Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (21 page)

“That would explain Natasha’s presence
here,” Cassie said.

“It would, and I’d love for that to be the
case, and that this was all planned out from the beginning,” Callum
said. “But when they took David from the ambulance, he was asleep.
And that looks like a real IV in his arm.”

“So if he wasn’t well, they might take him
to a smaller clinic, like you said before, instead of a hospital,”
Cassie said, “but not to a semi-rundown apartment building.”

“Exactly,” Callum said.

“So this
is
an abduction,” Cassie
said, “and Natasha is involved.”

“Yes,” Callum said. “Easier to grab him here
than once he’s in London.”

And really, what more was there to say than
that? “You said I was too nice, but this confirms all my fears,”
Cassie said.

“Which fears are those, in particular?”
Callum said.

“That
they
—” Cassie gestured to the
men in the parking lot, one of whom had opened a side door into the
building and was helping the second man wheel David’s stretcher
inside, “—are the bad guys. We need to get in there.”

“I know we do,” Callum said, “but I don’t
want to rush in without a plan. Watch first, act later.”

Leaving the gray-haired man inside the
building with the stretcher, the two remaining medics closed the
door to the apartment building, walked to the ambulance, and got
in. The ambulance started up and drove out of the parking lot,
turning right instead of left like the police car had. The
occupants of neither vehicle appeared to have noticed Cassie and
Callum.

Callum pulled out his phone and stared at
the blank screen.

“What are you doing?” Cassie said.

“Trying to decide what I should do next: use
my mobile to ring Lady Jane and report what is happening, or toss
it into a dumpster.” He turned the phone over in his hands, and
Cassie saw that it had a seamless construction. It wasn’t possible
to remove the battery. “Stupidly, I am only realizing now that it
might have a tracking device in it that functions even when it’s
off.”

“You’ve been away for a while,” Cassie
said.

Callum grimaced. “That’s no excuse. I should
have known better than to keep it on me.”

“We needed the phone to access the SUV,”
Cassie said.

“Which has its own GPS system.” Callum
gestured to the dashboard. “We’re probably not fooling anyone.”

Cassie’s stomach had been in knots from the
start over being separated from David. Bad enough to be stuck in a
foreign country with a bunch of spies. Far worse not to know what
was happening right under their noses or whom they could trust. She
was glad to be with Callum, but she was hating everything else
about today. It wasn’t at all what she’d imagined returning to the
twenty-first century would be like. She hadn’t even gotten a hot
shower yet, and the coffee in the cafeteria had been lukewarm and
bitter.

“It may be that everything that has happened
so far has been a charade for our benefit, a test even,” Callum
said.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Cassie said.
“David wouldn’t be playing along with them to test your
loyalty.”

Callum held up the phone. “What do you
think? If I turn on, I can use it to help find David.”

“How could your phone possibly help with
that?” Cassie said.

“I’m a secret agent man.” Callum gave her a
wicked grin. “It has a program to scan for heat signatures.”

“Wow.” She pursed her lips. “You can turn
off the GPS, can’t you?”

“Technically, but if the mobile is on, Jones
could turn on the GPS remotely. If anyone is looking for me, he
needs about a minute for my signature to come online, and another
minute to trace my location,” Callum said. “A lot depends on how
far Jones is willing to go to help us, and how much pressure he’s
under to find us.”

“Would he know about a new safe house?”
Cassie said.

“I don’t know,” Callum said. “I don’t dare
ring him to find out until we at least know more about what’s
happening here. So far, we haven’t done anything wrong or illegal.
We were concerned about David’s safety and tailed his ambulance. I
need a bit more information before I can make that call.”

“I say turn on the phone, then,” Cassie
said. “It’s worth the risk of them coming after us. At the very
worst, they’ll catch us and haul us back to MI-5. But all that
means is that we’ll end up right back where we started. No harm, no
foul.”

