Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (17 page)

“I’ve been tracking your progress.” Jones
came to greet them, grabbing Callum’s arm and tugging him inside.
Before he shut the door, he took a quick look down the corridor
behind them. “I might not be the only one.” Returning to his desk,
Jones gestured that Cassie and Callum should sit opposite. “Every
corridor, every office, up to and including the janitorial closets,
is monitored. You know that, right?”

“Even the loo?” Callum said.

Jones snorted. “Especially the loo. Where
have you been living—under a rock?”

Cassie laughed. “I think the Middle Ages are
the definition of ‘rock’.”

Jones barely blinked. “I assume you have a
plan for getting David away, Callum?” Jones didn’t ask this
accusingly, but as if he really wanted to know.

Callum studied Jones. Coming on the heels of
Lady Jane’s text about Driscoll, Callum thought about leaving the
room without another word, but decided he would treat Jones has he
had Driscoll: with a friendly face and with the idea of getting
what information he could. He hadn’t come here with a plan, just a
hunch, and was a little stunned to find that Jones was already
three steps ahead of him. “I see there’s no keeping secrets from
you.”

Jones lifted his chin to point at the
computer monitor beside him. “They’ll know I talked to you, but not
what about. I can head them off for a while, just by saying you
came by to introduce me to your wife.”

“Who’s
they
?” Callum said.

“Smythe for starters,” Jones said. “The
layers of paranoia go all the way to the top.”

“Are you offering to help us with David?”
Cassie said.

Jones cleared his throat. “I—” He stopped
and shook his head.

“I understand. Don’t worry about it.” As he
spoke, Callum put a hand on Jones’s shoulder. It was a gesture he
used often in the Middle Ages to settle a man in his charge. It had
been automatic for Callum to do the same with Jones, but Jones
looked down at his shoulder out of the corner of his eye, as if he
couldn’t believe Callum was touching him. Callum dropped his hand.
“I appreciate you talking to us at all.”

Jones nodded. “I can do that.”

“You are alone in this lab now?” Callum
said.

“Yes, and—” Jones swept his eyes furtively
around the room before continuing, “—its sole purpose is to work on
your problem.”

Callum eyes narrowed. “My problem? What are
you talking about?”

Jones waved a hand up and down the length of
Callum’s body. “The time travel issue.”

“Oh,” Callum said.

“Coming back here with
him
was
probably the worst thing you could have done.”

“Believe me, we didn’t mean to,” Cassie
said.

Jones shook his head. “I read your report,
but if you could have done anything else—”

“Tell me what you know.” It came out as an
order, but Callum was well aware that it was he who was the
supplicant and at Jones’s mercy. If Jones showed anyone the images
of Callum and Cassie in the loo, it would be enough to condemn
him.

“To begin with, the Security Service have
been working with Meg’s DNA and blood work for the past ten months,
and now they’ll have David’s,” said Jones.

“Wait a minute,” Cassie said. “Meg’s blood
work? How would they have come by that?”

Jones rubbed at the bridge of his nose with
his thumb and forefinger. “If you give me a minute, I’ll explain.”
He took in a deep breath. “When Meg was here last, the research
labs had come as far as cataloging the instances where she, Anna,
or David
traveled
.”

“Right,” Callum said. “We understand
that.”

“What you may not know is the rest of what
has happened. Meg was seen by a midwife at that clinic outside of
Aberystwyth. As part of a routine examination for a pregnant woman,
the midwife ordered a blood draw and various tests,” said Jones.
“The Security Service acquired that blood and took over a lab north
of Cardiff for the sole purpose of analyzing Meg’s DNA, trying to
isolate what is in her makeup—in the whole family’s makeup—that
allows her to shift between worlds. Meanwhile, here in Cardiff,
we’re working day and night on the physics of what they can do, as
well as our surveillance systems.”

“What kind of surveillance systems?” Callum
said. “I get the feeling you don’t mean cameras at every
round-about.”

“I do not,” said Jones, “though Britain now
has five million cameras in use, and I have access to all of them
except those on closed systems.”

