Liars' Paradox

by Taylor Stevens

  Everything they did from this point on had consequences, and consequence was a matter of degree. He said, “Any rules on maiming?”

  “Kind of a gray area.”

  She snapped the case together and powered on for boot up.

  Questions churned in the agony of the wait.

  She navigated through passwords to the phone within the phone, drew a sharp inhale, and shifted the screen to where Jack could see it.

  “There are pictures of you circulating now,” Clare had said. “Soon enough there’ll be seekers looking your direction.”

  The caller had sent four images. The first two were a series of his and Jill’s faces—photos that had been taken at the preserve, enlarged, and cropped. They were blurry, but the sibling connection and the resemblance to Clare would be unmistakable to anyone who’d known her when she was younger. The next two were digital copies of physical photographs that had been manhandled by time: a younger Clare with a man her age seated on a couch in a room distinctly old East Bloc, neither of them fully smiling but bodies close enough to be intimate, and Clare again on the grass in the warm outdoors with the same man and the same intimacy. Clare before their earliest memories, a Clare they’d never seen before. A Clare who almost seemed happy and a man he recognized from the one picture Clare had shown them of their father when they were younger.

  Maria Catalina and Dmitry. CIA and KGB.

  Jack wanted to study their faces, wanted to let history swallow him, but couldn’t afford the distraction.

  Jill said, “Photos received.”

  The caller said, “Dmitry Vasiliev requests honor agreement, immediate payment for immediate contract termination.”

  Jill muted the call and answered the question before Jack could ask it. “The contract requires me to stand down on a kill-code order,” she said. “Asking for an honor agreement means he’s willing to take my word as bond and pay immediately, instead of waiting to close escrow through the Broker.”

  Inside Jack’s head the strategy wheel spun.

  For twenty-six years Clare had been searching for the father of her children, haunted by not knowing if he was dead or alive, wanting to understand what had happened in the days after she left Moscow and what had happened to him since. Each time she’d surfaced for answers, she’d faced capture or death. And now, out of the blue, someone using their father’s name had made direct contact and offered bona fides through the man who’d been contracted to kill them.

  This was rolling right off the deep end into the twilight zone.

  To Christopher, Jack said, “What’d he say when you answered?”

  “Same as to you. Gave me the kill code and asked for an honor agreement.”

  “No, after that. His exact words.”

  Christopher pitched his voice into an imitation of the accent and doused the syntax with sarcasm. “We do not call for you. We call for your targets. Transfer the phone to your targets please.”

  Jack held his stance, muzzle leveled, eyes seeing but not.

  Two separate contracts, two separate kill codes.

  There was no way, in any form of logic or insanity, that a single client had initiated both contracts. But both kill codes had arrived from a single source.

  That was wrong.

  To obtain both kill codes, the caller either worked with the Broker, held power over him, or had hacked into the Broker’s system to work against him. Without knowing which, it was impossible to predict the traps ahead or the tangents each decision could take. He needed time to think, to pace, to puzzle through, and didn’t have that luxury.

  The voice said, “Please confirm contract termination.”

  To Jill, Jack said, “You have leverage. Get more.”

  Jill unmuted. She said, “Confirmation pending. Contract isn’t yours. Who are you, and what do you want?”

  The voice softened and, perhaps sensing resistance and the likelihood that events were about to scatter out of control, the man spoke plainly, without posturing or pretense. “On behalf of Dmitry Vasiliev, I bring news of your father,” he said. “He wishes to meet you. Arrangements are made for your travel but can proceed only upon contract termination.”

  News of your father.

  Can proceed only upon contract termination.

  Jack’s brain overheated, burning the span between reason and reality.

  This call, the baited name-dropping and the invitation to travel, the elaborate extension of the shit storm that arose whenever Clare crawled out of hiding, was one thing. But raising the specter of a father he’d never known as a temptation into that trap? That crossed out of business into a deep and personal violation.

  He fought off anger, brushed aside distraction, and grabbed hold of facts.

  He didn’t care about the money.

  He didn’t care about the contract.

  He cared about protecting his family for the long term, and he cared about securing answers to the issue of Dmitry Vasiliev.

  He couldn’t have one with Christopher alive.

  He couldn’t have the other with Christopher dead.

  The why of it all churned in a cauldron of trap-seeking, self-preserving suspicion.

  Clare’s voice was in his head.

  You’ve got seconds, John. Act or die.

  Instinct. Your gut knows.

  You don’t have time for perfection.

  Congratulations. You’re dead from a self-inflicted dumb-thought wound.

  Information shifted and reordered.

  Someone who knew of the connection between Dmitry and Clare, someone who knew she’d been pregnant, knew she’d given birth, someone who knew those kids were players and targets in a bounty war had just run out into the middle of the battlefield offering a crap load of money and motivation for a cease-fire.

  The silence of indecision drew out into something long and uncomfortable, and Jack understood.

  This was a forced truce to avoid the complications of a potential blood feud.

  Jill backed out of the images and thumbed the screen.

  “Two Lufthansa tickets. Dallas–Frankfurt–Berlin,” she said. Her color drained. She looked up, and her eyes met his. “Last name Lefevre on both of them.”