Callum reached for Cassie’s hand, squeezed
it, and then opened his car door. Cassie got out too. The parking
lot stayed as it had been, empty but for two cars. The day had been
warm before they were shut up in the MI-5 building, but with
evening coming on and clouds arriving that looked like rain, the
air temperature had cooled considerably. If she hadn’t been wearing
the Kevlar vest and the windbreaker, she would have been cold. She
wished for her cloak, left in the bathroom back at MI-5, and then
dismissed the thought. It had sentimental value, but it was a
thing
. Callum would commission her another one.

With the phone in Callum’s hand, though
still not turned on, they crossed the street and entered the
parking lot. Callum signaled for Cassie to stay back while he
approached the remaining two vehicles. He didn’t pull his gun from
the holster at the small of his back, but he did sidle down the
side of the nearest vehicle—a minivan—towards the driver’s door as
she’d seen police and agents in television shows do a million
times. He kept his eyes fixed on the side mirror.

When he reached the driver’s side door, he
peered through the window and then opened the door, which was
unlocked, and poked his head inside. Cassie thought he might climb
into the van, but then he pulled back and looked towards Cassie,
shaking his head.
Nobody.
She shrugged and pointed to the
side door of the apartment building through which the men had
wheeled David in his stretcher.

Callum closed the van door gently, hardly
making more noise than a click, and crossed to the building. He put
a hand on the apartment complex door, at which point Cassie
realized that it was a solid sheet of metal, without windows or
adornment, not even a handle. That meant, though she hadn’t noticed
it at the time, that the door had been opened from the inside for
the ambulance men. Yet another person was involved.

Callum came back to where she waited at the
near corner of the building. “Let’s try the front.”

Unsurprisingly, like the side door, the main
door to the apartment building was locked. Cassie shaded her eyes
with her hand to block the glare of the setting sun and pressed
close to the glass. Peering through the window, she saw an actual
human sitting behind a counter on the opposite side of the foyer.
She knocked on the window to get his attention while Callum
flattened his badge against the glass. When the man looked up from
his computer, Callum crooked a finger at him. “Open up.”

The man’s eyes narrowed, but he stood and
came around the counter. He glanced at Callum’s badge and then
twisted the lock to open the door. “What is it?” He had a very
stiff, upper crust British accent, which made Cassie wonder what he
was doing managing an apartment complex instead of drinking tea and
eating strawberries and cream at Wimbledon. He was dressed well to
match his voice, in a button-down shirt, slacks, and a tie. He wore
flip-flops instead of loafers, however, and the incongruity of it
had Cassie biting her lip and looking down at her feet to hide her
amusement.

“I have some questions about someone who has
leased one of the flats in your building,” Callum said. “What’s
your name?”

“Anders,” the man said. “Which flat do you
mean?”

Callum pushed passed Anders and crossed the
foyer to the counter without answering. Anders and Cassie hustled
after him. Anders seemed anxious to reach the counter first, and
Cassie understood why when she saw the images on Anders’s computer
screen just before he slammed the lid down on his laptop.

Callum cleared his throat. “I don’t have a
name, only that he entered through a side door a few minutes ago,
pushing a stretcher.”

“A stretcher?” Anders said. “I didn’t notice
anything.”

Neither Cassie nor Callum mentioned that if
Anders spent more time paying attention to what was going on around
him and less time surfing the web for pictures of naked women—or
watching pornographic videos—he might have noticed something like
that.

“I’d like to see your security tapes,”
Callum said.

‘Tapes’ hadn’t been used in a lot more years
than the ten months Callum had been in the Middle Ages, but Anders
knew what he meant. He didn’t ask for a search warrant either, if
one was even required in the UK, just gestured towards a door
behind him. Perhaps he was worried about Callum reporting his
visual stimuli. Callum’s glance at Cassie showed his
self-satisfaction with their progress so far; he put his hand at
the small of Cassie’s back, and they followed Anders into the
little room behind the counter.

