Liars' Legacy

by Taylor Stevens

  If they didn’t make it back, the charge would crack the television housing, and she’d find the key, a phone, and a message for the forensics team and bureaucrats.

  He didn’t care enough about Liv Wilson to do more than provide food and water, and even that felt generous, considering she’d run the mission to kill him and his family and would be first in line to do it again if given a chance. Her fate was in Kara’s hands, probably the safest place it could be, because no matter how much Kara detested the woman, she’d still do the right thing, which was more than he could say for himself—or for Holden or Jill.

  Kara was where his mind went as he rode out boredom through roller-coaster cycle after cycle, waiting for the crowds to grow and for the winter dusk to arrive. And when the business day neared its end, he shoved the high-tactile gloves back on, retrieved the first burner phone, inserted Liv Wilson’s SIM, and dialed Steven Hayes.

  Hayes answered with a casual hello, as if he hadn’t spent the past twenty-four hours trying to track down yet another team member who’d been snatched and vanished.

  Jack, matching turn for turn, skipped the small talk.

  “I still have information to offer,” he said. “You know where I am. Come find me.”

  Hayes said, “It’s going to take an hour to get there, and I’m in no mood to have my chain yanked the way you yanked Liv’s.”

  “I’ll be here,” Jack said. “Got no plans to kill or grab you. Just want to talk. I’d tell you to come alone, but we both know you’re better at giving instructions than following them, so bring your army if you must, but consider the casualities before you start a war.”

  Hayes said, “It’s a big park. Where will you be?”

  Jack hung up.

  He shrugged out of the sleeping bag, rolled it tight, and stuffed the bundle into his pack. Then, donning a close approximation to the park uniform, pulled a collared shirt over what he already wore, tucked it into lame-ass khaki pants, slapped a faux name tag over his heart, and clipped a two-way receiver to his belt.

  He studied the earpiece that went with it.

  Most of the staff wore two-ways, not identical to this, but close enough.

  Even still, he’d planned to go without.

  He and Jill had worked, lived, fought, and trained as a team for so long, they could predict each other’s movements. Instinct took care of the rest. They’d never missed having a two-way, because they’d never had one.

  Like so much else, that had been Clare’s doing.

  They weren’t military. They weren’t law enforcement. They were fugitives who couldn’t predict when trouble would come, or in what form, and unless they planned to wear the tech always, all it’d do was make them lazy.

  She’d taught them how to sign instead.

  Holden had dropped three units on the kitchen counter.

  He didn’t have the luxury of being part of their “secret-club handshake” codes, he’d said. At the very least he needed a way to know what was going on.

  Jack had hesitated all the same.

  Earpieces blocked sound, dulled situational awareness, and this was the wrong time to learn to compensate for that.

  Holden had unraveled thin wires and shown him a tiny earpiece. “There’s no ear fatigue, no sense deprivation,” he’d said. “You don’t even have to use them. Just wear them. Let me hear through you. Let me be eyes behind your back.”

  Jack had been curious enough to nudge the piece into place.

  Holden hadn’t been wrong.

  So here he was now, plugged in, listening to Holden as he narrated progress through the park and found the uniform Jack had left him and the toolbox, and then the maintenance access that led to a towering view.

  It felt a lot like listening to the voices in someone else’s head.

  Jill stayed quiet, but he didn’t need words to know she was in costume and headed toward the park’s invisible world, the side where delivery trucks and fuel trucks and all the ugly pieces critical to keeping the fantasy alive were shielded from view.

  Jack assembled what was left of his gear, placed it in a garbage bag, picked up a stolen broom, and crawled it all out into a night filled with couples and families, bundled-up kids and teenagers in loud, bawdy groups, a crisp cold infused with laughter and color and music, and fragranced by funnel cakes, cotton candy, gun oil, and death.

  He left the phone at the head of a snaking line, turned into a staff-only area to gather a cleaning-supply cart, and pulled another burner from the collection.

