Ashes of Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (19 page)

They all nodded as if they agreed with him,
but Meg looked wary, and Callum wondered if the way he’d taken the
mobile from her was going to color their relationship for a while.
Cassie immediately leaned back her seat and closed her eyes, though
she slipped her hand into Callum’s and left it there. If he’d had
his mobile to work on, he would have had to release her hand. But
he didn’t. Callum was staring at three hours of tense waiting.

Anna curled up in her seat, but Meg, who was
sitting across the aisle from Callum, looked out the back window of
the bus. “I keep expecting to hear a siren.”

“
Me too.” Callum leaned
across the aisle. “I am sorry for taking the mobile from
you.”

“
Thank you, but you don’t
have to apologize. You were busy, and you didn’t want to take the
time to explain.” She shot him a calculating look. “I’m a big girl.
I can take it.”

Callum sat back. “Aren’t you going to
sleep?”

“
No. You
should.”

Callum grunted. “I don’t know if I can.”
Sometimes it took more discipline to sleep than to stay awake.

“
When we talked earlier at
the Wal-Mart about you not being responsible for us, I meant what I
said. But we still need you alert. Let me do this, because it’s
something I can do. I’ll wake you if I’m at all
worried.”

Callum thought about that for a few seconds
and then said, “Okay.” He closed his eyes.

Chapter Eleven

November 2019

Meg

M
eg
was way too old to stay up all night any more. Since having the
twins, she’d been up in the night plenty, but not recently, not
unless one of them was ill. Being the Queen of Wales had its perks,
and one of them was having nannies both children adored, and whose
attendance meant the possibility of sleeping through the night long
before Meg ever would have with Anna or David.

That her children would be asleep at this
very moment made not being with them easier to bear. Someone else
had dressed them for bed; someone else had told them a story or
read from the stack of children’s stories she’d written down so she
wouldn’t forget them. Meg had memorized dozens of stories out of
sheer repetition when David and Anna were little, and she figured
Dr. Seuss would forgive her for pirating his books seven hundred
years before he wrote them.

Even without her promise to keep watch, even
without children, husband, or nannies, Meg wouldn’t have been able
to sleep on this bus. She’d never been able to sleep while
traveling. She had no reason to think she might start now. Callum
had laid his seat back and seemed to be genuinely sleeping. Meg had
been afraid he’d be too hyped up.

In her case, whether it was the image of
Marty with his knife to Anna’s throat, the raw taste of fear in her
mouth when they fell from the tower, or the sight of the policeman
standing by Art’s truck, Meg couldn’t settle her mind. Too much had
happened, and it was all jumbled up in her head.

Seeing Cassie and Callum hold hands as they
slept warmed Meg’s heart, but it also made her feel the absence of
her own husband more strongly. She missed Llywelyn. He had David to
console him and had been to the modern world himself. At least he
knew something of what she’d faced over the last few hours. She
told herself she would get back to him. She knew how.

Because the bus driver had dimmed the
lights, Meg could see outside the windows, and she watched the mile
markers pass by, her heart pounding unnaturally fast, as it had in
the woods as she and Anna had searched for a road. It was a fight
or flight response, but her adrenaline had nowhere to go because
nothing happened. The bus kept rolling down the highway, and the
endless unsettled anticipation and fear kept circling through Meg’s
system. At any moment, she feared to see blue and red swirling
lights on the road behind them.

But they didn’t come.

Three hours of exhausting but uneventful
travel later, the first sign for Medford appeared on the side of
the road, telling Meg they had six miles to go. She reached out a
hand to Callum to wake him.

He sat up, shaking his head to clear it.
“Are we there?”

“
Yes,” Meg said. “How
worried are we that men in black are going to greet this
bus?”

Cassie stretched and yawned. “Nobody was at
the stop at Grants Pass.”

Meg had woken Callum there, just as an extra
pair of eyes. At that time, he’d spoken to the bus driver, feeling
him out as to whether any alerts had come through about his
passengers, but none had.

