Liars' Legacy

by Taylor Stevens

She’d tried to speak, first in the bedroom, with threats; and then on the stairs, with calculated calls for civility; and then the kitchen, with faux curiosity about what Jack wanted; and finally with pleas for help in the mudroom.

  Each time he’d shut her down.

  She’d gotten the point.

  She was quiet now—murderously angry, but quiet—and he stood beyond arm’s reach outside the vehicle door, glaring right back and more angry than she could ever be, considering she was the one who ran the war room trying to hunt him dead.

  The pager vibrated.

  He used the vehicle remote to open the garage.

  Jill strode in wearing a pantsuit, carrying an oversize purse, red hair up in a bun, facial features altered enough that she could easily pass for Wilson.

  Like Jack, she wore high-dexterity gloves, and the wig did for her what the beanie did for him. She handed Jack a bundle of industrial zip ties and an earflap beanie. He handed her Wilson’s wallet and the vehicle key fob, then used the zip ties to secure Wilson’s hands and feet, shoved the hat atop her head, and stuffed loose strands of hair up beneath it. The house had no signs of forced entry. It’d be a cuffed naked man’s word against Wilson’s prints on the cuffs, and Wilson’s face behind the windshield for any cameras that caught the trip out of town. That was about all it took to disappear a person, at least for the short term.

  Jill took them north along the interstate, out of Maryland and into Pennsylvania, then off the highway for the backcountry, and she stopped at the edge of a field.

  Jack ordered Wilson out and onto the dirt.

  She slid to the ground and righted herself, and stood there in her bathrobe and bare feet, head high and haughty. He said, “You know who I am?”

  She nodded.

  “No,” he said. “Who I really am.”

  “Karen McFadden’s kid,” she said.

  “Good,” he said. “That means you know who I was trained by and have an idea of what I’m capable of. So tell me, why are you trying to make me your enemy?”

  Wilson didn’t answer.

  He said, “This. You. Here. Do you have any idea why?”

  She blew a frustrated raspberry, as if the possibilities were endless.

  He said, “You think killing me will stop the assassination? There’s more than one assassin and more than one target. The only person who can stop it is me. I’ve been trying to do that, but you keep giving me reason after reason to move it forward instead.” He cut her hands loose. “Clearly, you’re an idiot. I want to talk to your boss. Make the call.”

  Wilson coughed out a laugh. “That’s not going to happen.”

  Defiance in both laugh and words said she was immune to threat and pain and death, and with that declaration, the past imposed itself on the present, and he was twelve again, living in Athens with Raymond Chance, the closest thing he’d ever had to a father, dropped off on his doorstep for safekeeping, which was the word Clare used when she needed to abandon her kids again so she could jet across the globe.

  Ray’s past had caught up with him while they’d been there, a past that should have died in Prague at the same time Ray had officially died, and it’d come in the guise of a former Stasi agent who’d never believed the stories and never stopped searching.

  Jill had stumbled upon the man first.

  She’d knifed him and called for Ray, and Ray had hauled the guy south, to where homes were sparse, and had marched him to the edge of a barren cliff, put a bullet in his head, and shoved the body into the ocean.

  Ray had stood there for a solemn moment, and said, “I know your mom ain’t one for killing if there’s a way killing don’t need doing, but there ain’t no turning an ideologue, you understand?”

  Jack hadn’t, but Ray hadn’t expected a reply, either.

  “You can’t persuade or buy a man driven by the righteous belief of his cause. Show mercy, he’ll stab you with it. Threaten and torture, you strengthen his resolve. This here is the only way to keep him from coming back.”

  In time Jack had learned to see what Ray had seen, and he saw it now.

  Liv Wilson was an ideologue.

  But he hadn’t brought her here to persuade her.

  Jack offered Wilson her phone.

  “Make the call,” he said.

  She straightened her shoulders, balled up her fists, said, “No.”

  He shot her in the foot.

  She screamed and crumpled.

