Read Online Ashes of Time (The After Cilmeri Series) by Sarah Woodbury - Free Book Online Page B

closed, gathering his thoughts.
He’d liked the director of Signals, as much as it was possible to
like anyone who’d sacrificed as much as he had to reach the peak of
his profession. “What was he doing at work at that hour?”
    “ How often have you worked
that late talking to counterparts in Australia?” said Jones. “The
only good news is that the flash may go unremarked, and nobody else
will know about your friend’s arrival.”
    “ No one in our government,
you mean,” Callum said. “The Americans may have caught
it.”
    Jones grunted his acknowledgment of that
unpleasant fact.
    “ The Prime Minister might
be regretting shutting us down about now,” Callum said. “Without
information from GCHQ’s data streams, even MI-5 and 6 are
blind.”
    “ Should I call in whoever
might be around?” said Jones. “Delany hasn’t started work in London
yet.”
    “ Let me talk to Tate,”
Callum said, referring to the new director of MI-5. “We should be
able to get some of our people back temporarily.” The paperwork
would be a nightmare, but it would be worth it. “Keep me posted.
Given the bombing, I expect to be recalled at any
minute.”
    “ What are you going to do
about whoever’s come through?” said Jones.
    “ Go get them, of course.”
Callum pressed ‘end’ on Jones’s bark of laughter and looked down at
Cassie.
    She was hopping up and down with curiosity,
or maybe that was an attempt to stay warm. “What is it? I can tell
it’s bad.”
    “ Someone’s here, and
there’s been another bombing.”
    “ What? Where?”
    Her questions were the same as Callum’s had
been to Jones and were relevant to both halves of Callum’s
statement. Callum chose to answer the first. “Right here … well, to
the east of where we are now.” His mobile beeped, indicating that
the map Jones had promised to send had come through.
    Cassie and Callum put their heads together
and studied the blinking dot. “That’s way the heck out there,” she
said. “I don’t think it’s close to any road, not even a dirt
one.”
    As the crow flies, the blinking dot was
twenty miles from where they stood, but Callum knew from experience
that if a road went there directly, it wasn’t one he wanted to be
on. This was rough country: grassland and wheat fields and long
narrow draws turning to forested hills the farther into the
mountains one went. The entire county, an area slightly less than
half the size of Wales, had all of eighty thousand people in
it.
    The screen door screeched open, and Cassie’s
grandfather came onto the porch. He peered into the darkness and
then flicked on the light. “Cassie?”
    “ We’re here, Grandfather,”
she said.
    “ What’s happened?” Art
McKay thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans. He had
put on his Pendleton wool coat over a checked buttoned down shirt
and a cowboy string tie he wore underneath. Shorter than Cassie, he
nonetheless was a presence in any room he entered.
    Callum had speculated more than once about
those long dead Scots who’d emigrated to Oregon, resulting in
Cassie’s very Scottish last name. Many of her relatives had
suggested that he return for the festival of Highland games that
took place up the road every July. That Scottish connection was an
odd coincidence among many odd coincidences in the series of events
that had led in the end to Cassie’s rescue of him after his company
was ambushed by a host of angry Highlanders in Scotland in the
Middle Ages.
    “ Some of our friends have
arrived, Grandfather,” Cassie said.
    “ You’ll be missing dinner
then,” he said.
    “ I’m sorry.” Callum turned
the mobile so Art could see the map. “They’re out there all
alone.”
    Art pointed towards his truck with his lips.
“Let me get my keys and tell the others. That’s a lot of square
miles to cover. You’ll be needing help.”
    Gratefulness spread though Callum like a sip
of warm mead. Cassie’s family, led by her grandfather, had