Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (28 page)

“The same thing everyone wants, David,”
Cassie said. “What makes you tick.”

Lady Jane pushed through the door, looking
not at David but at Callum. “We need to move him. Now.”

Callum straightened against the wall.
“What’s happened?”

Lady Jane came a few steps further into the
room and stopped at the end of David’s bed. “I apologize on behalf
of the Security Service and the British government for what befell
you when you were in our care. We didn’t do our job.”

“Thank you,” David said.

“We will do everything in our power to
ensure your safety going forward.” She waved a hand. “Get him
dressed.”

It was unmistakably an order and not
directed at him, but David swung his legs out of bed anyway. He
couldn’t get out of here soon enough. Cassie crossed to the closet
and opened the door. David was pleased to see his duffel propped
upright against the back wall inside.

“What have you not yet said?” Callum
said.

Lady Jane closed the door to the room. “The
Home Office is sending a helicopter to collect David and bring him
to London.”

“Already?” David said.

Lady Jane looked at her watch. “It will
arrive within the hour.”

“Do you trust her?” David asked Callum. The
time for pretense appeared to be over.

“I guess I do,” Callum said.

“Then I’d better take this out.” David
braced himself for the pain and removed the IV needle from his arm.
He just refrained from cursing at how much it stung.

“That had to hurt.” Cassie dropped the
duffel bag to the floor at David’s feet.

Shaking off his discomfort, David pulled out
its contents, setting them aside one-by-one until he found his
breeches. He tapped the packet of papers that had been at the
bottom of the duffel. “Thank you for bringing it all.” He stood to
shove a foot into one leg of his breeches.

“You wouldn’t have printed out that lot if
you didn’t need it,” Callum said.

David might have been embarrassed to have
two women in the room while he dressed, but it seemed silly to
worry about modesty under the circumstances. Lady Jane faced away,
going to the door with Callum to peer into the corridor. David
glanced at the windows in the inner wall and saw nobody there.

“Did you order everyone to leave?” David
tugged his shirt on over his head.

“I made sure they’d be occupied for the next
few minutes,” Lady Jane said. “Time enough to find our way to my
vehicle downstairs.”

David stopped, his hands to the ties of his
shirt. “Isn’t that a huge risk for you?”

“Even if it is, I’m past caring,” Lady Jane
said. “The time has come for risk-taking.”

Callum pointed at David with his chin. “Put
on that vest.”

“What?” David said. “Where?”

Callum snapped his fingers, indicating the
Kevlar vest poking out of the duffel. “That vest. Put it on.”

David looked at it dubiously, but Cassie
picked it up.

“What about you two?” David said.

“We’re not anybody’s target,” Callum said,
leaving the door. “We don’t know what situation we might be getting
into. You have no armor so you need to wear the vest. For all our
sakes. It has ceramic plates in key locations that will even stop
an arrow.”

“How nice for me,” David said, but took the
vest from Cassie and held it to his chest. Then he looked up. “I
couldn’t agree with Director Cooke more, by the way, that the time
has come for risk-taking. Why don’t we go up to the roof right now
and jump off?”

“Do you think you’re ready for that?” Cassie
said.

David looked at his friends with a
completely calm expression. “I have my clothes. Five minutes and
we’re gone.”

“You’re really willing to risk your life,
jumping off a ten story building, on the off-chance you’ll be
transported to the Middle Ages?” Lady Jane said.

“What choice do I have? Last time, I got
home by causing a car wreck. This world-shifting thing only works
when my life is in danger.” David gestured to his bed. “Almost
dying of a bad drug interaction is apparently not good enough.”

“We would have to jump with you,” Cassie
said.

“I understand your difficulty.” David rubbed
at his jaw and saw blood trickling down his arm. Callum noticed it
too and handed David a tissue from a box on the side table. David
pressed it to the cut. He was probably lucky the vein hadn’t opened
more. “I do. I just don’t see an alternative.
I need to get
home!
”

“He’s right,” Cassie said. “Instead of going
with Director Cooke to her car, we could slip up to the roof.”

