Liars' Paradox

by Taylor Stevens

  He said, “Is it hard for you being the perpetual outsider?”

  “I deal.”

  “Not very well, if the things I’ve heard are true.”

  She sighed on the inside.

  God only knew what Robert had told him about her.

  Every story, every observation, would be a tool in his arsenal. Human intelligence—HUMINT was what Clare had called it—laid the groundwork for manipulation. He had everything, and she had nothing.

  She blocked out the words and focused on his position.

  He said, “Work with me, Jen. I can guarantee what I’m getting paid is more than what you’re being offered for me, and I’ll go fifty-fifty with you.”

  She pressed the blade between her teeth and crept toward his voice.

  “I don’t care that your mother’s escaped. Don’t care where you go or what you do from here. Help me settle this, and we can part ways in peace.”

  She recognized the accent now.

  Clare’s description turned around in her head.

  He started young, real young.

  Wasn’t a lot to work with but was more than his bounty packet revealed, and that alone should be enough to throw him off guard.

  She said, “Must have been rough for you growing up poor in Colombia, with no middle- or upper-class frills, nothing but what you took for yourself. Big ole USA must have been quite the shock. Not much of a relief, was it? Hard to relate when everyone around you is crying over first-world problems.”

  His breath caught, and his shadow slipped down to the crawl space floorboards.

  She watched his hands, watched his posture.

  He was too big, too strong to go at directly, and fast enough, she’d learned, to make close contact a genuine threat. But he didn’t want her dead.

  That was his mistake.

  “Work with me,” he said.

  She gripped the nearest brace, swung to gain momentum, and launched her full weight feetfirst into his side. The blow should have knocked him over, should have put her on top.

  His torso rotated before she hit.

  He seized her leg and twisted, changing her trajectory, dulling the impact.

  She grabbed hold of him and took him down with her.

  They tumbled, propelled by motion, and rolled in a flurry of fists and blocks, rolled right over the edge, went falling, falling, just as she’d fallen minutes before, falling without the controlled landing, both of them toward the fragile floor.

  She gripped his collar in an attempt to position herself above him, to use his body as a cushion for landing. His elbow powered into her, broke her grasp. She smacked down hard, feet, hip, shoulder, head. Couldn’t breathe—had to move.

  She groaned up from her side onto her stomach, dragging and clawing forward to put space between them.

  The bowie was gone. His rifle was gone.

  Her right arm wouldn’t move.

  She limped to her feet, blinking through the haze, shrugging her working shoulder against her face to get the sweat out of her eyes, and she fumbled left-handed for one of the holstered handguns and leveled the muzzle in his direction.

  She should have fired, fired before he’d had a chance to move, fired with the clinical, cold detachment of business, but hands shaking, lungs sucking in whatever oxygen they could find, she hesitated in the intoxication of his defeat.

  His eyes met hers.

  He opened his fists and lifted his hands an inch off the floor in a show of surrender. She shuffled toward him, kicked his feet apart and, with the weapon pointed toward his chest and steadied as best as her shaking arm could manage, searched his legs and waist. He moved to sit.

  She motioned with the muzzle for him to keep still.

  Wincing, blood trickling from his lips, he said, “Your mother has something I need. Connect me with her. One phone call. That’s all I’m asking.”

  She backed away for a better angle.

  She said, “You’re in no position to ask for anything.”

  “Work with me, Jen.”

  “The name’s not Jen,” she said.

  She clenched her teeth.

  This had to end. Clare wanted him dead, so he had to die.

  She moved her finger toward the trigger.

  CHAPTER 45

  JACK

  AGE: 26

  LOCATION: HOUSTON, TEXAS

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: USA

  NAMES: JASON FRANCIS WHITE

  HE STEPPED OVER WEATHERWORN CHAINS AND A RECENTLY CUT padlock and nudged through paint-chipped doors into an entrance hall stagnant from abandonment and an almost silence broken by stirring rusted things. Voices that didn’t belong, quiet voices amplified by emptiness, bled over the landing and down the stairs. Tweaked on sleep deprivation and fueled by adrenaline, he moved toward those voices, rifle to his shoulder, finger beside the trigger, up one cautious step after the next on dust-drenched, oil-slick stairs.

