Refuge in Time

by Sarah Woodbury

  Dennis turned to look at them as they entered. Though earlier he’d been dismissive of both Livia and Michael, similar feelings didn’t show on his face. “You’re just in time.”

  He was below average height and, unlike Chad, appeared to be trying to make up for it by working his upper body until his muscles were bizarrely large. Michael put him in his early forties.

  “I got ‘em all,” the woman said, chewing gum loudly between words. “Give me a sec.”

  She was speaking with an American accent, and Michael was in no way surprised her hair was purple. Given her age and demeanor, he would have expected tattoos as well, but she had none—or at least none that he could see.

  Livia nudged him as she’d done earlier and said in an undertone. “Bard’s people aren’t here yet, but they soon will be.”

  Michael matched her volume, not wanting Dennis, who was focused on the screens in front of him, to overhear. “Are we worried about what they’ll find?”

  Livia pressed her lips together for a moment before speaking. “I think we can’t be. I think we have to pursue this to the end, regardless of whom it implicates.”

  He breathed a little easier. “I agree.”

  When she’d showed up at the hospital three days ago, he’d distrusted her simply because she was MI-5, but that feeling had long since dissipated. Now he didn’t even blink when she grabbed his wrist and turned it so she could check his watch. He was surprised to see how little time had passed since the shooting. The interview had begun at eight o’clock, and now it was half past nine.

  It was going to be a long night for all of them.

  Chapter Seven

  3 April 2022

  Livia

  Livia edged between Dennis and Michael until the three of them were ranged around the back of the woman’s chair. The computer tech had waved a hand as introduction, calling herself Candy. Before them were three screens, each showing multiple squares of video feed, one of which was playing David and William’s disappearance on a constant loop, resetting a few seconds after the flash whited out the camera.

  She should have been used to it by now. After all, the video taken of Anna’s disappearance two weeks ago had played all over the world ad nauseum, much of the time at the behest of Chad Treadman. She would never forget the first time she’d seen it: the mountain wasn’t much higher than those around it, but it was plenty high to the people dancing around their fires and maypoles and what-have-you in the valley below.

  And then there was the moment the plane hit the mountain. In the video, the image flared out for a second. After it was restored, though initially viewers might have feared the flash had been an explosion, in point of fact, the plane had disappeared. The people who’d watched it live had been the only ones to see the actual moment, just as Livia had seen David and William depart in a hail of bullets.

  That video had shown the disappearance of an airplane, however, not two people. She was sure Chad would have played the feed of Anna arriving on her horse inside Westminster Palace if the government hadn’t suppressed it. Livia herself had seen it multiple times. Like the video of William and David disappearing, it made for compelling television.

  Michael leaned forward to support his weight with his left hand on the desk. “We want to see the cameras for the car park.”

  “You mean the parking lot, right?” The question was rhetorical, however, and Candy was already typing.

  A moment later, the three cameras that surveyed the exterior of the warehouse took up two of the screens. The third screen continued to show live shots of what was happening throughout the warehouse at that moment. Chad was no longer at the entrance to the warehouse but had disappeared into the crowd. There was still no sign of anyone from MI-5, including Livia’s two men.

  The warehouse now contained fewer than thirty people, all official in one capacity or another. Technicians were getting to work collecting bullets on the stage. Before Candy rewound the video to events in the past rather than the present, two of the exterior cameras showed clusters of audience members. They were still waiting to be interviewed, and few, if any, had been allowed to leave. Someone had unearthed spare trash bin liners, and people were using them to keep off the rain, which was coming down as hard as ever and leaving droplets on the cameras.

  “There! There!” Livia found herself leaning forward too and pointing to the image she wanted. “Rewind that.”

  Candy did as Livia bid, tapping a key such that one entire computer screen filled with the events from a camera that had caught a form crossing in front of it and alighting on the ground.

  “It’s Batman,” Candy said, deadpan. Then she frowned and squinted. “Bat-men.”

  “Two of them,” Dennis said, without commenting on the impossible way the two men had floated down from the roof. “What about the camera from up top?”

  Candy started to peck around looking for it, but Michael interrupted her. “Livia and I were just up there. The wires were cut, whether tonight or long ago, we don’t know.”

  Dennis gave a grunt of disgust. “Can we see them leaving? They should have a vehicle.”

  Candy reverted to the prior screen and the camera that caught the landing of their batmen.

  Just as the first touched down, a black car pulled out of a parking space. As the two batmen walked to the car, they calmly shrugged out of their parachutes (such as they were), opened the front and rear passenger doors of the car, and slid inside. Then, without apparent haste, they drove south, leaving the screen. Terence, Chad’s man who should have been guarding the car park entrance, still hadn’t been found, so it remained to be seen if he was in league with the shooters or had been incapacitated by them in advance. Unfortunately, they had no camera that looked in that direction, whether as an oversight or penny-pinching on the part of whoever had set up the system, or because those wires had been severed too.