  Pieces that shouldn’t have fit slipped into place.

  Lefevre.

  Possibilities replaced the past to make sense of the present.

  Clare claimed Dmitry had gotten her out of Moscow and then abandoned her. “As favor or manipulation,” she’d said, “I still don’t know.” Maybe he’d done neither. Maybe he’d been delayed getting to Switzerland and had arrived to find her gone. Like Clare, he’d been a foot soldier in a war of ideology, low enough in the hierarchy that he might not have even known she’d kept coming back to find him.

  An alternative time line formed, a parallel story to the one Clare had told.

  Dmitry had tracked her to France.

  He’d found their birth certificates.

  He’d searched for her and searched for his children and found a dead trail, because those names had died the month after Clare had given birth. And in the years that she’d been searching, he’d been searching, too.

  She’d been off radar a long time. Long enough that, as she’d said, agencies had changed hands and years had ravaged memories, enough time for Dmitry—whoever he really was, whomever he really worked for—to move up the chain of command, to be in a position of power that allowed him to act on his own, a position powerful enough that when the pictures from the preserve came calling and he saw the familial connection, he was able to step beyond his government’s official position on Clare and intervene to stop the bloodshed and keep his children alive.

  Jill, still scrolling, said, “Hotel reservations in Berlin four days from now.”

  Somewhere in the hazy distance, the voice said, “Please confirm.”

  Jack couldn’t rule out wishful thinking.

  The alternative, parallel story was a best guess.

  But he wanted to know, needed
to know, and the only way to sort truth from lie was to fling headlong into the mix. He signaled the go-ahead.

  Jill said, “Accepted. Contract termination confirmed.”

  “Payment will transfer now. Next photographs will arrive.”

  Jill scrolled and tapped and shifted the screen toward Jack again.

  A new set of images showed a flooded machine room where half-submerged bodies bled out into rust-colored water, a visual answer to how Clare had escaped last night, if ever he’d bothered to ask.

  The voice said, “Regards to Maria Catalina.”

  The line went dead.

  Silence filled the room.

  Jill let out a long, slow exhale, and they stood there, he and his sister, facing the man whom they’d intended to kill and who, in turn, had been hired to kill them.

  Broken things twisted and creaked in the vacuum.

  Laden trucks rumbled in the far distance.

  Jack said, “What happens if you renege on contract terms and kill him anyway?”

  Jill’s gaze tracked from him to the gun to Christopher.

  “Bounty goes out on me, maybe both of us,” she said. “Not that there isn’t one already. If we’re cool with that, it really becomes more a question of this. . . .”

  She offered him Christopher’s phone.

  Jack took the device and pondered the weight it represented. To renege on the contract meant walking away from the possibility of answers.

  He said, “Check your account. See if the agreement’s legit.”

  Jill’s thumb worked the Blackphone screen.

  Jack tossed Christopher his phone back. “Open your ledger,” he said. “I want to see.”

  Christopher moved to sit. Jack waved him back down with the gun.

  The silence bore down with tangible heaviness.

  A minute passed, two, five. Finally, Jill said, “Fully funded.”

  Christopher said, “Same.”

  And with that there was nothing but a hole of emptiness where action had been. They were done here, done with Christopher, done with running, one minute high on adrenaline and the next at a sudden stop.

  The absence felt like a cheap hit, felt like getting robbed. Jack deflated. He was tired, uselessly tired.

  The final words of the phone call rang in his ears.

  Regards to Maria Catalina.

  He’d have passed on the message to Clare if he’d had any way to contact her.

  She’d refused to tell them where she headed—for their own protection, she’d said. In that, some things would never change. She was still Clare, still running. She was invisible and truly, utterly alone, and that was exactly what she wanted.

  Christopher, on the floor, tucked the phone away with the slow cautious stretch of a man testing the ice of a recently frozen lake.

  Jack watched but didn’t react.

  Christopher pulled himself to his feet, limped across the room, and retrieved his rifle. He paused there and glanced back. He said, “I’d twitch at you now just to mess with you if I didn’t think that’d be enough for you to put a few holes in me.”

  Jack snorted. He almost smiled.

  The almost smile faded to an internal sigh.

  He’d gone into finding Clare adamant against reverting to the way things had been before, fully intent on returning to a shadowed half-life in a world that wasn’t built for people like him. In the end he’d have both and he’d have neither.

  There was no job to quit.

  No one he cared about enough to call and say good-bye.

  Nothing in his apartment he would miss if he never came back to get it.

  He and Jill would be on that flight to Frankfurt.

  They’d rendezvous in Berlin and start again on the hunt for answers that Clare had written off as lost just a few hours earlier. He had no idea what would come between here and there or what would happen after, but wherever they went or whatever they did, they’d never return to life as it’d been a week ago.

  Maybe that was the silver lining, and maybe that was hope.

  Jill pinched his cheek, and he batted her away.

  Christopher said, “My offer’s still on the table. Put me in contact with your mother, get me what she knows about the Broker, and I’ll split my payout fifty-fifty.”

