Liars' Legacy

by Taylor Stevens

  Dilemma chewed through him.

  He needed to follow, and could follow only one.

  Logic pushed one way. Desire, the other.

  The brother was predictable—not in the strategic sense. His ability to think in multiple directions made him unpredictably dangerous. But he was predictable in his reliability, which would make him easier to shadow.

  The sister was a few sane days shy of crazy.

  He had no good options for sticking with her for the long haul.

  Holden tracked her parallel from across the plaza because he wanted to.

  Want.

  Want was a dangerous, dangerous word.

  He knew better than to give in to it and did anyway.

  He glanced back at the table.

  The brother was gone.

  One second to the next, just like that, decision settled.

  Holden followed the cobblestones to where he had a view of both exits to the building she’d entered. His luggage was an issue. He’d condensed the items from Itzal’s cases into a single bag, but even one bag, no matter how bland, would stand out over time and make him visible, in the same way patterned shoes and bright clothing made a person visible. He couldn’t afford to be seen with the weapons, couldn’t afford to leave them.

  Down the street the basement door opened.

  The sister trotted up the stairs, clothes a different color, body a different shape.

  He gave her time, space, and started up after her.

  She looked so much like her mother.

  There were buyers who’d want the children for no other reason than revenge.

  Clare—Catherine—Catalina—Karen . . .

  One didn’t easily escape a legacy like that.

  “They’ll find you,” he’d told them. “You’ll end up running hard. You could use an ally, a friend.”

  He wanted them alive, wanted her alive.

  And want was a dangerous, dangerous thing.

  CHAPTER 15

  Alexanderplatz

  Mitte, Berlin, Germany

  KARA

  SHE THUMPED THE RETURN KEY IN FRUSTRATION, HARD ENOUGH THAT the laptop jumped. Nick stopped pacing. Aaron stopped bouncing the stress ball. Juan opened his eyes.

  She hadn’t been going for attention but had it now regardless.

  She waved them off and went back to trying to ignore them.

  They were too many bodies in too tight a space, an entire kill team sequestered and on edge, waiting for go, while the sense of impotence mounted.

  Every repetitive motion, even those she couldn’t directly see, was a gust of wind over a sand mandala, turning what should have been straightforward if tedious work into a struggle to keep big-picture focus.

  She was tired, desperately needed sleep.

  Obsession wouldn’t let her mind shut down.

  As of last night target was in Berlin.

  The war room had picked him up outside the central station and then lost him again. There’d been no sign of him this morning, but he was still here, of that she was certain. SIGINT and HUMINT both pointed to an early meeting with a Russian handler, and this guy hadn’t gone through all the effort of misdirecting attention just so he could up and leave before he got what he came for.

  The intelligence channels had all gone quiet.

  They had the time but not location.

  The war room was hunting, and her team was on standby, and where the others had taken to pacing and sleeping, she had gone digging and had found an anomaly in the Berlin flight manifest.

  She wasn’t an expert on predictive modeling.

  Didn’t know what the standard deviation for no-shows looked like on this particular route at this time of year, at this time of day, but an Internet search gave her rough averages, and by appearances, that flight out of Frankfurt had taken off with an inordinately high number of empty paid-for seats.

  Eyes closed, Vivaldi rolling through her brain, Kara willed herself through to the other side, trying to understand from target’s perspective why buying out a third of the flight would have been worth the trouble.

  The expenditure would have run into the high four figures.

  The time investment, too, would have been considerable.

  Most of the bookings had been for individuals or couples rather than large traveling groups, and keeping that many names, birth dates, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and passport details realistic and pointing to unique IP addresses required incredible attention to detail. For all of that, he gained . . . ?

  —Multiple tickets, multiple names.

  —A whole heck of a lot of obfuscation.

  The possibilities forked, and she followed the tangents.

  Headquarters had scraped the manifest, pushed the data through software analysis, turned up thousands of hits. They’d followed each one in a time-consuming process of elimination, but every name on that list, whether on the flight or not, had led to a legitimate person with a fully backstopped, ordinary, boring life.

  —Borrowed identities.

  Target could have moved through security with travel documents and identification for a different flight and used a borrowed identity to board this one.

  Gate agents rarely confirmed identification as part of a domestic boarding process, but on the chance they did, a quality fake would be enough. The photo wouldn’t even need to match, because nobody ever looked closely, and if the war room ever did manage to link a name to his body, all they’d find at the end of the rainbow was a random stranger with no idea how he’d been pulled into this game of intrigue.

  —Wasted resources.

  —Wasted attention.

  Liv Wilson and team had spent the past twenty-four hours immersed in a game of which one of these is not like the others. If Kara’s hypothesis held, the war room still wouldn’t have found him, because, in a repeat of the same damn strategy that had led to chasing a hat in Frankfurt, they weren’t looking for the real him.

  Kara rested her fingers on the keyboard and let the adrenaline pass.

  The dutiful part of her wanted to alert the war room to the anomaly.

  The rest of her knew she’d be wasting her time.

  She returned instead to the camera feeds in the Berlin airport.