  “They could have taken out all the cameras,” Dennis said. “Why didn’t they?”

  “That’s the thing about video surveillance,” Candy said. “If you take it down too soon, you alert whoever’s watching inside that something’s up. And really—” she gestured to the screens, “—what does this tell us that we didn’t already know? Two men shot up an interview with the King of England and drove away.”

  “I see no distinguishing features on the vehicle. It’s a Mercedes, I think. Can we make out the registration?” Livia asked.

  Candy zoomed in a dozen different ways, but could get no clear shot. “It’s possible when the feeds come in from cameras on the streets around the warehouse that we’ll get lucky, but I don’t have anything here. It looks to me like the plate has been muddied up.”

  Michael frowned. “They did everything right that they could control: they landed on the west side of the building, out of sight of the entrance. The car park abuts a stand of trees there, so the only witnesses would have been in the car park itself. The sound proofing and the distances involved were such that if anyone else was about, they wouldn’t know what was happening inside.”

  “I still would have killed all the cameras.” Dennis spun around and headed towards the door. “That’s what’s going to catch them. Candy’s right that we should be able to track their progress. Britain has more CCTV cameras per capita than any country on earth.”

  Livia let Dennis leave without comment. Inside, she doubted the car would be found. He’d said Britain, but he meant England. Even if they were currently in the most populated region of north Wales, it was a matter of a five minutes’ drive to some place far less populated with no cameras. Likely, thirty seconds after the culprits reached that blind spot, they changed vehicles.

  Still, she didn’t begrudge him the desire to look.

  Michael was standing with his arms folded across his chest, still studying the screens. “This may be one of the few issues they faced with having to pull this off so quickly. They couldn’t do anything fancy with technology.”

  “It is both easier and harder t
o meddle with cameras than you see on TV. While the cameras are accessible via the internet so the security company itself could access them, Dennis is right that it’s far easier simply to cut the wires or spray paint the viewfinders black.” Candy twisted to look up at him. “Mission Impossible has impossible in the title for a reason.”

  Livia glanced from Michael’s watch to the screen and made a motion to have Candy replay the events again. “In my head, everything took much longer, but we can time the events from the video: the shooting lasted—”

  “Three seconds,” Candy put in, her nose six inches from the screen as she read the numbers underneath the video that showed David and William disappearing.

  “Three seconds.” Livia repeated. “Though we don’t have cameras on the catwalk, you and I saw what the shooters left there, Michael. They put away the rifle, climbed the stairs, opened their parachutes, and floated down. All in—”

  Her pause was a prompt for Candy, who obliged, “Less than a minute.”

  Livia gritted her teeth. “It took no longer than that to drive out of the car park.”

  Michael pointed to one of the images on the screen. “Reg whisked you outside within that same two minutes. I was up on the catwalk only a few minutes after that, but it still took several minutes too long. We literally just missed them.”

  “They timed it.” It was Candy who said what Livia and Michael were thinking. “They knew exactly what they were doing and how long it would take.”

  “They were pros,” Michael added.

  He and Livia exchanged a thoughtful look, and then Livia put her hand on Candy’s shoulder. “Thanks.”

  Candy shrugged. “Chad said anything for MI-5.” She swiveled her seat to look up at her. “That’s you, right?”

  Livia tipped her head noncommittally.

  “Don’t worry.” Candy smiled. “My lips are sealed.”

  Despite the solemnity of the hour, Livia smiled too and said, “They’d better be. If you told anyone about what you’ve just seen I’d have to—” Her face fell, and she stopping talking, swallowing down what she’d been about to say, a joke along the lines of, “I would love to tell you, but then, of course, I'd have to kill you.” It was a line from The Hound of the Baskervilles, one of her mother’s favorite stories.

  Candy didn’t notice, however, having refocused on the screens before her.

  Outside the security room, the bustle had become more organized, and WECTU had completely taken over, as they should have done. And in this case, the local police were probably happy they had such a good working relationship with a higher authority. Explaining to a superior officer the progress of an investigation into the disappearance of a time traveling King of England was undoubtedly nobody’s idea of a career maker.

  Livia looked towards the stage. “Were the gunmen even shooting real bullets? Does David time travel because he fears for his life or because his life is genuinely in danger? Does his life have to really be in danger for this to work?”

  “I don’t know about what happens with David. That’s above my pay grade. But believe me, those were real bullets. Did you see how chewed up the front of the stage was?”

  “I didn’t.” Livia took in a breath. “I shouldn’t have to remind myself that all this is real. Part of me believed from the first that time travel was real, but what happened with Anna confirmed it, and still—”

  “And still you keep having to pinch yourself.” He lowered his voice, though with the activity in the warehouse, nobody was going to overhear. “We have basic defense mechanisms to protect us against things our minds don’t want to accept.” He studied her. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  She shrugged. “What’s there to talk about? David’s gone. Hard to see how anyone is going to deny what he can do now. The cameras were filming when the shooting started. They caught David and William’s disappearance. The whole world—everyone—saw it!”

