Liars' Paradox

by Taylor Stevens

  The quiet swallowed him. Urgency laughed at him.

  He needed to move.

  The firefight, brief as it was, had been loud. And the trees, thick as they were, wouldn’t hide these secrets for long. Every clue, no matter how obscure, and the trail, no matter how well hidden, could eventually lead back to its source. He needed to clear out the nests and erase their presence before the greenbelt crawled with attention.

  He returned to his kit, and his hands packed and strapped, while his mind structured and reorganized. “For us, there’s tomorrow,” Christopher had said.

  The man would have to get in line.

  The Broker wasn’t finished. The crazies weren’t gone yet.

  And he, too smart for his own good, had given them a map right to him.

  CHAPTER 34

  CLARE

  AGE: 54

  LOCATION: SOMEWHERE ON THE WATER

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: PAPERLESS

  NAMES: UNPRINTABLE

  THE SQUEAK RETURNED, DEMON IN THE DARKNESS, CLAWS TO THE brain, ripping her out of hard-earned sleep, flinging her with a thud back into cruel, silent stillness. Her eyelids opened. On the floor, face to the wall and away from the door, she panted against awareness. This new interruption had come too soon, too close on the heels of the last.

  Shoulder aching, body hurting, she rolled to face the ceiling.

  Sleep deprivation coaxed paranoia to life.

  The urge to run rose from deep, deep down, gurgling and spewing the need to chase after answers, toxic with the fear of having already lost them, of having already lost everything for nothing. Panic taunted her from the darkened corners, laughing at her for misjudging so badly, promising the only way off the ship would be by her own doing, chanting in rhythm to the squeak, squeak, squeak of rubber dragged against concrete until it stopped right at her door.

  She sat and, facing the thread of light, pinched hard on the web between thumb and forefinger, squeezing until fire filled her hand and seeped up her arm, squeezing until fear and anxiety fled in the face of pain.

  Metal touched metal. The slot near the floor slid open.

  She shielded her eyes against the light and watched, transfixed, as the pudgy hand stretched in and fingers searched for the tray she’d incrementally moved farther and farther from the door each time it arrived.

  He grunted, and lowered double chin and soft neck and puffy eyes to the hole. He redirected his aim and reached in to his shoulder. The watch on his wrist glinted, just as it had each time the tray had entered, dancing in the light the way the walls danced inside her head.

  He snagged the plastic and, muttering, dragged it out.

  Voices followed, not hushed, merely muted by distance, and the key engaged, and the door swung open and she braced for a stabbing cold that never came.

  Silhouettes of a fire hose and two bodies filled the doorway, both too thin to be the pudgy tray stealer. An unfamiliar voice, commanding and strongly accented, said, “Stay where you are, or the hose turns on.”

  Even in delirium, she understood this was new, understood they’d come for reasons other than to torment her for the sake of torment.

  She lowered her arm and placed her shackled wrists in her lap.

  Lights in the room powered on for the first time.

  She winced against the pain they brought.

  The tray stealer stepped inside, glanced at the shadows behind him and, with a shaking outstretched hand, continued toward her one sideways foot at a time, as if he expected she’d make a grab for him and devour his soul. She measured him, weight against height, fear against action, playing guessing games over what outside that door terrified him enough that he preferred cowering his way to her side.

  He stopped three feet away and shoved papers in her direction.

  She shifted toward him, legs straight, shackles tight, and made an exaggerated show of reaching for this thing he offered and being yanked short.

  He took another step forward.

  She toppled over, forcing him closer.

  He lowered a knee and offered the papers toward hands pulled taut at her face.

  Her fingers fumbled, trembling with cold.

  He pushed the pages in farther.

  She read his watch, both date and time.

  Knowledge reconfigured inside her head.

  The sensory input brought air to her lungs.

  Two in the morning. She’d been in this hole nearly six full days. No matter who had put the hit out on her, they never would have intended to keep her suspended in time the way she’d been. There were other factors in play.

  Pudgy hands shoved the pages into her own.

  She glanced at them and, refusing to react, handed them back.

  The fat hand yanked away and retreated, empty, and her gaze followed the pale, soft skin as it melted toward the door with ten times the speed it had entered. Metal slammed behind him, the lights powered down, and the room went blacker than the black it had previously been.

  For the cameras, she tipped back over, head to the floor, and shut her eyes.

  The pages, photos taken from the crosshairs, had been delivered without accusations or lies, without threats, and without commentary, because none were needed.

  Boris had found what she’d fought for a quarter century to keep hidden.

  Two pictures, two thousand unspoken words, making clear that as a special gift to her, he’d put a contract out on her children, ensuring that whether she lived or died, her legacy would be wiped from the earth.

  The sleepless demons dancing in the dark had been right in their taunting.

  Peace was an illusion. There’d be no answers, not now, not ever. The thing she’d feared had come to pass, and there was nothing left now but to face that fear.

  Acceptance filled the spaces between her heart and lungs.

  She had time, a small amount of time. If her children were already dead, she’d have been handed a different set of pictures. She shut her eyes against the dark.

  Her stay here was over.

