Liars' Paradox

by Taylor Stevens

  He reached the flight board and stood, scanning, because that’s what travelers did.

  Inside his head the kill in Louisiana looped on endless replay, those final moments again and again, and he puzzled over them as he had on the two-hour drive to Houston, and all the way through airport security, and then for the whole uncomfortable flight. Not the kill exactly, which had been flawless, but the strangers who’d shown up as he’d closed in. Two job sites interrupted back-to-back by a male-female pair.

  Didn’t take much in the way of deductive reasoning to put the same ghost label on both of them, but therein lay the confusion. The team he’d faced during the night had been a skilled, professional challenge. The two he’d faced in daylight had squabbled like a married couple in a strange mix of confidence and uncertainty. He would have written off the bizarre behavior as the odd coupling of a nerd and a stripper if not for the way they’d handled their weapons.

  He needed a toothpick, needed to chew.

  Even a coffee stirrer or plastic straw would work, but he couldn’t afford that risk because chewing was the type of detail that, if observed more than once, marked the man and tore holes through the best disguise.

  Boarding calls and gate changes came like the voice of God from the Heavens.

  Holden glanced at his phone to check the time, just like any passenger with a lengthy layover would do. The motion was a detail. As were the shoes that gave him an extra two inches in height, and the backpack bought off a college kid at Starbucks a week before, and the baseball cap that made him a Longhorns fan, and the Beats headphones placed over the cap, which all together removed a dozen years and gave the cameras something to look at other than his face.

  Cameras—with their indelible, searchable records which, in retrospect and hindsight, provided the ability to see beyond the details—were the price he paid to slip between the folds.

  He slouched with the pathetic demeanor of the kid who’d sold him the backpack, and turned for the main concourse in search of food.

  The nerd and the stripper kept pace inside his head.

  He’d watched them, puzzling over their actions, trying to determine if they knew he was there and if the bizarre behavior was an act to draw him out, or if, instead, they were rogue operatives trying to make a name by stealing the contract out from under him. He’d watched until the target met them, had waited until it seemed as though some agreement had been made and, unwilling to stand by as two unknowns stole what was his, he’d taken the first shot and lined up for the second.

  The stripper had stopped him.

  She’d spun, looked right at him, and flashed her breasts.

  One blinking delay of brain freeze had cost him the second kill, and the third.

  She’d tracked him down in the time it took to zip his supplies and rappel out of the tree, had opened fire, spraying blindly, and had grazed his thigh and side.

  A suitcase slammed into Holden’s foot.

  He stumbled into the present, blushing through apologies offered by a young mother wearing a baby in a sling, then took a breath and slowed his pace.

  He strolled past Shula’s Steak House.

  The petite blonde behind the hostess station smiled.

  He backed up, then followed her in, scanning diners, watching faces, and gauging interactions all the way to a table at the back, where he sat and studied the menu until a wrist with a Rolex attached to an arm in a pink dress shirt moved into his line of sight. Its owner sat across from him.

  Holden glanced up to slicked black hair and a pencil-thin mustache over café au lait skin nearly as light as his own. Three open buttons on the shirt showcased a thick gold rope around a solid neck on a body that looked far too healthy to be creeping past seventy. Holden went back to scanning menu items he didn’t care to eat.

  He said, “You look like a drug dealer.”

  The guy said, “This is Miami. I don’t got the beach body and a guy’s gotta blend in somehow.” The sarcasm, rich and resonant, was filled with a New England accent that had been buried under the Appalachian foothills and revived in the Bolivian highlands.

  Holden said, “How’s that been working for you?”

  “Eh. The bosses are happy. It’s all that matters.”

  The server arrived. Holden removed the headphones and stuffed them into the backpack at his feet. His fingers caught a small envelope on the way back out and sleight of hand slipped the envelope under his menu and then across the table while he ordered.

  It was gone by the time the server cleared away the cardstock.

  Holden said, “Good to see you, Frank. How long you in town?”

