Liars' Paradox

by Taylor Stevens

  She’d debated making a run for the US Embassy.

  Without proof of citizenship, she had no guaranteed entry, and if they turned her away—which was likely—she’d be worse off than if she’d never gone. Even if they did let her in, she had no way to prove her bona fides. The best she could hope for was detention and interrogation while they confirmed her identity stateside. And if Boris had fulfilled his promise, and the agency, believing him, had branded her a traitor, she’d be arrested, and imprisoned. And if none of that was true, she’d have blown her cover for nothing.

  The predicament had borne down with crushing weight, offering no clear way out, building tension into something unbearable which had finally surfaced in a rare bout of tears, made worse because Dmitry had walked in on her crying.

  She’d turned from him to face the window, but not quickly enough.

  He’d stood behind her and wrapped his arms around her. “Whatever it is,” he’d whispered, “I won’t let you hurt.”

  Those few words had changed everything.

  He’d tipped her chin toward him so she could see his face, and in that brief flash she’d understood, understood that she’d been right about Boris, that he’d already sold her out—understood that Dmitry knew what she was, and had probably known from the beginning—that it hadn’t been the training or being handpicked to appeal to him that had caused them to come together but that, as part of a disinformation campaign, she’d been his target as much as he was hers, and that he was the only reason the KGB hadn’t yet rolled her up. CIA and KGB, she and he, target and target.

  She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.

  Suffocating, she slipped out of his arms and pressed her head against the cool window glass. Dmitry reached for her and pulled her back. Inside her chest, in her heart, she fought his embrace as if she’d discovered infidelity, and yet she craved his comfort all the same. KGB and CIA, lover and lover, target and target.

  No one had predicted that for both of them, work would become personal, and that a relationship full of lies would become tender and trusting.

  Desperation thickened. The trap closed in. Words she’d never planned to utter spilled out of her mouth. She whispered, “I’m pregnant.”

  For two months, at least, she’d hoped for an opportunity to communicate the turn of events with her team, half relieved she couldn’t—because it wasn’t their decision to make—and half terrified of being left to decide on her own. Abortion was the only option, and easy enough to obtain in a country with the highest abortion rate in the world. She expected Dmitry would say as much.

  Instead, he held her in a long, long silence and, finally, using the term of endearment she’d taught him and by which he’d called her ever since, said, “Querida, how long have you known?”

  She couldn’t face him directly.

  Truth within the lie, she said, “A few weeks.”

  He took her hand, walked her to the radio, and turned the music up, as was his habit when he wanted to speak privately, a move she’d always ascribed to the paranoid over-cautiousness that permeated this harsh monitored world but now had a different meaning. He pulled her close. Lips beside her ear, he whispered, “Let’s run away, you and I. We can make a life away from this.”

  She wanted what he offered more than anything, but she was a realist. She said, “We’d never get through the airport.”

  “No, no, not like that. We go on holiday formally, with proper paperwork and permission, and from there we make our own way.”

  She offered a half smile and rested her head on his shoulder.

  The same suggestion from anyone else would have been preposterous. There was no getting out, no going on holidays, not for the average citizen. But he, with his family connections, had already traveled extensively.

  A short getaway would hardly raise eyebrows.

  “Where could we go?” she said. “Where could we go and never be found?”

  Where could they go and never be found by her people?

  Where could they go and never be found by his?

  Money was a concern, too. Her paychecks were deposited into an account back home, and a decent amount would have accumulated by now, but if she ran, as Dmitry proposed, there’d be no way to access that money without being traced and found.

  She’d saved while in Moscow, squirreling away what she could from the small monthly stipend sent to her under the guise of an allowance from her Ecuadorean parents, but currency restrictions made converting rubles into deutsche marks or francs a dodgy black-market affair, one that she hadn’t been willing to risk.

  Dmitry solved both issues.

  It took him over a month, but he worked through the red tape and the bureaucracy of being able to travel legally and made use of connections to borrow a family friend’s chalet to put a temporary roof over their heads.

  The night before they were set to fly, his aunt died.

  He had to delay his departure, and she wanted to change her plans to match his.

  Lying on his bed, head on his chest, their tickets and exit paperwork in her hands, she said she’d wait until they could travel together. He traced his fingers over a belly that had become harder and harder to hide.

  “Go,” he said. “I’ll join you in a day, maybe two, but you go.”

  She studied his confident smile, searching for a hint that her trust had been misplaced, and found nothing. He took her to the airport the next morning, walked her to the boarding area, and waited with her through to the last call, and when waiting was no longer possible, he handed her an envelope with twenty thousand Swiss francs and whispered, “I’ll follow soon. Wait for me.”

  She had no idea then or in the days that followed that this would be the last time she’d see him. She flew to Geneva as they’d planned, found the house empty and available. She let herself in with the key he’d given her, and made herself at home.

  One day stretched into three.

  An express post envelope sent from Milan arrived with another twenty thousand francs, no note, just the money, and she felt the sinking awareness then, her instincts warning her to pack up and leave. Instead she tried to reach him.

