Guardians of Time (16 page)

“We weren’t going to be able to walk into a
shop and buy the generator anyway,” Cassie said. “That industrial
supply place isn’t going to be open tonight, tomorrow, or the next
day. We have to break in, in which case we need some time to scout
it out.”

“I can help with that,” David said.

“Alternatively,” Callum said, “we could find
a dealer, who may or may not have one on hand. For now, while you,
Darren, and Cassie surf the internet, Mark and I can see what’s
happening at MI-5.”

“If the press is here, and if the bus
passengers are talking in Caernarfon, MI-5 can’t be far behind,”
Cassie said. “I’d like not to have David end up in a windowless
room again.”

David scoffed. “You and me both, thank you
very much.”

They reached Evan’s building, which turned
out to be made of gray stone, a hundred years old, and one of many
similar looking buildings along the block. They piled out of the
van: David lugging the reams of paper; Mark and Darren with the
three laptops, two of which had been newly acquired; and Callum
with the printer.

“Let’s try to keep a low profile, everyone,”
Callum said. “David is the only one who looks like he might belong
here. Slouch like you’re a graduate student, David, but otherwise I
recommend you don’t say anything.”

David grinned, hoping that Callum would
someday give him that kind of order when they were in the Middle
Ages, just for laughs. Callum wouldn’t, though. He’d missed his
calling as an actor, because he played whatever role was necessary
to any particular scene. Tonight he was the Security Service
commander. Two days from now, when they were back in medieval
Wales, he’d be David’s valued retainer once again.

Evan, when he appeared to let them into the
building through the front double-glass doors, turned out to be a
tall and lanky twenty-something, with straw-like hair and a face
full of brown freckles. He wore tan corduroys and a blue-striped,
buttoned-down shirt. He also, oddly, sported a string cowboy bolero
tie like David hadn’t seen since he’d lived in Oregon. David
couldn’t think of a single reason why the tie would be in fashion
anywhere on the planet. Maybe that was the point.

Mark and Evan shook hands, and then Mark
introduced everyone else, though he left off the part where David
was the King of England in an alternate universe, and Evan was
already turning away before Mark was halfway through the
introductions. Evan ushered them inside and then up to his office,
which, if the number of desks was any indication, he shared with
three other people, none of whom were present.

Evan took a seat behind one of the desks and
turned to his computer, not even bothering to gesture them to the
other chairs. Mark, Cassie, and Darren sat anyway, but since there
were no more seats, David braced himself against the frame of the
door, which he made sure was securely latched, and Callum perched
on the edge of one of the desks.

“What’s going on?” Evan typed into his
keyboard for a second, but when nobody answered, he finally swung
around to look at the motley assortment of strangers in front of
him.

“We need your help,” Mark said.

Evan made a
sheesh
sound under his
breath. “You’re MI-5 aren’t you? You’ve the entire world under
surveillance by now. Why would you need my help?”

Callum cleared his throat. “What we want
from you is a bit under the table.”

Evan had been leaning back in his chair, his
hands clasped across his chest, but now he shifted forward, looking
genuinely interested for the first time. “Who are you?”

Callum canted his head. “As you said,
MI-5.”

“Is this where you tell me that if I help
you I’ll be serving my country?” Evan said, mockery in his
voice.

“You would be,” Callum said.

Evan scoffed again and looked at Mark.
“Don’t tell me you’ve gone rogue. You of all people?”

Mark turned to Callum. “If we want his help,
we have to tell him the truth.”

“To my recollection, telling modern people
the truth doesn’t usually turn out well,” David said.

Evan folded his arms across his chest and
again reclined in his office chair, which he must have unwound as
far as it could go because he was lying almost horizontal. “I get
the truth, or I don’t help.”

“We need to know what MI-5 knows about us,”
Mark said without waiting for Callum’s or David’s consent. “I can
hack in with my old codes, but it’ll send up a red flag the second
I do it. Does that sound like something you can help us with?”

“You’re kidding, right?” Evan said. “What is
this—some kind of a trap?”

