Refuge in Time

by Sarah Woodbury

  “Then I’ll go.”

  It wasn’t a request for permission, and Reg didn’t treat it as one or try to dissuade him. “Likely there’s nobody up there. Whoever did this planned very carefully in not a lot of time. If they were good enough to arrange the shooting, they’re good enough to be long gone by now.” Reg’s tone darkened. “Thank God nobody was killed.”

  “You didn’t see anyone suspicious?”

  “I think everyone looks suspicious. But with hundreds of people here, from every walk of life, who should have been detained?” Reg switched the setting back, so Michael could hear the general conversation among the rest of the security force. “Wait for Mali. She’s on her way.”

  Now that Michael was on the floor of the warehouse, he could look up to the scaffolding without being blinded, but he still didn’t see anybody on the lights platform. It was where the shooters had been, however, and thus it was where Michael needed to go. Since his first job had vanished to Earth Two, and job number two, seeing to the wounded, appeared to be unnecessary, finding the culprit would be job number three.

  If the police had arrived, he would have left it to them, but he knew guns better than any run-of-the-mill policeman from Conwy. The worst crime any of them had probably ever investigated was the theft of a bicycle left out front of a corner shop. SIS could handle this, but there weren’t any teams in north Wales, and the Wales counterterrorism unit was based out of Holyhead, at least an hour away.

  The approach to the catwalk and the scaffolding was on the far wall, fifty feet from where Michael stood, and consisted of a louvered metal staircase. As he crossed the warehouse, he glanced at the giant screens, which now showed only an empty stage. Eight billion people had just seen David and William time travel, and if the networks were true to form, by now a national personality had come on to explain what had happened to the televised audience.

  Two feet from the entrance to the stairway, Mali appeared at Michael’s side, having snaked through a cluster of two dozen civilians to reach him. Her dark eyes flashed, revealing stress but also a level of determination that encouraged him too. At first she stepped so close he was disconcerted by her violation of his personal space, but then she moved her arm out from under her jacket and revealed a Glock 22 sidearm. Guns were rare enough in modern Britain that he gaped at it for a second.

  “What’s this?”

  “You know what it is.”

  “Where’d you get it?” Michael knew guns, but he was reluctant to take the firearm. He had hoped his days of carrying a weapon were behind him.

  Mali’s brows drew together, and her tone implied he was an idiot for asking, since the answer was obvious. “We work for Chad Treadman.” Then she tapped her earpiece, seemingly to mute it since then she said, “Dennis told Reg he doesn’t want any of us pursuing the shooter, but Reg gave that to me to give to you on the chance you didn’t get the memo. As it is, you didn’t get it from me.”

  “Right.” He took in a breath, accepting the gun and checking the ammunition and the safety in quick, efficient movements. Reg wasn’t wrong that it would be irresponsible and dangerous for him to go after an armed man or men without a weapon himself.

  “I’m off. Keep your comm open.” Mali glanced towards the people behind her. A few in the back were actually pushing at those in front of them as if that would get them through the door faster. “Be careful.”

  “Always.”

  Michael had spent thirty seconds talking to Mali, and it was still fewer than ten minutes since the shooting stopped. The last of the stragglers were finally away from the seats and headed towards the door. The sound proofing inside the warehouse was good enough that Michael couldn’t hear anything going on outside, but the police and ambulances had to be arriving soon. They would find a car park full of people desperate to leave immediately, none of whom could be allowed to. Honestly, Michael didn’t envy Mali. He’d take tracking a gunman over appeasing a crowd of hysterical people any day.

  He went up the stairs, the gun held in two hands in front of him, muzzle pointed down. By keeping his back to the wall of the warehouse, Michael could see in all directions at the same time. As a medic, he’d been embedded in a unit that had been charged with clearing buildings and villages of enemy combatants. He knew how it was done. To the British public, all overt military operations in Afghanistan had ended in 2014, but that wasn’t entirely true. He’d been told the lie was a necessary fiction.

  The catwalk structure was reached by two sets of stairs: the one he was currently going up and a second located in the opposite corner, to the left of and behind the stage. From the top of the stairs, he could follow the catwalk all the way around the inside wall of the warehouse or head along an extension that went directly across the middle, where it met another catwalk running perpendicular to it, one which was connected to the front and back walls.

  The entire structure was screwed into the walls of the warehouse and supported by a dozen or so giant pillars coming up from the floor. Heavy wire from the ceiling spaced every six feet also helped maintain the integrity of the structure. If nothing else, Michael didn’t think it was going to collapse at any moment.

  The lights for the stage had been affixed to an extension to the central catwalk, in what amounted to a loft, wide enough for technicians to move around without risk of falling off or running into one another. Thick cables descending from the ceiling held it in place.

  Once he reached the top of the stairs, the bad feeling that had formed in his belly coalesced into a hard rock. Two unmoving forms lay ahead of him on the lights platform. Not entirely throwing caution to the winds, but at least putting it temporarily aside, he ran along the central catwalk towards them, at the same time speaking into his earpiece, “I have two people down.”

  Reg was there immediately with an answer. “Medical personnel have been called. They are on their way.”

