Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series)

by Sarah Woodbury

  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.”

  “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.

  Chapter Fifteen

  September, 2017

  Cassie

  Cassie 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.