  She’d been through the deplaning footage once already, a quick pass to confirm with her own eyes what others had already reported.

  But target had boarded that flight.

  He wasn’t a ghost, and he didn’t have superpowers.

  He was just as human as she was.

  If he’d walked on that plane, he’d most certainly walked off. They were all just looking in the wrong place or for the wrong thing.

  Illusion and misdirection were his comfort zones.

  That’s where she’d find him.

  She located footage for the secured areas and started where the war room had long ago stopped. This was stale data. Locating him in the past wouldn’t lead to him in the present, but for her, it didn’t have to.

  Tracking him to current location was the war room’s job.

  What she wanted was to understand.

  She searched among the baggage handlers and fuel suppliers and food-service personnel, running feed after feed, laboriously enhancing images and pushing stills through recognition software.

  The system finally spit out a partial match.

  Its face belonged to one of the ground crew.

  He worked the job as if he’d been doing it for years, but she knew him by the way he slipped away. The entirety of start to finish filled her with awe and concern.

  To make this happen, he had to have known airlines and routes and have had the uniform in advance, and he had to have made the switch while their operative was on the aircraft, all of which meant he’d already anticipated and prepared against someone waiting to snag him in Berlin before her team had even known they’d be tracking him out of Dallas.

  With that level of foresight, they could be chasing him indefinitely.

&nbs
p; —No.

  —Illusion and misdirection.

  Everything they’d seen thus far was what he’d wanted them to see, which meant even in this, he expected to be seen, which meant he was directing their attention away from something else.

  —The accomplice.

  Nobody watching the flight had been looking for a second person, because she hadn’t discovered the second until after the flight had landed.

  The accomplice, too, had been there.

  Kara went back to the Frankfurt boarding footage and watched the passengers, ignoring faces, focusing on attributes, and notating key characteristics, and she returned to the Berlin arrival to study the process in reverse. Over and over she watched and replayed, and each time the woman with lush blond hair drew her attention. She was young, stylish, haughty in a way that reminded her of the girls at school who’d thought they were better than everyone else and deserved special treatment because their parents had money. The worst had also been beautiful.

  That’s what this blonde was, and she had no match on the outbound side.

  Kara moved the footage back thirty seconds, lifted a still out of the frame, enhanced the image, and ran it through the databases. Just as had happened with the guy in the ground-crew uniform, facial recognition came back with a partial match on target’s passport photo, and what should have been the lucky break that confirmed they were hunting a male and female team instead led to the impossible.

  She’d already found target below the aircraft in a ground-crew uniform.

  The same person couldn’t be in two places at the same time.

  Frustration squeezed her from the inside.

  Facial recognition software wasn’t infallible.

  There were always false positives and false negatives, and this hit was a low enough match that the war room, having not seen what she’d just seen, would have likely discarded it. But it wasn’t a fluke, wasn’t a mistake.

  And yet two partial matches for the same person so close together?

  The only way that made sense was if they were dealing with two people who understood the way the algorithms worked well enough to pass themselves off as the same person—unlikely—or they were two people with nearly identical facial features.

  She sat motionless, staring through the image, thoughts racing from possibility to possibility. Target had used quick change in Frankfurt—basic disguise, no masks, no prosthetics, just a well-planned series of clothing swaps performed with incredible timing—and, by appearance, the accomplice entering and exiting the restroom had done the same. But basic disguise had limits.

  Passing a woman off as a man was straightforward enough.

  Going male to female was a whole different level of difficult.

  For this kind of nodal match, they were looking at identical twins. But target was male, and what she had here on-screen was either the best goddamn drag she’d ever seen or this was an honest-to-God woman.

  —Target was female.

  —Or, best guess, this was a brother-sister team.

  She needed space from it, time and space to let the subconscious percolate on what else between the layers she might be missing. She set aside one analysis track in favor of another and returned to the departure out of Dallas.

  She sorted through the angles for a view that would allow her to convince the waiting area to give up its secrets, and when she found it, she grabbed her notepad, and flipped to a clean page. She diagrammed the waiting area, marking out each key figure, like in a football play schematic, tracking physical movement and eye movement, until she had a map that told a story she only half understood.

  She’d found target, but no sign of accomplice.

  She’d also found Emilia Flynn, Daniel Cho, Peyton What’s-his-name, and Bill Wright, a full four-person crew, and seeing them there, observing them from a distance, answered the question of why Emilia had been in Frankfurt.

  —One flight.

  —Two liquidation teams.

  —Two targets.

  That would have been really helpful to know before they’d boarded.

  The men and women they sought to liquidate were assassins for hire, top-tier names on the Broker list, the ones smart enough, invisible enough, dangerous enough to become national security threats if the right money came along. Odds that two of them coincidentally happened to be on the same flight were about the same as getting struck by lightning while getting bitten by a rabid shark in the middle of the desert.

  Their target was on his way to a rendezvous in Berlin.

