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4 April 2022
Livia
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The tunnel wasn’t a straight affair, so Livia couldn’t tell at any given moment as they ran along it how much farther they had to go. It felt like the longest hundred yards of her life.
Cade had started to flag, so Michael scooped him into his arms. “I’ve got you.” Livia would have done the same if carrying Cade wouldn’t have slowed her down.
“I can run!”
“I know you can. This is because I’m terrified. Not because you are.”
Now that he was being carried, Cade had time to think. “Why does Sophie hate my home so much? Hate us?”
“Oh, honey,” Livia said, “she doesn’t. Really, she doesn’t.”
They finally reached the bottom of the stairs that would take them up to the shop, and she paused for breath while Michael set Cade on his feet and went up to the door to press his ear to it.
“Mark does too,” Cade said.
“I know for a fact that he doesn’t. He loves you all. When he’s in Earth Two, he just misses his computer. When Sophie was there, she missed her family and the life she has here. It has nothing to do with you. That can be one of the hardest things to understand when someone is unhappy.”
“Hey.” Michael flapped a hand to get her attention. “I can’t hear.”
Livia looked up at him and waited a beat, letting him listen in peace. She didn’t know that any of them had recovered from the flashbang as yet. In her mind, she’d been whispering.
When Michael pulled away from the door, she said in as low a tone as she could manage, “It is possible this entire thing was designed to get us into the open and easy to take.”
“Not unless they knew the tunnel was here.” Now Michael gestured that they should join him on the top step. “What was idiotic was not pulling the curtains again. I should have known better.”
“You should have?” She scoffed under her breath. “I’m the MI-5 officer.”
He glanced at her, a sheepish smile forming on his lips. “How about we share the blame and leave it at that?”
“Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the blame should be equally distributed.”
He chuckled under his breath, as she meant him to, but then he sobered, his eyes on her face. He took his gun from beneath his jacket. “Ready?”
She pulled up the hem of her dress and unholstered hers too. “Ready.”
Michael opened the door, and she went through it first, gun held in front of her, but the shop was deserted. All she could hear was her pounding heart.
Michael cat-walked to the door to the shop, circling around a small tractor that was suspiciously clean, as if it was really for show rather than for actual farm use. He pulled the deadbolt and turned the handle to the door, pushing it open with his left hand so he could point the muzzle of the gun through the widening gap between the door and the frame.
She had feared that a hundred yards really wouldn’t be far enough from the house to disguise the fact that they’d left the kitchen, but the car park was shielded from the house by a thick rhododendron hedge. The farm track, unpaved and very rutted, perhaps by centuries of use, was the same one David and Chad had walked along. Often tracks like these appeared on ordnance survey maps, but whoever had assaulted their compound appeared completely focused on the house itself.
“I hope the others are okay,” Cade said.
“We don’t dare hang around to find out,” Livia said. “We’ve been given a chance to escape, and to protect you, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
Michael held the key fob out to her. “You drive this time. I know you’ve had training.”
She looked at the key. “I have.”
Michael forced it into her hand. “You should have been driving this whole time probably.”
The key fob was plain black without a logo, giving no indication to which of the three cars parked before them it belonged and amazingly enough, there were two orange cars in the car park. “The car is going to beep if I press the button, so we’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way.”
The farthest vehicle from her was a blue Nissan, so she ruled that one out immediately. Nearest to her were the two orange cars: an old Ford Fiesta and an older model Citroen, which was smaller than Livia’s own. Livia darted towards the side door of the Ford, fumbling to open the lever on the fob, and once she did, she stuck the physical key in the driver’s side lock. Nothing happened, so with a furtive look around her, and her heart beating fast the whole time, she ducked around the rear of the car, which was facing away from the house and had been backed into its spot, and went to the Citroen. To her relief, the key worked, and she gestured that Cade and Michael should come to her.
They dashed forward, by which time Livia was in the car and had reached across the gearbox to manually unlock the passenger door, once again trying to avoid the beep that accompanied the clicking off of the locks.