  Jack grabbed her hair and pulled her up.

  Her hands and feet and bathrobe were muddy.

  “Make the call,” he said.

  She gritted her teeth, her nostrils flared, her breathing picked up tempo, and she refused to look at him or the phone, so he shot her other foot, too.

  She screamed again, crumpled again.

  “We’ve still got hands, knees, and elbows to go,” Jack said. He shoved the phone in her face. “You’ll be doing your country a favor by making the call.”

  She grabbed the phone, scrolled through the contacts, dialed.

  Jack tugged the device from her hand, put the call on speaker, gave the phone back. Steven Hayes answered. Wilson told him she’d been kidnapped by the people he’d been trying to find, driven off in her own car, and shot twice, and now they wanted to talk to him. Jack told Hayes what he’d already told Wilson.

  He was trying to stop this assassination.

  He had information to offer. Hayes was welcome to look at it first, before deciding if he valued it enough to barter for a life. They should meet.

  “Where and when?” Hayes said.

  Jack hung up, pulled Liv off the ground, and shoved her onto the backseat. “I already had that number,” he said. “You could have spared yourself two crippled feet by not being such an asshole.”

  She spit at him.

  He smiled, pulled the SIM from the phone, pocketed it, powered the device back on, and left it lying in the field. He climbed in beside her and slammed the door. “Don’t need you anymore,” he said, “but gotta keep you until it’s over. Let’s hope your boss is better at playing this game than you are.”

  Jill pulled back on the road and hit the gas.

  The Range Rover, like most modern vehicles, was hackable and trackable and probably had had a target slapped on it before he’d gotten off the phone. The big guns were coming, and he was going to outrun them with a naked woman who couldn’t walk.

  CHAPTER 35

  Brush Creek Township

  Pennsylvania, USA

  KARA

  THE ROOM HAD ONE WINDOW, HIGH AND NARROW, AND IF SHE ANGLED off as far as the chain would reach and then stretched, she could catch just a glimpse of the porch and the spot where the car had been. The rest was sky and trees. Nearest neighbors, best as she could tell, were a few miles down the road, and she’d been left alone, ankle shackled to a chain that ran through a boarded-up hole in the floor to some kind of concrete anchor beneath the house. Ten hours by car from Chicago for this, an old pier-and-beam on the edge of nowhere Pennsylvania, where she could scream for days and never be heard.

  There was a fancy-ass composting toilet in the corner, but no heat.

  For that Jen had given her all the coats that were waiting for them with the car in Chicago, and all the blankets that were waiting in the house, and as some token toward warm food, a tiny microwave, and enough water and packaged edibles to make a prepper properly proud. “I don’t expect we’ll be gone more than a couple days,” she’d said, “but I know how fast food runs out when you’re sitting out time without much to do, so I brought a lot of extra.”

  Kara had nodded thanks, hated herself for it, and hated herself for hating it.

  This was how Stockholm syndrome set in, thanking kidnappers for basic necessities, but it wasn’t that, exactly. What she’d acknowledged was the genuine kindness. And then Jen had left, Jen and Christopher both.

  Chris was a whole other side of this.

  Kara had suspected since Cleveland that he was involved, but
Jen had never mentioned him, and only when he’d rolled that wheelchair into her cabin a few minutes before they reached Chicago Union Station had she finally laid eyes on him. He was taller in person and so god-awful charming that the choice he’d offered between sitting and behaving or taking a long chemical nap hadn’t been a choice at all.

  It’d been interesting watching him and Jen interact.

  A jealousy-making thing, or maybe what she’d felt was envy.

  From so young an age, she’d had to fight for every scrap, every skill.

  She’d escaped into the navy for the education, and to help her sisters into better situations, but it’d just been a different version of the same nonsense. She’d never had a chance to be a kid, or even a girl, really, and yet here was Jen, glittered and glammed, charming and feminine, younger by a half dozen years at least, treated like a full equal by a man as skilled as she was, a man who also treated her with that same respect of equals, minus the handcuffs, of course. And that was the thing, goddammit.