  Every second’s tick on the mental clock put him further on edge.

  He turned onto the landing and slipped left along the wall, past an elevator, toward a burned-out hole where wide double doors had once been.

  He could hear the words now.

  One phone call. That’s all I’m asking. Work with me, Jen.

  He quick checked the room.

  Jill stood with her back to him, right arm and hand wounded and limp, handgun in her left pointed toward Christopher, who lay there, palms up, in a show of surrender, talking.

  Jack lowered the rifle and swore in silent protest.

  He’d confirmed Christopher’s presence, had watched Jill begin the climb up the outside brick. He’d hurried from rooftop to parked car and driven recklessly, abandoning stealth, drawing attention he otherwise wouldn’t have, racing time to ensure he didn’t leave her exposed, all for this.

  The enormity of the moment upturned reality.

  Jill the badass, Jill the party girl, who’d never found a man she couldn’t discard, didn’t have it in her to pull this trigger.

  He didn’t need to see her face to know what her expression looked like, and didn’t need to hear where the conversation had traveled to understand where it had gone.

  Christopher alive, Christopher still talking, Christopher on his back, showing his belly like a too-comfortable, safe-feeling cat, said it all.

  Present played against past and pitted Jill against Clare.

  He’d have turned and walked away for no other reason than to give his sister a chance at whatever had stayed her hand, but he couldn’t.

  Life was cruel and bitter with its jokes.

  Christopher had to die, and it fell to him to kill the man who’d spared his life.

  He stepped into the room and strode across the floor.

  Christopher’s focus cut from Jill’s face to his, and in that glance, the nature preserve, wet with blood and biting betrayal, sent memory rushing to the fore.

  “For us, there’s tomorrow,” Christopher had said.

  Jack’s thoughts slowed. His skin flushed.

  Clare smiled in his head and winked and repeated her mantra.

  You need to know your opponent to outthink him.

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

  Christopher had known, known that if they separated, Jill would be the one to pursue him. So he’d laid diversions, seeded a trap worthy of Clare’s operational handbook, and bought time alone with Jill to incapacitate the stone cold in the killer and deliberately funnel death’s decision into hands he’d already let live.

  Comprehension mired down in traitorous respect.

  It was difficult not to laugh and call this whole thing off as a joke just to find a way to spend a late night over beers, deliberating battlefields and scars with a worthy opponent, the way old men in parks and pubs played chess.

  But no. Christopher had to die.

  Jack slipped in beside his sister.

  “Robert here?” he said.

  She shook her head, confirming what
he already knew.

  He turned his shoulder toward Christopher, leaned for Jill’s ear, and whispered, “Look, I know how it is with you and Clare, and I don’t want to step into that. You’ve already pissed all over this. It’s yours, right? But she wants him dead.”

  Jill’s lips tightened.

  Her finger massaged the trigger guard, but still no action.

  Conflict bore down on him.

  He reached for her hand to take the weapon.

  She jerked away and kept the muzzle leveled exactly where it’d been.

  Christopher’s expression registered the change in tone.

  Jack studied the man laid out on his back, one killer fighting against two in a trap of his own making.

  He’d gone to considerable effort to put his life in these crosshairs. Confident as he might have been in victory, he’d have had to consider the price of miscalculation, which meant that whatever he ultimately wanted, he wanted it badly enough to die for.

  Christopher stayed focused on Jill. He said, “I get it. Really, I do. You have your mom back. Don’t need me anymore. All that’s left now is to clean up the threat. But I knew that before I got here. If I wanted you dead, you’d already be dead. I didn’t come here to kill you any more than you wanted to kill me at the preserve.”

