Guardians of Time (13 page)

“They build everything this way. And since
their country is at peace, they never think about being attacked,”
Llywelyn said. “It takes some getting used to.”

“They have more money than-than—” Math
struggled to think of a way to convey his thoughts.

“Than sense.” Llywelyn smirked. “What we
could do with what they have and think nothing of.”

Math was finally starting to understand the
quiet desperation he felt in Dafydd when he talked about what
Avalon could offer the Middle Ages. “
Things
, as Anna has
said many times.”

“Things,” Llywelyn agreed.

“I would like to see one of these bathrooms
Anna goes on about,” Math said.

“I thought I saw a sign—” Llywelyn broke off
as lights flashed across the doorway, and the sound of a motor
indicated someone had entered the parking lot.

Llywelyn signaled with his hand, indicating
they should both move back around the corner of the corridor. Math
heard the clunking sound of a closing car door and feet crunching
the snow.

He and Llywelyn crouched on opposite sides
of the corridor, which formed a ‘T’ with the one that led to the
front doors. As the footsteps came closer, Math peered around the
corner. A light shone directly in his eyes, and he pulled back his
head, blinking away the glare.

He waited a moment, watching the light dance
against the walls, and when it disappeared, he carefully looked
towards the doors again. A man in a trench coat, a nearly exact
replica of the one worn by Callum, shone a light—a
flashlight
to Anna and a
torch
to Callum—all around
the doorframe. Beyond him, snow continued to fall, and flakes
coated his head and shoulders, just from the brief walk from his
car to the sheltered doorway.

“Who could that be?” Math half-moaned,
half-whispered the question. “Why can’t these people leave us
alone?”

“The authorities must have thought better of
the policemen’s departure and sent this new man to ask more
questions,” Llywelyn said.

“We’re not going to answer any,” Math said,
a little grimly.

“There you are!”

Both men turned at Anna’s voice. She’d come
down the same stairwell they had.

Math put a finger to his lips. “Shh.”

“What is it?” Anna crouched against the wall
beside Math, speaking now in a whisper. “I’ve been looking
everywhere for you, even the men’s bathroom in case you were
discovering the wonders of a flush toilet.”

Math jerked his head in the direction of the
front doors. “A man is outside. He is dressed like Callum.”

“Oh no,” Anna said. “What’s he doing?”

“Nothing yet,” Math said.

“We don’t think he knows we’re here, though
Dr. Wolff’s vehicle is still parked out front.” Llywelyn was
standing, but he had hadn’t crossed the gap between them because it
would expose him to the view of the man outside.

Anna’s face fell. “If he’s MI-5, he can run
the license plate and discover in two seconds who owns it.” She
leaned past Math, seemingly to look around the corner, but Math
caught her arm to stop her.

“He’s just looking right now. The bus is
gone, so there’s nothing to see.”

“Those policemen must have called their
superiors immediately,” Anna said. “I would have thought they would
have been intimidated enough by Callum to do as he said, since he’s
MI-5 too.”

“Sadly, it doesn’t appear so,” Math said.
“Maybe they found courage in a cup of mead.”

“I don’t think anyone drinks mead here
anymore,” Anna said.

Of all the changes that could have occurred
in seven hundred years, that surprised Math the most. “What do they
drink then?”

“Um—” Anna was distracted by the light
bobbing around the hall, directed into the building by the man at
the door. “Beer, I think.”

“That’s an English drink,” Math said.

Anna gave him a dark look. “You remember the
English won, right?”

“Do you have news of Meg, Anna?” Llywelyn
said.

Anna looked past Math to her father.
“Actually, yes. That’s what I came to tell you. Mom’s had the
mammogram. It’s amazing how quickly things can go when you don’t
have to wait for anyone else to go first. There’s a lump there—kind
of a big one, actually. Dr. Wolff is doing an ultrasound right now.
The next step would be a biopsy.”

“And then we’ll know if it’s cancer?” Math
said because Llywelyn looked so stricken he had to have been afraid
to ask.