  Hayes answered, less confident than on the first pickup.

  “I’m still here,” Jack said. “You still coming?”

  “Traffic is bad,” Hayes said. “Forty minutes.”

  Holden said, “If the signal’s accurate, more like eight minutes.”

  Jack said, “Were you brave enough to come alone?”

  “I brought a few friends,” Hayes said. “It has nothing to do with bravery.”

  Jack hung up and dropped the phone.

  Minutes passed.

  Holden said, “Vehicle convoy turning east. Three-minute ETA.”

  Jack retrieved the next phone and called again.

  Hayes said, “Thirty minutes, Jack. Why don’t you give me a number? I’ll let you know when I get there.”

  Jack hung up and continued toward the Grand Theatre.

  In thirty minutes, the next show would start.

  Holden said, “Convoy bypassing the front for the delivery entrance,” and then, “Twenty-eight friends.”

  Jack sighed on the inside.

  Twenty-eight itchy trigger fingers multiplied by however many rounds each man carried in a park filled with families and kids, where the best-lit spaces still cast colorful shadow and a shit ton of glare, was peak stupidity. Even if Hayes planned to shut down the entire park, it’d take a half hour at least to clear it out, and under current circumstances, a half hour was a lifetime.

  Jack dialed again. He said, “It’s cold, and I’d like to get this over with.”

  Hayes said, “Fifteen minutes.”

  Holden said, “They’re lit up and headed your way.”

  No word from Jill, but Holden’s confirmation said she’d successfully marked Hayes’s men with spy dust.

  Not the nitrophenyl pentadien of Clare’s Cold War tales, in which the KGB coated doorknobs and floor mats with an invisible substance that, once touched, was nearly impossible to remove. In those stories many a spy had gotten their entire operation rolled and assets killed by unknowingly creating a trail to every place they visited, every hand they shook, and every paper they touched.

  Not one of the commercially available antitheft powders, either.

  Those all needed UV light to be seen. That made them useless here.

  But fine glitter, herpes of the craft world, made a suitable alternative.

  Beneath the park’s halogen and holiday lights, it could turn a dull head of hair into a telltale chandelier. Every small reflection would help separate security from civilian as Hayes’s men attempted to blend.

  The men might see it, but like nitrophenyl pentadien, they couldn’t get rid of it.

  Jill had filled a few dozen bulb syringes with the stuff.

  He’d carried them in for her.

  According to Holden, Hayes’s men were wearing it all now.

  Jack kept the phone on, kept it with him as he continued behind a restaurant to the dead end of a staff-only area. He pushed the cart in behind the gate, hopped the fence out the back, cut behind a building whose only purpose was to display animatronics, and popped back into the crowds.

  Holden said, “Bait taken.”

  Jack could see the men in his head, a school of cartoon fish stopping midstream, turning in unison, reconfiguring. And he saw his sister on the edge, predator in the shadows, slinking in unseen to grab those stupid enough to end up on the periphery. She’d always preferred knives over bullets, and preferred hands over knives, and tonight, when winning and walking out of
this alive meant more than avoiding a trail of bodies, a lot of Hayes’s men would die by those hands. Jack had warned them, just as he’d warned the kill team in Frankfurt and in Berlin.

  They never listened.

  Jack dropped the phone and circled back for the cart.

  In his ear Holden said, “Twenty-three friends.”

  He retrieved the next phone, dialed again.

  “I’m pulling up to the park now,” Hayes said.

  There was no stress in his voice, nothing to betray that his team, aided by a war room of experts and analysts listening in real time, observing from the sky, and tapping into park cameras, had already spread out in their hunt for him.

  Holden said, “Closing in.”

  To Hayes, Jack said, “Head for the front gates. I’ll find you there.”

  Jack killed the connection, dropped the phone, slipped onto the main thoroughfare, and broom and dustpan in hand, he swept the street at the edge of the crowd that had gathered outside the theater, waiting for the doors to open.