  The mustachioed pink shirt fidgeted with his phone beneath the table. “Long as it takes,” he said. “You?”

  “Catching a flight in an hour. Thanks, you know, for this.”

  The older man nodded. Silence filled the space between them.

  When history went back eighteen years and each man carried enough dirt on the other to guarantee a concrete tomb under an ice-cold pier, silence was more than enough.

  Frank stopped fiddling. He brought the phone up, glanced at the screen, pulled it away for a clearer look, then tugged reading glasses from his pocket and slipped them on.

  He flipped from one picture to the next and turned the phone facedown on the table. He said, “That the best you got?”

  “What do you mean, the best? Those are damn good shots, and you know it.”

  Frank shrugged, unimpressed. “They’re all you have?”

  “All I have.”

  “What else you know?”

  “The woman is Karen McFadden, single female, fifty-two years old, alias Katrin Schmittlein, alias Catherine Smith. Alias goes on ten names deep. Took six of us to take her alive. The younger two are ghosts encountered twice, first on her hit and then again on a cleanup. For them, I’ve got a VIN that’s tracing to dead ends and the pictures on that card. That’s it.”

  Frank turned the phone over and flicked the screen again.

  “What’d you do these at? Four, five hundred yards?”

  “Four-thirteen.”

  Frank nodded and shrugged, as if to say, “Not bad.” He moved the phone under the table. The SD card flicked into Holden’s lap.

  Frank said, “Ghosts are too young. After my time. Don’t got nothing on them for you, but this Karen McFadden, she’s trouble. She wanted you dead, you and me wouldn’t be talking right now.”

  “She wanted me dead.”

  “So you say. Who sent you for her?”

  “Don’t know. Was a brokered deal.”

  Frank winced in pained disapproval.

  Holden said, “Was hoping you’d be able to tell me who’d want her.”

  The food arrived. Frank winked at the server, called her honey doll, and ogled her ass when she walked away. She was young enough to be his granddaughter.

  Holden waited until she was out of earshot and said, “The Rolex and greasy hair aren’t enough? Now you gotta be a lecher, too?”

  Frank jabbed a knife into a rare steak, sliced off a piece, and shoved it in his mouth. Chewing, he said, “Lay off. At my age, looking’s all I get anymore.”

  Holden pushed his plate toward the table’s center. “I got twenty minutes.”

  “McFadden,” Frank said. He pointed his knife for emphasis. “Everyone’s wanted a piece of that woman over the years. She started out as CIA. Clandestine operative. She was good, too. Ran deep undercover in Moscow attached to an asset valued so highly the agency kept her outside the chain of command. Chief of Station didn’t even know she was in town. On a strategic level, probably the smartest thing they ever did, but for everything else, not so much.”

  CHAPTER 15

  HOLDEN

  AGE: 32

  LOCATION: MIAMI, FLORIDA

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: SPAIN

  NAMES: THIAGO MARTÍN MORENO

  FRANK SLICED ANOTHER RED, FAT-RIMMED BITE. “TO UNDERSTAND McFadden, you’d have to understand the mess she c
ame from,” he said. “But it’s Cold War stuff, before your time. You wouldn’t know it.”

  Holden offered the man an extra napkin.

  Frank waved him off.

  Holden said, “I was young, but I remember. Work with me.”

  Frank chewed and nodded and restuffed his mouth. He said, “CIA ops in the USSR were bullshit. Soviets wiped their asses with us. Still do.” He grabbed his soda straw and washed the food down. “We had maybe three or four high-value assets over the entire course of the war, not recruits, mind you, walk-ins, and those poor bastards all ended up executed for the trouble. Meanwhile, we’re being spoon-fed disinformation by guys we think we’re controlling, and that’s the shit that got churned into some of our most important intelligence analyses.

