Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series)

by Sarah Woodbury

  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.”

  “That would explain Natasha’s presence here,” Cassie said.

  “It would, and I’d love for that to be the case, and that this was all planned out from the beginning,” Callum said. “But when they took David from the ambulance, he was asleep. And that looks like a real IV in his arm.”

  “So if he wasn’t well, they might take him to a smaller clinic, like you said before, instead of a hospital,” Cassie said, “but not to a semi-rundown apartment building.”

  “Exactly,” Callum said.

  “So this is an abduction,” Cassie said, “and Natasha is involved.”

  “Yes,” Callum said. “Easier to grab him here than once he’s in London.”

  And really, what more was there to say than that? “You said I was too nice, but this confirms all my fears,” Cassie said.

  “Which fears are those, in particular?” Callum said.

  “That they—” Cassie gestured to the men in the parking lot, one of whom had opened a side door into the building and was helping the second man wheel David’s stretcher inside, “—are the bad guys. We need to get in there.”

  “I know we do,” Callum said, “but I don’t want to rush in without a plan. Watch first, act later.”

  Leaving the gray-haired man inside the building with the stretcher, the two remaining medics closed the door to the apartment building, walked to the ambulance, and got in. The ambulance started up and drove out of the parking lot, turning right instead of left like the police car had. The occupants of neither vehicle appeared to have noticed Cassie and Callum.

  Callum pulled out his phone and stared at the blank screen.

  “What are you doing?” Cassie said.

  “Trying to decide what I should do next: use my mobile to ring Lady Jane and report what is happening, or toss it into a dumpster.” He turned the phone over in his hands, and Cassie saw that it had a seamless construction. It wasn’t possible to remove the battery. “Stupidly, I am only realizing now that it might have a tracking device in it that functions even when it’s off.”

  “You’ve been away for a while,” Cassie said.

  Callum grimaced. “That’s no excuse. I should have known better than to keep it on me.”

  “We needed the phone to access the SUV,” Cassie said.

  “Which has its own GPS system.” Callum gestured to the dashboard. “We’re probably not fooling anyone.”

  Cassie’s stomach had been in knots from the start over being separated from David. Bad enough to be stuck in a foreign country with a bunch of spies. Far worse not to know what was happening right under their noses or whom they could trust. She was glad to be with Callum, but she was hating everything else about today. It wasn’t at all what she’d imagined returning to the twenty-first century would be like. She hadn’t even gotten a hot shower yet, and the coffee in the cafeteria had been lukewarm and bitter.

  “It may be that everything that has happened so far has been a charade for our benefit, a test even,” Callum said.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Cassie said. “David wouldn’t be playing along with them to test your loyalty.”

  Callum held up the phone. “What do you think? If I turn on, I can use it to help find David.”

  “How could your phone possibly help with that?” Cassie said.

  “I’m a secret agent man.” Callum gave her a wicked grin. “It has a program to scan for heat signatures.”

  “Wow.” She pursed her lips. “You can turn off the GPS, can’t you?”

  “Technically, but if the mobile is on, Jones could turn on the GPS remotely. If anyone is looking for me, he needs about a minute for my signature to come online, and another minute to trace my location,” Callum said. “A lot depends on how far Jones is willing to go to help us, and how much pressure he’s under to find us.”

  “Would he know about a new safe house?” Cassie said.

  “I don’t know,” Callum said. “I don’t dare ring him to find out until we at least know more about what’s happening here. So far, we haven’t done anything wrong or illegal. We were concerned about David’s safety and tailed his ambulance. I need a bit more information before I can make that call.”

  “I say turn on the phone, then,” Cassie said. “It’s worth the risk of them coming after us. At the very worst, they’ll catch us and haul us back to MI-5. But all that means is that we’ll end up right back where we started. No harm, no foul.”

  Callum reached for Cassie’s hand, squeezed it, and then opened his car door. Cassie got out too. The parking lot stayed as it had been, empty but for two cars. The day had been warm before they were shut up in the MI-5 building, but with evening coming on and clouds arriving that looked like rain, the air temperature had cooled considerably. If she hadn’t been wearing the Kevlar vest and the windbreaker, she would have been cold. She wished for her cloak, left in the bathroom back at MI-5, and then dismissed the thought. It had sentimental value, but it was a thing. Callum would commission her another one.

  With the phone in Callum’s hand, though still not turned on, they crossed the street and entered the parking lot. Callum signaled for Cassie to stay back while he approached the remaining two vehicles. He didn’t pull his gun from the holster at the small of his back, but he did sidle down the side of the nearest vehicle—a minivan—towards the driver’s door as she’d seen police and agents in television shows do a million times. He kept his eyes fixed on the side mirror.