“The cells have to be sent to a lab—or
should be—but both he and Rachel said they’d look at them with the
equipment they have here, and they’ll be able to give at least a
tentative answer.”

Math knew what a
lab
was because
Rachel had one in Llangollen, and he was opening his mouth to ask
what equipment said
lab
might have that Rachel’s father
didn’t when the front door rattled and banged.

“Open the door. I know you’re in there!”

The three of them looked wide-eyed at each
other. Math put a hand on Anna’s arm. “Don’t move.”

Crouching, he peered around the corner
again. The man now stood facing the parking lot, his hands on his
hips, clearly frustrated.

Llywelyn took the man’s moment of
inattention to dash across the corridor to reach Math and Anna.
“Can he get inside?” he asked when he reached them.

“I don’t know English law, but in America,
police need a search warrant because this is private property. They
can’t just go barging in.” She shrugged. “But again, that comes
from American television police procedurals, not any real knowledge
on my part.”

“We’ve been here only a few hours, and
already I can’t understand a word you’re saying,” Llywelyn said,
though he squeezed Anna’s shoulder as he spoke to take the sting
out of his words.

“The answer to your question is,
I don’t
know
,” Anna said. “I’m just sorry someone was paying attention
on Christmas Eve after all. Or was lucky enough to find out about
the Cardiff bus so quickly. Maybe that agent lives in Gwynedd.”

“I don’t like it when my enemy gets lucky,”
Llywelyn said. “It makes me wonder what other mistakes I might have
made.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” Math said. “We
can’t allow him to arrest us.”

Anna pulled out her phone. “It’s time to
call Callum, don’t you think?”

Math grimaced. “I hate to disturb him. He
and Dafydd are doing important work.”

“What about Abraham?” Llywelyn said. “It’s
his clinic. He could send the man on his way.”

“We can’t expose him to MI-5!” Anna said.
“If the police had returned, I’d ask him to come down here in a
heartbeat, but what if the man takes him away?”

Math found a growl forming in his throat.
“Your father and I could take him easily.”

Anna shook her head. “I know you can, and it
might be easier just to let you. We could lock him in a closet
until Mom’s done, but that would only cause trouble for Abraham
down the road. Callum knows how these people think. He can tell us
what to do.”

Math’s discontentment rose further. He had
his sword, but no authority. At home, he would have walked right up
to the doors and sent the man on his way. Llywelyn, as King of
Wales, could have done the same—as could Anna for that matter. But
this world was too big and, while the modern Prince of Wales might
have had that kind of authority, among those of them here, it was
only Callum who could tell a fellow agent what to do. It was the
lesson in powerlessness that Dafydd had been trying to teach. Math
hadn’t understood what he meant until now.

“What if we ask Callum and Dafydd to return,
and they are thrown in irons instead of us?” Math said. “This could
be a trap for Dafydd.”

“I can’t talk to these people, Math. Nor can
you. Even Anna is an outsider as an American,” Llywelyn said. “I
know my son, and you know your brother-in-law. He would want Anna
to call.”

Nodding, Anna pressed the screen on her
phone.

Callum answered almost immediately. “Is
everything okay?”

“There’s a man in a suit and trench coat
like you wear outside the door,” Anna said.

“Damn,” Callum said. “We’re in the middle of
something here—”

“The door!” Llywelyn dashed away.

A gust of cold air wafted down the corridor,
and Anna passed Math the phone at the same time that she called out
to the agent, who had pushed the door open. “Hi! We were just
coming to talk to you.”

“What’s happening?” Callum said into Math’s
ear.

“He opened the door,” he said.

“Keep me on the line,” Callum said.

Anna caught the edge of the door and stood
directly in the doorway so the man would have to push past her in
order to enter the building. “May I help you?”

“What can you tell me about the bus that was
here?” the man said.

Anna frowned and didn’t bother to pretend
she had no idea what he was talking about. It wasn’t snowing so
hard that the great ruts weren’t clearly visible in the snow,
though they were starting to be filled in by new flakes.
“Nothing.”

“But you saw it?”

Anna shrugged. “It came. It went.”