The Citroen was very small but it still had four doors, and Michael opened the back door on his side for Cade. The boy was becoming such an expert passenger that he crawled to the seat behind her, correctly gauging that his feet and knees would have more room there, since she would sit closer to the steering wheel than Michael. Any adult-sized person would have been very cramped in his place. Then he buckled himself in, even moving the lever on the side wall that adjusted the chest strap to fit his smaller frame. When Livia had been little, she’d always had to tuck the strap under her arm to prevent it from cutting into her neck, and she was glad kids didn’t have to do that anymore.
Livia had already started the car, and now she eased forward with hardly a sound. The wheels on the graveled car park made more noise than the engine. The sun had risen by now, which was both a blessing and a curse. It was light enough to see their way without having to use the headlights, but it meant that if anyone was watching from the house, they would see them leaving.
Livia shifted into gear and eased down the lane, initially thinking not to go fast so as not to call attention to themselves, but once the road curved to the right, putting her out of sight of the car park and the house as well, she picked up speed the best she could, given the poor condition of the road. It was heavily rutted, and both the ruts and any dip were filled with water from last night’s rain. At one point they came to a slight hill, and she feared they could be seen from the back of the house. But with a hedge on one side of the road and a fence on the other, ultimately she could do nothing other than what she was doing.
Two miles on an unpaved farm track when twenty miles an hour is fast was heart-thumping in its slowness and desperation. Livia’s heart had been beating hard for a good thirty minutes now, with adrenaline pumping through her. She didn’t see the fear stopping any time soon either. Six minutes later, they pulled onto a lane heading east, and Livia accelerated to sixty.
Michael had been turning around every few seconds in his seat to check behind them, allowing Livia to concentrate on her driving, and now he faced more solidly to the front. “Amazingly enough, we appear to be in the clear.”
Livia had been trying to keep her breathing even, not wanting to freak Cade out any more than the child probably already was. He’d arrived in this world less than ten hours ago and had basically spent the entire time either asleep or fleeing for his life in a car. He still had a piece of bacon clutched in his fist.
Suddenly he spoke up. “My backpack!”
Michael turned to look at him. “We left it in the house. I’m sorry. Sophie will keep it safe until we can work out what’s going on.”
“At least I still have my money.” Cade’s anxiousness eased.
“What money is that?” Michael asked.
“This money.” A jingling noise came from the back seat, indicating Cade was holding up what he had and shaking it.
“Nice how you can keep it hidden like that,” Michael said. “How much do you have in there?”
“Ten shillings! My grandfather gave them to me last summer for my birthday.” Then Cade’s enthusiasm wavered slightly. “Do you think we’ll need to spend all of them?”
Michael reached back to pat his knee. “I doubt it. But if we do, I’ll make sure you get more.” He brought back his arm and said to Livia in an undertone. “Ten shillings, eh?”
Livia was feeling confident enough in their escape that she’d slowed to the speed limit and was able to take a hand off the wheel to adjust the mirror so she could see Cade’s face. “What can you buy with that much money? A cow?”
“That’s what Dad said: You’re a real Welshman now. You can afford your first cow.”
Livia laughed to see Michael’s jaw drop.
They were coming up on the A55, the same multi-lane motorway they’d driven multiple times last night. It ran east from Caernarfon past Bangor to Conwy and then to England. She and Michael hadn’t discussed exactly where they were going, but he had inputted something into the car’s GPS, and she had elected to follow it without question.
Once on the motorway, Michael grew quiet, paying attention to the cars around them.
“Do you see someone behind us?” she asked.
“I see plenty behind us. Plenty in front too. Professionals would tail us with a team of four cars. It makes them hard to track.”
“Do you have suspicions?”
“A couple of SUVs, maybe a panel van, and—” he shrugged, “—half a dozen cars look suspicious. I’ll keep watching.”
They passed Bangor and began circling through a series of roundabouts on the way to Conwy.
The minutes passed, as did the miles. Perhaps she was clenching the wheel a little tightly because Michael said, “You know we couldn’t do anything for Chad and the others.”
She didn’t glance at him. “I know.”
He gave a single shake of his head. “I just wanted to make sure you knew that. There was nothing we could have done.”
“As in Sarajevo.”