  They’d come this way. The dot-to-dot he’d given had guided them to it.

  In his ear Holden kept him apprised of position.

  Jack moved slowly, sweeping, dumping, until the man came into view.

  Crowd and cameras, location and lighting collided.

  The map re-formed inside his head.

  He caught sight of his sister, invisible to anyone who didn’t know her, walking slowly in his direction. Her hands spoke in quick bursts, telling him from the ground what no amount of distant observation or over-the-wire communication could.

  She’d removed nine of the twenty-eight.

  There were four following a hundred feet behind him.

  There were three a hundred feet behind her.

  He told her he needed a distraction.

  She passed him by, and he continued sweeping.

  To his left, Hayes’s men met in the middle.

  There were six, instead of the seven Jill had counted.

  They turned slow circles, aware that another had gone missing, and they fanned out to search through the crowd.

  A commotion started up around the bend.

  The spit pop of a suppressed weapon followed, and then a scream.

  Hayes and his men hurried toward the noise, passing within feet of Jack’s broom, men moving faster than their boss. Jack fell in behind them, weapon in hand, counting down yards, feet, inches until Hayes reached the opening between building and bushes, and Jack shoved him off the path, beyond the glare of ten thousand Christmas lights and into the shadows behind. He shifted the muzzle up under Hayes’s chin, yanked the earpiece from his ear, motioned him out of his shoes and jacket, emptied his pockets onto the ground, shoved a hat on his head, and pushed him into the crowd.

  He was an easy snatch.

  Men who ran the operations were decades removed from activity, assuming they’d ever had an operative skill set to begin with.

  Clare 202.

  In Jack’s ear, Holden said, “Friends in chaos.”

  Jack prodded Hayes deeper into the mix and up and through the doors of the Grand Theatre, which was a cloyingly hot contrast to the cold outdoors.

  Hayes said, “What happened to not having plans to grab or kill me?”

  Jack didn’t answer.

  Someone stupid enough to bring twenty-eight idiots into a park filled with families and children might actually be dumb enough to think he’d have to go to all this effort for a grab or kill, but probably not.

  Audience members moved down the aisles toward the stage, removing hats and scarves. Jack reached behind a curtain, retrieved a lightweight, ankle-length, packable down-filled coat, and shoved it at Hayes. “Put this on,” he said.

  Hayes protested. “It’s hot enough in here as it is.”

  “Put it on.”

  In Jack’s ear, Holden said, “Attention coalescing on the theater.”

  Jack guided Hayes to the far right aisle, kept him moving until they reached the midpoint, gripped his shoulder, shoved him into a seat, sat beside him, and pulled from beneath his shirt an envelope that held copies of the pages he’d been handed in Toledo.

  He thrust the first of them into Hayes’s hand.

  The theater lighting was dim, made it hard to read.

  Hayes angled the page to be able to see, but seeing was hardly his point.

  Jack jabbed the muzzle hard into Hayes’s side, snatched the page back.

  Hayes brushed sweat out of his eyes and fought against a nose run brought on by the extreme temperature shift. Jack handed him a new page, said, “Keep it in your lap,” and waited long enough for Hayes, sniffling and sweating, to scan the details, then took it back and handed Hayes the next. He continued that way until the man had handled them all, and he had Hayes return the lot of them to the envelope and shoved the envelope back up under his shirt.

  In Jack’s ear, Holden said, “Friends at the doorstep.”

  Jack tapped center chest above the envelope. “I have your target and can confirm a time window of twenty-four hours.”

  “So you’re what?” Hayes said. “Bragging?”

  Jack filled his expression with incredulity. “Jesus,” he said. “Are you stupid, or do you just think I am? I know I’m not the real assassin, just the decoy. Secretary of state, right? That’s who you’re really trying to hit. Is that why your killing crew is chasing so hard after me, so no one looks where they should be looking?”

