Cardiff. Parking lots in Wales, even from the short time she’d been
here, had revealed themselves to be half the size of American ones
but still needing to hold the same number of cars, which admittedly
were also half the size of American ones. Not this parking lot,
however.

David still had the IV in his arm, and the
drip bag swung above his head, hanging from a hook attached to the
stretcher. He looked to be asleep.

“Tell me this is one of your safe houses,”
Cassie said.

Callum’s mouth twitched. “We do have them.
You haven’t been watching too many movies—”

“I haven’t been watching any movies—”

“—but this wasn’t one of ours when I was the
head of Cardiff station.” Callum stared hard as Natasha took off a
hazmat suit outside the ambulance and, dressed as before in what
Cassie might call a ‘power suit’ approached the passenger side of
the police car.

Callum made a groaning sound deep in his
throat. “Oh no.”

“Does this have to be bad?” Cassie said.
“Maybe Lady Jane established this safe house in your absence,
specifically in case David or one of his family members came back?
This could be playing out exactly as she means it to.”

“You’re too nice.”

Cassie scoffed. “I wouldn’t ever have said
so.”

Callum didn’t respond to her comment, though
she thought she detected a slight twitch of a smile before he went
back to chewing on his lower lip and watching Natasha. His former
friend spoke to one of the men involved, a tall, gray-haired man in
round glasses. Natasha nodded twice and stabbed a finger at him
before climbing into the passenger side of the police car. The
police car then started up and backed out of its space. It exited
the parking lot, took a left, and headed back the way it had
come.

“I’ll tell you why this bothers me so much,”
Callum said. “The initial response—the stretcher, the hazmat suits,
the ambulances—speaks to me of an abundance of caution.
Someone
was very concerned about David and called in the
cavalry. But the sudden departure of the ambulance without its
escort indicates fear or extreme recklessness. The former would
mean that Lady Jane has grown concerned that someone is trying to
get at David. In this case, the initial response—over-response, in
fact—would have been for show.”