Livia
MI-5 had pulled out all the stops for this one—as had Chad, Livia was sure, though little of what he was doing had been shared with her. She’d known something was afoot from the moment she’d woken that morning, but nobody wanted to talk to her about it, for obvious reasons. They treated her like a mole in their organization. And of course, that’s exactly what she was.
“I would ask you to tell me the truth, but I’m not going to bother.” David gazed out the car window as they left the rental house in one of Chad’s vehicles.
The roads were congested, and it was a good thing the windows in the vehicle were tinted black, because otherwise people might have been able to see David’s face. She knew without asking that the vehicle was armor-plated, just as Five’s would be. The sun was near to setting as well, which she assumed was why David had chosen this hour to meet.
“I am telling you the truth.”
He looked at her. “As you know it. Maybe.”
“Mark trusted me,” she said as mildly as she could manage.
“I’m not going to be taken in again. For the thousandth time, I have absolutely no reason to trust them.”
“Then why are we even doing this?”
David tsked. “Because I am just like you and Mark. I want to believe. I want to trust them, and somehow I can’t help giving them a chance.”
“So this is a test?”
He laughed. “Yeah, it’s a test. Didn’t you know?”
Livia hadn’t thought about the meeting that way, and it was too late to mention David’s thoughts to the D-G without everybody overhearing. To her, this meeting was intended as a meet-and-greet, a chance for them to get to know each other after several bad years of estrangement. To her—and she was pretty sure to the D-G—David’s relationship with MI-5 was the one that really counted, while his current arrangement with Chad Treadman should be viewed as a temporary aberration.
In other words, MI-5 was family; they were the known quantity and who David would want to work with once he got over these current difficulties. For David to include Chad Treadman was like a cousin bringing a boyfriend nobody liked to Christmas dinner. Livia had been thinking—and she was pretty sure that Philips had been thinking it too—that David just needed to be coddled a bit, and he would come around.
It hadn’t occurred to her that some things couldn’t be fixed.
They arrived at the Tesco, which was packed, as David had assumed it would be on a Saturday afternoon. There could even have been more tourists present than usual, either hiking up Snowdon to see where the plane didn’t crash or over to Beaumaris, which might well end up as some kind of shrine. The driver parked in the middle of the parking lot, while the two other cars that had driven in with them found spaces nearby.
“How are you going to do this?” Livia turned to look at David. “You may be the most recognizable person in Britain right now, and that includes the current royal family.”
“Nobody is going to expect to see me here.” David pulled a black wool hat with a Welsh dragon emblem on it down low over his ears. The emblem came to rest off-center between David’s forehead and ear. He looked foolish, and he appeared to know it, because he grinned at her. “It’s raining, so we’ll carry an umbrella. Just you and me.”
“Are you out of your mind? What if someone does recognize you? You’ll be mobbed.”
“That’s why Tesco’s staff has been augmented by a dozen of Chad Treadman’s men. I bet half the shoppers in there are MI-5 anyway. We’ll be fine.” Having accepted the umbrella Michael offered, David got out of the car and came around to her side to open her door. It was a chivalrous move she hadn’t expected, augmented by the umbrella he held open over the top of the car to prevent a drop of rain from touching her head.
Thankfully, she’d had the foresight to pack trousers and sensible leather shoes instead of the heels she normally wore. From the look of it, David was already getting wardrobe advice from Amelia, since he was in black jeans, shoes, and leather jacket. And then, of course, there was the hat. The rain was coming down hard enough now that she planned to keep her hood up too.
With Livia’s hand tucked into David’s elbow, they hustled through the rain to the front doors. On the way, they passed twenty people coming and going, and nobody looked at them twice. David picked up a basket and wended his way through the shoppers towards the produce section, which was somewhat in the center and to the back of the store. He stopped in front of a bank of squashes. “Zucchini was never my favorite, even when I could get it.”
“We call them courgettes,” Livia said. “You don’t have them in the Middle Ages?”
“Most squashes are New World.” He poked at a fat yellow squash. “I could see bringing back pumpkin seeds. Did you know the Celts invented Halloween, but they carved turnips, not pumpkins?”
“I didn’t,” she said flatly.
Her eyes continuously scanned the store for threats. At the opposite end of the aisle they were in, someone dropped a container of chocolate milk, and it exploded. Instantly, service workers were there with a yellow warning sign and mops, and it was only then that she realized the entire scene had been orchestrated to close off that end.
David was watching too, and a smile played around his lips. Then he turned to look behind Livia. “Director Philips, I presume.”
It was. In his suit and tie, he was far more out of place than David in his funny hat—but the D-G stuck out his hand as if meeting a time traveler in the produce section of a Tesco was utterly normal. His hair, streaked with gray at the temples, was wet, as were the shoulders of his raincoat.
David shook. “Thanks for coming.”
“I was in the neighborhood.” The statement came out something like a drawl.
David laughed. “As was I.”
This was going better than Livia had hoped—feared—it might.
“We would like to put our relationship back on what we consider to be a proper footing,” the D-G said.
“As in, not hostile? I wouldn’t be opposed to that.”
“Let me begin by apologizing again for what happened with your sister. It was a mistake.”
“I still have questions about that. Which part, exactly, are you referring to as a mistake?” David said. “The part where you hunted her across England, or the part where you sent fighter jets to drive her plane into Snowdon?”
Philips took in a breath through his nose. Livia knew he hated apologizing, for all that he’d done it a half-dozen times so far to David. He wanted things to go well, but he was loath to grovel. He did it anyway. “I know that Livia has expressed Five’s regrets in that regard. I would like to assure you of mine as well. I am truly sorry.”
David nodded, his eyes never leaving Philips’ face. “You do realize where the problem lies, don’t you?”
A gesture from the D-G encompassed their surroundings. “Meeting in a Tesco is all very well and good, but walking into Thames House and walking out again? We have never allowed you to do that.”
“You have not.”
There was a pause, and then Philips said, “What about Chad Treadman? What makes you trust him?”
“For now, he has given me no reason not to.”
“He broadcast your face across the planet.”
“Yeah, I didn’t like it, but I can see why he did it.”
“So you’re going to give him what he wants?”
David’s eyes narrowed. “I am not for sale.”
The D-G put up a hand. “I would never dream of suggesting it.”
“He told me what the CIA hopes to gain from me, which is more than you have done, though you have to know.” David paused. “And if you don’t, that’s far worse.”
The D-G’s benign expression wavered for a second. “What did he tell you?”
“That they want to ride me back and forth from Earth Two to Avalon. They want to make me their slave.”
Livia could feel the rage in David at the thought, though he mostly kept it out of his voice.
“That is not my doing,” the D-G said, “and I would never help them achieve it.”
“I would hope not.”
Philips’ jaw clenched for a moment. “I know you agreed to allow Treadman and his people to help you when you are in this world.” He took a card from his breast pocket and held it out to David. “I would hope that next time you, or whoever returns here, would extend us the same courtesy.”
David took the card. “Next time?”
“There will be one, surely.” Philips paused. “That’s what you fear, isn’t it?”
David looked down at the card for a count of five. “That’s it? You’re willing to wait?”
“We are not fickle. Nor are we subject to the same rules and laws that govern the rest of the world, including your new friend Chad. The Security Service have been defending Britain for over a hundred years. We’ll be here after a hundred more.” Philips canted his head. “Can you say the same about Treadman Global?”