  Sweat continued its slow drip, but for the first time, Hayes looked truly uncomfortable. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, I think you do.”

  Holden said, “Eight friends inside. Others blocking exits.”

  Jack could see them in his head, bodies moving forward down the aisles. He said, “Take off the coat. Do not stand. Do not look up. Do not speak.”

  Hayes tugged out of the coat, bundled it onto his lap.

  Jack said, “I’m being forced to do this against my will, so fine, you have my guarantee that absolutely nothing will prevent these killings from taking place. But I’m begging you, Hayes, whatever you decide to do next, at least get ahead of the story. You still have a chance to control the media spin and keep this country from devouring itself in a new civil war. If you don’t at least do that much, then maybe the real traitor here isn’t me. It’s you.”

  Hayes’s focus twitched right.

  Jack felt the heat of threat at his back. He said, “If it’s your life or mine, there’s no question who dies.”

  Hayes stayed motionless, silent.

  A shadow passed through Jack’s peripheral vision and continued on. They weren’t looking anymore. They knew where to find him.

  They were circling, tightening the noose.

  In his ear, Holden said, “Get out now.”

  In his head, the clock counted down to show opening.

  Jack said, “I’m also offering you an opportunity. Once this deed is done, you’ll have a man Moscow trusts who’s willing to keep the information flowing both ways. Ignore me, continue hunting me and my friends, and I guarantee that you and your family will never be able to stop looking over your shoulders.”

  Hayes said, “Twenty-four hours isn’t enough.”

  “Yeah, well, you ate all the extra time by forcing me to dodge your killers for the past few days.”

  In Jack’s ear, Holden said, “Doors closing. Go. Now.”

  Jack tossed a burner in Hayes’s lap and slid sideways off the seat.

  Inside his head, the maze froze, and the clock stopped.

  Background music piping in through the sound system went silent.

  The theater lights went fully dark.

  Jack backed into the aisle, and the sound system came alive.

  Strobe lights flashed across the stage, and Jack moved with the bursts.

  Holden was in his ear again, an audible voice talking over the inner voice he’d relied on since his earliest memories.

  Jack pulled the
earpiece loose, let the wire dangle free.

  His entire brain relaxed. Music and lights and bodies formed a multidimensional map that rotated and tilted, allowing him to mentally place each itchy finger. He searched for Jill, found her on the outside, keeping a path free. He headed for the door at stage right, owning every bit of the cheesy park uniform, as if it belonged to him, passed one armed man, avoided eye contact with the other, who blocked the door, kept the semiautomatic as low and as inconspicuous as a hunk of metal ever could be.

  Clare’s training told him to fire now, eliminate the nearest enemy.

  Gunshots would send the theater into a mad scramble for the exits.

  The panic would provide him ample cover to get out.

  But panic also got people trampled, killed in the crush, and there were an awful lot of little kids in here. If he could settle this quietly, he would.

  He pried knife from sheath.

  Clare joined the voices in his head.

  Are you mad? Only a fool would gift the enemy his own weakness.

  He shut her down.

  This was his life, and these were his mistakes to make.

  The heat of threat burned behind him, rising, closing in fast.

  Time slowed, ticking between strobe pulses, hovering between blinks on rapt audience faces, and Jack felt the weight of footsteps and shifted.

  A suppressor rose to meet the base of his skull, but he’d moved first.

  Fingers scraped air where his collar had been.

  His blade swung over and down, connected with forearm, sliced tendons. The shooter’s cry rose with the music and died with his own bullet, muzzle twisted back, spitting into his face due to his own uncontrollable finger, and was drowned by pounding drums.

  An eight-year-old boy in the nearest seat turned and watched wide-eyed.

  Jack pulled the deadweight close, leaned in toward the kid, said, “It’s part of the show,” and he dragged the body far enough forward that the kid wouldn’t be able to see once the theater began to empty.

  The music stopped, and the lights shut off.