Although Math was pleased to discover that
he understood the English the man was speaking, thanks to being
married to Anna for most of the last decade, he wasn’t in a
position to involve himself in the conversation in a way that would
make sense, so he didn’t try. His eyes went instead to the vehicle
beyond the sidewalk, parked such that Dr. Wolff’s little car
wouldn’t be able to leave.

“Did you notice that it was a Cardiff bus,
not one from Bangor?” the stranger said.

Anna put on a puzzled expression. “Why would
a Cardiff bus be in Bangor?”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you,” the man
said. “You’re saying you have no idea where it went.”

Anna raised her shoulders in an elaborate
shrug. “I didn’t see anything. My mother has a lump in her breast,
and the doctor is doing a biopsy of it right now.”

The agent frowned and shifted from one foot
to the other. “Er—”

Math was quietly pleased to discover that
men in Avalon weren’t any happier than medieval men to hear about
the private doings of women. He had to stare at a point three feet
above the man’s head to keep his expression blank. It really wasn’t
fair of Anna to pretend she knew nothing about the bus, but if it
made this agent leave without any more questions or Math having to
resort to violence, he could accept it.

“Was there anything else you needed?” Anna
said brightly. “I really would like to get back upstairs to my
mother.”

She started to back away, but that was a
mistake because the man in the suit pushed between the door and the
frame, his eyes now on Math. “Is that a sword you’re wearing?”

Math looked down at his sword, and then up
again at the stranger. He should have left his sword on the bus,
but he hated not having its comforting weight at his side.

“Oh, that?” Anna said. “We’ve come from a
medieval feast to celebrate Christmas Eve. My husband wanted to
dress the part.”

Math was astounded that Anna had come up
with an exact description of where they’d been and why he was
wearing a sword that wasn’t even a lie.

The man in the suit continued to edge
sideways, trying to get all the way inside. Math stepped forward
and put an arm out to prevent him from doing so. The man retreated
slightly. There must have been something to Anna’s idea that the
law didn’t allow an officer to enter a private building without
cause or unless he was invited. Math still had the phone in his
other hand, though he’d put it surreptitiously down by his side so
the agent wouldn’t realize Callum was listening.

“And you decided to stop on the way home for
your mother to have a biopsy?” the agent said.

Anna shrugged. “It was when the doctor could
see her.”

Llywelyn then came into the light and said
in his heavily accented English, “Excuse me, could you tell me your
name?”

The man reached into his breast pocket,
pulled out a wallet not unlike the one Callum and the other MI-5
agents carried, and held it up. Anna looked closer, and Math peered
over her shoulder. A piece of paper said his name was Rupert Jones,
and he was associated with something called
The
Guardian
.

Anna blinked. “You’re a reporter?”

Math studied the man.
A reporter
.
He’d heard of such an occupation. Darren, in particular, had made
several sneering comments about
the press
in Math’s hearing.
Dafydd had brought the printing press to the Middle Ages, and books
and broadsheets were becoming more common. Wales and England had
the beginnings of what Math understood had become a huge industry
in Avalon.

Math stepped back and put the phone to his
ear, turning sideways so he could still pay attention to the
stranger but could also talk without being overheard. “He isn’t
MI-5. He’s a reporter named Rupert Jones.”

“Ask him how he tracked the bus to the
clinic,” Callum said.

Math put down the phone and repeated the
question to Rupert.

Rupert gestured to the parking lot. “I have
a police radio, which also confirmed that the bus is definitely the
one that disappeared a year ago in the bombing at Cardiff city
hall.”

Anna frowned. “Maybe you’re looking at an
alien abduction.”

Math didn’t know what that was and,
apparently, Rupert didn’t either because he ignored the comment.
“One of my contacts was on the motorway earlier and saw it appear
out of nowhere with her own eyes.”

If that was true, Rupert’s friend had truly
been in the right place at the right time and, depending upon how
close she was when the bus appeared, she was lucky to be alive. It
also meant, now that Math thought about it, that Rupert might have
a bigger role to play in what was happening here than it first
appeared and wasn’t merely an obstruction to what they were trying
to do.