Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series)

by Sarah Woodbury

  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.

  “I’m scared, Callum.” Cassie’s eyes were on her feet as her legs moved rhythmically beside his.

  “I am too,” Callum said. “I’m afraid of losing you.”

  “It’s going to work,” David said from a few steps ahead.

  “He’s done it four times,” Callum said.

  “That knowledge is keeping me climbing these stairs,” Cassie said.

  Callum found Cassie’s hand and they weaved their fingers together in a tight clasp.

  “I wouldn’t be leading you up here otherwise,” David said.

  Then a door banged below them and feet pounded on the stairs. Callum looked down through the stairwell. Driscoll was coming up the stairs behind them, his gun in his hand.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  September, 2017

  Cassie

  Driscoll was still several floors below them, but he was coming on fast. Cassie’s breath caught in her throat at the sight of the gun. “Oh God.” As if Lady Jane’s death wasn’t bad enough. She felt like throwing up.

  “Stop!” Driscoll shouted up at them.

  David didn’t even break stride. “Not gonna do that.”

  Cassie glanced up at him. When David had talked about jumping, Cassie hadn’t heard the slightest hitch in his voice that might indicate fear or uncertainty. At a few inches over six feet and two hundred pounds, dressed in his freshly laundered clothing (MI-5 was good for something, it seemed), he’d transformed himself into the medieval man he’d grown to be. The last two days had put some uncharacteristic lines around his eyes and mouth, from exhaustion, Cassie guessed, but that only made him look more forbidding.

  “Just get to the top.” Callum pulled out his own gun. “I can hold him off if he starts shooting.”

  “Why doesn’t Driscoll have anyone with him?” she said.

  “He doesn’t have anyone he can trust any more than we do,” Callum said.

  Because they’d paused to look down, David was now half a staircase ahead. “Come on, guys. Keep up!” he said.

  Cassie and Callum ran, moving side-by-side in a steady motion. They caught up with David, and Callum passed off the duffel to him. David slung it over his shoulder. The papers in the bag might mean the difference between life and death—a lot of lives and a lot of deaths—if they could take them home, but Callum shouldn’t be carrying the bag as well as the gun if Driscoll started shooting. They passed the seventh floor and then the eighth. The pounding below them grew closer.

  “Don’t look,” Callum said.

  Cassie didn’t. She didn’t dare hesitate even for a second.

  The stairs ended at the ninth floor. David hit the safety bar on the door and went through it. Cassie and Callum followed. She didn’t know where David was going, but he seemed to because within a few seconds he found a second stairwell to the right of a pair of elevators.

  No stairs led down from here at all, but only went up and just one floor, to what Cassie prayed was going to be the roof. She was terrified—absolutely terrified—of jumping off. They were completely insane to consider it. She didn’t want to do it; she didn’t want Callum to do it, but neither could she see letting David go alone. The possibility of failure had her throat squeezing closed, but the utterly insane idea that it really might work kept her following both men up the steps, around a corner, and out onto the roof.

  Bank after bank of solar panels took up most of the roof space, along with a massive air conditioning unit, some other industrial-looking boxes which might have been for power and gas, and an extensive antenna array like on the MI-5 building. Other than the equipment, the roof was empty and lit up as if it were day, with torchlights and strobe lights crisscrossing the night sky. Cassie started across it after David, heading for the edge. She braced herself with ever
y step for what she had committed herself to doing:

  Jumping off.

  They were insane. And yet, she was going through with it anyway.

  “Don’t make me shoot you, Callum!” The shout echoed across the rooftop.

  Cassie stopped and turned to see Callum facing away from her, standing between her and Driscoll, who blocked the doorway of the stairwell.

  “Let us go, Driscoll!” Callum said. “This has nothing to do with you.”

  Driscoll brought up his gun.

  “Get down!” David caught Cassie in his arms, and they rolled together behind one of the metal boxes.

  Two shots rang out, followed by two more and a shriek, cut off sharply.