  When he reached the driver’s side door, he peered through the window and then opened the door, which was unlocked, and poked his head inside. Cassie thought he might climb into the van, but then he pulled back and looked towards Cassie, shaking his head. Nobody. She shrugged and pointed to the side door of the apartment building through which the men had wheeled David in his stretcher.

  Callum closed the van door gently, hardly making more noise than a click, and crossed to the building. He put a hand on the apartment complex door, at which point Cassie realized that it was a soli
d sheet of metal, without windows or adornment, not even a handle. That meant, though she hadn’t noticed it at the time, that the door had been opened from the inside for the ambulance men. Yet another person was involved.

  Callum came back to where she waited at the near corner of the building. “Let’s try the front.”

  Unsurprisingly, like the side door, the main door to the apartment building was locked. Cassie shaded her eyes with her hand to block the glare of the setting sun and pressed close to the glass. Peering through the window, she saw an actual human sitting behind a counter on the opposite side of the foyer. She knocked on the window to get his attention while Callum flattened his badge against the glass. When the man looked up from his computer, Callum crooked a finger at him. “Open up.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed, but he stood and came around the counter. He glanced at Callum’s badge and then twisted the lock to open the door. “What is it?” He had a very stiff, upper crust British accent, which made Cassie wonder what he was doing managing an apartment complex instead of drinking tea and eating strawberries and cream at Wimbledon. He was dressed well to match his voice, in a button-down shirt, slacks, and a tie. He wore flip-flops instead of loafers, however, and the incongruity of it had Cassie biting her lip and looking down at her feet to hide her amusement.

  “I have some questions about someone who has leased one of the flats in your building,” Callum said. “What’s your name?”

  “Anders,” the man said. “Which flat do you mean?”

  Callum pushed passed Anders and crossed the foyer to the counter without answering. Anders and Cassie hustled after him. Anders seemed anxious to reach the counter first, and Cassie understood why when she saw the images on Anders’s computer screen just before he slammed the lid down on his laptop.

  Callum cleared his throat. “I don’t have a name, only that he entered through a side door a few minutes ago, pushing a stretcher.”

  “A stretcher?” Anders said. “I didn’t notice anything.”

  Neither Cassie nor Callum mentioned that if Anders spent more time paying attention to what was going on around him and less time surfing the web for pictures of naked women—or watching pornographic videos—he might have noticed something like that.

  “I’d like to see your security tapes,” Callum said.

  ‘Tapes’ hadn’t been used in a lot more years than the ten months Callum had been in the Middle Ages, but Anders knew what he meant. He didn’t ask for a search warrant either, if one was even required in the UK, just gestured towards a door behind him. Perhaps he was worried about Callum reporting his visual stimuli. Callum’s glance at Cassie showed his self-satisfaction with their progress so far; he put his hand at the small of Cassie’s back, and they followed Anders into the little room behind the counter.

  The apartment’s security system was minimal but efficient. Two cameras watched the parking lot, with a wide angle of vision. More cameras monitored both the front and side doors and all the hallways on all ten floors. Anders fiddled with the video, moving forward and back until the image of the ambulance driving into the parking lot appeared. Even though he’d seen it live when it happened, Callum cursed again at the appearance of Natasha. After that, they had full coverage of a man opening the door, the ambulance men unloading David in his stretcher, and two men wheeling him through the side door, into the corridor, and down it to the last apartment on the end, number 118.

  “When did you let this flat?” Callum said.

  “A month ago; a bloke paid in full for a year.”

  “Is he one of the men you see here?” Callum said.

  Anders’s leaned forward, squinting. The resolution on the screen wasn’t great. “I can’t tell.”

  “Might he appear elsewhere? How about when he rented the flat?” Callum said.

  “We delete the video after a fortnight. In fact, I don’t remember seeing him since then.” He gestured to the screen. “I could try to find him for you.”

  “Thank you,” Callum said.

  “Should be a doddle.” Anders’s forehead wrinkled up, and he suddenly looked wary. “Do you want to wait?”

  “I wasn’t planning on it. Let me know if you find him.” Callum gestured to the corridor. “We’ll be down there.”

  Anders gestured to their armor and windbreakers. “Are you here to arrest him?”

  “We’ll see,” Callum said.

  “We’ll do our best to keep it peaceful,” Cassie said, without any real knowledge of what they were going to do, but because she thought that’s what an agent might say.