“
That was an hour ago,”
Callum said.

“
A lot can happen in an
hour,” Meg said.

“
This is a ridiculously
large country.” Callum stood and made his way to the front of the
bus. When he’d chatted with the driver earlier, they seemed to have
come to some kind of accord, augmented by the three twenty dollar
bills Meg was pretty sure she’d seen pass from Callum’s hand to the
driver’s front shirt pocket. This time, the driver nodded his head,
and Callum returned to his seat.

“
He’s going to drop us at a
group of hotels to the west of the highway one exit before the bus
depot,” he said. “I assured him that he’d barely have to stop since
we brought our luggage on the bus.”

“
How far will we be from
the airport?”

“
Easy walking distance,” he
said, “and all the hotels have shuttles. We’re slipping by under
the radar at the moment, and we have to pray that we can continue
to do so.”

“
While you get the rental
car,” Cassie said, “I can email Mark from the hotel if it has a
public computer. Lots of them do.”

“
I hate not being able to
use my mobile,” Callum said, “but there’s no help for it. I still
can’t believe they found Art’s truck as quickly as they
did.”

The muscles around Cassie’s eyes tightened.
Callum put a hand on her shoulder. “Only a few more hours. We can’t
help your grandfather from here anyway, and you can call him from
the plane.”

“
I have another idea.” Meg
sat straighter in her seat.

Callum looked over at her, interested.

“
What if we turn on our
phones and leave them on the bus?” she said. “Or, if we want to get
really crazy, we could give them away. They have a certain number
of prepaid minutes, right? It might be a real gift to someone
without much money.”

“
That’s good.” Callum’s
eyes lit. “That’s very good.”

“
You’re a genius, Mom.”
Anna started putting her phone back together. She looked up at the
rest of them. “I’ll pass them out. You’re too intimidating,
Callum.”

Cassie grinned at his expression of mock
outrage and dropped her phone in the cup holder beside her seat.
“That will be a nice surprise for the next passenger.”

Anna strolled to the front of the bus. With
a smile, she handed one phone to the bus driver, who tucked it into
the same pocket of his shirt that held the twenty dollar bills.
This had been a lucrative journey for him. Then she passed another
phone to a raggedly dressed college student, who was barely keeping
his eyes open, and tucked the last one into the open zipper pocket
in a backpack on the rack above a sleeping woman.

A minute later, the bus exited the highway
and pulled into the driveway of the Hampton Inn. It took
approximately eight seconds for the four of them to disembark.
Callum saluted the bus driver, who waved and turned the bus back
onto the road. A shuttle bus waited in the valet parking area, and
passengers were starting to file onto it, coming from the
hotel.

“
Ten minutes to the
airport, ma’am.” The driver spoke in response to a woman’s
question, having come out of the shuttle bus to help load the
passengers’ luggage. “When’s your flight?”

“
6:30.”

“
We’ll have you there in
plenty of time.”

“
Too bad we can’t fly from
here to San Francisco,” Cassie said.

Callum shook his head. “Anna and Meg have no
ID. I thought about it, but even with Jones’s help, we have no way
to accomplish that particular miracle. If all goes well, I’ll be
back within the hour, and we could be on the plane to Britain by
noon.” He kissed Cassie goodbye and joined the line of waiting
travelers.

“
Let’s get inside,” Meg
said.

It was shortly after five in the morning and
breakfast was being served in the small dining area off the lobby.
A talking head for the local news channel gave way to a video of an
apartment building on fire. Meg glanced towards the front desk, but
the lone clerk on duty was being besieged by guests checking
out.

“
What do you think?” Anna
said.

“
I have cash,” Cassie said.
“I can pay for breakfast.”

“
Not to be either
clandestine or a thief,” Meg said, “but paying for breakfast is
going to draw attention to us.”

“
Not eating is going to
draw attention to us.” Anna gazed toward a row of plastic cereal
dispensers. “I could eat something sugary and artificial if you
twisted my arm.”

