Exiles in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) Read online

  A Novel from the After Cilmeri Series

  Exiles in Time

  by

  Sarah Woodbury

  SMASHWORDS EDITION

  Copyright © 2013 by Sarah Woodbury

  Cover image by Christine DeMaio-Rice at Flip City Books

  http://flipcitybooks.com

  Exiles in Time

  Two years in Afghanistan; four years working for MI-5, the British security service; and the death of both of his parents from cancer. At the age of thirty-four, Callum thought he’d experienced the worst that life could throw at him. That is, until his boss ordered him to open a buried file on his desk and to take it seriously. His new assignment: to detain and question a pregnant woman and her ailing husband—and if need be, to stop them from returning to medieval Wales.

  Until today, Callum believed in his job and always followed orders. Until today, he thought time travel wasn’t real …

  Exiles in Time is the sixth novel in the After Cilmeri series. Other books in the series include a prequel, Daughter of Time, and Books 1-4: Footsteps in Time, Prince of Time, Crossroads in Time, and Children of Time.

  www.sarahwoodbury.com

  To Dad

  I think you would have

  liked this one

  Books in the After Cilmeri Series:

  Daughter of Time (prequel)

  Footsteps in Time (Book One)

  Winds of Time

  Prince of Time (Book Two)

  Crossroads in Time (Book Three)

  Children of Time (Book Four)

  Exiles in Time

  Castaways in Time

  The Gareth and Gwen Medieval Mysteries:

  The Bard’s Daughter

  The Good Knight

  The Uninvited Guest

  The Fourth Horseman

  The Last Pendragon Saga:

  The Last Pendragon

  The Pendragon’s Quest

  Other books by Sarah Woodbury:

  Cold My Heart: A Novel of King Arthur

  A Brief Guide to Welsh Pronunciation

  c a hard ‘c’ sound (Cadfael)

  ch a non-English sound as in Scottish ‘ch’ in ‘loch’ (Fychan)

  dd a buzzy ‘th’ sound, as in ‘there’ (Ddu; Gwynedd)

  f as in ‘of’ (Cadfael)

  ff as in ‘off’ (Gruffydd)

  g a hard ‘g’ sound, as in ‘gas’ (Goronwy)

  l as in ‘lamp’ (Llywelyn)

  ll a breathy ‘thl’ sound that does not occur in English (Llywelyn)

  rh a breathy mix between ‘r’ and ‘rh’ that does not occur in English (Rhys)

  th a softer sound than for ‘dd,’ as in ‘thick’ (Arthur)

  u a short ‘ih’ sound (Gruffydd), or a long ‘ee’ sound (Cymru—pronounced ‘kumree’)

  w as a consonant, it’s an English ‘w’ (Llywelyn); as a vowel, an ‘oo’ sound (Bwlch)

  y the only letter in which Welsh is not phonetic. It can be an ‘ih’ sound, as in ‘Gwyn,’ is often an ‘uh’ sound (Cymru), and at the end of the word is an ‘ee’ sound (thus, both Cymru—the modern word for Wales—and Cymry—the word for Wales in the Dark Ages—are pronounced ‘kumree’)

  Prologue

  November 2016

  Cardiff, Wales

  Callum

  “We found them.” It was Agent Jones, the new man, who so far had done a better job of keeping his composure in the current crisis than most of his superiors.

  “Where?” Callum said, holding his dripping hands above the sink. Callum’s employer, the British internal security service known as MI-5, no longer stocked paper towels. Callum needed to run the drying machine, but the conversation with Jones came first.

  “Fueling up at a petrol station south of Builth Wells,” said Jones.

  “So we have them,” Callum said, not as a question.

  Jones paused before speaking. Callum sensed him arranging and rearranging his sentences in his head to find a way to tell the truth in the most efficient and least painful manner. “We didn’t catch the image in real time, sir. It’s from an hour ago.”

  Callum slammed his fist onto the counter. “What road were they on?”

  “The A470, sir.”

  “I want to see the images. Set it up. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Callum dried his hands and was back in the conference room within the allotted time.

  Agent Jones stood at attention to the right of the screen that filled one wall. The images of their fugitives took up half the space: Meg Lloyd; her husband, Llywelyn Gruffydd (who claimed to be the last Prince of Wales); and Goronwy, whose surname they hadn’t yet determined.

  “So they’re headed back to Chepstow.” Callum nodded to Jones, who tapped a square in one corner of the screen showing a map of Wales. He highlighted the southeastern portion of the country and enlarged it to fill the screen.

  “They must have taken that trackway from Devil’s Bridge,” said Agent Natasha Clark, pointing to the unnamed road that ran through the Elan Valley. “No cameras, which is why it took so long to find them.”

  “Not much of anything out there but sheep,” said Jones, “though at least the road is paved.”

  “It couldn’t have been fun in the dark,” Natasha said. “They must have felt desperate to take that road.”

  “We made them desperate,” Callum said.

  The initial pickup had been handled badly, not by Callum, but by Thomas Smythe, a fellow security service agent. Although the file on Meg was Callum’s, and had been for six months, his boss had bypassed him for the lead on the case because Smythe spoke Welsh. Smythe didn’t know anything about people, however, and had misjudged his quarry badly, going in heavy when he should have gone in light.

