Liars' Paradox

by Taylor Stevens

  Laughter echoed against the walls, seconding in commiseration. She shushed the gremlins and sent them on.

  She wasn’t alone and wasn’t without sight, not even here.

  Darkness and solitude were gifts to the senses, allowing what lay dormant to stretch like seeds reaching through soil for the sun. Every shift in sound, every smell, every motion had meaning. She knew, even cut off as she was, that she rested near the engines, deep down in the belly of a freighter at port.

  A change in reverberation moved up through her fingertips.

  Her breathing slowed.

  Her hands heard footfalls, heavy, nearing footfalls.

  She strained for the higher pitch and found the keys, jangling against a leg.

  Food came sporadically, preventing her from timing an arrival, and never in enough quantity to keep her fully fueled, for the same reason the air piped in through inch-wide vents stayed several degrees too cold.

  She stood and counted chain lengths as she headed toward the door.

  Heat-seeking cameras watched her.

  She didn’t care.

  She knelt and, head inches from the slot near the floor, waited.

  Metal touched the door. The tumblers released the lock.

  She shut her eyes against the coming light blindness.

  The slot slid open wide enough for a half-sized tray and a hand to fit through.

  She inhaled, pushing her senses beyond the room’s stench to the labored breathing on the other side.

  Fat fingers scratched along the floor, feeling for the empty tray.

  Fragrant hints of onion and selyodka layered over base notes of diesel oil and cooking grease.

  Happiness and pain rushed in with the smell—unmistakable recognition—reliable in the way only sensate memories could ever be.

  She pushed the emotion away and focused on the opening, straining to place the guards. Her captors couldn’t be foolish enough to trust the strength of this prison and the cameras alone, yet in the three days, possibly four, of searching for them, there’d been no voices, no movement, and still she had no sense of where they were or how many of them there were.

  The hand pulled the old tray out and shoved a new one in.

  Selyodka on the skin.

  Vodka on his breath.

  A Russian cook on a ship meant nothing by itself. But for the sixth time now, salo on cold bread . . .

  The food on her plate told of a kitchen galley that had been provisioned for a ship and crew that had come from half a world away.

  The room went black again.

  She left the food and returned to the wall, to chasing light slivers in the dark, and to the memories and the questions and the silence.

  Hope of a Russian destination warmed the cold.

  She’d known a hit would come, but not when, and not from where.

  Unknowns from the present corroded her insides with doubt. Worry bubbled into another replay of the phone call and the potential aftermath, urging her to rise and fight and flee. She quelled the protective instinct and fed the rage instead.

  She would escape, yes. The overweight cook had been their first mistake....

  But not here, not in this country, not before the journey took her closer.

  Calculation took hold.

  This was the sweet spot, the information void in which all the players scrambled to put meaning to events. Two and two hadn’t yet collided. She had time. Not endless time, but still enough, perhaps, before the powers that be understood her hired protectors weren’t hired at all, and her children became active targets simply because they existed, and she was forced to choose between saving them and pursuing the questions she’d set out to put to rest. There was no choice.

  The kids would win. They’d always won.

  She shut her eyes against regret and shoved failure into the background.

  She was so close and yet so far.

  A quarter century of hardship and pain, of doing what had to be done to keep the twins off radar and safe, of pushing them until they broke, and in the end, she’d led them right into the insanity all the suffering had been meant to protect them from.

  There’d never be a safe time for questions.

  She’d known it then and knew it now.

  No matter which regime changed, how the political climate shifted, who died, or where power was transferred, there were some things that time would not forgive.

  The twins had been thirteen the last time she surfaced.

  She’d hidden them in the Colombian mountains, with arrangements for Raymond to collect them if she failed—and she nearly had.

  All these years she’d waited.

  They were older now, smarter, stronger, and so she’d prepared for this final ride, planning to chase the trail until it ended or she did—whichever came first—but age had made her soft. She hadn’t been strong enough to steel herself against never seeing them again, hadn’t been strong enough to simply vanish. She’d succumbed to emotion, broken the rules of survival, and called them home to say good-bye.

  She’d miscalculated.

  She’d called them home too late.

  So many years of struggle, of teaching them to be strong, and in the end, the failure was hers, all hers.

  She’d destroyed the Earthship in an attempt to reverse the damage, had destroyed every tangible thing she treasured, hoping to keep her children out of a trap they wouldn’t see, and had added the complicating risk of toying with her interrogators to warn them off by phone, and still the twins wouldn’t stay away, she knew.

  Duty bound, they’d come after her and would hate and despise her, just as they despised her for so much else.

  Hate.

  A luxury she’d paid for with blood.

  The day they stopped hating meant a day they understood through experience, and that was a day she’d fought hard to ensure would never come.

  Failure lumped in her throat, making it difficult to breathe.

  Beyond the door the reverberation shifted again.

  She heard the keys and, with the keys, a familiar squeak of rubber.

  Her body reacted, viscerally and violently.

  She stood, drew in a long, hard breath, clenched her hands within the shackles, planted her feet as wide apart as the chain would allow and, with her back straight and chin high, braced for what came next.

