Liars' Paradox

by Taylor Stevens

  Mercenaries were never of little consequence.

  That these particular killers were the kids of the target he’d just taken was its own universe of importance. Even factoring in the genuine possibility that the curator and collector of knowledge had known nothing of McFadden’s children then, and that he knew where they were but not who they were now, they still weren’t of little consequence.

  He said, “No consequence, little consequence, it doesn’t matter. You should have had everything in the packet from the beginning.”

  “Oh, dear boy,” the Broker said. “And to think I’d believed your whiny excuse finding had been a temporary lapse. I suggest a thank-you, and that you get on with cleaning up your mess.”

  Holden waited.

  There’d been a time when wounded pride would have blinded him to distraction and misdirection, and he’d have responded to the snide condescension with chest-thumping self-importance and braggadocio, oblivious to the way egoistic outbursts announced his own weakness and need. But he wasn’t that boy anymore.

  He heard past the mind games and mental bait.

  This was a philanderer accused of indiscretion picking a fight to focus attention anywhere but on himself. This was the Broker showing his hand.

  Of little consequence, indeed.

  A man’s threats were his actions, and those would come soon enough.

  The Broker said, “There’s a bonus for quick, clean elimination. Assuming you’re still man enough for the task.”

  Holden said, “I’ll finish the job. Send the link.”

  “There is no link. Only an address.”

  “Then the link to the address.”

  “No links. Write it down.”

  Holden rifled for a pen to transfer the information the old-fashioned way, found a receipt, and wrote, and when he’d finished and confirmed what he’d heard, he took the Broker’s manipulation and twisted it backward.

  “I assume you’ve verified these targets,” he said.

  Silence, louder than words, rose in place of an unasked why.

  The knowledge was much too valuable to give away whole, but worth every penny of the suspicion and chaos that parceling it out could provide. Holden said, “My own digging has led elsewhere. These are targets you want alive.”

  He ended the call before the Broker could respond and studied the address.

  Peckinpaugh Preserve. Spring, Texas.

  He tore the paper into pieces and turned the information into a stick of gum.

  The location was north of Houston, according to the Broker. Not far from where the bounty had been sent, according to what Holden already knew.

  He pondered the entwining possibilities.

  He’d been wrong about the ghosts, specifically, but not wrong in his conclusion.

  Priorities reordered inside his head. What had started as a high-value extraction had gone completely off the rails.

  The rules no longer mattered.

  He glanced at the remnants of Jen’s photo, and the look on the bounty’s face before he’d sent her off wound round and round inside his head.

  He’d asked Frank all the wrong questions.

  McFadden, her kids, their history—he’d been looking at them backward.

  There was more to this story, far more, than just a contract.

  He was willing to bet his future that in the same way Frank had filled him in on McFadden’s past, McFadden could do the same for the Broker.

  He wanted what she knew.

  He picked up the pieces of Jen’s photo and held them in his hand.

  Want congealed into plan.

  McFadden had already been delivered; she was off the table, but her kids were fair game. He needed to get paid, and for that, he needed them dead, but information could come first.

  Perhaps.

  Faking a killing or two would be the better complement to payback.

  The phone vibrated, as he’d expected. The Broker back with unfinished business. He had no patience for another conversation and thumbed the device to turn it off. Baxter’s number caught his eye instead.

  Holden answered.

  The big guy said, “You good to talk?”

  “Maybe. You doing all right?”

  “Depends. How’d you feel about our young friend having just received an invitation to visit downtown bright and early tomorrow morning?”

  “He still their main squeeze?”

  “Looking more and more like he’s their only squeeze.”

  “Invitation, huh?”

  Baxter snorted.

  Holden sighed.

  At this stage, the cops wouldn’t be calling the kid into the station to ask him more questions, they were calling him in because they planned to arrest him and wanted to make their job easy. Holden pinched the bridge of his nose and, for the second time within the hour, fought the urge to laugh.

  He couldn’t afford to lose Robert to law enforcement, but there’d be warrants issued when the kid didn’t show up. He dug a dispenser out of his pocket, shoved a toothpick in his mouth, and ground down deep into thought. The Broker was coordinating a hit to ensure he died and stayed dead.

  McFadden’s children, out hunting for revenge, wanted the same.

  He was about to walk a tightrope between lunacy and mutiny, and his link to Jennifer, the one thing he had available to draw her in, was sixteen hours from becoming a high-profile fugitive.

  CHAPTER 24

  JACK

  AGE: 26

  LOCATION: LA PORTE, TEXAS

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: PAPERLESS

  NAMES: NAMELESS

  HE STOOD BEHIND THE DOOR, FINGERS RESTING AGAINST THE hinges, measuring and timing the gaps between vibrations. Another thud, another room, another minute fewer until the uniforms making their way down the corridor came knocking.

  The men out there were skipping vacant rooms and passing over those where the occupants were out, a batting average only possible if the information had come from the front desk, but that they didn’t seem to know which room held what they were after indicated the front desk hadn’t called them here.

  So they were cops, or they were assassins playing the role.

  And they were here because someone had seen and recognized Jill, or because her Blackphone had led them, or for something else with god-awful coincidental timing.

