Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (22 page)

“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 you 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.

Cassie tried to calculate how long the phone
had been on. Their actual conversation with Smythe and Lady Jane
had stayed within the required two minute time frame, but that
didn’t mean Smythe wouldn’t have had Jones punch up the
specifications of Callum’s phone and turn on the GPS remotely as
soon as they hung up.

“How about you get the two men who are not
David to open the door, and I go through it?” Callum said.

“That was the sum of my plan.” Cassie eyed
him. “You realize that Lady Jane does trust you, or she wouldn’t
have left you with your gun.”

“That’s a nice thought. Perhaps it was on
her orders that nobody patted me down. I’m not sure what’s going on
except that if we wait until the Security Service arrives in force,
David’s chances of getting out of this alive decrease
significantly.”

“You really think agents would come in here
guns blazing?” Cassie said.

“I don’t know what to think,” Callum
said.

Not for the first time, he showed Cassie his
underlying self-confidence. He could admit how much he didn’t know
and yet push through this problem anyway. He wasn’t hampered by
fear or indecision. He thought he knew what they had to do, and by
God, they were going to do it.

“We’ve come a long way since rescuing Samuel
and James Stewart at that fort in Scotland,” Cassie said.

Callum gave a snort of laughter. “We did all
right then. We can do this now, and this time we don’t have a horde
of angry Highlanders after us.” He looked down at his gun. “That
was the last time I held this gun with the intent to use it if I
had to.”

“Let’s hope you don’t have to.”

“Very little of what has happened so far
makes sense to me, Natasha’s defection—if that’s what it is—being
at the top of the list.”

Cassie unwound her hair from the bun at the
back of her head and let the long braid fall over her left
shoulder. Then she pulled out the mop, dry as it was, and began
sweeping it around the floor in front of the apartment door. Callum
pressed himself flat against the wall to the left of the door, on
the opposite side from the handle.

After a quick intake of breath for courage,
Cassie bumped the handle of the mop into the door and then a few
seconds later did it again, this time making it scrape along the
wood a little longer. Footfalls came from the apartment, but the
door didn’t open. Cassie passed the mop along the floor, scraping
the door a third time, and then a fourth.

The door opened abruptly, and Cassie
straightened. She had made sure she was more to the right than the
left of the door, so whoever opened it would look towards her and
not to Callum. When the man opened the door, his mouth was agape,
as if he was ready to curse her out—or whomever he found scraping
at his door—but at the sight of Cassie, his teeth snapped
together.

Until Callum, she’d never thought of herself
as beautiful—certainly not enough to stop a man in his tracks—but
the man who faced her was so struck by her appearance that he
didn’t speak. She gave him a shy smile.

“Who is it?” Someone spoke from behind the
first man, who turned his head to talk to his partner. “It’s just
the maid—”

Callum shoved his left shoulder into the
door, knocking it from the man’s hand. The next second, he snapped
his right elbow into the man’s throat. He staggered backwards, his
hands coming up to his neck and his face a rictus of agony. The
man’s calves banged into the couch behind him and, because he was
still unbalanced, he fell sideways and cracked his head against the
side wall of the room.

Callum didn’t wait to see any of that. He
continued through the door, which flew inward and slammed against
the wall to the left. Callum’s gun was steady in his hand and
pointed at the second man, who had the sense to put up his
hands.

“Step away from the stretcher,” Callum
said.

Cassie’s eyes flicked from Callum to the
fallen man, who moaned and curled into a fetal position. She moved
into the doorway, the handle of her mop at the ready. If he tried
to get up, she would whack him.

“You don’t want to do this, son,” the man by
David’s stretcher said in an American accent.

“I really think I do,” Callum said. “Cassie,
help David.”

Cassie abandoned her vigil, leaving the mop
and bucket just inside the doorway. She sidled behind and around
Callum, so she wouldn’t get in the way of his line of sight, and
went to where David lay.

“He’s alive,” the man said.

“He’d better be.” Cassie leaned over David,
patting his cheek and speaking softly to him about how he was going
to be fine. After a few seconds, David took in a deep breath and
then coughed. He tried to turn onto his side, gasping a bit at the
effort, and she shushed him, though that cough was the nicest sound
she’d ever heard. “It’s okay. It’s me.”

David hadn’t really opened his eyes until
that moment, and now they widened in recognition. “Hey,” he
said.

“Hey yourself. We’ve come to get you out of
here.”

“That’d be nice.” David’s words came out
slurred.

Cassie looked more closely into his eyes:
his pupils were very dilated. The IV drip was almost completely
full, so whatever it was, it hadn’t taken much to put him out.
Cassie had never turned off one before, but there was a little dial
on the tube that led to David’s arm and she turned it.

“What did you give him?” Callum said.

The man’s chin jutted out, and he didn’t
answer.

“Tell me,” Callum said.

“Or what? You’ll shoot me?” the man said.
“Then you’ll get no answers.”

“Don’t push me,” Callum said.

“He can shoot you in the leg,” Cassie said.
“Your mouth would still work.”