  “Send them to the lights platform.”

  Each step rang out metallically until he reached the extension to the catwalk, at which point they became muffled. He understood instantly what had happened: the movie people who’d used the warehouse didn’t want the technicians to disrupt the show on the stage with the sound of footfalls on metal.

  The first body was that of a woman who lay on her belly on the floor, her head turned to one side. He held his breath as he put his fingers to her neck and let it out when he felt a strong pulse. He didn’t have his medical bag with him, but the hand he placed on her back rose and fell with her steady breathing. He moved on to the second person, a man who lay unmoving a few feet away. He was also breathing.

  “Let the medical personnel know both are alive but unconscious.”

  “Copy that.”

  Michael stayed where he was for a moment, crouched between the two people, surveying the small space while his mind puzzled over the problem. Guns had been fired, but nobody had died.

  Why?

  How?

  And what, if anything, could he do about it now?

  Chapter Five

  3 April 2022

  Livia

  Livia lifted the hatchback door of her car, using it to shelter against a sudden rain, which had started sometime during the interview, while she rummaged through her go bag in the boot. Because Director Philips had wanted to send the right message to David, Livia had been driving her own vehicle this whole time. She’d driven it from London while her goons, as David had called them at one point, had followed in a Security Service vehicle, one which David had spotted immediately in the hospital car park.

  The director had wanted to put David at his ease, and she’d done her best to carry out his wishes. At least that had been the thinking three days ago. Though the two agents hadn’t been welcome at Chad’s rented compound outside of Bangor, they’d never actually left Wales, of course. Where they were at this moment, however, Livia didn’t know—and that, quite frankly, was very troubling. For starters, they should have been watching her back, if not David’s, an
d the shooting in the warehouse was precisely the reason she’d continued to put up with them in the first place.

  And if they’d gone for a coffee, making them the only people on the planet not watching the events of tonight, where were they now? Unlike Chad’s team, the three of them didn’t have comms but had been relying on their mobile phones to communicate.

  The shots had been fired five minutes and a lifetime ago, long enough for someone among the staff, in the audience, or watching from home to have telephoned to emergency services. Once Livia reached the car park with Chad, Alex, and Amelia, she’d tried to ring not only the goons but her boss, Jack Stine, but had been unable to get through.

  After the meeting between Director Philips and David in the Tesco produce section, the chain of authority had been made very clear. She was to communicate with Jack and only Jack. He then reported to Grant Dempsey, MI-5’s head of Internal Security—meaning the security of Britain, not MI-5 itself. That job had belonged to Amanda Crichton, who’d been sacked three days ago by Philips himself for insubordination and crazy thinking. Grant Dempsey had initially supported her efforts to contain Anna and David, but had seen the error of his ways quickly enough to keep his job.

  An image of Dempsey rose before Livia’s eyes. He was gray-haired, tall and thin, educated at the finest schools in Britain, and had a proverbial steel rod up his spine. Last she’d seen him, he’d been spinning slowly back and forth in his chair as he sat at the conference table on the top floor of Thames House, behaving as he always did as if he’d seen it all before, even if he couldn’t possibly have done so. Certainly, nobody could have predicted what had happened tonight.

  Last but not least, the two men sent with her were to report to her and her alone. There’d been so much intrigue associated with David and his family—and Livia’s role in the reconstituted Time Travel Initiative was too important—to allow anyone else to interfere.

  It was all meant to be very simple.

  She’d last spoken to Jack that morning, just as a routine check-in. A moment ago, she hadn’t been able even to dial out. Four billion people had decided they needed to telephone the other four billion people on the planet to exclaim about what had happened. Even high speed mobile technology couldn’t handle that volume. Next she would have tried 999, the number for emergency services, but she didn’t want to ring them from her work mobile, which was the only one she had on her person. Though she herself worked in IT, she was still a clandestine operative for the Security Service, and the only people outside of Five and Treadman’s organization who knew the name of her real employer were her parents.

  Besides, it wasn’t as if every police force in the country hadn’t just been put on high alert and was on its way here.

  The car park was mobbed with people, all wanting to leave right now. Everyone was hunched against the rain, and since many of the audience members weren’t wearing coats, having left them in the stands or in their vehicles, they were shivering and miserable. If the police—or Five—wanted witnesses to question, they needed to hurry.

  While it was Michael, and then she, who had hustled Amelia and Chad off the stage, Reg had appeared before they’d reached the door and escorted them into the car park. He’d designated Joe as the man in charge of Chad, along with two more agents, who’d formed a protective circle around him where he stood by one of the armored SUVs that made him look like a dictator from an impoverished country. He’d arrived in a similarly armored limousine, which was parked a few spaces farther down.

  At long last, after another minute, sirens sounded in the distance. By then, Livia had stripped off her heels and skirt right there in the car park, stashing both in the boot, and was wearing black pants with multitudinous pockets, comfortable shoes, and a black American baseball cap, having undone the chignon and replaced it with a messy bun at the base of her neck. She’d kept on her silk blouse, but the jacket of her dress suit went into the boot as well, to be replaced by a black rain jacket.

