Liars' Paradox

by Taylor Stevens

  Two threats. One hostage.

  The world crawled to a standstill, and he moved in half time, stepping forward with each trigger pull. Bullet to the chest of the man facing glass and swapping out magazines. Bullet to his head. Shift. Bullet to the hostage’s thigh.

  The driver yelped and slumped, redistributing weight, adding confusion.

  Bullet to the head of the hostage taker.

  Silence.

  Three minutes, fifty-five.

  He two-fisted the weapon toward the kitchen, the hallway, got no movement. He knelt, and felt sideways for a pulse on the man who’d held the hostage. He glanced at the driver, who sat beside the body, jaw clenched, hands gripping his thigh, which was bleeding onto the carpet.

  “Are there more?” Jack whispered. “Any more of them here?”

  “One outside.”

  “Roommates? Where are your roommates?”

  The driver looked back toward the hallway.

  Jack didn’t need the words. Didn’t want to know, didn’t want to see. He leaned in toward the driver’s leg, nudged the loose pants aside, and traced the bullet trajectory.

  He’d gotten lucky, hadn’t hit an artery and had missed bone.

  The driver winced, and his eyes, full of questions, accusation, and pain, traveled up to settle on Jack’s face.

  Self-scorn heaped upon guilt. Jack let the material drop. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was the only way to keep them from killing you.”

  The driver, breathing through clenched teeth, nodded.

  Jack said, “Where are the phones? The ones they found?”

  The driver scooted sideways to lean into the wall and motioned toward a backpack slouched against the aging sofa. Jack reached for the bag, unzipped, and searched through crap he didn’t recognize to get to what he did.

  Four minutes, twenty.

  He stuffed the handgun in with the rest of the stuff, shouldered the strap, retrieved a printout from the Broker’s bounty packet, and held it open so the driver could see it. “Call nine-one-one. Tell them there’s been a shooting. Tell them you’re hurt. Eventually, there’ll be questions. The police will want to know who came through that window.” He moved the image of Christopher’s face, shielded by hat and glasses, closer. “This guy did. You understand?”

  The driver nodded again.

  Four minutes, forty.

  Footsteps pounded in the breezeway.

  Shouts rang out from near the front.

  Jack refolded the picture, stuffed it into the hostage taker’s sock, and collected phones from pockets and hands. He said, “Which one of these is yours?”

  The driver reached for the smartphone. Jack took it and tossed him one of several disposable plastic flip models. “The guy in the picture has yours,” he said. “You took this one from that dead guy after he left.”

  Another nod.

  Jack dumped the rest of the phones into the pack, left the weapons where they lay, and let himself out the way he’d come.

  Five minutes, fifteen.

  He slipped over the rail and swung down to the patio beneath the balcony.

  Disgust gurgled in his gut.

  He’d despised Clare, always had, for the way she’d used others to reach her end goals. Hypocrite of hypocrites, he’d been no different when pushed.

  The wording of Jill’s accusation poked holes in his worldview.

  Don’t confuse self-righteousness with love.

  She’d been talking about his attitude toward her, not Clare, but the fundamentals were the same. He understood now, for the first time, understood Clare’s dilemma, understood that she had cared about collateral damage, and just like him, she’d cared about protecting her family more.

  Voices rose behind him, around him, sounds of threat that carried to him on the wind.

  His feet hit the ground.

  Approaching sirens screamed out far in the distance.

  He skirted around brick and over concrete, moving just slowly enough to avoid drawing attention, reached the wall, went over the wall, and speed walked to the car.

  He tossed the backpack into the passenger seat, plugged key into ignition and, lights off, moved down the alley. He made a slow turn out onto near empty streets, drove, and kept driving to put distance between himself and the crime scene.

  Time dragged long, painful nails down his diaphragm, and he counted the miles as he moved away from Jill, driving in the opposite direction in which he wanted to go, because from a distance was the only way he could safely turn the burners back on—safely in terms of the Broker, safely in terms of law enforcement, who, if they did their job properly, would search for any digital trail to follow out of that complex.