  Voice flat, Jill said, “You don’t know what I want.”

  “Same thing I want. Same thing your brother wants.”

  “And now we all hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya.’”

  “I’ve done the best I can to make my position clear. I’m not your enemy.”

  Jill said, “Why?”

  Christopher sighed, as if the single word asked a dozen questions to which there was only one answer, and that answer was so clear the only reason she’d have asked was to play dumb, and he had no time for dumb.

  He said, “For the same reason I need to talk to your mother.”

  “Which is?”

  The sigh turned to exasperation.

  “Obvious, don’t you think, given what happened at the preserve?”

  Jill’s finger twitched, and she shook her head in slow contradiction. She said, “No. You made the no-kill decision before what happened at the preserve.”

  “True, but what happened there was observable, and you were a witness to it, which makes it easier to point to than trying to get you to take my word for anything.”

  “You’re asking us to take your word right now. You—a guy whose entire skill set revolves around kidnapping and killing—want us to believe in a onetime, special just-for-you change of heart.”

  “Not a change of heart,” he said. “A change of priorities. Killing you was never part of the contract. The Broker switched terms after you showed up, refused to pay contract fulfillment, and then stabbed me in the back. I have no personal reason to want you dead, no professional reason to want you dead, I’ve already fulfilled my obligations regarding your mother, and what happened after is none of my business. I’m going to zero out this balance sheet with the Broker, and your mother has what I need to find him.”

  “And you know that how, exactly?”

  Christopher’s eyes smiled like she’d offered him a long-sought-after gift.

  If the circumstances hadn’t been dire, if the man hadn’t been one wrong word away from death, Jack would have sworn he was flirting.

  Christopher said, “Let’s grab coffee. I’ll tell you the whole long story.”

  Jill said, “Doesn’t matter, anyway.”

  “It matters.”

  “Not to us. Whatever you say, the fundamentals don’t change. You know who we are. You know we’re alive. The bounty on our heads will rise, and the temptation to collect on that will only grow.”

  “Not interested in the money,” he said. “Not now, not ever.”

  Jill shrugged, as if to say words and promises were meaningless from a man in his position, but Jack saw beneath the tone and posture, saw what only someone who knew her the way he knew her would. She was struggling hard to feign indifference.

  Christopher said, “Work with me to fake your death. We’ll split my fee, disappear. All problems solved.”

  She said, “We don’t need the money and can fake our own deaths. You’ve got nothing to offer that we can’t get for ourselves.”

  “I offer our common enemy.”

  “You need us for that, not the other way around.”

  Jack stretched his hand over hers, and this time, she let him take the gun.

  He didn’t want to kill the guy any more than she did, but it had to be done. Not because Clare had said so, but because the only thing that mattered long term was keeping his family safe, and they had enough threats to worry about without the specter of someone like this hanging over their future.

  Jack raised the weapon.

  Christopher’s gaze traveled from Jill to the handgun to Jack’s face, traveled with the steady calm of a man who’d accepted death a hundred times and had no fear left to squander by arguing with fate. He said, “Killing me won’t change the inevitable. Word will spread. They’ll find you, and you’ll end up running hard. You could use an ally, a friend. I’d like to be your friend.”

  Jack watched the words form, heard in them a siren’s lullaby that promised belonging and brotherhood and offered kinship from another who knew what it was like to be them. He lined sights to forehead.

  Christopher said, “The three of us, together, we’d be damn near invincible.”

  Every part of training warned against self-preserving lies. Every part of gut instinct insisted each word was truth. The strategy wheel flung through possibilities, searching for a way in which they might all walk out of this alive.

  In that pause, Christopher inched toward his weapon.

  His miscalculation broke the trance.

  Doubt firmed into resolve.

  Jack tightened his aim, and somewhere in the half blink between lineup and trigger pull, a ringtone stole finality from him.