  “They could be heading anywhere, not necessarily Chepstow,” Callum said.

  “If they didn’t go north, Chepstow Castle is the most logical choice,” said Jones. “They’re trying to reverse what they did to come here.”

  According to Meg’s brother-in-law, Ted, Meg had spent the last few years living in medieval Wales. She and her companions had started out earlier in the week in the Middle Ages, jumped from Chepstow’s balcony that overlooked the Wye River, and gone from 1288 Chepstow to 2016 Aberystwyth in the blink of an eye.

  “Does that sound as crazy to you as it does to me?” The last member of the team, John Driscoll, kicked back in his chair.

  “From their point of view, it makes a certain kind of sense,” said Jones.

  Snorting his disgust, Driscoll tossed the papers he’d been holding onto the conference table. “A pregnant woman and two old men, one of whom has a heart condition, are running circles around us. How in the hell have they eluded us?”

  “While Meg might be from this world originally,” Natasha said, “Llywelyn and Goronwy are not. That reaches to the heart of our problem: they don’t think like we do.”

  “I wouldn’t have taken you for a true believer, Natasha,” Driscoll said.

  Natasha gave her fellow agent a sour look. “I’m not. Just keeping my options open.”

  “I can’t believe we’re even having this discussion. As if that’s not crazy right there.” Driscoll mumbled the words under his breath as he typed into his laptop.

  “If we could focus on the mission …” Callum said.

  “Of course, sir,” Natasha said. “All I’m saying is that if Meg is telling the truth—”

  “Would you rather I put you on to infiltrating those Welsh nationalists in St. David’s?” Callum said. “You could reveal everything you know about the return of the last Prince of Wales and they’d welcome you to their meetings with open arms.�
��

  That made Natasha laugh. “No, no. I’ll take this case any day over that.”

  Callum checked his watch and then pointed to Jones. “Keep watching the cameras. If they’re in Chepstow, or getting close, we need to know.” He looked at the rest of his team. “I think we all should be involved in this.”

  Driscoll closed the lid of his computer and got to his feet. “I’ll get Ted ready.” He left the room.

  Callum turned to Natasha and Jones. “I don’t want to hear talk about anything but the task before us. We have a job to do, and we’re going to do it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jones and Natasha said together.

  The SUV pulled into the parking lot of Chepstow Castle a few minutes before seven in the morning.

  Natasha rubbed her hands together. “It looks cold.”

  “It’s November in Wales. What did you expect?” Callum unlatched the door and discovered that the driver had parked directly over a puddle. Having just responded curtly to Natasha, Callum refrained from chewing out the driver. They were all going to get a lot wetter than this before the day was over. Callum was still dressed in his regular work clothes: business suit, trench coat, and respectable shoes. Half an hour ago when they’d left Cardiff, he hadn’t felt he could stop by his flat to collect his rain boots and hat.

  The men who made up Callum’s security team wore Kevlar under black trench coats. While it was standard policy to wear armor during operations like this, Callum hadn’t seen the point for himself. As far as Callum was concerned, nobody was shooting anyone today, and certainly not pregnant women or men who thought they were nobles from medieval Wales. They weren’t a threat to anyone but themselves, and even that was debatable.

  In fact, this was a crap assignment and Callum would be the first to admit it. MI-5 usually dealt with threats to national security such as the detection and apprehension of terrorists. These people needed a psychiatrist. They certainly didn’t need to be chased by a dozen agents from MI-5.

  For this mission, Callum had brought two SUVs and a larger van, which he directed to park in the castle’s rear car park. He then dispersed his ten men around the perimeter of Chepstow Castle. They could patrol the exterior until Callum got word that Cardiff had rousted the government official who managed the castle, and he had arrived to unlock the main door. Callum left Ted inside the second SUV with two agents to watch over him. There wasn’t any point in getting him wet until the castle opened for business. Callum got back into his SUV himself just as his phone rang.

  It was Jones. Callum put him on speaker and popped up the tablet that connected the SUV to the computer in the conference room back in Cardiff. His eyes went instinctively to a corner of the screen where Jones had pasted the picture of one of the girls who’d somehow gotten caught up in all this: Bronwen Llywelyn. She’d been an archaeology graduate student in Pennsylvania before she’d disappeared three years ago. Ted had met her and claimed that she’d gone back to the Middle Ages with Meg’s son, David.

  “What can you tell me?” Callum said. “Are we in the right place?”

  “A camera caught their car coming into Chepstow earlier this morning,” said Jones.

  “When this is over, heads will roll,” Natasha said. “You can be sure that Smythe’s will be first, even if he is the current pet of Thames House.”

  Callum glanced at Natasha in the rear view mirror, surprised at the venom in her voice. He was touched if it was on his behalf but sensed there was more to it. Ever since he’d come back from Afghanistan, there were moments when Callum didn’t trust his instincts, particularly with women. He wanted to ask Natasha what Smythe had done to her, but now wasn’t the time.