  Minutes bled the clock dry. An hour allowed him to pull off the road.

  He closed his eyes against the wait while the phones booted up.

  The tone of missed calls sent his pulse racing.

  He scrolled through the numbers.

  He didn’t recognize any of them, but he recognized the timing gaps between Clare and Clare and Clare and more Clare.

  Failure mounted into frustration and fury.

  He had another round of time-devouring evidence to destroy, urgently needed to find a way to make and maintain contact, and this phone, and every other he carried, was exposure, handcuffs, and an ambush waiting to happen.

  CHAPTER 38

  CLARE

  AGE: 54

  LOCATION: GALENA PARK, TEXAS

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: PAPERLESS

  NAMES: NAMELESS

  HEAD DOWN, HANDS IN HER POCKETS, CRACKED CONCRETE AT HER feet, she shuffled past payday lender, furniture rental, and repair store, past security bars and sleeping storefronts, into the light of a doughnut shop already alive at four in the morning and under the blinking neon signs of an empty gas station.

  Car tires turned into the lot behind her.

  She fought the paranoid urge to turn and look.

  She’d reached delirium hours ago, maybe days, and was running on fumes in a body exhausted by adrenaline surge and dump and surge, stopgap fueled by vending machines and two hours of rest pulled from a twenty-four-hour Laundromat, which had been interrupted by knife-wielding hoodlums who’d tried to relieve her of the little money she carried. She’d relieved them of phones instead and had come to within a hopped-up junkie’s inch of breaking an arm to relieve the smallest of his shoes.

  She needed protein, needed sleep, but couldn’t stop, because once inertia set in, she’d be done. One foot after the next, she trudged on in Nike Airs that were as much a relief to raw and tender feet as the phones were a relief from drawing attention while making calls. She checked the time and resisted the urge to dial again.

  She’d called Jill twice, tried Jack three times.

  The numbers were active, but the calls had gone directly to automated voice mail.

  Calls to Raymond, too, had rung on, unanswered.

  Dread, thick with desperation, set in behind paranoia.

  She’d been wrong, wrong, and couldn’t understand. If the kids had been dead, the pictures would have shown as much, but they hadn’t been. They’d been alive, alive in the crosshairs, alive with a promise that hadn’t yet been fulfilled.

  Heel to toe, she walked an unending, exhausting line to nowhere. Daylight would come soon. She’d have to find a way off the streets.

  Repetitively, reflexively, she checked the time again and chased back the anxiety. She had two hours, three at the most, before these phones became a liability and she’d be forced to abandon them and find others. Images and thoughts and fear bounced wild and uncontrollable within a mind fighting to maintain a grasp on reality.

  Another ten minutes and she could call again.

  CHAPTER 39

  HOLDEN

  AGE: 32

  LOCATION: LA PORTE, TEXAS

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: PAPERLESS

  NAMES: NAMELESS

  THE BEACON LED OUT OF HUMBLE AND INTO HOUSTON, LED IN LONG, jagged cuts through t
he city, then southeast toward the coast, where it blinked off for good. Holden followed, heading toward war, everything he’d need carried with him in a twelve-year-old Kia bought off a guy for quick cash.

  He had parceled out forty-eight hours’ worth of hydration and medication, had left a preset timer and instructions clear enough that even a patient in the throes of dementia would understand them, yet the burden of leaving weighed heavy on his soul.

  If he didn’t return, odds favored that Baxter would die.

  He kept off the highways to avoid data-sucking, driver-tracking license-plate scanners, opting for the lesser evil of missing front plates and city traffic cameras. Vehicle registration still pointed to the guy who’d sold him the car, but fifty moves ahead and looking back, the plate scanners had the potential to trace his movements after the fact, and he didn’t need that headache. Avenues and side streets declined steadily into depressed neighborhoods so culturally opposite the clipped, manicured northern suburbs that the two might as well have been in different countries.