  Calls to his flat went unanswered. Calls to their mutual friends revealed he’d quit school and no one had seen or heard from him since the day she left.

  Three days turned into a week—a week of being cut off, with no one to turn to, no way to return, and this home above Lake Geneva the only thing left to connect her to him—a week of knowing she should leave but being unable to take that step, because leaving meant losing him forever, meant spending the rest of her life torn between the illusion of love and the bitter belief that all she’d ever been was a high-value instrument played by a master of strings.

  One week turned into two.

  Her return ticket expired. She squatted at the house, lights off, bags packed, and ready to flee, jumping at every sound along the road in a constant swing between hope and despair, certain only that each passing day multiplied the risk of being grabbed.

  And now mail had come again.

  Through the window she watched the postal carrier return to the car and continue up the steep, twisted road. Barefoot, uncomfortably swollen, and off balance in a body that no longer felt familiar, she trod down the old wooden stairs, reached the front, flipped through the two letters added to the growing pile in the box, and put them back.

  Nothing for her.

  The autopilot of self-preservation pushed her to the hallway bench.

  There was no way Dmitry would have gotten the exit paperwork without KGB approval. That they’d been content to let her sit out the month meant they’d wanted her here. Self-loathing grew thicker with the thought. She’d been an easy accomplice to their plans, whatever those plans were, cutting off her own avenue of escape, turning herself into an enemy of the state, outplayed, outwitted, because, fool that she was, she’d believed Dmitry.

  Boris had done this. His scrawl was so obvious in the signature.
r />   She worked water-fat toes into her shoes.

  Love and loss churned in the turbid poison of survival and fantasy revenge.

  She stood and, brushing her fingers along the wall, walked toward the back door, toward the unknown, in which she had only herself to trust and more life than her own to protect. Certainty drove her forward.

  Events that had brought her here weren’t over.

  Leaving wasn’t part of their script.

  The past would one day catch up, and when it did, she’d have to be ready.

  She pulled her suitcase from the coat closet, everything to her name in that one small bag, closed her eyes, and whispered the forever good-bye.

  Today was the day she ceased to exist.

  CHAPTER 29

  JACK

  AGE: 26

  LOCATION: SPRING, TEXAS

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: USA

  NAMES: JASON FRANCIS WHITE

  HE WALKED OFF SUBURBIA’S EDGE INTO A WILDERNESS HEMMED IN by freeways and toll roads, franchise restaurants and chain grocery stores, off a dead-end street in a crossover- and minivan-filled neighborhood onto land that had never known the developer’s scythe, following a dot to dot to the man he believed had taken Clare.

  The Broker’s bounty packet, as Jill called it, pointed a half mile northwest to Peckinpaugh Preserve, where Christopher was expected to surface: twenty-five acres of hiking and biking trails that wound around a lake and through natural forest as part of an expanding greenway project that connected parks and older reserves, which, combined, encompassed thousands of acres of suburban wild.

  He headed for it backward.

  Branches and lush undergrowth scratched his skin and snagged his clothes.

  He shoved forward, patiently, methodically, slowed by the weight of gear he’d acquired in the hours since leaving Jill, creating a path to the beat of Marxist guerrilla philosophy that had been forced into his head.

  The fighter chooses when and how to fight.

  He strikes. And runs. And returns and strikes again.

  Santiago’s lectures had meant nothing when he and Jill had been squatting beside buckets of dirty water, washing and peeling root vegetables in the Colombian mountains.

  They held meaning now.

  He’d come ahead of the battle to choose when and how to fight.

  Jack checked his watch and then his position, course corrected, and continued on from thicket to creek, and across the creek and onward, until rich underbrush opened to a gentler, tamer wild thinned under the hand of civilized upkeep. Clare’s voice chased after Santiago’s:

  You need to know your opponent to outthink him.

  Understand your enemy and you’ll know his plans before he does.

  Hard advice to follow when one had no idea who the enemy was.

  Jack stopped thirty feet in from a trail.

  This was as far into the preserve as he’d go.

  He scouted potential vantage points, found what he wanted, shoved his hands into half-finger gloves, unhooked climbing rope from his pack, looped it over a branch, and clipped carabiners to his climbing belt.

  He had an hour and a half left, two hours with any luck.

  If Jill woke before he returned, she’d be gone, and he’d be forced to fight two wars instead of one. He tied a Prusik to one side of the rope, locked the carabiner on his climbing belt to a loop at the end of the other, and headed up.

  They’d had weapons and ammunition, had their tool bags and two decades of experience, but taking Christopher alive required more. Acquiring more had required invisibility. Invisibility had required time. He’d left the motel on foot, marbles of tissue beneath toes and heel to alter his gait, hat and glasses on to hide a clear view of his face.

  A half dozen new burner phones, prepaid debit cards, and a few generic clothing items inside a forgettable backpack had started him on the long chain of disguises and ID shifts that had got him to where he was now: hauling eighty pounds of equipment to a sniper’s hide in the middle of a suburban wilderness.