  The data she’d collected, footsteps and shift changes, routines and engine-room noises, came together in a three-dimensional picture. From between her cheek and gums, she pulled the shard of hard plastic she’d worked off the food tray on her first night in. Hour after hour, she’d sat with that piece between her fingers, rubbing it against the floor, whittling it to size, small enough to fit the handcuff keyhole, rigid enough to maintain its shape.

  She bit down on it now, bent the plastic at an angle, and lay with her face to the wall, hands shielded from the cameras, in the same sleeping position she’d taken time and again. She worked the piece into the pinhole lock methodically, patiently, twitching as she’d twitched against the shackles for six whole days.

  Time rolled on into a sea of focused movement while her fingers, bent hard toward her wrists, failed and failed and returned to fail again. The pictures drove her, her children’s faces through a scope, and the promise that had been made all those years ago.

  You can’t hide from me. You can’t run.

  No matter where you go, no matter how long it takes, I’ll find you.

  He’d kept that promise, had found her twice, and she’d suffered then far more than she suffered now, but she’d never allow him the same for her children.

  This time, she’d find him, and she’d destroy him.

  Somewhere within the sea of focus, the manufactured hook caught, and her left hand slid free. She worked the lock against her feet, hurried now because her functioning hand wouldn’t be familiar to the cameras in the way her repetitive twitching movements had been. Feet free, her right hand came next, and when that was finished, she sat against the wall facing the door, staring into the sliver of light, hands and feet positioned just as they’d been for hours every day when the shackles had kept them there.

  Food would come eventually, and feeding time meant freedom.

  CHAPTER 35

  HOLDEN

  AGE: 32

 
; LOCATION: HUMBLE, TEXAS

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: PAPERLESS

  NAMES: NAMELESS

  HE SAT BESIDE THE BED IN THE QUIET DARK, SLOUCHED IN THE same position, on the same sofa chair, holding the same vigil he’d held since bringing Baxter in. Heavy curtains blocked most of the afternoon light, and the air conditioner’s hum held the room in a cathedral stillness reverent with pain, remorse, and supplicant pleading.

  If he’d had rosary beads, he would have used them.

  Instead, he picked at his cuticles and studied Baxter’s face, counting the time between each strained exhale to the endless slow-motion replay that relived every step, every bullet over and over, as if willpower alone could stop time and rewrite the morning.

  He’d been forced to cut into Baxter on the forest floor.

  Calling on emergency responders would have betrayed his friend’s wishes in the worst possible way, and he hadn’t been able to carry the sleeping giant out.

  In the annals of battlefield dressing, his work wasn’t the worst.

  He’d watched men bleed to death. He’d watched men heal. He’d gotten his own hands bloody in making miracles out of shattered bodies in wars where there were no hospitals or licensed surgeons. He’d worked with far fewer supplies than what he’d been able to source from a drugstore and steal from an emergency care center.

  A headlamp and a tarp doused in antimicrobial wash had become the operating table, and he’d dug for metal and irrigated wounds beneath the cries and calls of searchers hunting through the trees in response to the battery of weapons that had been fired.

  The holes had bled little enough, were positioned high enough, to give him hope. He’d stitched them closed and waited for Baxter to wake. Getting out and into the car had been hell, getting to a room even worse, but now Baxter slept, floating on stolen opiates, which eased the pain, and hooked up to an IV for hydration and antibiotics.

  There was nothing more he could do but watch and wait and pray infection didn’t set in, and in that waiting, his thoughts turned dark and brooding.

  From one blink to the next, things had deviated into shit.

  Robert had performed exactly as expected, following Jen rather than drawing her to him. They’d let him run. So long as he stuck with her—and they were certain Jen would see that he did—they’d be able to track her. That was the beauty of playing against an opponent trained for the same job.

  He and Baxter had backtracked along the path she’d taken, knowing that the brother, hunting them, expecting them to follow her, would run to them. They would have missed him if they hadn’t known what they looked for.

  Baxter found him first. That’s where the plan went wrong.

  The horror played out in Holden’s head, beat against beat, to the second before Baxter fired.

  The brother had shifted. The round went wide.

  Hunted became the hunter.

  The brother returned fire, fast enough, accurate enough that he would have killed Baxter if that’s what he’d wanted, but he didn’t.

  Holden didn’t realize it then, not at first.

  Baxter’s yell sent birds scattering, made suburban soccer moms out riding with their bubble-wrapped kids look around and search the sky, sent Holden crawling through the underbrush for a clean line of sight, prepared to kill and lose everything they’d gone to collect if it meant protecting what mattered more.

  He was too late.

  Baxter went down and never got up.

  He sighted in on the brother’s thigh, curved finger reaching for the kiss, and in one beat, one veritable blink, everything changed.

  The brother’s head ticked up and he scrambled backward, and impact thuds carried through the silence, pop after pop, and Baxter’s body jerked, and a scream filled his own head.

  Against experience, against knowledge, his body rushed him forward.

  Through foliage, across daylight, he spotted the glint, and he knew, knew what the brother had seen. He reached Baxter and checked vitals. Relief and frustration and risk boiled into rage. He wanted to stay. For his brother, he needed to stay.

  The mission compelled him forward.