  The sights and smells soothed him. His shoulders relaxed.

  He’d fit into whatever social stratum the job called for, but returning to the misfits and the downtrodden was like wearing a comfortable jacket or unwinding in a favorite chair, and that was the last thing he’d have imagined in that dirt alley in the hills of Ciudad Bolívar when Frank had stood in front of him and offered him a fairy tale.

  Not that this, here, was poverty, exactly.

  Paved streets and a functioning civic foundation, cell phones, running water, streetlights, cheap food, and secondhand shoes all touted the promise of the American Dream. In that slum of slums at Bogotá’s southeastern edge, homes patched together from plywood and cinder block and scraps of tin made the houses he passed now seem like proper mansions. He’d laughed when Frank had presented an orphan’s daydream, grown aggressive when Frank persisted, and stopped cold when Frank called him by a nickname dredged out of buried memories. He’d listened to a tale of an American father who’d spent years after his lover’s death searching for a son, until he’d met the same fate.

  Frank had offered him the chance of life as an American citizen, and Holden had grabbed hold of the dream, but he’d known even then that there were no fairy tales, only lies wrapped in good feelings, and that happy endings weren’t even endings, merely where the stories were cut and the reader moved on.

  Years of using wits and hands to stay ahead of powerful people whose sadistic hatred of him deepened with each inch he grew had hardened him effectively enough that he’d done well for himself as a fourteen-year-old in neighborhoods where the violence rivaled that of the worst urban ganglands.

  Taking Frank’s offer had been his version of moving on.

  He’d known the promise of a better life couldn’t change watching his mother die, couldn’t change being hauled out of her home in Cartagena and across the country to a fortress in the hills outside Calamar where he’d been left to fend for himself like a stray dog, wearing rags, stealing food, and had been a spoil of war brought out as entertainment for guests and enemies alike, but it had turned the page.

  He couldn’t remember the first months, the ones in which he’d wandered the tiled halls and covered porticos, soiled and hungry and crying for his mother, the ones in which he would have starved to death if not for the kindness of maids who snuck him food from the plates they served, the ones in which he would have died from infection if not for those who had the least to give who bathed and clothed him from what they could spare from their own homes. He couldn’t remember but wished he could. Wished he could hold on to the worst of the pain.

  Unable to have the memories, he’d grabbed hold of hate.

  Frank had tried to temper his rage with explanations, had told him his father had been a part of a joint task force, a Hail Mary operation that had targeted a kingpin’s youngest mistress in a reach for insight into where the international links in drugs and politics were the weakest. As if somehow a noble beginning could make sinners whole.

  There was no forgiveness when want, dangerous want, drove the liaison far past the operation’s finish line. They’d gone careening over the cliff of danger. One three-year-old son later, his mom was dead, and he was a captive trophy. Another two years after that, his dad had met the same fate: two casualty blips on the relentless drug-war radar.

  His parents had made their choices in spite of the risk.

  What was unforgivable was that they’d brought a child into that nightmare.

  Frank had never spoken of them again.

  Life was better that way.

  Holden pulled to the curb across the street at the edge of a mildew-stained, roach-infested motel—the type of place where occupants saw nothing and proprietors saw even less, the type of location he’d have gone to disappear, which said as much about Jen and her brother as it did about him.

  This was where the tracker had led. This was where he’d find them.

  Robert had been the first diversion to get him here.

  Jen would never have come out into the open—not even for a hostage boyfriend—but the hostage boyfriend had shifted the power dynamics, and by forcing the kid to carry the phone, he’d provided the illusion of lesser evils, which had saved him from a protracted hunt.

  GPS trackers sewn into pants and jacket had been the second diversion.

  The ones in Robert’s soles had been the third.

