Guardians of Time (27 page)

Static came over the earpiece, and Callum
spoke words David interpreted to be
you’re breaking up
.
Reception being what it was in Wales—sucky—and with the many feet
of stone surrounding them on all sides, it wasn’t surprising they’d
lost contact. Hopefully the gap in service would be brief.

David put a hand up to his ear. “If you can
hear this, we’ve started checking the toilets, beginning on the
east side of the castle.”

Callum didn’t answer.

“There’s one in here.” Abraham, who to
nobody’s surprise knew Caernarfon Castle well, led the way up
another staircase into one of the east towers of the castle. For
all that security was incredibly tight getting into the castle,
once inside, far fewer guards were visible. David supposed the
security people felt everyone inside had been vetted—and certainly
nobody had been able to smuggle in so much as a thimbleful of C-4,
so they didn’t need to be watched closely.

“Am I to understand that neither of you have
ever been here before today?” Abraham said to David and his
father.

“Caernarfon Castle was built by Edward to
subdue the populace,” David said.

“That would be after my death.” Dad grinned.
“Strange to think about, isn’t it?”

Abraham shook his head. “I will never think
about the Prince of Wales in the same way again.”

“You’d better not if you’re coming with us,”
David said.

Caernarfon Castle was the largest castle in
north Wales and modern for its time. It had seven towers built into
the curtain wall, not including the towers that guarded the two
main gates. As a result, it had dozens of toilets on multiple
levels. David ducked into a second one. He used his phone as a
flashlight and shined it into the recesses of the toilet shaft. No
C-4. He heaved a sigh of relief. The absolute best outcome would be
to spend the day in the castle, hear the prince’s speech, and go
home.

“Why isn’t anyone else in here?” Dad
said.

“Because Tate didn’t listen to Callum,”
David said. It made him kind of angry to be disbelieved. Again.

“Are you sure you want to return to the
Middle Ages?” Dad said.

At first David thought his father was
talking to Abraham or Darren, but Dad was looking at him when he
spoke. David laughed. “We’re really not going to go over this
again, are we? People need to stop asking me that.”

Dad held up his phone. “This is a miraculous
world.”

David scoffed and was about to make a
sarcastic comment when they turned a corner, heading for the last
of the toilets in the east wing.

Dad was slightly ahead of him—so he saw Lee
first and stopped cold in the middle of the corridor.

Lee was coming straight at them from the
other direction, dressed in a Caernarfon Castle maintenance
uniform, with the little logo for CADW, the Welsh historical
preservation society, on the breast pocket. The detached part of
David’s brain told him that it made sense for Lee to be wearing the
uniform since that had to be how Lee could have gotten inside the
castle without being stopped. He might have even come by the
uniform legally, since he could have heard about the prince’s
speech as soon as it was announced, seen the implications, and
applied at Caernarfon for a job.

They were still twenty feet apart, but Lee
had noticed them too, so David didn’t see much point in retreating.
He put out a hand, trying to think of something appeasing to say to
Lee while at the same time whispering a warning into his earpiece.
As before, he got no response from Callum.

“You.” A gun materialized in Lee’s
hand—maybe the same gun he’d brought to the Middle Ages and shot at
David with last year—and he pointed it at them. “Put up your hands,
David, or your father dies.”

David obeyed, hoping that Lee hadn’t seen
Darren, who was still in the toilet corridor, or Abraham, who was
shorter than either Llywelyn or David. Abraham had stopped in the
shadow against the wall. David tried to make himself look bigger
and more looming, even as he heard Abraham take a few quick steps
backwards. David hoped he could bring help, or at the very least
get to some place with better reception. David turned his head
slightly sideways, tracking him out of the corner of his eye.

But before Abraham could get far, a second
man moved out of the shadows farther down the corridor. He held a
gun in his right hand and shoved at Darren’s back with his left.
Darren edged forward until he reached Abraham’s side. The man
waggled the gun, urging Darren and Abraham to move past David
towards Lee.