  “Callum!” Cassie screamed his name and, after extricating herself from David, scrambled to her feet. Callum ran towards her, and Cassie almost collapsed in relief.

  “Go! Go! Go!” He caught her arm and spun her around, urging her towards the edge of the roof. “Driscoll’s dead. We have to get out of here now.”

  Before they’d gone three steps, however, the whuf-whuf-whuf of a helicopter sounded overhead.

  “That’s for me.” David backed away from the helicopter’s searchlight, which panned across the roof towards them as the helicopter descended.

  Callum moved towards David, but then staggered—and it was only then that Cassie saw the blood dripping from his fingers.

  “No!” Cassie threw her arms around his waist, holding him tightly as she sagged with him to their knees. Another scream rose in her chest.

  At last, another agent appeared in the open doorway that led to the stairwell. He pulled up at the sight of Driscoll’s body at his feet. David pointed at him. “You! Agent Callum’s been shot! Go for help!”

  The man hesitated.

  “Now!” The word split the air.

  The man went, his hand to his ear as he spoke into his phone.

  Cassie’s eyes blurred with tears as she and David together lay Callum down on the hard concrete of the roof. She kissed Callum’s forehead while David ripped open his shirt. At the sight of the bullet wound and the blood, David bent his head, but it was in relief, not despair. “It missed his heart, Cassie. The bullet hit him high in his shoulder. I think it even went all the way through and came out the other side.”

  “Oh, thank God.” Cassie doubled up the edge of Callum’s suit jacket and pressed it to the wound, her tears dripping onto the back of her hands, mixing with Callum’s blood on her fingers.

  “If we get him help soon, he’ll be okay.” Then David nudged her, forcing her to meet his eyes. “But not if he comes with me.”

  Callum bent his right arm at the elbow, holding up his hand for David to clasp. He wheezed in pain. “Go. Go before anyone else comes to stop you.”

  David squeezed Callum’s hand. “One of us will come back for you. If not me, it’ll be Anna or my mom. I swear it.”

  Cassie meant to tell him not to be ridiculous, that he didn’t have to, but all she got out was, “He’s weakening.”

  “Where’s the medical team? Isn’t this a hospital!” David glanced towards the elevator doors, which at that second opened. A team of medics with a stretcher surged towards them.

  Then the backwash of the helicopter blades swept over them again. “We’ve got your back, whether or not we ever see you again,” Cassie said.

  “I know you do.” David released Callum’s hand, grabbed the duffel, and ran to the edge of the building. Without stopping, thinking, hesitating, or looking back, he launched himself upwards and over the edge, arms and legs pin-wheeling in the air.

  And then he fell below the level of the roof and was gone.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  September, 1289

  David

  David rolled onto his back and stared up at the star-strewn sky.

  I made it.

  He almost didn’t care where he’d landed, just so long as he wasn’t a flattened pea on a side street in Cardiff. He’d known that ten stories was over a hundred feet high, but though he’d launched himself from the roof with a clear vision of what would follow, the sight of the street below him had been heart-stopping. He’d fallen, his faith failing him at the last minute, but even without faith, the familiar-yet-foreign black abyss had opened up beneath him, and he’d been sucked into it.

  An eternity—that is, three seconds—later, he’d landed with a thump on the turf of a field amidst a herd of sheep. The animals had scattered at first but had started to creep back towards him, cropping the grass and no longer concerned about his presence. “Good thing I’m not a wolf,” he said to them, and then got to his feet. The ground was wet, but not overly so, and his cloak had soaked up most of the dampness.

  “Okay.” He brushed off the seat of his breeches and took inventory. The place in his arm where he’d tugged out the needle hurt a little, his throat was sore only at the tail end of swallowing, and he was utterly starving. The fish and chips in the interrogation room had been good but he’d eaten them over a day ago. All he’d had since then was what they’d fed him through the IV: salted sugar water and drugs.

  All in all, for someone who until half an hour ago had been unconscious in a hospital bed in the twenty-first century, he was doing pretty well.