“We could take the car and try the balcony
at Chepstow, like I suggested before,” Callum said.

“Even if we could reach it without getting
caught, I’m afraid that’s not going to be enough,” David said.
“Believe me, I’m glad it worked—both times—when my mom and dad
jumped. If it hadn’t, they would have lived through it. I just
don’t feel like that’s going to be good enough for me.”

“What’s the downside of trying?” Cassie
said.

“We get wet,” Callum said, “and end up in
the Wye River.”

David sat on the edge of the bed and clasped
his hands in front of his mouth, looking at them both over his
fingers. He didn’t say anything. They could argue with him until
they were blue in the face, but it wasn’t going to change his
mind.

“I’m willing to risk my life for you, but …”
Callum glanced at Cassie.

David switched to medieval Welsh. “You don’t
want to risk Cassie’s. I understand.”

“I don’t know what you just said, but I
don’t care either.” Cassie had arranged the chest and back pieces
of the Kevlar vest on David’s torso and was systematically
velcroing the shoulder pieces, adjusting the sizing so it fit
snugly over David’s shirt. She stopped in the act of cinching the
chest piece tighter and looked into David’s face. “Do you believe
jumping off the roof will take you home?”

“Yes.” David spoke with utter resolve.

“Then I do too,” she said.

Lady Jane had been watching them with her
arms folded across her chest.

“Thank you for your help,” David said to
her, “but I have every intention of getting out of your hair as
soon as possible.”

Lady Jane’s lips pinched together and she
glared at David. “I am loath to lock you up—”

“—because that’s worked so well so far,”
Cassie said.

“—but you are forcing my hand.” Lady Jane
transferred her hostile glare to Cassie.

Cassie shrugged, not at all cowed. “David
seems to get what he wants most of the time. I suggest you let him
do what he needs to do, and perhaps in the end you might get
something out of it. Knowledge, if nothing else.”

David had been pleased to let Cassie talk
back to Lady Jane, but then Lady Jane snapped back at her. “Do you
want to see your grandfather again or don’t you?”

“Hey now.” Callum took a step towards Lady
Jane, but in that instant the window between David’s bed and the
corridor exploded in a shower of glass.

“Get down!” They all shouted at once, and a
second later, David found himself on the floor beneath both Cassie
and Callum, who had dived at him at the same time. Cassie had
gotten there first, shoving him flat onto his bed, and then Callum
had scooped them off the bed to land in a heap on the other side.
Cassie lay flat on the floor beside David, with Callum stretched
across them both.

David turned his head to look under the bed
and found himself looking at Lady Jane. Her eyes were open but
sightless. She was dead.

September, 2017

Callum

I
t had taken Callum
a half second—which in retrospect could have been too long if the
killer had been aiming for David instead of Lady Jane—to realize
that when the window exploded, it was because the bullet had come
through the plate glass window on the street side of the room and
hit the window in the corridor after passing through the room and
its victim. Lady Jane’s skull had slowed it and spun the bullet
enough to shatter the glass instead of punching through it like it
had the outside window. Callum expected that when someone examined
the hole in the outer window later, he would find that the bullet
had created a perfect circle the width of the bullet itself.

“Agent down! Agent down!”

Men shouted to one another, repeating
Callum’s words, and then someone much closer to the doorway said,
“Callum?”

“Stay down, Driscoll! The shooter has a
clear line of sight into this room. He may still be out there,”
Callum said.

“Who’s down?”

Callum watched the doorway as Driscoll,
appropriately attired in Kevlar, peered around the frame, his head
only eighteen inches above the floor. Driscoll’s eyes widened at
the sight of Lady Jane’s body, and then he focused on the three of
them huddled behind the bed a few feet away.

“Christ.” Driscoll brought his mobile phone
to his lips. “Man down, man down.”