“Five million?” Cassie said. “How is that
possible?”

Callum’s jaw would have been on the floor
too, but he already knew this from when he worked here before. He
hadn’t been gone as long as Cassie.

“Five years ago, we had two million,” said
Jones. “But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

“You’d better tell us,” Callum said.

“We are preparing not only for David or
Meg’s return, but trying to identify any other people who might be
doing what David’s family is doing.”

Callum stared at him. It had honestly never
occurred to him that there might be other families out there like
David’s. “We don’t know of any other
travelers
to
Wales—”

“Wales, England, Germany or Borneo, we don’t
care,” said Jones. “We’re looking purely for the ability to shift,
whether to the past, to the medieval world you came from, or to a
different one entirely.”

“Wow,” Cassie said. “You’re serious about
this.”

“That’s not all,” said Jones. “Another
section is trying to build a device.”

Callum and Cassie absorbed that stunning bit
of information in ten seconds of silence.

“You’re trying to build a time travel
device,” Cassie said, “like in
Dr Who
?”

“
Yes
!” said Jones, clearly excited
about that in a way that he hadn’t been about the DNA.

“I hope you aren’t using a blue police call
box,” Cassie said, deadpan.

Jones gave her a sour look, but Callum said
to Cassie, “How do you know
Dr Who
? I’ve only ever met three
Americans who’ve watched the show, and one was David.”

“My roommate in college watched three
seasons in one weekend after a bad break-up. I had no choice.”
Cassie bit her lip. “Did you ever notice how the Doctor always
shows up when he’s needed, even if he intended to go somewhere
else?”

“Kind of like David,” Callum said, “except I
can’t see how he was needed here.”

Jones waved a hand to draw their attention.
“Regardless, now they have access to his genetic material too.”

Callum ran a hand through his hair and got
to his feet, pacing back and forth in front of Jones’s monitors. He
couldn’t believe what he was hearing, but then again, it shouldn’t
be surprising that once the Security Service accepted what was
happening, it would try to control the process in every way anyone
could think of.

He paced back to Cassie, who was looking
down at her feet. “Driscoll indicated that large amounts of money
might be involved,” he said.

“
Mucho
money,” Jones said. “On top of
which, the Americans have discovered that there’s a puzzle to solve
and are screaming at us to share the rest of it with them.”

“The family is technically American,” Cassie
said.

“
Technically
.” Jones scoffed. “We’re
not going to share. Not something this big, and especially not if
the Americans can throw more money at it than we can. They’ll want
to take over.”

Cassie had her arms folded across her chest.
“David doesn’t know any of this. He’s down in the interrogation
room, possibly spilling his guts. We have to get to him.”

“You can’t
get to him
, as you say,”
Jones said flatly.

“We have to try,” she said.

Jones was still shaking his head. “Since you
left, Callum, the entire station has been focused on this problem
to the exclusion of all else. Smythe has gone somewhat mental on
the subject.”

“He’s trying to atone for screwing
everything up the first time,” Cassie said, and when Jones stared
at her, she added, “Callum told me.”

“What did happen when I went off the balcony
at Chepstow Castle?” Callum had an almost morbid interest in the
answer to this question. It was like attending his own funeral.

“Initially, the focus was on damage control.
Several of our men witnessed your fall: Leon from the battlement
and others, whom Natasha sent to find you when your mobile cut out,
from the balcony itself. Having you disappear like that wasn’t
something Lady Jane or anyone else could dismiss, even if they
wanted to, which they didn’t. Natasha was pretty gutted to learn
you’d gone.” Jones said those last words casually, but then
reddened, glancing at Cassie before looking towards a monitor.

Cassie appeared oblivious, but her poker
face was excellent, so Callum might well hear about Jones’s comment
later.

“So what happened after Callum vanished?”
Cassie said.

“Everyone stood there at first like they
couldn’t believe it,” said Jones. “I was communicating with Natasha
and had been watching the live feed from the castle’s cameras.
While none were pointing at the water, three tourists caught the
fall on their video phones. I killed the cell towers in the area
before any of them could upload to the internet. After that, we
shut down the town completely. Between you and me, it was probably
a violation of their rights, but before anyone could leave
Chepstow, they had to surrender their cameras and mobiles for
inspection.”