  “Just so long as the head that rolls isn’t mine.” Callum couldn’t allow this mission to get out of control, not with junior MI-5 agents lurking in the wings, waiting for him to slip up. He walked a thin line as it was, having come back from Afghanistan with enough Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (known as PTSD) to feel like he had to hide it. The fact that everyone came back from Afghanistan with issues of one form or another meant that his obsessions were so minor they didn’t prevent him from working. But he didn’t care to advertise them either. As his American father had said, “Son, the war screwed you up, but not so much they feel they should mention it.”

  It might be, for example, that the goons deep in the belly of Thames House knew all about Callum’s current compulsion to wash his hands a little too often, even if the IT department swore they hadn’t put cameras in the loo. Callum didn’t trust them to tell the truth. Admittedly, that was an occupational hazard.

  “The other news could be better,” said Jones. “Chepstow is having a fair today—hundreds of people are expected.”

  “Bloody hell. We need to shut it down,” Callum said.

  But even as Callum spoke, Natasha was shaking her head from the back seat.

  “Hold on, Jones.” Callum turned to look at her. “What?”

  “If nobody is here, if all Meg sees when she arrives is our men, she’s smart enough not to approach. A crowd might be better,” Natasha said.

  Callum directed his voice towards the speaker again. “I take that back. We’ll stick to the current plan.”

  “A crowd will give them cover,” said Jones.

  “But it will also make them think they’re safe,” Callum said. “We can’t let them get away again.”

  “The men are good,” said Jones. “They’ll see to it.”

  “You’ve got the camera feeds?”

  “Eight of them,” said Jones. “The only difficult spot is the rear of the castle. The cameras in the car park are working, but the two that cover the west side are out. You’ll have to mind that back gate in particular. That’s where we’re completely blind.”

  “The gate was locked when I visited Chepstow a few months ago,” Natasha said. “I know because I wanted to use it but the custodian told me I couldn’t.”

  “I doubt that something like that would have changed,” Callum said, “but we shouldn’t presume.”

  “Right,” said Jones. “According to the plans I have here, the original entrance was destroyed and that gate is used only for maintenance.”

  “I’m orienting the men now,” Natasha said, one hand to her ear piece. “They’ll patrol there specifically.”

  Jones disconnected and Callum scrubbed at his hair with one hand, feeling every one of his thirty-four years. Natasha had deep circles under her eyes too, not surprising since neither of them had slept in twenty-four hours. If they stayed at this much longer, their boss would replace Callum’s team with a different unit. Tired men made mistakes.

  “Worst case, the river patrol has to scoop our fugitives out of the Wye,” Natasha said.

  “I’d prefer it didn’t come to that,” Callum said. “I can see the headline now: Pregnant Woman Evades Security Service, Jumps into Wye River!”

  “Have you ever been inside the castle?” Natasha said.

  “I dated a girl who brought me here soon after I arrived at Cardiff. It was summer, so warmer then.” Callum checked the sky as he slipped his gloves back on. “Though admittedly, not by much.”

  Natasha nodded her head towards the entrance to the castle. Only three people had passed across their line of sight since they’d arrived. “Where should I set up the command post?”

  “You’ll be my point person here and coordinate with the team,” Callum said. “I’ll take the balcony when it comes to it.”

  “They’ll never reach it,” Natasha said. “We could use you elsewhere. Maybe on the battlement.” She gazed up at the crenellations on the closest tower. The rain had turned the normally yellowish stone a dark grey.

  “We’ve underestimated them from the beginning,” Callum said. “I’d like to start thinking two steps ahead.” The driver had left the engine running and the heat bathed Callum’s face. Callum relaxed against the headrest. “We need to move to a less noticeable location. We don’t want to scare them off before we’ve start
ed.”

  It took until eight o’clock to contact the custodian of the castle. By then, the man was already on his way in. To top the morning off right, the rain started to fall again, though the crowd that had gathered to await the opening of the castle seemed unperturbed by it.

  Natasha, talking through her headset, had been patiently directing the men. As the time neared eight-thirty, she tapped Callum’s shoulder. “Have you noticed what everyone is wearing?”

  Too late, Callum realized that the crowds not only would hide Meg, Llywelyn, and Goronwy, but would provide them an easier cover than he had expected: everyone in the crowd that was forming outside the castle gate wore medieval garb.

  Callum grabbed the binoculars and put them to his eyes, focusing on one individual at a time as he worked his way through the crowd. It was one thing to find the three fugitives in broad daylight, but with the rain, hoods were up and cloaks were tucked tight under chins. Callum’s men were going to have a hard time spotting them, even with cameras watching keenly.

  Callum turned up his earpiece. “Driscoll, get Ted to the front gate. We need someone closer who can recognize them on sight.”

  “Yes, sir,” Driscoll said. “But we risk Meg spotting him.”

  “Better that than to lose her entirely,” Callum said.

  “We can watch the crowd for anyone who balks as he approaches the entrance,” Natasha said.

  “I don’t like this.” Callum turned to Natasha. “I need a better picture of what’s happening. I’m too far away.”

  Natasha put one hand to her ear, listening, and held up her other hand to Callum. Then she said, “The custodian has arrived and is waiting for you at the castle entrance.”