  She worked for the good guys, these were the bad guys, and yet they were kinder and treated her better than anyone she’d worked with other than Nick.

  That ate at her, made her wonder what it said about who she really was.

  She paced the floor, blanket wrapped tight, and for the umpteenth time strained to see out that narrow window. The sun would soon set. She hated the idea of being alone here in the dark. Not because she was afraid of the dark or afraid of being alone, but because this was day two and they were still gone. To be able to release her, they had to survive, and so here she was again, wanting the wrong team to win because her fate intertwined with theirs.

  She dragged the chain across the room and stopped mid-step.

  She had most certainly heard an engine.

  She strained for the window, caught a glimpse of color, recognized the car, and tried counting heads but didn’t have the view.

  Footsteps tromped up the porch steps.

  She crossed the room, leaned into the door to listen, caught movement and Jen’s voice in a few scattered words.

  A door down the hall opened. The door shut.

  Footsteps headed in her direction, and she backed away.

  Knuckles rapped against the door—more of that respect thing, Jen treating her as if the space was hers, giving her the illusion that as captor, she couldn’t just come and go as she pleased.

  Kara said, “Come in.”

  Jen peeked her head inside.

  She said, “You holding up okay?”

  Kara shrugged. Just because she was grateful for the little things didn’t mean she had to be happy she needed the little things in the first place.

  Jen said, “We’re going to have to go again soon. I just want to make sure you’re as comfortable as can be.”

  “I’m okay,” Kara said.

  “Also,” Jen said, “I don’t know if maybe you want to meet Jack?”

  Kara’s stomach somersaulted.

  Her brain hung up, and her mouth stopped working.

  She wanted to meet him, yes. Had wanted to meet him since he’d followed her to her hotel in Prague, and had wanted to meet him every day since, wanted to meet him the way someone might want to meet Alan Turing or Katherine Johnson, but she didn’t want to meet him like this, hair greasy, two days since her last hot shower, sitting on a mattress on the floor with a goddamn chain around her ankle. But to admit to any of that opened her up to questions even she wasn’t ready to answer.

  She shrugged again, said, “Sure.”

  Jen closed the door. A minute later there was another knock, and then a pause, and Jack walked in alone, and seeing him up close, face-to-face, brought on a torrent of inner conflict that sent all the old disfluency rushing through her head.

  She thought through the words, said, “I guess you won.”

  He knelt so he was at eye level.

  “This isn’t winning,” he said.

  He glanced at her ankle. “May I?”

  She nodded.

  He ran a finger between shackle and sock, checking the spacing, looking for chafing, and, apparently satisfied, let her ankle drop. “You don’t deserve this,” he said. “There aren’t many people I’d say that to, but if I could have seen another way, some path to avoid this, I’d have done it.”

  She said, “I’m worth nothing to them. Someone as smart as you has to know that, so what could you possibly hope to gain from all this?”

  “Freedom,” he said.

  Not the answer she expected.

  He said, “Our mother is—was—a paranoid nutcase. Straight up pathological, probably should have been institutionalized, delusional. Until, you know, she wasn’t, and it turned out all the crazy was just a difficult version of truth. I don’t want to be her,” he said. “But it’s not easy to walk away from that legacy when everyone either wants you dead or wants to use you to make other people dead.”

  “They’re not going to give you what you want,” she said.

  “I think they will.”

  “Not as some sort of trade for me.”

  “No, but because of what you symbolize.”

  She sighed on the inside. She’d seen too much to view him as naive or credulous, and for that reason alone, she refused to write off hope completely, but even still, she found it difficult to see a path forward.

  “I wish I could stay longer,” he said. “It’d be nice to talk.”

  She nodded and tried to ignore the Stockholm quality in her agreement.

  He said, “We might still get that opportunity.”