“We’re moving!” Callum hooked his arms under
David’s to get him going, while Driscoll reached for Cassie. They
left the room at a low crouch, their noses only a few inches from
the floor. A phalanx of men in black Kevlar gave way as they exited
the room, and Cassie, Callum, and David hustled away down the hall.
The hospital was set up so one bank of rooms took up one half of
ICU, and a second bank took up the other, with the nurse’s station,
administrative offices, and lavatories in the middle. Callum went
down the right-hand corridor and opened the second door on the
left, which said, ‘Family Members Only’.

They entered a small sitting room. “You’ll
need to secure not only the hospital but anyone who knows about
this project, even peripherally. Take the time you need. We’re good
here,” Callum said, even if it wasn’t true.

“I’m on it.” Driscoll disappeared.

Don’t trust Driscoll. Don’t trust
anyone.

The litany resounded in Callum’s ears as he
pushed away any thought of Lady Jane but what she’d said to him. He
kept seeing the blood pooling underneath her body. Even in the
small time they’d remained in the room, it had started a slow trek
to the door. Up until that moment, it would never have occurred to
him that the hospital floor was uneven.

“Are you all right?” Callum crouched in
front of Cassie, who had found a seat on a small sofa next to
David. Shouts came from the corridor, but he ignored them for now.
Lady Jane was dead, so his priority was the living. “I wrenched
your arm pretty hard.”

“I’m okay,” Cassie said. “A sore elbow is
better than being dead.”

David was staring at nothing, so Callum
said, “Look at me, David.”

David obeyed, swinging his eyes up to meet
Callum’s. David hesitated for a second, and then he nodded. “I’m
fine, too. Really. My hip is sore where we landed—neither of you
are exactly lightweights, you know—and my arm is bleeding again,
but other than that, I’m fine.”

“Was the bullet meant for David or Lady
Jane?” Cassie said.

“Lady Jane,” Callum said with certainty.
“She told me earlier tonight that she feared for her life. And she
told me why.”

“Do you know who—?” Cassie cut herself off
at Callum’s sharp nod. Sirens wailed and footsteps pounded in the
corridor as an assault unit approached the doorway. Driscoll poked
his head into the room, put up a thumb, and then pulled out again.
Cleanup and control commenced
would be what he wrote in his
official report, but Callum didn’t think those words quite did
justice to what needed to happen next. Agents would scour not only
the hospital but all the buildings within line of sight of that
room, looking for evidence of the shooter.

Callum wasn’t an investigator in that sense,
so he would have to leave that to others. He didn’t plan to be
around to find out what they learned, however. If the shooter knew
what was good for him, he would be long gone by now, anyway.

“Is it Smythe?” David said. “He’s Lady
Jane’s second, right? With both her and Natasha gone, he’ll take
over Thames House
and
Cardiff station.”

“I can’t accuse anyone or talk about it
here,” Callum said. “It’s enough to know that there are traitors in
the Security Service and the government, more than just Natasha.
And that a helicopter may be arriving at any moment to take you
from Cardiff.”

“When Anna and I first came to Wales, we
drove into it in my aunt’s minivan,” David said. “How did we get
from there to here? How did our lives become fodder for
international intrigue?”

“It happened the moment your Uncle Ted
spilled the beans to Lady Jane’s husband,” Cassie said, taking his
question literally.

David rolled his eyes at her, but then said
to Callum, “I’m sorry Director Cooke is dead.”

Callum was peering through the narrow slit
of a window in the door and just nodded his head in response.

“Are those guards still there?” Cassie
said.

“They are.”

“We should go.” David rose to his feet.
“Director Cooke had a car for us, but we should go to the roof,
like I said before.”

Callum found himself agreeing with more
certainty than before. He swung the duffel over one shoulder,
opened the door, and gestured the others through it. “Head to the
left; we’ll take the stairs.”

David left the room and trotted down the
corridor towards a door on the end that showed a graphic of a set
of stairs and said ‘way out’. Cassie followed, but Callum stopped
in front of one of the guards.

“I’m moving David for his safety,” he said.
“Smythe’s orders.”

The guard saluted, and Callum walked quickly
away, catching Cassie’s elbow when he reached her and hurrying her
along. They started up the stairs, all three of them taking the
steps two at a time. They circled around and around and Callum lost
count of the number of steps.