  Michael grimaced apologetically. “They saw a flash, and those have been caught on camera many times before.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Livia said. “We’ve chased David and his family all over Britain, and there’s usually a camera there as witness.”

  “Nobody is chasing David now. The shooters made certain of that.” He paused. “In which case, maybe we should be thanking the men who did this rather than hunting them down.”

  Livia’s disapproval must have showed on her face, because Michael laughed. “Let’s put aside speculation for now and focus on what we know. Can we begin from the position that you didn’t do it, and I didn’t do it? Can we agree to that?”

  “Yes.” She found her answer coming instantly.

  “You’re very certain. You don’t think I’m capable of being devious?”

  “No.”

  Michael grinned. Then he cut off their conversation with a hand to his earpiece, his expression a picture of concentration, before looking back to her. “Chad needs us in the car park. There’s been another flash.”

  Chapter Eight

  3 April 1294

  Chester

  Sophie

  As her boots thudded hollowly on the wooden floorboards, Sophie followed the sound of voices coming from farther down the corridor in the keep. A bit of cold air swirled around her, and she shivered and tugged her cloak closer around her shoulders. Medieval castles, as it turned out, were just as chilly as she’d read, though the corridor was colder than usual, making her think there was a door open to the outside somewhere along the passage. She wore her cloak inside all the time, taking it off only to sleep or when it was wet and she had a moment to dry it beside a fire. But really natural wool, which was coated with lanolin, kept off the rain nearly as well as her modern raincoat had done.

  The corridor was also darker than usual and, as she passed the tower stairs that led up to the battlement, the lantern that usually lit the entrance wasn’t on its hook.

  Their victory at Beeston had been in the early hours of the morning of April 2nd, and now, on the evening of the 3rd, not quite forty-eight hours later, here she was back again at Chester like nothing had happened. She’d been told that travel in the Middle Ages was slow if it happened at all, but that hadn’t been her experience. The dislocation was such that she felt almost as if the events that had transpired at Beeston were a dream.

  She could have convinced herself it hadn’t happened at all were it not for the scrape along her right forearm from a prickly bush on Beeston’s slopes and the fact that Andre and George were even now marching again to battle. They were to have left shortly after she did, in order for the army to get a few hours’ march under its belt before calling it a night. They were headed north, following the path the cavalry had taken. Even knowing how slowly they would move in comparison, they hoped to make a difference yet again.

  Time had passed here too. Lili had left, and most of the Welsh royal family had arrived. Because Math had marched with his army for Beeston, Anna had felt the need to be closer to the action and had ridden the twenty miles from Dinas Bran with her sons, Cadell and Bran. Meanwhile, Meg and Llywelyn, along with half of Gwynedd, apparently, had sailed from Aber up the Dee Estuary to Chester, which in this world was one of the most important seaports in Britain.

  For her part, once she’d told Andre and George that she wanted to go home, the twelve miles of traveling between Beeston Castle and Chester had been easily accomplished by early evening yesterday. For once, she hadn’t begrudged the time her journey had taken, even though she could have crossed the same distance in twenty minutes of driving had she been in Avalon. She wasn’t in Avalon. That was the whole problem.

  Instead, she’d ridden the distance in slightly more than three hours. She’d been escorted by two men whose injuries precluded them from fighting anymore. They’d taken it slowly as a result, but in truth less because of the men’s wounds than her own incompetence. Callum was right that she wasn’t a horsewoman by any stretch of the imagination. Learning how to ride a horse properly was at the
top of her list of skills she needed to learn if she was going to stay here.

  If.

  The thought elicited a groan. Her desire to return to the modern world was like a physical thing, so strong she could have wept with it. She’d been certain and adamant before George and Andre, but that was more to keep herself from falling apart. Before she’d left Beeston, when she’d explained she was leaving, Venny’s expression had turned fleetingly to that of a puppy who’d just been kicked. But she’d smiled sweetly and told him she hoped she would see him again soon. Part of her did want to see him again. She was interested, so to speak, since Venny appeared to be a not-quite-run-of-the-mill medieval man.

  But in her heart of hearts, she had come to the conclusion that really, she could never be with a medieval man the way Venny would expect her to—especially after the events at Beeston. It was one thing in Avalon to date someone from a different culture or country. At least that person lived in her world. People from every culture on the planet mixed in London and, worst case, if at a loss for topics of conversation, one could always talk about delays in the Tube.

  Intimacy with a medieval person was another matter entirely. She and Venny had nothing in common apart from their current location and the fact that they were both human—and sometimes she wondered about that.

  Then again, that was hardly fair. The atrocities and outright inhumanity in Avalon easily rivaled the actions of people in Earth Two. The very fact that she was here at all, driven into Snowdon by fighter jets, proved it. As Meg had said an hour ago when they’d been talking about the way the castellan of Beeston Castle, Robert FitzWalter, had been left in a lightless prison cell to die, “Humans are capable of anything.”