  CHAPTER 23

  HOLDEN

  AGE: 32

  LOCATION: EL PASO, TEXAS

  PASSPORT COUNTRY : CANADA

  NAMES: TROY MARTIN HOLDEN

  HE STOOD AT THE EDGE OF THE ABANDONED LOT, SCUFFING A SHOE against cracks in the concrete walk, playing a coffee stirrer against his teeth, staring out over knee-high weeds and grasses strewn with broken glass, empty cans, and wind-blown trash. Torn and stained mattresses rested against the exposed brick of the adjacent walk-up, and his gaze followed those to mistrustful eyes in second-floor windows watching from behind laundry hung out to dry.

  The same picture that satellite and street-view images had given.

  He’d known the odds were slim to zero that a building had gone up at the address since the last image capture, but he didn’t know when that capture had been, and so he’d had to see for himself. Standing here now, he found it hard not to laugh.

  Ten mind-numbing, body-cramping hours in a drive across a landscape from hell had brought him to a dumping ground on a derelict street that would have fit in with the Calamar of his childhood better than any version of big-city USA. He flipped the stirrer and chewed the plastic into a ball.

  To his right, three boys in grown men’s bodies loitered on concrete steps, eyeing the rental car behind him, sizing him up.

  He nodded their way. They nodded back.

  He’d been them once, a version of them, stray-dog hungry and suspicious, with everything to prove, nothing to lose, and angrily susceptible to kindness.

  He offered them Jennifer’s photo.

  They conferred in slang-filled Spanish.

>   Holden caught enough to know the answer before the ringleader handed the photo back.

  He’d have spent the last of the afternoon knocking on doors and exchanging greenbacks for knowledge if he thought he’d have a chance of picking up Jen’s trail. All he’d get for the effort was wasted time and money.

  She’d never been here, not even once.

  He returned to the rental, sat behind the wheel, and studied the picture.

  Finding her really shouldn’t have been this difficult. She wasn’t a hit man who’d moved into town and set up a temporary legend before moving on again. Her boyfriend had hooked up with her too frequently and spontaneously for that, and too many people knew her as a hard-core party girl well acquainted with the “had to know someone to know about it” happening scene for her to have been a recent transplant. Austin had been her home for a while, yet she was as much a ghost in real life as she’d been outside Blanco, hiding in plain sight and living in the open while not existing at all.

  She had no address, no number that led to a traceable phone.

  He couldn’t find her in property records or aggregated data. She was invisible on social media, didn’t exist in credit histories. And clues to family and friends had all led nowhere. Thanks to her knight in tarnished armor, he did know how she smelled, the way she smiled, and what made her laugh. And he knew her poison of choice, the drugs she took, the clothing brands she wore and, more importantly, the car she drove, which was why he was now six hundred miles away, in front of a nonexistent address, sitting in a rental car, looking at her picture.

  There were so few Teslas on Texas roads that finding hers had been easy.

  The techs at the Austin service center had seen her on the news. They’d known who she was even before he’d come asking and had gotten him plate and VIN numbers. Those had given him the vehicle’s registered address, which was what he’d followed to this trash-filled lot where his greatest lead had turned into the biggest dead end.

  He was back to working back channels to gain access to the Tesla’s electronic data, back to chasing location leads through license-plate scanner databases.

  He ran his thumb over the face in the photo and contemplated. She was a tough catch, a formidable opponent.

  The challenge made him smile in a way nothing had for a long time.

  Any buffoon with the right hardware could point and shoot and blow things up, but that type died off fast. In this line of work longevity required invisibility, the mastery of self and surroundings, the ability to turn hits into accidents and random acts of violence—skills that took time to develop, took training and learning through mistakes, the kinds of mistakes that made for early shallow graves. This Jennifer, whoever she really was, was too young to have reached this caliber on her own or to have come out of nowhere. She’d been trained hard, and that made him like her more.

  Seemed a sorry waste to have to kill her.

  Light flickered in his peripheral vision.

  Holden set the photo on the passenger seat and watched without watching as a gang of eight, tatted up and turf protective, headed toward him.

  He knew their walk, had seen the same purposeful stride herald protest violence and street-level assassination and mob justice. And he’d been them once, too, street thug and lawless, before Frank had found him and taken him under his wing.

  His mistake in the moment was forgetting that familiarity and recognition were one-sided. He no longer appeared as he’d once been. This wasn’t home. He was an intruder who’d stayed in the neighborhood beyond the pretense of tolerance.

  He buckled in, moving slowly, methodically, to avoid the appearance of flight, which would incite the instinct to chase. He pulled the car from the curb.

  The men ahead stepped into the street, blocking the way.

  He veered toward the center line.

  The gang fanned out, filling the street, and edged closer, betting with their bodies that a well-dressed outsider in a new, plain-vanilla, low-end Cruze would be too much of a coward to create casualties by driving through them.

  To a point, they were right.

  Unlike them, he had nothing to prove by fighting.

