Ashes of Time (The After Cilmeri Series) Page 14

  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-e
aten 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.

  Cassie shot Meg a sardonic look. “Lots. My husband plans for every contingency.” She looked at Callum. “Though I don’t think even you believed Anna’s and Meg’s arrival was imminent or you might have done things differently from the start.”

  “I didn’t.” Callum sped out of the parking lot, following the directions to the Wal-Mart given to him by the GPS in the car. When they reached the store, its parking lot was packed, just as the one in Eugene had been.

  Cassie and Anna got out. “We’ll be as quick as we can.”

  “I don’t see any parking spaces anyway,” Meg said to Callum. “Is it turning out to be a good thing or a bad thing that we’re fleeing across America on Black Friday?”

  Callum gave a laugh, circling through the parking lot at two miles an hour. “I’ll let you know when we finally reach that plane.”

  Meg sat back in her seat and closed her eyes. She didn’t want to feel tension in her shoulders any more. She didn’t want to be scared that men in a black SUV would pull up beside them and point their guns. When Llywelyn had been ill and she’d brought him to Aberystwyth, whatever happened, she’d found comfort in the fact that she’d had no choice. This time it had been Marty’s choice, and he’d paid for it with his life. Meg hated what he’d done to Anna. She hated how her children and grandchildren had been forced to witness what he’d done to Anna. But she would never have wished him dead.

  Then again, justice being what it was in medieval Wales, he might have paid for his actions with his life anyway.

  And with that, tears pricked at the corners of Meg’s eyes, partly because she was so tired, but mostly because she had allowed herself to think about Llywelyn again for more than a few seconds. She knew—because she knew him—that he would be going out of his mind with worry for her and Anna. He’d told Meg what it had been like when she’d disappeared at the beginning of her labor with David twenty-three years ago. Meg’s absence had torn him apart, as it had ripped away her own heart. He’d spent as many years searching for her as she had for him.

  At least this time he knew where she’d gone. At least he knew now that she would do everything in her power to return to him and the children. But he had to be hating his own impotence every second they were apart. Hopefully, with David beside him, he would find a way to keep busy.

  Callum tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “This is taking too long.”

  Meg peered out the window, but no sirens wailed and no police cars turned into the parking lot. “The store’s just crowded.”

  Wal-Mart’s cameras might be on a closed-circuit, but that didn’t mean the ones in the parking lot were. Fortunately, since it wasn’t yet seven in the morning, it was still dark. They could hide among the huge number of people and cars. If it had been any morning but Black Friday, the parking lot would have been all but deserted, and they would have had a much harder time keeping a low profile.

  Callum grunted, which Meg took to be dissatisfied agreement, and before Meg started to actively worry about them too, Cassie and Anna came out the front entrance of the store. Callum pulled around the end of the parking lot, cruising slowly, and stopped before he reached the end of the row of cars. Anna saw him, tugged on Cassie’s arm, and hurried over, both women taking long, confident strides. Meg felt a burst of admiration for her daughter, who was handling these difficult circumstances with such grace.

  “Any problems?” Callum said as Cassie and Anna opened their doors and sat in their seats.

  “Not that I know of,” Cassie said. “We got the same deal you did, and Anna and I bought the same phones, though we went through separate registers.” She shot Callum a worried look. “I hope that’s okay.”

  “It should be,” Callum said.

  “It’s a question of how omnipotent the U.S. government has become,” Anna said. “I can’t say it looks good from here.”

  “Hundreds of people all over the United States are buying these phones today,” Meg said. “Buying them in two separate transactions was a great idea.”

  “I will never again say that I hate Black Friday,” Cassie said. “I have never shopped on this day. We always avoided it.” Then she held up a prepaid mailer envelope. “I also wondered if you would object to me using this?”

  “What is it for?” Callum said.

  “It’s so I can mail the truck keys back to my grandfather,” Cassie said. “By the time he gets them, we’ll be long gone, or we’ll be in custody. It won’t matter if someone knows we were once in Medford.”

  “Okay,” Callum said, giving in far more easily than he might have. And then he explained why. “I’m sorry we involved him. I wish I had been smarter about finding another vehicle.”

  “Short of renting one, which would have been a trick in Pendleton, Oregon on Thanksgiving night, I don’t see what choice we had,” Meg said. “No matter whose car we borrowed, if they caught our images at Mission Market or the truck stop, they would have traced us to Art.”

  Cassie grimaced. “I think it’s actually our fault—Callum’s and mine.”

  “How so?” Anna passed a phone to Meg and started opening a second herself.

  Cassie twisted in her seat to look back at them. “Assuming they picked up the flash of your entrance into this world at the same time Mark did, seeing Callum and me on those cameras shortly thereafter, with a posse
of searchers, was like blowing a horn and announcing, ‘they’re here!’” Then she looked over at Callum. “You understand that my grandfather isn’t regretting helping us, right? No matter how much trouble we’ve caused him?”

  Callum gave a jerky nod.

  “What do you mean by that?” Anna said.

  Cassie busied herself with the phones in her lap. “My grandfather would have been offended if we hadn’t asked him for help. On the reservation, we look out for each other, never mind who might be in trouble with the law. That’s why so many men volunteered to look for you. It’s a dangerous world out there.”

  “We’re grateful,” Meg said.

  “It would be the same at Llangollen,” Anna said. “People protect their own.”

  Cassie nodded. “Here’s what my grandfather wants in return: for David to fund an expedition to the New World himself, instead of leaving it to the Spanish in two hundred years. He wants us to make sure it turns out better.”

  “That won’t be easy,” Meg said. “Ninety percent of the native peoples who were here before Columbus died after 1492. Mostly from disease. Is it better to leave it for later, or to ‘discover’ the New World now hoping we can handle the side effects?”

  “Creating the United States of Britain is one thing,” Anna said, “but we’d be changing history on a way bigger scale. Maybe there’d be no U.S.”

  “Maybe,” Meg said. “But how responsible are we for something that might or might not happen five hundred years from now? We’ve already changed the course of British history irreparably. I don’t think we should worry about the U.S.” She laughed. “We’re sitting here running from a government that feels pretty totalitarian to me right now. We have the ideals, and most of them aren’t even reality in this world. Maybe we can make something better.”

  “All those deaths, though,” Anna said. “I can’t even wrap my mind around a 90% mortality rate.”

  The conversation had carried them back onto the highway. Callum seemed to be handling driving on the right side of the road without any trouble. He hadn’t contributed to this conversation at all, but then, as a Scotsman, it wasn’t his country’s future at stake.