  “The KGB ran a hell of an operation, I’ll give them that. They were ruthless in ferreting out our officers. That didn’t excuse our missteps, mind you. Hell, there was hardly an officer stationed in Russia who even spoke the language. Wasn’t just Soviet Russia that went bad, either. Had a two-year spell in the mid-eighties where the agency lost every spy in Eastern Europe. So, along comes McFadden, fluent enough in Russian to pass as a native. She’s like this . . . I dunno what you’d call it.... A shape-shifter. You could know her for years and pass right by her on the street and not know it was her you’s seeing. If intelligence was actually up to date, if anyone had seen what was coming, then maybe they wouldna sent her or woulda gotten her out before the shit hit the fan.

  “She got caught in the mess as the USSR was coming undone. One day she bleeps off the map. No one knows what’s happened. Higher up the chain, they’re thinking she got snatched, but there’s nothing leaking out of the KGB, and later nothing from the FSB or the SVR, either.” Frank paused and then, as if he was teaching high school world history, said, “Those are what the KGB morphed into after the restructuring.”

  Holden kept a straight face. “I keep score for a living, Frank. I’m familiar with the terminology.”

  The man didn’t miss a beat. “So the State Department gets involved, like the CIA’s supersecret missing spy is some regular Jane. The Russians swear they have no idea what we’re talking about, and we don’t know if that’s typical denial or if she’s gotten lost in the chaos of right-hand, left-hand miscommunication.

  “Couple years later, she shows up in Prague for a hit-and-run. Not as McFadden, you see. She’s never been reliably ID’d since she was last seen in Moscow, but a lot of old-timers swear by the MO that it’s her. Could be wrong. For all they know, she died in some Soviet hellhole, and this thing, this person, maybe more than one person, has been using her legend as cover. Still, someone who fits the profile would show up a few times a year and always left a dead man in her wake.”

  “Political assassin?”

  “Political, economical, something like that, but here’s the thing. A decade rolls around, and then, bam, she’s gone again, completely vanishes. Been so long since she’s left her mark that I’da thought she’s dead if it weren’t for seeing that photo. So if this really is McFadden, the question you need to ask yourself is why you were able to find her in the first place.”

  “You think she wanted to be found?”

  Frank stuffed more than a mouthful into his oversize mouth and shrugged. Knife in the air, he said, “Far be it from me to tell you what that woman’s thinking. Alls I know is if McFadden wanted you dead, we wouldn’t be sitting here now.”

  “What about the ghosts? Can you get me something on them?”

  Frank laughed. “I like you, kid, you know I do, but I’m a month out from a beach house in the Bahamas and a pair of twins in bikinis. I don’t like you that much worth.”

  The older man paused. He put his fork and knife down. For the first time since he’d joined Holden at the table, he looked him dead in the eyes. “Now wait up,” he said. “You got McFadden, didn’t you? Delivered your target?”

  Holden nodded.

  “Then what’s driving all this need to know?”

  “Self-preservation.”

  “Someone put a hit out on you?”

  “Don’t know, but I get the feeling I’m the final loose end on this McFadden deal and those ghosts are the ones sent to take me out.”

  “Ah, the plot gets clearer.” Frank pushed back from the table. “You’re thinking someone knows she’s alive and wants the rest of the world to think she’s stayed dead?”

  “Contract called for no witnesses and no trails. I’m both.”

  Frank pressed his lips together and studied the table. “Brokered deals are a dangerous thing, kid. You were raised better than to mix with that pit of vipers.”

  Holden smirked. “I was raised on behalf of that pit of vipers.”

  Frank shook his head. “Nah.” He shook his head some more. “Not like this, no.” He dumped his napkin on the table. “Listen, I know a guy who needs a security detail, pays real good. You decide to switch career paths, let me know. I’ll hook you up.”

  “How about hooking me up with someone who can access NGI?”

  Frank stood. Hands on the chair, he paused.