  Shoes were critical when on the run, would be the last to go. They’d been backups to the backups, in case Robert fled and he was forced to hunt him down, and they’d also buy him time if Jen made it out before he was ready. And, if Jen found them, they’d be the distraction to keep her from seeing that what he’d really wanted all along was her number.

  But that was before the shooting had started, before Baxter had flirted with death, before well-laid plans had flipped upside down. He’d never intended the trackers to stay live through surgery on the tarp beneath the trees, or into the hours of bedside vigil, but they had, and he’d monitored them, brooding in the dark as they’d moved across the city, until they blinked off her good and he knew he was out of time. Protocol vulnerabilities had let him turn Jen’s phone into a beacon whenever the device was on—which it wasn’t, not right now—but it had been, and would be again, and these quick intervals continued to point right here to this motel. Holden scanned the parking lot and studied the room doors.

  Jen knew he had this number, knew there was a chance he’d come looking, could have used the calls to draw him in the way he had her, could have, but the timing between signals had gotten shorter, and those brief active bursts, communicating like Morse code in the dark, had more in common with stealth than snare.

  If he’d read them right, she was waiting on a call, trying to make a connection, and was growing desperate. There was only one person she’d be in a panic to reach.

  Which meant her brother wasn’t with her.

  He pondered the implications and weighed them against options.

  She’d be guarded, trigger happy, and dangerous.

  He’d needed a team of six to take the mother alive, and that was only because, for whatever reason, the mother had allowed it. That wouldn’t happen here, not even if Jen was alone, not even if she had Robert to slow her down, not even if he had five men. This was invader against defender, and she matched him on skills and outclassed him on weapons. He didn’t need to see her inventory to know that.

  He traveled light, always had, preferring strategy over brute force, and invisibility over shock and awe, nothing like the laughable assassins of Hollywood who transported fully assembled firearms by air—packed in carry-on luggage, no less, as if X-rays and security checks in a terrorist-watching world didn’t exist—into countries where being caught with one was an instant invitation to years behind concrete walls. In comparison, the three pieces he carried now felt like wanton excess: a handgun for short range, a high-precision rifle for distance, and a high-velocity semiaut
omatic for spray and pray.

  They were unregistered, all of them, ghost guns built out of parts purchased at shows or bought online, with receivers—the only part of a firearm treated by federal law as a weapon—milled by his own two hands. They had no serial numbers, no registration, no background checks to provide his biometric data a permanent home on look-out lists that didn’t officially exist, and their ballistics were guaranteed to never link to a crime he hadn’t committed. Ghost guns were legal in a way stolen weapons, filed serial numbers, and black-market purchases could never be, because US law didn’t require licensing to build a weapon for personal use, and that was all this was. He watched the motel as minutes turned into quarter hours, balancing professional patience against strategy against sand in the hourglass bleeding out of Baxter’s life.

  A bullet into a door—hopefully, the right door—would create action and movement, and through movement he’d know if Robert was present, and if Jen was with him, or if the calls that had led him here were merely enticement and a time-sucking distraction. He slipped the hard case from the back, stepped into the cooling night, and followed the cracked sidewalk toward a chain-link fence.

  Fence led to opening, opening to empty lot, empty lot to dumpsters, and dumpsters to a flat industrial rooftop. He assembled the rifle in a reverent ritual, metal to metal, fully conscious of every contact, present for every twist in prebattle meditation, and sighted in on a door bottom, high enough to cause a reaction, low enough to avoid killing anyone in the room.

  Headlights interrupted the timing.

  A vehicle rounded the motel corner, and he paused to allow potential witnesses and casualties to move on.

  The car stopped three spaces over from where he’d intended to put the round.

  A young man and a middle-aged woman stepped out.

  Dim, moth-attracting light illuminated their profiles, and his brain jolted with recognition, his mouth went dry, and his scattered thoughts wove between each other in a twisted race to put meaning into order.

  CHAPTER 40