“Get him out of here, Cassie,” Callum
said.

She got behind the stretcher and pushed
David towards the door, out it, and down the corridor, aiming for
the exit door through which the men had brought David an hour
earlier. As she reached it, Anders met her.

“Thank you,” she said.

He helped her lift the stretcher over the
threshold and into the parking lot. A chill wind greeted her,
reminding Cassie that she’d left the windbreaker in the maintenance
closet. More days like this and she’d have clothing scattered all
over Cardiff.

“Where are you going with him?” Anders
said.

Cassie pointed to the SUV, still parked on
the street. She couldn’t remember if Callum had left the doors
unlocked, but it didn’t matter because by the time she and Anders
got David across the street, Callum was hurrying out of the
apartment building, still with his gun in his hand. He unlocked the
SUV from across the street. Apparently, he had a button for that on
his mobile too.

Cassie opened the rear door and crawled
inside in order to put down all the seats but the front ones. While
she worked, Anders and Callum dropped the height of the stretcher
to a few inches above the ground so it would fit inside the
vehicle. Then Cassie slid out to allow the men to lift David into
the back.

When David was securely inside, Callum got
in the driver’s side. He started the engine, and Cassie turned to
Anders. “Thank you, again.”

“Always happy to help the Security Service,”
he said, but as he turned to leave, he hesitated. “You know,
though. I’m pretty sure the bloke who rented the flat was one of
you.”

“Why would you think that?” Cassie said.

Anders looked a little sheepish. “He took a
stack of pound notes out of his wallet to pay the rent but then
dropped his keys. When he bent to pick them up, I took a closer
look at his wallet and saw that he had an ID like his underneath.”
Anders pointed to Callum, who had turned around to look at them
from the driver’s seat.

“What was that?” Callum put a hand to his
ear.

Cassie flapped a hand at her husband. “Just
a sec.”

Cassie didn’t ask Anders if he’d taken a few
more bills from the man’s wallet too and instead said, “But you
didn’t see who he worked for?”

“Sorry,” Anders said. “I didn’t have
time.”

Cassie nodded at the apartment manager.
“Thanks for the information—and the help.”

“No problem. I never liked that bloke
anyway.”

Cassie climbed in after the stretcher and
Anders shut the rear door. After another wave, he crossed the
street and returned to the apartment building. Thinking about the
mess he had to clean up, she stuck her head out the window. “You
might call the police, just to cover yourself.”

Anders shot her a grin and waved a hand in
acknowledgement.

Cassie crouched by David’s head. “Do you
hurt anywhere?”

David was struggling to wake; he rolled his
head from side to side but didn’t seem to have the wherewithal to
answer properly.

Callum looked at them through the rearview
mirror. “You two okay back here?”

“I guess,” Cassie said.

While they’d been inside, the daylight had
faded, and though it wasn’t yet fully dark, evening had arrived,
along with a few scattered drops of rain. Callum allowed several
cars to pass him before pulling into the street heading east. The
rain began to pick up, and he turned on the windshield wipers and
the headlights.

“I’m really glad you came.” David’s eyes
were open, and he struggled to push up onto his elbows. Cassie
shushed him and forced him to lie back down.

“Did you find out what they gave him?”
Cassie said to Callum. His hands were clenched around the steering
wheel, and he was driving faster than the weather and the streets
might normally allow.

“A cocktail of pain killers and something to
get him to talk,” Callum said. “He wouldn’t tell me anything else
without more effort on my part, and I was in a hurry to get back to
you.”

“What did you do to him?” Cassie said.

“I didn’t kill him if that’s what you’re
asking.” Callum gave her a quick glance over his shoulder to let
her know he was joking and that he didn’t believe she would think
that.

Cassie just shook her head at him.

“If you must know, I duct taped them both
with a roll they’d kept handy for use on David and phoned the
police.” Callum held up his cell phone. “But not before I took
their photos. If they’re in the system, facial recognition software
should get us an ID.”

“Anders thought one of them was MI-5,” she
said, “though that wouldn’t account for him being an American.”

“They did look ex-military,” Callum
said.

“What’d I tell you?” David threw an arm
across his eyes and Cassie wondered if the bit of light coming
through the windows hurt them. “If you think someone’s out to get
you, you’re paranoid only if it turns out not to be true.”

Cassie smiled. For the first time since they
arrived in the twenty-first century, his mind and hers were working
along the same lines. “I’m pretty sure, in this case, paranoia is
our only hope.”

September, 1289

Lili

F
rom the entrance
to the castle on the northeastern end of Windsor town, it was a
matter of three hundred yards to the gatehouse where the King’s
Road ended at the city gate, and an equal distance to the town end
of the bridge across the Thames River. Messengers, young boys and
girls mostly, scurried back and forth from gate to bridge to castle
and all around the city in a near constant stream, keeping Math
updated on the status of the defense and what was coming against
them. Lili had heard men say that watching the lower lands outside
the moat fill up with enemy soldiers as darkness descended upon the
castle and town was more terrifying than fighting an actual battle,
and she had to agree.