  He couldn’t see much of his surroundings due to the darkness of the evening, but the stars gave him some light and gradually his eyes adjusted. Only two days in the twenty-first century, and he had already forgotten what it was like to walk in an unlit landscape.

  His surroundings, as far as he could see, were relatively flat, consisting of fields and pastures. In the distance, a dark line gave the suggestion of trees and indicated that he was near a river, though every spot in Britain was within hailing distance of a river so that didn’t tell him much. He slung the duffel over one shoulder, thankful it was made of a muddy brown canvas that didn’t look overly modern, and started walking towards the river. He assumed that if he followed it, he would eventually reach a village. Once there, the inhabitants could tell him where he was.

  David was very conscious of how alone he was. The whole time he’d been in the twenty-first century, he’d told himself that nothing was going to stop him from bringing Cassie and Callum home with him if they wanted to come. To find himself here without them had thrown him off-kilter. They’d all felt urgently that David needed to leave in that moment or he would never have been able to leave. He also knew that he couldn’t have brought Callum with him, not with a bullet hole in his shoulder. David had to trust that decision, and that Callum really would be okay. Modern medicine being what it was, David didn’t have too much trouble convincing himself of that.

  It was a bit harder to convince himself that his promise to retrieve them was one he could keep. But as David had found over the years, certain problems had to be put aside to deal with ones that were more immediate. Callum needed time to recover from his wound. A few weeks, a few months. It mattered to all of them that they remained behind, but Cassie and Callum were together, and they were alive; David could commit them to the care of others, or God, until he could figure out how to get them back.

  After half a mile of walking, David approached the river, which was good-sized—at least fifty feet across. The moon had risen, and the shadows of trees interspersed with the pinpoints of starlight rippled on the surface of the water. Without too much stumbling around, David found a trail and followed it south on the east side of the river, which flowed north-south at this location. He pulled his cloak tighter against the chill of the evening, and it was only then that he remembered he was still wearing Kevlar. He suspected that it had been Callum’s, but there was no point now in cursing Callum’s generosity in giving it to him. What was done was done.

  David couldn’t wear the vest out in the open, however, so he took a moment to rearrange the order of his clothing, putting his shirt and cloak back on over the vest. Television had made him think that Kevlar was a half inch thick. Callum’s Kevlar, however, was thinner than th
at, three layers of woven fabric that felt like nylon, with hard plates inserted in key places. Though black, not silver, it bore a greater resemblance to Frodo’s mithril coat than the Kevlar from TV.

  He could have put it in the duffel and not worn it, but something told him he might be better off wearing it, just until he could put on his own armor again. And then he groaned as he remembered that he’d left that armor back on the cog in modern Cardiff. The historians would be having a field day with it, he was sure, but he would miss it. It had fit him perfectly.

  It was just as well that he’d remembered about the Kevlar, because within another quarter-mile, he reached a bridge across the river he’d been following. Torches lit both ends, and a phalanx of farmers-turned-soldiers guarded it. At the sight of them and their village, David knew precisely where he was. He would have laughed but for the grave expression on the faces of the men who confronted him.

  “Who goes there!”

  David halted fifteen paces from the end of the bridge. He didn’t answer right away, deliberating as to what, exactly, he was going to say. That the gray-haired guard who asked belonged to the village of Maidenhead, established just ten years ago when a bridge was built here across the Thames, changed everything. Maidenhead was five miles north of Windsor. David had no men-at-arms or knights with him, but he was the King of England. He’d been to Maidenhead. The men here might recognize him.

  Arms spread wide, David entered the ring of light thrown out by the torches and approached the group of men. “I am your king, David.”

  For a moment, David wasn’t sure if he’d used the right form of English because the men stared at him, pikes and axes at the ready. And then the man who’d spoken first dropped his pike head to the ground with a thunk. “Sire!” He whipped off his hat and sank to one knee, hastily followed by the other six men with him. “I am John Wade, headman of this village.”