  Their old phones—all of them—were on the move somewhere in the city.

  He’d hated letting go of his only connection to Clare, but any two known devices connecting to the world from the same location would create all the dots the Broker needed to know them and track them. Thanks to Clare, the Broker had his burner’s number. He couldn’t guarantee the Broker hadn’t acquired the Blackphone number and no matter what Jill said, he couldn’t guarantee the Blackphone hadn’t been running at any point that either of their burners had been.

  He had to keep those phones moving.

  He also needed a way to get them back.

  A temporary phone, a prepaid credit card, and the Uber app had been the easy, if messy, solution. He’d left his burner on, volume off, had left everything else in pieces, had tossed his bags in the trunk, had shoved his burner down with the emergency tire beneath the floorboard, and had stashed the rest of their old phones beneath the backseat. A solid tip to the driver and a request for a possible off-the-books pickup had gotten him the driver’s number.

  It was the best he could do under the time constraints.

  Those same time constraints propelled him to hurry now.

  Forty-feet up was high enough.

  A haul line and pulleys got the gear up after him. He secured his kit and rappelled down, retraced his steps out of the preserve, into the greenbelt, back to the neighborhood where he’d left the rental parked between two homes, and out before the neighbors figured out the car didn’t belong to the other guy’s guests.

  The motel room was as he’d left it, and Jill was already restless.

  He packed while she came to, dividing weapons and ammunition and enough food and water to get them through a three-day wait. He retrieved the X-Caliber, a two-thousand-dollar gauged and scoped CO2 projector that he’d found in the barn together with Clare’s truck, the kind of thing ranchers and game wardens used to tranquilize one-ton animals from a safe distance.

  The accompanying case should have held five rapid-delivery devices. It only had three. He couldn’t guess at what Clare had used the first two for, certainly not for four-legged animals. He loaded the first of the syringes and dosed for 250 pounds.

  Three delivery devices: three opportunities to make a hit.

  One would have been enough if he could guarantee that Christopher was coming alone or that he’d recognize him on sight, but if there’d been more than one man alive after taking Clare, there’d be more than one at the preserve, and split-second survival choices didn’t make good bedfellows with switching out weapons—especially not in a civilian-filled park where every movement was a potential mother or child begging for disaster. He strapped the rifle to his bag, cinched it down, glanced up, and met angry eyes watching from the edge of the bed.

  Adrenaline hit with a defibrillating jolt.

  He had no idea how long she’d been there.

  He flinched, fought the urge to scramble, and offered her a bottle of water.

  Her eyes tracked to the water and then to him.

  She was calm, the dangerous kind of calm that came before wreaking unthinking damage because she was too highly charged to care about outcomes.

  He scooted back, out of reach. “You win,” he said.

  She shifted off the bed, feet on the floor, as if he’d never spoken.

  He stood and, louder this time, said, “You. Win.”

  She kept coming.

  Hands up, defensive, he sidestepped. “Name your price. Call a truce.”

  She paused, lips flat, eyes seething.

  He said, “I don’t have time to fight you, I sure as hell don’t have time for recuperation, and I need functional bones and joints to find Clare, so . . .”

  She snatched the bottle, uncapped it, and took a long swig.

  “You want a truce?” she said. “Give me back the shit you stole.”

  “Come on, be reasonable. I can’t undo what’s already done.”

  She took an
other swallow, glared at him while she drank, and capped the bottle. “The problem with you, John, is you forget that being the smartest guy around doesn’t make everyone else an idiot.”

  “I’ve never thought of you as an idiot.”

  “Yeah? So maybe don’t ask for a truce and then insult my intelligence. We both know you didn’t flush it all.”

  He’d have argued if he thought he could win, but she’d called it right. Doubling down would only double the hurt at the end. He knelt for his bag, ran a finger between the bottom and an inner pocket, pulled out a pill pouch, and tossed it toward her.

  She motioned for more. “All of it.”

  He opened his mouth in protest.

  “Give it, or I take it,” she said. “Your call.”

  This was him in the truck, demanding her keys, forcing compliance for the sake of compliance, knowing full well he didn’t need it, because he had keys of his own.

  He’d earned this and hated every bit of it all the same.

  He fished the rest in tiny portions from hidden seams and pockets and dropped each packet into her outstretched hand. She clenched a fist around the goods, turned for the bathroom, stood over the toilet bowl, and he watched, dumbfounded and silent, as she opened each bag and flushed the stash away.

  His face reddened. His palms went damp with the sucker-punched anger of having expended time and emotional effort over something that hadn’t been real, of having lost another round due to manipulation. He met her halfway out the door.

  She straight armed him in his chest to keep him back.

  Teeth gritted, he said, “What the hell was that about?”

  She jabbed a finger into his chest and moved up into his face. “I am not your fucking crack whore, John, and you’re delusional if you think that shit matters enough for me to let you use it to control me.”

  He smacked her away. “Control you? What kind of messed up are you? I held on to that in case you needed it to be okay, to stay well.”