David would have told them to stall, but
Abraham couldn’t read minds and obeyed the terrorist instead of
David’s unvoiced thought. With a gun in his face, David couldn’t
blame him. Lee’s accomplice came forward too until he was four feet
away from David and Darren, with Abraham and David’s father
standing beyond them, closer to Lee. David had by now turned fully
sideways, one arm outstretched towards Lee and the other towards
his accomplice, keeping them both at bay.

Abraham, meanwhile, pressed his back against
the corridor wall and faced David. He was very calm, as befitted
his training as a doctor used to crisis situations, and his eyes
kept flicking from one gun to the other.

“You don’t want to do this,” David said to
Lee.

“I really think I do,” Lee said. “I didn’t
exchange servitude to you for oppression here only to fail
now.”

Judging Lee to be the more dangerous of
their two opponents, Darren edged towards Lee, taking a half-step
to the right to end up in front of Abraham in order to act as his
protector. Dad was closer to Lee than David, a matter of two feet
from the gun, which Lee should have known wasn’t a good idea. David
sensed his father moving a split second before he did.

Dad grabbed the barrel of Lee’s gun with his
right hand, jerked the gun down and forward to pull Lee towards
him, and then popped Lee’s nose with the heel of his left hand.

A half second later, in a
what the
hell
sort of way, David launched himself at Lee’s
accomplice.

Men with guns should be prepared to aim
them, but Lee’s accomplice either viewed the gun as a prop or
simply didn’t expect David make a move on him. As David rushed
forward, the gun went off. David felt the bullet whistle by his
left ear, but it didn’t hit him, and then David was close enough to
grasp the man’s right wrist with his own right hand and twist
it.

The accomplice released the gun, which David
caught in his left hand. Still holding the terrorist’s wrist at a
brutal angle, David levered the man to the floor, kicking his left
knee as he did so, and said, “Get down on the ground and put your
hands behind your head.”

David had never shot a gun in his life, but
as Lee’s accomplice fell forward on his face, he held it two-handed
like he’d seen on television. David backed away too so there was a
good five feet between him and the man on the ground. He wasn’t
going to make the mistake both these men had made, which was to get
close enough to his victim to have the tables turned on him. David
thought it would have been taught in Terrorist 101. Guns were
uncommon in Britain, however, so maybe they really hadn’t known—or
their nervousness had overcome their training.

Once the man was on the ground, David
glanced again at his father to see how he was faring. He had Lee on
his knees, but instead of lying face down, Lee had both hands to
his nose, which was pouring blood.

Dad held Lee’s gun and was pointing it at
him. His father had only seen a gun a few times in his life. He’d
never held one and certainly never seen one fired, which was the
only explanation David could think of as to why his father had
taken the chance of getting shot and had moved as he had. He’d
saved them, however, so David couldn’t feel bad about it.

Before David could suggest Darren help out,
the MI-5 agent moved swiftly to Dad’s side, took the gun from him,
and then kicked at the back of Lee’s knee with his boot. “On the
ground.”

With that, David lifted his chin and tried
to make his voice carry, though all the saliva in his mouth had
suddenly dried up, and he found himself croaking, “Over here! We’re
over here!” He repeated the words in Welsh for good measure.

It would have been great if Callum had been
able to hear him speak, but David wasn’t counting on it. His own
ears still rang from the sound of the gun going off in the enclosed
space, so even if someone had replied, he might not have heard
him.

He shouted one more time, and then answering
calls came from outside the walls. A few seconds later, feet
pounded along the stone passage.

“You okay, Dad?” David said.

Because of Darren, Dad had backed away from
Lee, and now he stood guard over Abraham. “I am.”

“Abraham?”

Abraham nodded but didn’t speak. David
turned the gun so the butt was towards the doctor. “I need a
second.”

Showing surprise for the first time, Abraham
took the gun, his eyes a little wider than usual, and pointed it in
the direction of Lee’s accomplice.