  Callum shot her a grin as he turned away; they left Anders in the security room and headed down the corridor towards apartment 118. Cassie looked back to see the manager’s head just peeking around the corner. As she noticed him, he pulled his head back, but she knew that with his cameras, he would be watching them. “Are you just going to knock on their door?”

  “I’m thinking about it,” Callum said.

  “You could call Lady Jane,” Cassie said. “She could be freaking out at this point since we’re missing.”

  “Or she isn’t because she knows I’m doing as she asked. My job.” Callum tugged on Cassie’s arm, pulling her into a maintenance closet located halfway along the corridor. He left the door slightly ajar so they could keep an eye on number 118.

  “Given time, I could think of things to do with you in here that are more fun than this,” Callum said, with another smile.

  Cassie smiled, too. She’d never made out in a maintenance closet at school, not being adventurous that way at the time. Then she looked away, and her smile faded. Callum appeared to be in his element. It was a little daunting to think that the Middle Ages had less life and death peril than one day at MI-5, and if she wasn’t mistaken, Callum had missed it.

  “Remember, we have two minutes,” she said.

  Callum pressed a button on the side of his phone, and it turned on. Almost immediately after the main screen came up, before Callum had a chance to do anything else with it, the phone lit up with an incoming call. They stared at the name of the caller for a few seconds before Callum took in a deep breath and pressed ‘talk’. “Hello, Driscoll.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  September, 2017

  Cassie

  “Where are you?” Smythe’s voice burst from the phone.

  Both Cassie and Callum jumped, and Cassie’s elbow hit a stack of sponges on one of the shelves in the closet. Fortunately, they made no noise as they fell. Callum turned down the sound, though he didn’t put the phone to his ear and instead started flipping through its many screens and programs. Cassie put her head near Callum’s shoulder so she could hear the conversation better.

  “Out.” As Callum spoke, he found where the GPS application was on his phone and turned it off.

  “What? Did you say out?” It was still Smythe speaking, for some reason using Driscoll’s phone.

  With a grimace, Callum turned down the volume another notch. A thud, followed by rustling and fumbling sounds, came from the other end of the line, as if Smythe had dropped the phone, and then a woman’s voice came on. “This is Jane Cooke. All of us can hear you, Callum. David has been abducted.”

  “I know,” Callum said.

  “Where are you, exactly?” Smythe said.

  “Why don’t you know?” Callum said.

  Cassie mouthed ‘Jones?’ at Callum, who nodded and said, “Is Jones there?”

  “I’m here, Callum,” came the familiar voice. “You took the one vehicle in the car park without a working GPS, and I see you’ve turned off the GPS on your mobile.”

  “It would be quicker if you just told us where you were,” Smythe said.

  “I’m less concerned that you don’t know where I am than that you don’t know where David is,” Callum said. “You were supposed to look after him.”

  “We were looking after him, as you so succinctly put it,” said Lady Jane, “until his ambulance took another route. Is Natasha with y
ou too?”

  Callum frowned even though the people on the other end couldn’t see his expression. “No, though we’ve seen her. The ambulance David was riding in doesn’t have a GPS either?”

  That prompted a buzz of conversation on the other end of the line, none of which Cassie could clearly distinguish. It rose and fell, and then Lady Jane came back on. “Callum—”

  “I’m doing my job.” Callum cut her off. “I’ll ring you back as soon as we have David.” He closed the connection and looked at Cassie. “That was less than two minutes.”

  “Do you think Jones really doesn’t know where we are?” she said.

  “If he does, he hasn’t told anyone else,” Callum said.

  “I’ve had a thought.” Cassie unzipped her jacket and took it off, removed her Kevlar vest, and then slung an apron that had been hanging on a hook on the wall around her neck. Callum stopped fiddling with his phone, watching her without asking what she was doing, and when she turned around, he tied the apron at the back for her.

  She turned back to look at him. “I’ll knock on the door to the apartment, and then you do your thing.”

  “My thing?” Callum said, but he stepped into the corridor without asking her to elaborate. Cassie followed, hauling a mop bucket on wheels behind her.

  Callum pulled out his gun and held it loosely in his right hand, pointed straight down at the floor, while still holding his phone in his left. They approached apartment 118, Cassie walking down the center of the hall, wheeling the bucket behind her, and Callum sidling down one wall.

  “How many men do we think are in there?” she said.

  “You can see for yourself.” Callum showed her the screen on his phone. The room contained three men in shades of green, red, and black. One man was clearly sitting down and from the way his body was shaped, Cassie guessed he was sitting on a couch or a squishy chair. A second man lay flat. On the screen, it looked as if he was suspended in mid-air. A third man stood beside him. The phone recorded no other heat signatures in the apartment.