  She gave him a wry dose of side-eye. “As much fun as that might be, it’d mean I’d still be here,” she said, “like this. And I’m ready to be done.”

  “Well,” he said, “you never know.”

  He headed toward the door and stopped.

  “I’m sorry about your friends,” he said.

  She glanced up.

  “In Prague,” he said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  He stepped out, and she was left staring at the floor, confused and hurt, but a strange kind of confusion and a strange kind of hurt, and she didn’t have words and had no way to explain. She swiped angry tears from off her cheek.

  Outside, the car doors slammed and the engine rolled over and she was alone again, and then a voice reached out from the silence, high pitched, distant, muted, almost as if it’d come from behind soundproofed walls.

  Kara cocked her head to listen.

  Pounding came from far away, and a woman’s voice screaming for help.

  Kara beat fist against wall, spelling out an SOS in Morse, the one pattern that even the densest, most panicked person would recognize. If Liv was smart, she’d catch on that this was a path to communication. The yelling stopped. Kara raised her fist to begin again, but a reply came back. Name? Who?

  Kara spelled out her name, but beyond that what was there to say?

  She’d been offered assurance that freedom was imminent, and she believed the promise would be kept, but she had no idea what fate held for Liv—hadn’t even known they’d already taken Liv until she’d heard the yelling—and had nothing to offer the woman other than the knowledge she wasn’t alone.

  She rested her head against the wall.

  Through her bones, questions came.

  Where?

  Why?

  The first made sense. The second surprised her. Surely any leader running multiple teams of assassin hunters would expect that sooner or later, a killer would take offense at having been targeted and come seeking in murderous, retaliatory rage.

  It’d be gratifying to write Liv off as a self-deceiving fool and toy with the reversed power dynamics, but that would make her the bigger idiot.

  Her heartbeat spelled out revenge.

  Her fist answered, Unknown.

  CHAPTER 36

  Six Flags America

  Woodmore, Maryland, USA

  JACK

  THE CHAIN LIFT RATCHETED OVERHEAD AGAIN, AND METAL RUS
HED against metal, and empty seats accelerated through a banked turn, and the pattern of preopening safety checks that had been going on for nearly an hour now started anew.

  The clock on his wrist said early afternoon.

  Five days of hard hours on the rough, grabbing sleep in whatever small increments he could, said it was so-over-it o’clock.

  He’d hauled eighty pounds of gear through the night to get here, following the transmission lines that cut a swath through woodland and suburban enclaves and woodland again, ten miles of hugging the easement edge like his own private walking trail, and then off into the untamed forest to cut his own path to the park’s outer boundary. He’d waited out the bone-chilling damp in the branches of a white oak not five hundred yards from where he was now, watching the lights, listening to screams of delighted terror, until the holiday hours ended and the employees and food vendors closed out and security staff were the only souls left.

  All those bullshit years with Clare had led to this, these hours crawling in and out of restricted areas and building shells and down into overgrowth and bushes, hiding supply stashes. This was Colombia and Greece, Bulgaria and Indonesia and Germany and Belize, it was his entire life compressed into twenty-four hours, and today it all ended, or he did, because one way or the other, he was done.

  Recorded announcements and music rose over roller-coaster rhythm.

  Another day begun. Another park opening.

  Inside the mental maze each beacon moved into place.

  Feet tromped up the stairs and sent dust from the platform into his face.

  The pager vibrated, alerting him to Holden’s arrival.

  Jill’s alert followed a few minutes later.

  They’d come separately, entering through the front gate, carrying what they could safely get past a security team known more for impounding outside food and drink than for anything else. They’d roam, charting paths, scouting positions.

  They’d find the drop marks.

  He had prepared hard to ensure they all walked out of this alive, and had made contingencies for Kara in case they didn’t. Jill had left her with enough food and water to last four or five days—a couple of weeks, if she rationed—and he’d brought her a television and a signal booster so she wouldn’t be left in an information void, but mostly because the TV housed a small explosive on a self-powered timer.