Cassie looked at Callum, a little
open-mouthed. He nodded. “You’ve seen only the tip of the iceberg
of what we’re capable of.”

“After that, Lady Jane sent Smythe to settle
things down. He’s a ponce, but he really pushed us; I’ve kipped in
the office more times than I can count in the last six months. A
team cleaned out your flat, moved your money to an offshore
location, and scrubbed the internet clean.”

“Hard to do,” Callum said.

“That was my job,” said Jones. “You’d be
amazed how significant your presence was, even with your service
here.”

“I had a life before the Security Service,
believe it or not,” Callum said, taking the news of his
invisibility in stride.

“You don’t now,” said Jones. “You have no
living family, so disappearing you was easier than some.”

“So I don’t exist at all?” Callum had
expected no less and had ordered the same kind of scrubbing twice
before for other agents caught in compromising circumstances. The
Security Service deliberately recruited unattached people for that
very reason. While those agents hadn’t time-traveled to another
universe, they’d committed unforgiveable breaches of security and
had to be virtually killed and reborn as someone else.

“You’re dormant, but not dead,” said Jones.
“Now that you’re back, it won’t be hard to resurrect you. You’ll
have been on assignment in as remote a place as Lady Jane can dream
up.”

“You mean like Scotland?” Cassie said, with
a laugh. Jones looked at her quizzically, and she explained
further: “He’s MI-5. You guys don’t go to Madagascar.”

“We do when requested for training or in a
goodwill exchange,” said Jones. “Lady Jane will come up with
something plausible.”

“Well, don’t start the process yet.” Callum
looked at Cassie. She raised her eyebrows, and as he continued to
look at her, she shrugged. He continued, “We don’t necessarily
intend to stay.” He didn’t mention Driscoll’s odd request.

“No. You don’t mean it!” Jones’s mouth fell
open.

“I do mean it,” Callum said.

“How could you return?” said Jones. “I
thought you couldn’t time travel without David?”

“We can’t.” Callum looked harder at his
former colleague. “You don’t really think you’re going to be able
to prevent him leaving if he chooses to, do you?”

“You do!” Cassie poked a finger at Jones.
“Haven’t you learned anything at all from Meg’s disappearance?”

Jones shook his head and didn’t seem to have
heard Cassie’s protest. “You still don’t understand. Our superiors
are going to do everything in their power to prevent him from
returning—and when I say
everything
, I mean it. He’s in
their clutches now.”

“I think I liked it better when you didn’t
believe us,” Cassie said.

“Those days are long gone,” said Jones.

“I wonder how David is taking being believed
instead of dismissed?” Cassie said.

Jones made an involuntary motion with his
hand.

Callum’s eyes narrowed. “What is it?”

“The plan was not to tell him,” said
Jones.

“Not to tell him that you believed him?”
Cassie said, and when Jones nodded, she added, “That’s twisted and
a little sick.”

Callum squeezed her hand. “David can take
care of himself.” He turned back to Jones. “Have you managed to
discover anything from Meg’s blood?”

“At one point, Smythe assured Lady
Jane—based on no evidence—that identifying what allows the world
shift would be a doddle. He assumed, as did we all, that her DNA
would be different, but so far—nothing,” said Jones.

“I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear
that,” Cassie said.

Jones smirked. “That’s not to say we aren’t
trying with everything we’ve got to break down her genome
nucleotide by nucleotide. Meanwhile, we’ve had better luck with the
when
than the
how
.”

Callum nodded. The moment their
time-traveling occurred had been the crucial piece of knowledge
that had allowed Lady Jane’s husband to backtrace the family’s
world shifting in the first place.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Cassie said,
looking from Callum to Jones and back again.

“It has to do with what happens to time and
space,” Callum said.

“Of course.” Cassie wrinkled her nose at
him. “That explains everything.”