“Not for you,” Callum said. “We all
worked
for MI-5, but we’ve been out of it for a year.
Unfortunately, we now need access to information we can’t get
elsewhere. That’s why we came to you.”

“If you’re caught, you’ll go to jail,”
Cassie said brightly.

Evan spun around to his computer. “The whole
point is to not get caught.” But then he reached back towards
Callum and snapped his fingers. “This is a test, right? Let me see
your badge.”

Callum obliged, though not before shooting a
look at Mark, who raised his eyebrows and shrugged.

“You’re right,” Mark said. “This is a
test.”

“You want to prove to your superiors that
MI-5 is hackable—which it completely is, by the way.” Evan’s
fingers were already moving across the keyboard. “What do I get
paid for doing this?”

David shifted slightly against the frame of
the door, but then forced himself to stop moving. Nobody else was
making an effort to correct Evan’s misconception, and he didn’t
feel like it was his place to say anything. He was the low man on
the totem pole. This wasn’t his world anymore, and he didn’t feel
that he had the right to interfere.

“I’ll be sending you an S-7 form in the new
year,” Mark said.

Evan made a guttural sound at the back of
his throat, implying disbelief, and remained focused on his
computer—which was actually a bank of three oversized monitors.
“Get me a job, will you, after I graduate. I’d be happy to hack for
MI-5 all day long.”

“Done,” Mark said.

David frowned at Mark’s certainty, but he
still kept his mouth shut.

Mark stood up to look over Evan’s
shoulder.

Callum stood up too, though not to look at
the computer. “Is there some place we could set up our stuff other
than in here? Some place we could spread out?”

Evan was focused on what he was doing, but
he took a second to wave a hand before returning it to the
keyboard. “Sure. Down the hall. Computer lab with everything. My
code is 1282.”

“Thanks,” Callum said without commenting on
the significance of Evan’s code. He put his hand on Mark’s shoulder
briefly, silently telling him he was leaving, though David wasn’t
sure Mark noticed. Then Callum shooed everyone else out the
door.

Fifteen minutes later, his new laptop on the
table in front of him and having spoken to Mom and Anna twice more,
David was hard at work on the internet. Military technology aside,
David’s highest priority was getting his nascent communication
system up and running. Thanks to huge advances in the last few
years in metallurgy, he was a few months away from being able to
broadcast a speech to half of England. Once you understood the
theory behind it, a radio was an incredibly simple device to make,
even without stripping the cars for parts. They had turned out to
be easier to produce than the telegraph, since he didn’t have to
string wire across the whole of the country. Tonight, he was
looking for any information that might augment the work.

Each of the others had a list of twenty
similar topics—the result of long sessions with various bus
passengers over the course of many months where they’d brainstormed
for everything they could think of that was buildable in the Middle
Ages with the resources they had. David didn’t need to vault the
Middle Ages all the way into the twenty-first century—the
seventeenth would do well enough.

Unfortunately, David felt like he’d only
gotten started on his research when Mark came flying down the hall
and skidded to a halt in the open doorway. “We’re here.”

At first David was confused by Mark’s use of
the word
we
, but Callum stood so fast his chair tipped over;
he didn’t have to ask who Mark meant. “Where? Outside this
building?”

“No. Caernarfon.”

And then David’s phone rang again.

Meg

…
ten minutes earlier.

“W
ho are you
calling, Mom?” Anna said.

Meg tipped the phone away from her mouth for
a second. “My sister.”

“You haven’t already? I thought David told
you to call her hours ago.”

“I didn’t want to until I knew more about
what was going on with me, and then I when I called her home
number, nobody was there,” Meg said a little more tartly than she
intended. “I had to call Callum to get her cell phone number. I
need something to distract me while I wait for the results.”

Which was about the truest thing Meg had
ever said. When she’d found the lump in her breast months ago,
she’d ignored it, since there wasn’t anything she could do about it
anyway. She’d had lumps before, as nearly every woman of a certain
age eventually did, especially one who’d birthed and nursed four
children.