  Holden waited. He’d find the ghosts with or without help, but the FBI’s Next Generation Identification system, which took facial recognition to a whole other level, added a real-time scan that factored in body height, gait, scars, tattoos, and birthmarks and ran it all against a database of every immigration pass-through, law enforcement encounter, fingerprint, palm print, and mug shot, could cut a long-term search down to days.

  Frank looked Holden over. “I worry about you,” he said. “It’s an ugly business, and these are dangerous people.”

  “I’ll be okay.”

  “As a favor to an old man, try to not hit the grave before I do. Maybe put the good looks and good body to use while you still got ’em. Get out while you can. Meet a girl. Get laid. Settle down.”

  “Get me hooked up with NGI and I’ll make your wishes come true.”

  “Was good to see you, kid. Thanks for lunch.”

  Holden smiled and watched the pink shirt leave.

  The detour had cost him a day, the information on McFadden was worth ten. He paid the bill and slouched back to the boarding area, slept through the return flight, and fought with the ghosts in his dreams.

  At Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental he was one more body in another of the world’s overlapping folds until a random glance at a random soundless television showing a random over-tanned, overbleached newscaster brought him face-to-face with the stripper.

  He paused mid-step, choked on his own surprise, and then continued in slow, cautious disbelief to stand before the TV.

  Subtitles gave him the gist: Panicked boyfriend. Missing girlfriend kidnapped out of his house at gunpoint. Police sketch of no one Holden recognized. Austin law enforcement asking the public for any information.

  And then the television gods gifted Holden with names:

  Jennifer White.

  Robert Davis.

  The reporting ended. Video switched to a hamburger settling in slow motion onto a bun, and Holden turned away, feet on autopilot, headed for the exit while his mind stumbled past disbelief into anger.

  He hated, hated, hated being played for a fool, and only a fool would walk, invited, into the trap that had just been laid out.

  But that didn’t mean he couldn’t utilize the information in his own way.

  He put the battery into his phone and powered it on.

  The bounty had been delivered. Baxter had cut Rafi loose with a threat to never show his face on a contract application again, and the big guy was kicking back, waiting for news on what next.

  Holden punched in his number.

  Now was the time to go hunting in pairs.

  CHAPTER 16

  JILL

  AGE: 26

  LOCATION: BEAUMONT, TEXAS

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: USA

  NAMES: JULIA JANE SMITH

  THE BAR AND GRILL WAS AN UPSCALE MOM-AND-POP AFFAIR, JUST
south of Beaumont, off Interstate 10, with plenty of midafternoon booth space and a clean, empty bathroom where she could dip into her purse without being disturbed. In the stall, alone, she sniffed relief, closed her eyes, and leaned back against the wall.

  She’d threatened Jack with bodily injury if they didn’t stop for food. She hadn’t eaten since dawn, had endured the heat and the dogs and the emotional conflict of burying Ray. She wasn’t waiting for sustenance until they reached Houston, no matter what Jack had planned. Not like they really had a plan.

  Houston was where Ray seemed to think Clare would have been taken.

  Jack’s reasoning went that the shooters would never have put the effort into taking Clare alive if they’d wanted her dead, that there were a dozen airports north and south of the Earthship that would make for simpler logistics than heading east, that the only thing east that made sense was Houston, and that the only thing that would make Houston a better option than any of those dozen airports was if they were taking Clare somewhere by ship. So he had his sights on the Houston Ship Channel and was hell-bent on getting there as quickly as he could. But the ship channel was fifty miles long, and Houston was a big fucking place.

  Not a plan.

  Jill opened the stall and headed for the door.

  She caught sight of herself in the mirror and paused.

  Her clothes were a disaster. Her roots needed doing. The shower at her apartment had worn off six hours ago, and she looked like Clare—a younger, rounder version of Clare, with the same skin, light enough to be white, tan enough for Hispanic or Asian or Polynesian, same light brown eyes that fell within those ethnicity ranges, same cheekbones, same nose—which was why her hair was always any color but natural, and why home had so few mirrors, and why seeing her face now made the past forty-eight hours feel that much more fucked up.