  Jack glanced toward the bathroom.

  Jill had grabbed his tool bag and taken it with her in the rush. His things in her hands made him nervous. He would have fought to keep them with him if there’d been time, but priority always went to survival—that kind of training would never die—and at the moment, survival meant liquid latex and a quick change of face. So he’d let her have the bag and had gone for the weapons, shoving the armory out of sight in an instant decision to disarm rather than arm—a turn through the strategy matrix that might yet come back to kill them both.

  Fists pounded one room over.

  Furniture scraped and scratched. Stage whispers carried through the wall, and the next-door bathroom door opened and shut.

  Authority had a way of scattering the undocumented.

  A deep drawl in horrific Spanish bellowed, “No buscando papeles.”

  A few seconds passed. The neighbors answered.

  They had a minute at best, and Jill was still painting on the layers.

  The strategy wheel spun hard, clacking through a limited quantity of knowns and vast array of unknowns. If he’d predicted correctly and the uniforms outside were legit law enforcement, he didn’t have to open the door or answer questions, but standing firm on constitutional grounds threatened more action and more attention than playing along.

  If he’d predicted wrong, he was probably already dead.

  He checked over his shoulder again.

  For this to work, Jill had to answer the door.

  She was the one who crawled into people’s heads, made them see what wasn’t, got them to behave as she wanted. They had their mother to thank for that, the one
who’d refused to be pleased no matter how hard Jill tried, the one who’d rewarded Jill’s best with impossible expectations and harsher demands.

  Jill hadn’t been able to make Clare love her, so she’d tried filling an unfillable void by making everyone else love her instead, morphing into whatever people wanted or needed until she owned their hearts, and he’d hated it every time—hated the gullibility, hated that people refused to see past her charade—and he’d fought her, needling and scheming and provoking, forcing her true self to the surface to shove reality in their faces.

  They’d only loved her more.

  He’d lost, always lost, and tired of losing, he’d switched to putting ideas in her head, winding her up and setting her loose for his own benefit, and she’d gone right along with it, because to the unwanted child, any attention was love. He’d been under Raymond’s roof, watching her downward spiral, when he understood, but by then he was too late. They were all too late.

  Jack felt the footsteps through his fingertips.

  The pounding transferred to his shoulder.

  The bathroom door opened, and Jill rushed out, bare-legged, in his dirty T-shirt, hemline at high thigh, hair tousled into from two nights’ worth of sleeplessness, eyes red and puffy, nose wider, cheeks fuller, chin fatter. The latex wasn’t dry, but under the circumstances, it leathered her skin. She was Jill, but nothing like in the picture on TV. She was older, had lived harder. She looked like shit, and he approved.

  He scurried for the duffel, snatched the strap, and dragged the bag after him into the bathroom. She tossed the bedding, wrapped a sheet over her shoulders, and headed for the door, huffing, swearing, and muttering with each step.

  The lock turned. Her voice, a husky octave deeper and thick from a three-pack-a-day habit, said, “What in God’s good name d’ya want?” The chain caught. She said, “Oh.” Paused and then added, “My apologies, Officers.”

  Muffled voices followed.

  Jill said, “Give it. Let me see.”

  She fumbled with the chain. The door hinges squeaked.

  She said, “I ain’t seen her, honey, but if her home is looking to adopt, I’m available.” She guffawed and coughed and said, “Listen, sugar, I’d invite you in to chat some, but I ain’t slept more’n an hour or two, and I gotta get some rest before my next shift.”

  More talk followed, and then the door closed and the chain was latched, and a few seconds later Jill’s nails tapped lightly on the bathroom door.

  Jack opened it.

  She gave him a chin salute and motioned him out of the way.

  He said, “They had your picture?”

  She slipped in behind him. “Same one shown on the news.”

  He grabbed the tool bag and stepped out of the bathroom.

  She shut the door on him.

  He dumped the bag on the bed, and thoughts zigzagging in a race through a mental maze, hands working by rote, he ran an inventory to ensure she hadn’t stolen anything. He set the last filled hypodermic aside and shoved everything back into proper pockets and places. They were done here. He’d been right about the uniforms, and now they had an assassin to find and kidnap and follow to Clare.

  He reached for Jill’s purse and dug for the Blackphone.

  The Broker had given her an address, a picture, and the promise of a bonus if she took the target out quick and clean. The scenario ate at him, churning up inconsistencies that refused to let go. If he could see the setup flashing its neon warning in the dark, a man with the ability to kidnap Clare would certainly see it, and the only reason a man like that, on the hunt to clean up loose ends, would willingly detour into a potential meet-greet-shoot was if he’d been offered the right motivation.

  This Christopher Rivera had to believe he’d find his missing targets.

  Jack brushed his thumb against the phone screen and hefted the weight, struggling against the questions he’d asked less than an hour earlier.

  He couldn’t ignore the possibility that Christopher or the Broker had connected the face on television to the individual who controlled this phone. The dots were hard to follow if Jill had kept the phone away from Clare and away from boys and away from the burners, like she’d claimed, but that was a mighty long series of ifs.