“As in.”
Up ahead she could see Penmaenmawr and Penmaenbach, two great outcrops through which the westbound motorway ran, since there wasn’t enough land directly along the coast to support both sets of lanes. Their half of the motorway had been built right along the edge of the cliff, below which was a sharp drop to the sea.
Michael glanced at it and said softly, “It would take very little to time travel right here, you know?”
“I don’t think we’re up high enough, really.” For her part, Livia was focused on the traffic up ahead. The highway designers had seen fit to stop traffic in the middle of a high-speed motorway. It was awkward, but it was how the A55 had been built in North Wales. Once into the latest roundabout, she glanced at him. “Are you really ready for that?”
“Are you?”
But Livia’s attention was caught again by what was ahead of them. Their lane had successfully skirted one of the bluffs, while its mate had gone through the mountain, but once on the other side, up ahead was a wall of red tail lights. She had to slow and then slow again. Michael’s left hand was braced against the dashboard while his right was hooked around the headrest, trying to watch the front and back at the same time. “I don’t like this. We could be caught between the bluffs with nowhere to escape.”
“Except over the cliff, as you said.” Livia shot him a grim look. Up ahead was an exit, and she edged between two cars that didn’t want to give her room, drove for twenty yards, and then took the ramp off the motorway.
“Two vehicles are coming with us.” Michael remained twisted in his seat, looking behind them. “A white panel van and a blue SUV.” He pulled Sophie’s mobile from a pocket and started taking pictures.
Livia glanced into the rearview mirror as the vehicles came down the ramp after them. Like the black SUVs Chad favored, she could see the appeal of more space, except large vehicles sometimes ran into trouble on Wales’ tiny lanes. “They’re probably innocent drivers.”
Michael was busy with his thumbs. “And if they’re not?”
“Who are you going to send them to?”
“Candy, in case they took away Chad’s phone.”
Livia gunned the little Citroen through a roundabout, took the overpass over the highway.
Michael was still busy with his phone and didn’t even look up. “Candy says they’re all fine. The assault on the compound was by the National Crime Agency, looking for—” he paused before adding in an incredulous tone, “—human traffickers?”
“It’s a front for the EM. It has to be.” She barely stopped at the first controlled intersection she came to, taking a left and then an immediate right
“That’s what Chad thinks.” Michael finally glanced forward. “You’re going into a mine?”
“It’s Monday morning. It will be open, and there will be people about.” She checked the map screen again. “And it will allow us to get high.”
Michael looked behind him. “And those cars are following.”
Livia let out a sharp breath at the knowledge that they really were being chased. After speeding past the granite mine’s administrative building, they started climbing through a series of switchbacks.
Livia was focused entirely on the road, so Michael, his eyes now split between the map, the mobile, and what was happening outside, navigated with simple commands: “Right; stay to the left around this curve; straight; the road curves to the right; straight.” Every fifteen seconds he took another picture and texted it.
They passed a dozen lorries, leaving puzzled workers in their wake. Nobody tried to get in front of them. On one straight stretch, Livia could see both vehicles still following, though they struggled with the curvy gravel road more than the Citroen, as she’d hoped.
She took a hard left and the road began to switchback more dramatically up the face of the mountain. The vehicles behind her kept pace, and now a third had joined them. Everyone had GPS now, so perhaps the driver had found an alternate entrance to the mine. They came around a hairpin curve and found themselves running along the very top of the bluff, overlooking the mine.
Now they had a choice before them: to take a left and come off the mountain via a narrow lane, which would take them to the village behind the mine. Or they could drive straight and follow the road to its end, whatever that end might be.
Livia glanced at the map, seeing the choice coming. Given that the road had straightened, the third vehicle, an SUV, which had managed the drive more easily than the panel van, was bearing down on them.
Michael looked behind them and then at her. “We’re not Thelma and Louise.”
Despite the danger, she briefly turned her head to meet his eyes. “No, but maybe we should be.” She returned her attention to the road, waiting for his decision.
He sent one more text before reaching back to Cade’s seatbelt to make sure it was secure. Then he straightened in his seat. “Straight.”
Livia floored it.