  Jack said, “You want the Broker dead, you’re going to have to get in line.”

  “That’s why she’s not with you?”

  Jill chuffed, snorted, and broke into an exhaustion-filled laugh.

  Christopher’s expression darkened.

  Jack sighed on the inside. His sister had gotten her wish, hadn’t had to execute the guy or watch her brother do it, and now that she wasn’t trying to kill him, she was back to messing things up. He said, “Our mom’s complicated. You’d have to have lived our life to get why the question was funny, but yeah, as far as we know, she’s gone after him.”

  “You know where?”

  “Wouldn’t tell you if I did.”

  “She went after him on her own?”

  Jack nodded.

  “There’s a good chance she’ll fail.”

  He nodded again.

  There was that chance, had always been that chance, and if it happened, the wee morning hours they’d shared with her would be the last. He’d have no opportunity for good-bye and no way to continue building the bridge she’d begun, but that had been the subtext of his entire childhood. Clare had left five dozen times, and even when they were certain it would be the last, she always returned.

  He counted on that now.

  He said, “She might, but her going it alone is the best shot you have at getting the job done. You’d have to know her to understand.”

  Christopher hoisted his gear and limped toward the stairwell. “I do know her,” he said. “Just wish the circumstances had been different.” He paused a few feet from where they stood. A shy smile crossed his face. He glanced toward the windows and then back at Jill.

  He said, “Still have that long story to tell. You wanna get coffee?”

  CHAPTER 47

  CLARE

  AGE: 54

  LOCATION: ON THE LOUISIANA GULF COAST

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: PAPERLESS

  NAMES: NAMELESS

  HE WAS BORIS POPOV. WILLIAM MASON. AMAUD DURAND. HE WAS Russian, American, French. He was a dozen faces and a hundred legends, none of which mattered, because for people like him, like her, names were artifacts, constructs, clothing tried on for size, worn, shed, and sometimes washed and reused.

  Tonight she’d find him as Alan Henry, but she knew him for what he really was.

  She was in Louisiana waters now, close and closing in, riding low in a boat borrowed from a private dock in Baytown—not so much a boat as a dinghy—loaded with stolen jerricans and syphoned fuel. She’d followed the coast from late evening into the deep night black, guided by dwindling city light and winking shore light, engine vibrating from tiller down through her body while the rhythmic rise and fall soothed a week of deprivation and lulled her dangerously close to sleep.

  Mental movies walked her through the labyrinth of the coming confrontation and warded off exhaustion in the long hours the same way they’d warded off insanity during times of captivity.

  Tonight she’d finish what she should have finished long ago.

  Tonight she’d ensure the Broker of Death faced a death of his own.

  Rumors as to who he was and how to find him had existed since before she knew him as Boris. Speculation had only grown wilder as turbulence hit the USSR and the satellite states broke away and his influence increased.

  Those who weren’t inclined toward superstition placed him in Brussels.

  She knew better.

  Raymond Chance hadn’t settled an hour’s drive north of Lake Charles by coincidence any more than she’d been the only one to carry a decades-long grudge.

  She’d pushed hard in the months after the twins were born to prove what she’d instinctively known about the events that had le
d to her leaving Moscow. The hunt had guided her to Raymond, and through him, she’d learned just how long she’d been compromised. The agency had known about Boris and had let her float, had sacrificed her to maintain an illusion of ignorance in their pursuit of a more valuable target.

  Her little stunt with the recording had done nothing but speed up the inevitable.

  Boris had seen the writing on the wall, had cut deals, and had slipped their grasp.

  Ray, working in Prague, had been part of the fallout, just one of so many casualties. She’d reached him before his killers, had covered him, staged his death, given him a rebirth, and in exchange, had gained loyalty and kinship.

  It had taken them seven years of trial and error and tensely close calls to find their quarry, and three more after that to circle surveillance tightly enough to monitor movement, document vulnerability, and ensure they wouldn’t lose him.

  Ten years they’d worked, until they’d held imminent death in their hands.

  She could have killed him in numerous ways over numerous days and hadn’t. Not because she hated him less, but because those years had allowed her to understand that Boris served them all better alive. He was the devil they knew—knew how to find, knew how he worked and the games he played, knew where they fit inside those games—and that knowledge had provided a measure of safety and allowed them to sidestep traps and pitfalls they might otherwise have fallen into.

  His death would have created a vacuum.

  Others far worse would’ve risen to take his place.

  She’d have been content to let him die of sickness and old age if he’d been smart enough to simply broker her capture, as he should have. But no, he’d had to meddle, had to turn things personal. He’d taken Ray. He’d taken her heart. He’d threatened her children. He’d miscalculated and cornered an animal meaner than he was.

  GPS guided her into the cove she’d travel tested on far too many bitter nights, and there, under a clouded quarter moon, she beached the dinghy and slogged through high-tide cordgrass for dry ground. She turned east, trudging around marshes and bald cypress groves, walking three miles as the crow flew, until she reached the clearing that marked the boundary of the coastal estate, home of the recluse who pulled the world’s puppet strings.