  A second assassin along for the ride meant that somewhere out there, a third party had a vested interest in seeing he never made that meeting. A second assassin also meant a killer would be robbed of payment if Nick’s crew hit target first, which made Nick & Co. the competition, which meant that unless Emilia was successful, there’d be an assassin gunning for them, and from the look on Emilia’s face, as of Frankfurt, that killer was most definitely alive and roaming free.

  Kara narrowed person-of-interest possibilities down to three, closed out the Dallas feeds, and switched back to the Frankfurt arrival. This time, she stuck with a single camera and watched the entire flight deplane.

  She found target, and found Daniel, Peyton, and Emilia, and found the three persons of interest, but still no accomplice.

  More curiously, there was also no Bill Wright.

  She let the footage roll long past the deplaning.

  Motion out on the tarmac, beyond the window, caught her attention.

  She switched feeds for a better angle.

  A stretcher wheeled a body from aircraft to ambulance. New data layered over old, and Kara understood, and she felt so very, very small.

  What had seemed like war-room incompetence had been distraction in the juggle between crises. Emilia’s target had struck preemptively on the flight.

  She’d lost a man before the wheels had ever touched down.

  Hers would have been a very different hunt through the airport, and all of this while Nick’s team had been tracking their man through the concourse.

  Kara’s throat tightened, and emotion built like water welling in a blowhole.

  She hadn’t known Bill personally, but she’d known of him, and known he was good people. She was overtired, needed sleep, was useless on this now.

  She nudged the mouse to close down the camera feeds.

  A flash of color at the edge of the frame gave her pause, and she stopped, pointer hovering over box, mind processing, trying to grasp what she’d just seen.

  She pushed the time stamps backward and rewatched at the edge of the lounge.

  The accomplice was there, acting as lookout.

  She hadn’t been on that Dallas flight, because she was already in the terminal, waiting for the flight to arrive. This explained how events in Frankfurt had spun so quickly out of control, and explained target’s foresight and preparation.

  This was a team that expected to be trailed.

  By whom, she didn’t know—Emilia’s assassin, the Russians, both, something else altogether—but these two had come prepared for high-level evasion, and her own team had stepped right into the middle of that.

  Were still in the middle of whatever it was.

  That raised the exponential risk of getting caught in existing cross fire.

  The weight of the implication must have shown on her face, because Nick crossed her field of vision and nudged the bed. She pulled earbuds out.

  He said, “What’d you find?”

  She scooted over, made room for him.

  Aaron stopped bouncing the ball.

  Juan rolled over and opened one eye.

  Ringing interrupted before she had a chance to get to show and tell.

  Attention riveted in Nick’s direction, the entire room reverent and focused.

  The conversation was one sided.

  They waited.

  Nick said, “Understood,” and ended the call.

  “Pack up,” he said. “Rendezvo
us has moved to Prague.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Eglise Amberieu en Bugey

  Ambérieu-en-Bugey, France

  HOLDEN

  THE CHURCH FILLED ONE SIDE OF THE SMALL PLAZA, TWO VAULTED stories of quarried limestone blocks and lead-paned windows that led off the main street in a solid wall. Narrow homes and old stone buildings edged the rest—solid doors, wooden shutters, sun-bleached plaster—in neat, crisp lines, hemming in a few trees, tidily parked cars, and the cobblestone center. Clean. Calm. Quiet.

  The only thing that moved was water spurting from the center fountain.

  Not the kind of place a person could sit for a while and go unnoticed.

  Stores, cafés, banks, all the busy places he’d have utilized to blend into the background, were a few blocks over.

  It would have been easier to kill her here than it was to surveil her.

  Ironic, considering she wasn’t an easy person to kill.

  Also ironic, considering this was the first time killing wasn’t the objective.

  The bell tower, twenty, thirty feet above the church peak, with a clean line of sight on the mairie—the town hall—was where he would have gone if it had been. What he’d needed was a fast, clean exit. The belfry couldn’t give him that, and the plaza was too exposed, too naked to hang around in an attempt to observe both sides of the mairie, which was how he’d gotten to where he was now, holed up in a place of worship, staring out a window and watching the entrance like a trusting dog convinced its person would walk back through that door any second.

  She might. She might not.

  She’d been in there two hours, at least he believed she was still in there.

  Two hours for God only knew what.

  The destination had been Prague.

  This wasn’t Prague.

  This was everything opposite Prague. Opposite direction, opposite feel, and if he’d read the signals right—and he was pretty damn sure he had—opposite the plans she’d made with her brother.

  Whatever she was doing here, she was doing behind her brother’s back.

  As if there weren’t already enough warning signs.

  He had followed her on foot out of Savignyplatz, a six-kilometer trek across town, through high-traffic areas and appearance changes, into a residential area, where she’d disappeared through a nondescript door and reemerged a half hour later as a woman twice her age, drab and unnoticeable, but for a carry-on suitcase, and had followed her out of Berlin by train in a jagged route that detoured through Frankfurt and Paris. He’d been able to stay with her because he was her, another iteration of her, ghost and chameleon, familiar with the ways in which a person stood and walked and gestured identified them as much as any individual piece of clothing did. But mostly he’d been able to stay with her because her disguise was flawed.