  In his world, killing bystanders and creating collateral damage were signs of an amateur’s sloppy thinking. In his world, only the weak felt shame in avoiding a battle wherein every dead or wounded body brought unneeded complications and potential exposure. He nudged the gas and closed the distance, counting weapons and watching eyes, measuring footfall to footfall, waiting until the last possible moment to break.

  Shouts carried above the engine and into the car.

  The checkered flag inside his head went down.

  Pedal to the floor, he swerved left over the curb, onto the sidewalk.

  A crowbar swung hard for the windshield and missed.

  He fishtailed between light poles and aging concrete.

  The passenger mirror exploded into shards of plastic and glass and he plowed past, onto the street behind them, and through a red light, with not even enough tension to get his heartbeat up. In the rearview the lot faded, the men faded. With them, Holden’s smile faded.

  The prospect of another ten-hour drive across hell rose before him, and dread descended. He’d rather sacrifice an identity to catch a flight back than make that trip again. He reached the next intersection, took a hard right, and shifted into the speed of traffic. The light ahead turned yellow. He slowed, redirected the GPS to the airport, and there, with his hand stretched out, with Jennifer White moving in and out of his peripheral vision on the seat beside him, he froze.

  He’d seen that face before.

  The traffic cleared. He cut over, pulled into the nearest parking lot, and stopped. Grabbed the picture, laid it flat, and studied it hard, looking down, as if he stood over her.

  The angle of her face, the way her hair drifted into her eyes made it difficult to see the connection exactly, but yes, he knew this face. He’d seen an older version on the bounty before he’d shoved the stretcher into the helicopter.

  He reached for his phone, scrolled through photos, and pulled up the images from Louisiana that he’d shown to Frank. Taken from a distance as they were, their resolution was too low and her face turned too far to the side to have seen the obvious then, but the harder he looked now, the clearer the relationship became.

  He stared through the windshield.

  Hands on the wheel, desert sun beating down through the windshield glass, he rewound back to the night he’d lost three men, to the phone calls he’d traced, to the vehicle that had arrived right before the explosion, to the chase through the brush for two professionals who’d vanished into the dark, and to the look on the bounty’s face—the promise—before he’d shoved her into the helicopter. And he pondered the way the ghosts had arrived on his heels in Louisiana, forcing him to switch from creating an accident to taking a kill shot. Step-by-step, he rearranged the truth as he knew it, everything filtered through one simple change that put each event into focus.

  The ghosts were connected to the contract, yes, but they weren’t hit men.

  They hadn’t come for him. They’d come for her. They were McFadden’s children.

  Realization ran headlong into memory, and he stumbled over the Broker’s words on that call outside Blanco, Texas.

  He’d been mocked, his concerns written off. These were children that the Broker, apparently, knew nothing about.

  The irony made him laugh out loud and scared him just a little.

  If even the person who made a business of knowing things was unaware of the kid’s existence, did she exist? He stared at the picture again and fit the pieces into a tighter puzzle—what Frank had and hadn’t said—the clues Robert had dropped—what he’d figured out on his own.

  There was a mother, an assassin mother, but no father.

  Jen would have grown up on the move, born to kill, trained to survive, never in one place long, always present and never belonging. Robert’s stories about her took o
n new meaning—the drugs, the partying, the manipulative mask—so many decisions and choices made day after day in a perpetual effort to avoid the need to feel.

  He and Jen, they weren’t so different.

  She was him, a version of him, a version of him if he’d had a mother.

  He stopped mid-thought and, in a moment of frustrated violence, tore the picture in half. He knew better, knew so much better.

  Humanization opened up weakness and invited mistakes.

  He shredded her face piece by angry piece.

  This had gone far, far past humanization.

  He tossed the photo remnants on the floor, pushed into cold hunter mode, and started for the airport again, driving by rote, mind zigzagging through options in a race to stay ahead of the unknowns.

  Vibration from his pocket intruded as a guilty reminder that he was hours overdue in contacting Baxter. He’d called the big guy in to go hunting for the face on television and had left him in a single room with a doped-up, panicked kid and nothing but daytime television and cheap fast food. It was enough to drive anyone to self-destruct, much less an adrenaline junkie who thrived on action, movement, and wide-open spaces. He owed the man a call, if for no other reason than to talk him off the ledge of stir crazy.

  Holden glanced at the phone.

  The caller wasn’t Baxter.

  He stared down the road. The call vibrated on and the sting of betrayal and mockery, of being taken for a fool and set up to fail, simmered hot beneath his skin.

  He’d have to answer eventually.

  To ignore the Broker completely was unwise and dangerous.

  Holden swiped the screen on the final ring.

  The computerized voice, efficient and without introduction, said, “Your target’s associates have been located for removal.”

  Holden’s focus darted toward the picture pieces on the floorboard.

  That the collector and curator of knowledge had already located those he still hunted wasn’t impossible, but the timing was off.

  He said, “Who are they?”

  “Hired guns. Loose ends of little consequence.”

  The Broker’s words exploded inside his head, sending the mental pendulum on a wild swing between betrayal and gift and back again.