David had to assume that the result of this
encounter would be that all of them would spend the rest of the day
being questioned by MI-5. He would have preferred to avoid that and
silently thanked Callum for insisting that Darren join his party.
Even if it took a while to clear everything up, having an MI-5
agent among those subduing a terrorist had to put them all
instantly on the side of the angels.

Still, it would mean no more toilet
checking, and they hadn’t even finished this tower, much less the
six others. With that worry at the front of his mind, David ducked
into the last toilet he hadn’t checked, the one he’d been heading
to when they’d been interrupted by Lee. In fact, it was through
this doorway that Lee had entered the hallway a moment ago.

The small room was at the end of a
zig-zagging corridor, and this toilet was more intact than some of
the others. Looking down it, David couldn’t see daylight. He stuck
his hand into the chute, feeling around the stones, his mind more
on Lee and his accomplice in the corridor than on what he was
doing. Thus, it was a few seconds, as he felt around inside the
toilet shaft, before he realized his hand was touching clay.

Not that it was really clay, of course, but
C-4. David hadn’t encountered explosives since that awful day at
Dover Castle, but the experience of feeling around inside the
toilet shaft at Canterbury Castle, touching the squishiness of the
C-4 that felt more like modeling clay than anything else, wasn’t
something he’d ever forget.

David focused on his fingers, feeling around
the edges of the block until they touched a cord, which ran
downwards. He followed the cord it until it—and David’s
fingers—connected with another block of clay. He could just reach
it if he bent over fully and stretched his arm as far as it would
go down the chute. The awkwardness of the position meant there was
no way David could pull the bomb out by himself—and it would be
stupid to try anyway, in case the detonator went off when he moved
it.

Fixing in his mind the particular details of
what he’d found in order to convey them to the authorities as
succinctly as possible, he pulled out his arm and darted down the
passage towards the interior corridor. When he reached the doorway,
Dad and Abraham were waiting for him, and Dad directed his
attention to where two security guards were getting Lee and his
accomplice to their feet while Darren talked to them urgently. His
badge was closed but still held in his hand.

“We need to get out of here right now,”
David said to his father and Abraham, and then raised the volume of
his voice to add, “There’s a bomb in the toilet shaft!”

David kept his eyes on Lee because—bloody
nose or not, hands cuffed behind his back or not—he was going far
more quietly than David thought he should be. Lee was violent and
spiteful, and even with Darren’s warnings, the two policemen had to
be woefully unprepared for what he might do next.

At David’s shout, Darren spun around, and as
long as David lived, he would never forget the look of horror on
his friend’s face. While the two guards openly gaped behind him,
and Lee’s accomplice glared disdainfully, Darren ran back down the
corridor towards David and the others. Meanwhile, the expression on
Lee’s face as he looked at David chilled him to the bone. It was a
mocking smirk, which turned into an open smile as he turned his
back in order to show David his hands cuffed behind his back—and
the trigger he held in his hand.

“You get to be my ticket out of here,” Lee
said.

Fear coursed through David, but instead of
freezing him, it gave him clarity and purpose. He didn’t reply. He
didn’t protest. Instead, he grabbed Darren’s hand and clapped it on
Abraham’s upper arm. “Don’t let go whatever you do.”

Then he hooked his arms through Abraham’s
and Dad’s elbows, spun everyone around so they were facing away
from Lee and the guards, and urged them forward. Instinctively,
David tucked his arms closer to his body and clasped his hands
across his chest so neither Abraham nor Dad had a chance to get
loose. Darren by now had one hand on Abraham’s arm and one arm
around David’s shoulders and was shoving them forward as he ran
behind them, as if he was pushing a giant boulder up a hill.

Neither Dad nor Abraham protested at the
treatment, though one of the policeman shouted, “Hey! You can’t
leave!”

Yes we can.

Ten feet … twenty feet … they were fifty
feet away from the toilet, having made it almost all the way back
down the corridor to the Black Tower, when the guard’s echoing call
was cut off by the percussive
boom
that resounded in the
corridor almost at the same instant that the force of the explosion
pressed Darren into David’s back, and all of them were lifted off
their feet and vaulted forward. David hit the wall in front of him
full on.