  Revenge compelled him forward.

  The Broker had played him like a windup toy, offering the ghosts to misdirect his suspicions and sending a contract crew in to clean the whole thing up.

  Whoever they were, they’d die.

  He grabbed his gear and, in a silent race beneath the trees, tracked after the brother.

  The cool, reverent present jerked Holden out of the wooded memories.

  Car doors slammed. Voices rose.

  He strode to the window and through parted curtains watched an older couple traipse toward the pool with three small children in tow. His heartbeat settled, and he returned to the bed, to Baxter’s ashen face, to the closest thing he had to a brother, the only person besides Frank close enough to consider family.

  They’d been fifteen when they met, he and Baxter. Back then he’d been a rangy, feral street kid fresh off the plane from Bogotá, and Baxter, an overweight couch potato and apartment-complex bully. Ego and posturing had pitched them into more than one fistfight.

  Bruises and blood had forged a friendship that grew into brotherhood.

  Holden ran his fingers through his hair.

  He’d known pain, known suffering. He’d been hungry, abandoned, and cold. He’d lost men and lost family, and he’d felt none of that the way he felt this pending loss.

  He hadn’t seen the trap.

  McFadden’s children hadn’t seen the trap.

  The Broker would have come out the winner if not for the brother.

  The brother.

  The mental replay hitched there, always hitched there, with the brother on his knees on the woodland floor, hands searching Baxter’s body. He’d used a CO2 rifle.

  The siblings, too, had come for reasons other than death.

  They wanted him alive, just as he wanted them alive, all for the same woman.

  He checked the IV running into Baxter’s veins.

  Plans for retaliation scorched through his own.

  Violence, forced to simmer under the pressure of saving life, bubbled over with the need to take it. He’d been thirteen, an orphan and chained monkey, when he plunged a blade deep into the man who’d fed, clothed, and housed him, and for twenty long minutes he had watched as the life he hated most pooled and congealed on the tile floor. He’d since watered the earth with the blood of forty-one men, but only with that first had he derived pleasure from death.

  Hell-bound soul that he was, he’d know that satisfaction again.

  But for that, he’d have to leave Baxter.

  The window of opportunity was fast closing.

  In this gladiator arena where winner took all, staying meant losing everything for nothing. He’d get the siblings, he’d get paid, and they’d lead him to the Broker.

  CHAPTER 36

  CLARE

  AGE: 54

  LOCATION: SOMEWHERE ON THE WATER

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: PAPERLESS

  NAMES: UNPRINTABLE

  DARKNESS EMBRACED HER, DARKNESS, HER FRIEND. COMFORT TO THE comfortless and sight to the blind, darkness translating sound and vibration into mental images. She saw him coming, coming with food, coming for freedom.

  She drifted, weightless and formless, waiting in primordial calm.

  Metal jangled. The lock engaged.

  Some patterns couldn’t be helped.

  She stood, hands and feet positioned as they’d been when shackled, and she shuffled forward as she’d done and done and done.

  The slot opened.

  She broke the pattern and kept going, blissful and euphoric in movement.

  Someone would notice and would come to stop her, or wouldn’t. Either way.

  The tray slid in.

  She grabbed the hand.

  Grappling hooks to skin, she dug a week’s worth of nail growth into flesh and swung fast, rotating her body around, flinging the free end of
the leg shackles around the wrist, wrapping the chain tail up her forearm. Bare feet against the door, she straightened her legs and dragged the arm inward until the shoulder stuck.

  He fought, and the harder he fought, the tighter the chain cinched. Screams filled her ears the way stench filled her lungs.

  “I’ll tear your arm off,” she yelled. “Open the door.”

  He couldn’t, she knew that. He didn’t have the key, and even if he had, there wasn’t any way to reach the lock while pinned to the floor as he was. But he believed her—that’s what mattered—and he screamed louder, begging and pleading, raising an ungodly commotion.

  Doors slammed, a tumult of voices arose, and the tug against the chain grew heavier, as if men had laid hold of body and legs to pull him free.

  She worked her fingers around his wrist, loosened the watch clasp, then let go of the chain, and one heartbeat to the next, the watch was in her hands and the arm was gone.

  She slipped the band over her ankle and secured it.

  The food slot slammed closed.

  She swung the shackle chain up into the nearest corner, snagged the camera, and yanked it out of position. She turned, flung for the second and missed, costing her precious seconds. She tried again, connected, and pulled.

  Fatigue consumed her. Lack of sleep and lack of food turned arms to weights, depleting conserved energy faster than she’d anticipated.

  She’d survived worse for longer, but she’d been younger then.

  Noise shifted outside the door, and within that shift came the squeak, the beautiful squeak, with its wonderful promise of freedom, the reward for accurately predicting a move they shouldn’t have made but did. A voice bellowed from beyond the door, commanding her to get back against the wall.

  Smarter, better would have been to deprive her of food and water until she was dehydrated to the point of incapacitation and then drag her ass back into chains, but they couldn’t. They couldn’t take that risk any more than they could risk controlling her with firearms, and so they’d come with the fire hose, their only weapon, a weapon they sorely overestimated. She’d seen to that.