Meg feigned a shudder.

Cassie surveyed the lobby and then tipped
her head towards the breakfast area. “Get a table by the window,
close enough to the television to hear what the announcers are
saying. I’m going to email Mark.” She sounded as authoritative as
Callum.

Neither Anna nor Meg begrudged her the
right, since she did work for MI-5, and the three women drifted
away from each other. Anna and Meg wandered towards the cold
cereal, and Cassie made her way towards a computer and printer set
up near the lobby fireplace.

The food on offer was standard hotel
breakfast fare: pastries, cold cereal, bagels, and waffles. Meg
forwent the sugary cereal in favor of a bagel and cream cheese. The
coffee looked unappealing, so she opted for orange juice. It might
be processed to within an inch of its life, but she hadn’t eaten an
orange in seven years. There were some things even the Queen of
Wales couldn’t get.

“
Carbohydrate heaven.” Meg
took a bite and made a face. The bagel didn’t taste as good as she
remembered. Admittedly, it wasn’t a New York bagel. “I was hoping
we’d have a chance, despite all the travel, to run down a pizza
before we leave this world.” Meg was glad for the duffel bag at her
feet with its precious cargo of tomato seeds and
potatoes.

“
I haven’t thought about
not eating carbohydrates in years,” Anna said. “I suppose whether
or not I eat them hasn’t been at the top of my list of
concerns.”

“
Back home, we eat what’s
available and are thankful for it,” Meg said, watching one of the
patrons dump a half-eaten waffle into the garbage, followed by a
full plate of pastries.

Cassie arrived three minutes later, got
herself a bowl of cereal, and sat down, wrinkling her nose at the
colors in Anna’s bowl. “How is it?”

Anna made a so-so motion with her head.
“Sweet.”

Cassie pulled her chair around so her back
was to the wall and the front door was directly in her line of
sight.

Meg pointed at her with her knife. “Did you
go to spy school?”

For a second, Cassie looked startled. Then
she grinned. “I did.”

“
I noticed Callum was
trusting you with more stuff than I expected,” Meg said.

“
He is a control freak,”
Cassie agreed, starting to eat her bran and raisins.

“
I chalked up your driving
to the fact that he isn’t used to driving on the right side of the
road, but that isn’t it, is it?” Meg said. “Or not
entirely.”

Cassie smiled into her bowl. “I got a very
high score on the driving test—higher than his—even with driving a
car that had the steering wheel on the wrong side.”

Anna took two more bites of the pink and
orange cereal and then abandoned it in favor of a waffle, which she
coated with butter. She picked up the container of (fake) maple
syrup and put it down again. She saw Meg watching her and shrugged.
“I thought I missed sugar. Turns out, I don’t like it as much as I
thought I did.”

Meg wasn’t enjoying eating what was
available either, whether because of the flour processed to within
an inch of its life, the sugar, or the oddly bland flavors. A few
of the criticisms Meg had heard leveled at medieval food were that
spices were rare and the food rotten and unflavorful. Meg had never
eaten rotten food nor seen anyone else eat it, and the critics were
missing something important: butter made from cow’s milk where the
cow had eaten actual grass was a very different food from the pat
in a foil wrapper Meg had spread on the other half of her bagel.
She wished she’d had a chance to eat more of what was being served
at Cassie’s aunt’s house.

“
He’s here.” Cassie stood
up.

It was a matter of a few seconds to gather
up the duffel bag and two backpacks and toss the remains of their
meal into the trash. Cassie led them out the door and walked
straight to the black car Callum had rented. As before, Anna and
Meg got into the back seat.

“
How did it go?” Cassie
said.

“
It was easy,” Callum said.
“No questions asked. We need to swing by another Wal-Mart, get new
mobiles, and then we’re in business again.”

“
Anna and I will buy them
this time while you circle the block,” Cassie said. “And we’ll pay
cash.”

“
How much cash do you
have?” Meg said.