But the lump hadn’t gone away, and she found
herself constantly suppressing the urge to touch it, which was
hardly something the Queen of Wales should do in polite company,
given its location. It was just always
there
, and she’d
grown to hate it. If there was any indication it was cancer, she
hoped Dr. Wolff could cut it out today.

From the very beginning, Dr. Wolff had been
relentlessly cheerful, but as the evening had progressed, he began
to look less like Santa and more like a stern professor. Rachel
hadn’t been kidding when she’d said her father had a full service
women’s clinic. On the way upstairs, she’d passed birthing rooms,
examination rooms, a laboratory, diagnostic imaging, and a
childcare facility. Now, here she was in a section of the building
with every piece equipment necessary for diagnosing breast
cancer.

She’d had the mammogram first, but when that
hadn’t shown anything amiss, and that the lump appeared normally
fibrous, he’d gone and done an ultrasound anyway.

After the ultrasound, however, although he
spoke reassuring words, she didn’t think he could help the
deepening ‘v’ between his eyes. Rachel had said he was only doing a
biopsy because it wasn’t like he could tell her to go home and come
back in three months. But his expression, coupled with the way he
was taking the whole Middle Ages thing in stride, had her more
worried than pretty much anything else he could have said or
done.

When he’d stuck the biopsy needle into her
breast, she’d heard a popping sound, which he said was normal, but
at this point, she wasn’t willing to believe that anything about
the lump was normal. The biopsy took only a few minutes, after
which he’d patted her hand, nodded at Rachel, and then disappeared
into his inner sanctum to look at the cells under a microscope.
After bandaging the incision point and getting Meg ice for the
swelling, Rachel had gone after him.

Meg was officially terrified, though she was
trying to hide it for Anna’s sake.

By now it was nearing eight o’clock in the
evening. Meg hoped the others were faring better than she was.
David had kept in constant communication with both her and Anna.
Every time she’d spoken with him, she’d reassured him that things
were progressing smoothly, whether or not it was true. At least
they’d had no more visits from the police or the press.

Elisa picked up on the third ring, and
almost before Meg had said hello, she said, “I knew it! I knew it
was you!”

Meg found herself smiling. “Merry
Christmas!”

“Where are you?” Elisa said. “Please don’t
tell me you’re outside our house in Pennsylvania.”

“No, actually. We’re in Gwynedd.”

“So are we!” Elisa crowed so loudly into the
phone that Meg had to hold it away from her ear lest she be
deafened.

She put the phone back to her ear. “Really?
Where?”

Elisa sounded like she was practically
jumping up and down with excitement. “The Black Boar. It’s a hotel
in Caernarfon. More of an inn, really. It’s about a thousand years
old.”

Anna gasped, having overheard because of the
volume coming out of the phone. “Mom, that’s where the bus
passengers ended up!”

“Elisa, we’re only a few miles away in
Bangor.” Meg’s heart had started to pound. “Why are you here?”

“Christopher has been asking to spend
Christmas in Wales since he was ten years old. He’s seventeen now,
you know. If we were going to do it, this year seemed like finally
the time. The real question is why are
you
here, Meg?”

“Medical stuff.”

“Just a second. I can barely hear you
because there’s a ton of people in the restaurant, and they’re
talking really loudly. Meg—” Elisa paused and lowered the volume on
her voice, “—I don’t know how to tell you this, but we’re listening
to some of what they’re saying, and—” She paused again.

“What are they saying, Elisa? Just tell
me.”

“Something about a bus? Elen’s eyes are the
size of dinner plates because we heard David’s name mentioned along
with
thank God we’re back
. Is that about you? What’s going
on?”

Meg closed her eyes. When Math had come back
from the interaction with the reporter, saying that Rupert had
received a call from the Black Boar Inn in Caernarfon, Meg had been
counting the minutes until someone said something that led him back
to the clinic. To her. It didn’t sound like that had happened yet,
even though Rupert had to have reached Caernarfon by now. Maybe he,
like Elisa’s family, was listening, even egging the bus passengers
on, trying to get the whole story out of them before they thought
better of their frankness.