  Jill’s breath hitched.

  Christopher glanced toward his pocket. “It could be Robert,” he said. “He’s with my brother—that big guy you shot at the preserve. Rob was supposed to call if he took a turn for better or worse.” He nodded toward the weapon. “At least let me know before you . . . you know.”

  Jill moved her hand over Jack’s and nudged the muzzle toward the floor.

  For her sake, for the sake of not turning a moment’s reprieve into a three-way war, Jack didn’t resist. Christopher kept one hand in the air, out and visible. He spread the fingers of the other wide, and, never breaking eye contact, working slowly to ensure every movement was clear and predictable, opened a snap, reached fingers into a pocket, pulled out the phone, offered it, palm forward, for inspection, and bought himself more time.

  He squinted at the screen, answered, listened.

  On his face bewilderment turned to confusion.

  He said, “Yes.”

  And then, “Received.”

  And then, “Honored.”

  He pulled the phone from his ear, looked at it as if it were toxic, and stretched it toward Jill. “This call’s for you,” he said. “For the both of you.”

  CHAPTER 46

  JACK

  AGE: 26

  LOCATION: HOUSTON, TEXAS

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: USA

  NAMES: JASON FRANCIS WHITE

  THE UNEXPECTED SUCKED OXYGEN OUT OF THE ROOM AND THE unanswerable encased time in silence. Christopher held deer-in-the-headlights still, arm outstretched, phone in his palm, waiting for retrieval. Jill glanced at Jack, and Jack stared at the phone, sorting known from unknown in a rapid sequence.

  Something had changed.

  The call had come to Christopher’s equivalent of Jill’s Blackphone.

  Whoever was on the other end wasn’t Robert.

  Probably wasn’t the Broker.

  Was even less likely to be Clare.

  Whoever was on the other end had left Christopher authentically surprised.

&n
bsp; A new variable had been added to the equation.

  Jack said, “Take it. Put the call on speaker.”

  Jill plucked the phone from the outstretched hand, stepped out of Christopher’s reach, swiped, tapped, and said, “Who is this?”

  A male voice thick with a Slavic accent said, “London. Paris. Moscow. Rome.”

  She sighed. Her shoulders sagged.

  Jack whispered, “What’s that mean?”

  She hit MUTE. “It’s the kill code—a safe word. Every bounty packet has one. Gives the client a way to terminate the contract in case a sensitive situation changes or they get cold feet. Dead or alive, we get paid either way.”

  Jack nodded. She unmuted. Said, “Continue.”

  The accented voice deepened and, as if delivering an edict of life-altering consequence to an audience sure to understand its significance and be properly awed, said, “I call on behalf of Dmitry Vasiliev.”

  Jill cut Jack a sideways glance.

  Twenty-four hours ago, that name would have meant nothing.

  Clare’s late-night tale had changed that.

  She said, “Who’s Dmitry Vasiliev?”

  The question wrested control and shunted the conversation off its rails.

  The voice, more restrained, said, “Your phone does not answer. You are sent photographs for introduction and connection. You must retrieve them.”

  Jack shrugged out of his pack.

  “Blackphone,” he whispered. “Get it on.”

  Jill unzipped the pocket and, struggling to work with one good hand, tugged the phone’s Ziploc bag loose.

  In that distraction, Christopher shifted another few inches toward his weapon, fast enough, subtle enough, that anyone else might have missed it.

  Jack fired a round just shy of his leg.

  The report thundered through empty space, shaking windows and scattering birds.

  Christopher froze.

  Jack searched him for a hint or tell—anything that might indicate this call had been Christopher’s doing and they’d just leveled up into another round of Clare-crazy foresight and manipulation—and got nothing. He said, “That was a warning, not an accident. Next one will hurt.”

  Jill shoved the SIM and battery into place. She said, “We received a stand-down order. If you kill him, there’ll be consequences.”