  Amelia, who’d at first gone with Chad, came hurrying over, carrying a large black umbrella held above her head. When she reached Livia, she looked her up and down. “You came prepared.”

  Livia shot her a quick grin. “I’m always prepared.”

  Then Livia returned to the boot and punched in the code for the safe bolted to the body of the vehicle. Opening it revealed a pistol and bullets.

  Amelia stared at the weapon, clearly surprised. “Are you sure you should carry that?”

  “I’m trained,” Livia said, trying to keep her voice even and expressionless.

  “I know, but—” Amelia broke off, looking dubious.

  The gun was small, appropriate for concealment on Livia’s person, and hadn’t been bought in Britain. MI-5 didn’t issue its officers weapons as a rule, though she’d had the advanced training offered to all officers. But such was the upheaval in the Security Service at present that even if someone showed up at the warehouse and noticed Livia was carrying a gun, it was unlikely they’d question how she’d acquired it.

  Livia was afraid to speculate about how the shooter had acquired his gun. She wasn’t military like Michael, but she knew enough about gunfire to understand that what had been fired had been an automatic weapon. They weren’t easy to come by in a country where not even the police carried guns except under specific circumstances. Guns could be smuggled in, of course, or stolen. Given that the shooter had fired upon David in front of a live studio audience, he had the panache for both.

  “With an active shooter in the building, I can’t reenter the warehouse without it.”

  “You’re going back in?” Amelia was appalled.

  “I have to. It’s my job.” Livia didn’t know at what point she’d decided to go back inside, but the decision had somehow been made. Then, as she let out a laugh, surprised at the surge of adrenaline and even joy that coursed through her, she looked past Amelia to see Mali coming out of the warehouse amidst some straggling audience members.

  Livia waved, prompting Mali to say a few curt words to the civilians with her, directing them away from the doors. Then she trotted over to Livia and Amelia.

  “Most everyone is clear.” Once underneath Amelia’s umbrella, Mali pushed back her hood and paused to listen to the wailing of the sirens, coming closer with every second. “Reg is seeing to the stragglers.”

  Livia’s gun came with a holster that expanded to be belted around the waist or cinched for the thigh. Livia chose the waist tonight, thinking to wear it concealed under her jacket. “Any sign of the shooter?” she asked as she adjusted it.

  “No,” Mali said.

  “Did Michael come out?”

  Mali pressed her lips together, and it appeared she was reluctant to speak. But then, under Livia’s steady gaze, she said, “He was going up to the catwalk when I left.”

  Amelia drew in a breath. “You didn’t go with him?”

  Mali shook her head. “Not my job.” She watched Livia snap the gun into the holster. “I gather you think it’s yours?”

  “I’m not going to let Michael get himself killed in there all by himself. Or worse, make himself a hero.”

  Mali put her hand to her ear. “Livia is coming in, Michael.”

  Livia couldn’t hear Michael’s response, but she assumed it was in the affirmative because Mali said, “He says he’ll wait for you. He has a gun of his own, so make sure you identify yourself well in advance.”

  Amelia surprised Livia with a quick hug and then a pat as she released her. “If you’re going, you should go now before the police take over.” Two police cars had just pulled through the car park entrance two hundred feet away. Behind them came a fire engine and the first of what might be several ambulances. Since this was Wales, the latter was spelled ambiwlans.

  Livia adjusted her jacket to hide her weapon and then looked at the two women. She liked both of them, and the crisis had created a sudden camaraderie among them. They were three steady heads amidst a sea of panic. “Tell the police Michae
l and I are inside and who we are. They’ll listen to you.” Without a backward glance, she headed across the car park, ducking her head against the rain.

  Once at the door, Livia didn’t stop to catch her breath. Reg had posted an agent on either side of the opening, and they waved her through. The danger, if any remained in the warehouse, wasn’t here. Inside, the red carpet still stretched half the length of the building and was otherwise surrounded by a large expanse of concrete. A few minutes ago, the space had been full of life and laughter. Now, the picked over food tables offered their wares to an empty room and, eerily, the fifteen-foot screen that faced her still showed the deserted stage.

  Livia moved first towards the stage, confirming her memory that no bloody bodies lay on, in front of, or beside it, and then she headed for the stairs up to the catwalk Mali said Michael had taken.

  “Michael?” She called up to him, trying not to shout but wanting to speak loudly enough so he’d know she was coming. Her shoes were rubber soled and squeaked on the metal stairway. She reached the top step and spied him on the lights platform thirty feet away. “It’s me, Livia.”

  “I didn’t recognize you in that hat.” He motioned her closer and, once she approached, drew her attention to two the bodies over which he was hovering.

  “They’re not ... dead?”

  “No. I gave them each a quick going over and can’t find any wounds. They weren’t shot, but I can’t wake them either.”

  “The authorities have arrived.” Livia slid her gun into its holster and crouched beside the first body, as Michael must have done earlier.

  “Along with an ambulance?”

  “At least two.” Livia leaned closer, putting her nose near the woman’s face and sniffing. “Whatever the shooter used, it wasn’t chloroform, which anyway takes longer to knock someone out than you see in the movies. I’d say this was something stronger, like what they use before surgery. Propofol or similar.”