  The Broker very well may have engaged Jill to take down a top-tier assassin for the simple reason that she was one of a few with the skills to do it. And he’d have convinced Christopher that the targets he was hunting would be there.

  And the irony of it all being true would be a bitch.

  But even then, a schemer like the Broker would never pit equal strengths against each other and leave the winner to fate. There’d be more.

  The trap he couldn’t see was where the danger lay.

  This was Clare 101.

  He dropped the Blackphone into his tool bag and dumped the rest of the phones in after it. He’d pulled SIM cards and batteries out of all them, including the burners—especially the burners—but even bricked as they were, they left him feeling exposed and naked. He’d have run them over and flushed the pieces if they weren’t handcuffs keeping them connected to Clare.

  Jill stepped out of the bathroom, hair brushed, clothes cleaned, face bright and made up, but still not Jill. Her gaze drifted from the bed to his bag, and she stopped.

  “All your stuff’s still there,” she said.

  Her tone was mellow and nonconfrontational, but he knew where this was going, and he watched her eyes, wary of her hands and feet.

  Her focus cut to the purse. “I’ve got stuff missing.”

  “Stuff? That’s what you’re calling it now?” He reached for his tool bag and swung it off the bed. “What do you want me to say? You knew what I’d do and backed me into a corner.”

  “Where’d you put it?”

  “Down the toilet.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She scrutinized him, and he fought hard to maintain the truth within the lie. She said, “You’re not that stupid.”

  “No, not stupid, just desperate.”

  All of which was true. He had no idea how bad her problem was, wouldn’t risk pushing her into withdrawal right when peak performance mattered most. He’d just left out the part about where to find the little he’d held back.

  She moved in close.

  He said, “Focus on the mission. Focus on what matters. This wasn’t about you, wasn’t about me. It was about priorities and finding Clare.”

  Her hand snapped around his wrist. “Give it back, or I’ll break your fucking thieving fingers.”

  He tugged free. “Before or after we find Clare?”

  “Don’t use her as your excuse.”

  “I’m not the one who needs excuses.”

  She came at him, the old Jill, the one who needed to fight just to fight and who took her frustration out on him just to prove she could. She punched the heel of her hand into his chest, took the air out of him, made him dizzy.

  He said, “You can have the drugs, or you can have me. You can’t have both.”

  She hesitated, and in that hesitation, he plunged the hypodermic into her thigh.

  She grabbed his hand, fought for control of the syringe, pulled the needle free, and shoved him against the wall, fingers like talons pinching nerve points.

  He waited through the pain, waited for her to weaken, pried himself free, and pushed back.

  No matter how badly she claimed to want to find Clare, priorities had a way of shifting when addictive need kicked in. He couldn’t risk taking her with him and couldn’t risk leaving her alone.

  “It’s not that I don’t trust you,” he said. “I just don’t trust you.”

  She shoved him again, kicked, and lost her balance.

  He guided her to the bed and nudged her down.

  Speech starting to slur, she said, “You’re going to regret this.”

  “I might,” he said. “But I’ll regret it less than if I hadn’t.”

  CHAPTER 25

  CLARE

  AGE: 54
/>   LOCATION: SOMEWHERE ON THE WATER

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: PAPERLESS

  NAMES: UNPRINTABLE

  SHE WOKE CHOKING, GASPING, THROWN FROM DREAMS OF DROWNING, trapped beneath the ice to a body racked and shivering in the pitch-black vault, thrown from forgetfulness into painful silence and acute awareness. The ship wasn’t moving.

  Possibilities for the delay rose blacker than the room.

  Stillness had become a special form of torture.

  She tamped down the rising dread and tucked frigid fingers beneath her arms.

  Her clothes, still damp from the most recent hosing, permeated her skin and infected her bones with a chill made worse by the constant air seeping in from the vents.

  She rolled onto her stomach into a push-up and pressed through set after set, forcing blood into her extremities, wasting limited energy for the sake of warmth. And she stood and took short hobbled steps to the door, where the last tray of food sat untouched.

  Austerity, living hard and training hard, had kept her tough, made sleeping in the rough tolerable, prepared of sparse nutrition a feast, and tamed darkness into friendship. But here, where day and night were one and torture arrived in stop-starts as random as sleep, the cold took a slow, hard toll.

  Ear to the slot, she strained to catch sound from the other side.

  Silence reached out from beyond.

  She pulled stale bread off the tray, took a bite for her watchers, and carried the rest back to the wall. More than food, she needed sleep, and sleep was an elusive mirage. Her captors made certain of that. She tucked her feet into her pant legs, pulled her arms as far into her sleeves as the chains would allow, and nibbled on the bread while her hands twitched in a repetitive motion against the cuffs, just as they’d regularly twitched throughout the days and nights she’d been here.

  Time and scheming played shadowed games in the dark until the squeak, dreaded and familiar, rose from beyond the door.

  She sighed and stood.

  Her clothes weren’t even fully dry and they were already at her again to torture her with water and with the voice, that god-awful voice on speakerphone, demanding answers she would never give and taunting her with truth mixed into lies.