The apartment’s security system was minimal
but efficient. Two cameras watched the parking lot, with a wide
angle of vision. More cameras monitored both the front and side
doors and all the hallways on all ten floors. Anders fiddled with
the video, moving forward and back until the image of the ambulance
driving into the parking lot appeared. Even though he’d seen it
live when it happened, Callum cursed again at the appearance of
Natasha. After that, they had full coverage of a man opening the
door, the ambulance men unloading David in his stretcher, and two
men wheeling him through the side door, into the corridor, and down
it to the last apartment on the end, number 118.

“When did you let this flat?” Callum
said.

“A month ago; a bloke paid in full for a
year.”

“Is he one of the men you see here?” Callum
said.

Anders’s leaned forward, squinting. The
resolution on the screen wasn’t great. “I can’t tell.”

“Might he appear elsewhere? How about when
he rented the flat?” Callum said.

“We delete the video after a fortnight. In
fact, I don’t remember seeing him since then.” He gestured to the
screen. “I could try to find him for you.”

“Thank you,” Callum said.

“Should be a doddle.” Anders’s forehead
wrinkled up, and he suddenly looked wary. “Do you want to
wait?”

“I wasn’t planning on it. Let me know if you
find him.” Callum gestured to the corridor. “We’ll be down
there.”

Anders gestured to their armor and
windbreakers. “Are you here to arrest him?”

“We’ll see,” Callum said.

“We’ll do our best to keep it peaceful,”
Cassie said, without any real knowledge of what they were going to
do, but because she thought that’s what an agent might say.

Callum shot her a grin as he turned away;
they left Anders in the security room and headed down the corridor
towards apartment 118. Cassie looked back to see the manager’s head
just peeking around the corner. As she noticed him, he pulled his
head back, but she knew that with his cameras, he would be watching
them. “Are you just going to knock on their door?”

“I’m thinking about it,” Callum said.

“You could call Lady Jane,” Cassie said.
“She could be freaking out at this point since we’re missing.”

“Or she isn’t because she knows I’m doing as
she asked. My job.” Callum tugged on Cassie’s arm, pulling her into
a maintenance closet located halfway along the corridor. He left
the door slightly ajar so they could keep an eye on number 118.

“Given time, I could think of things to do
with you in here that are more fun than this,” Callum said, with
another smile.

Cassie smiled, too. She’d never made out in
a maintenance closet at school, not being adventurous that way at
the time. Then she looked away, and her smile faded. Callum
appeared to be in his element. It was a little daunting to think
that the Middle Ages had less life and death peril than one day at
MI-5, and if she wasn’t mistaken, Callum had missed it.

“Remember, we have two minutes,” she
said.

Callum pressed a button on the side of his
phone, and it turned on. Almost immediately after the main screen
came up, before Callum had a chance to do anything else with it,
the phone lit up with an incoming call. They stared at the name of
the caller for a few seconds before Callum took in a deep breath
and pressed ‘talk’. “Hello, Driscoll.”

September, 2017

Cassie

“
W
here are you?”
Smythe’s voice burst from the phone.

Both Cassie and Callum jumped, and Cassie’s
elbow hit a stack of sponges on one of the shelves in the closet.
Fortunately, they made no noise as they fell. Callum turned down
the sound, though he didn’t put the phone to his ear and instead
started flipping through its many screens and programs. Cassie put
her head near Callum’s shoulder so she could hear the conversation
better.

“Out.” As Callum spoke, he found where the
GPS application was on his phone and turned it off.

“What? Did you say
out?
” It was still
Smythe speaking, for some reason using Driscoll’s phone.

With a grimace, Callum turned down the
volume another notch. A thud, followed by rustling and fumbling
sounds, came from the other end of the line, as if Smythe had
dropped the phone, and then a woman’s voice came on. “This is Jane
Cooke. All of us can hear you, Callum. David has been
abducted.”

“I know,” Callum said.

“Where are you, exactly?” Smythe said.

“Why don’t you know?” Callum said.

Cassie mouthed ‘Jones?’ at Callum, who
nodded and said, “Is Jones there?”

“I’m here, Callum,” came the familiar voice.
“You took the one vehicle in the car park without a working GPS,
and I see you’ve turned off the GPS on your mobile.”