Liars' Paradox

by Taylor Stevens

  The stone facade loomed large in the moonlight, upper-floor windows dark and only a few lights burning in the grand foyer and bottom right, thirty thousand square feet of dark and gloomy haunted house rising from the midnight foggy ground in a paranoid dream of interconnected halls and rooms and hidden passageways.

  Unseen below the surface was that much more.

  So many nights she’d stood here, observing from beyond.

  So many days she’d watched and re-watched rare footage taken from inside.

  Loss welled up, fueling the fire of retribution that had until now stayed muted.

  Raymond should have been here. He was the one who’d studied the architectural drawings, the one who’d kept up with changes as they were made.

  They’d never expected that he’d be the first one Boris got to.

  That was her failing.

  One ring to warn him that she was preparing to surface again.

  He’d known what that meant and had chosen to stay, but he’d have been better off if she’d never called at all.

  She continued forward, hands free and pockets empty.

  Under other circumstances she might have scaled the fence, skirted the dogs and the armed foot patrol, bypassed the alarms, and let herself in.

  Tonight called for none of that.

  Tonight she’d walk through the front door.

  Muck and weeds turned into manicured lawn, and manicured lawn led to tree-lined gravel road. She walked that road for the gate and from there could see the man inside the guard shack, feet up on the small desk, chin on his chest, while the colors of a small television danced across his sleeping face. In the dark, without headlights, she made none of the impression a vehicle would have made.

  He didn’t wake on his own, and she found no need to disturb him.

  Hand over fist, boots to niche after niche, she scaled the wrought-iron gate, dropped down to the other side and, knee to the ground, waited for the loping rattle of dog tags and the thud of boots on patrol.

  Sounds from the marsh filled the night.

  Shadows in her peripheral vision charged toward her.

  She spread her fingers and stretched her arms wide, allowing the breeze to catch her body’s fragrance and carry it on. The shadows slowed.

  She closed her eyes and welcomed them.

  All those nights watching from the outside had allowed her to learn the dogs and feed them well. She knew their names, their individual quirks, had watched them grow and age. Noses touched her skin. Muscle bumped her body.

  She ran her fingers along coarse Akita fur, bitter over the callous loss of her own pack leader. She missed Mack, loyal protector and constant companion, as much as she missed Ray, and she’d seen to it that the man who shot him had bled out and died that night, but retribution couldn’t put air back into the lungs of the lifeless.

  Raymond was gone. Mack was gone.

  There was no evening the score when the dead stayed just as dead.

  She waited until the pack lost interest, watched as the fog took them back to shadow, then stood and, wary of men on patrol, who seemed strangely absent, continued for the wide double doors. Hand against warm metal, she tested the latch.

  Heavy wood on silent hinges opened to marble floors and cooler air.

  The ravage of time filled her nostrils—wood polish and wax, and cleaning chemicals that did little to mask the must and mold, all riding on the stale filtration of overworked air-conditioning. No alarm sounded, but she knew well enough there’d been an alarm.

  This wasn’t the security of a man hiding from alphabet agencies the way she’d been hiding for the past half century. The men who ran the world knew where to find him, just as they’d known in Moscow and before Moscow and after Moscow. They’d used him then and were using him now, brokering out what they couldn’t afford to have traced back to them, letting others sully their souls to keep their own hands clean.

  He held too much collateral to worry about the powerful coming for him.

  No, this monstrosity had been built to hide him from those he’d personally betrayed and to protect him from those who’d kill to take his place. Boris, in the control room, encased in concrete and behind bombproof doors, like a nesting alien life-form whose tentacles reached into every room and hallway, knew she’d come.

  She slipped into the circular foyer.

  A low-light chandelier hung thirty feet above, and a polished staircase swept in a wide, majestic curve to the second floor and to doors that led nowhere. Hallways branched off right and left into darkened holes framed by sideboards bearing floral arrangements in three-foot vases. An ice pick rested beside the nearest vase, its tip pointing to the right, the way a compass needle pointed north.

  Boris might as well have carved welcome into the sideboard lacquer, offered her a weapon, and begged her to take it. Her fingers hovered over the handle.

  Laughter lilted through the foyer, crazy carnival-horror-house laughter, so faint and multidirectional, it might have been inside her head.

  Footsteps pattered somewhere on the upper floor, a single set of steps, lonely and eerie in a house that should have had multiple servants and guards and far more ambient noise. Her fist closed around the ice pick.

  The footsteps stopped.

  She eyed the hallways and weighed them against the stairs. The ice-pick compass pointed in the same direction from which she’d seen light outside.

  Debate marched its way through a multitude of choices.

  She pulled her hand away, leaving the weapon as she’d found it and, hands twitching, senses on overdrive, turned out of the grand foyer into a mirror-lined hallway. Her image warped and stretched, a haunting shadow in the dark, and she dragged her fingers along the glass, smudging spotless mirrors, counting the seams between them.

  Laughter and madness followed, bringing cliché to life.

  She focused on the light at the end. The laughter grew louder and more frantic, echoing in a dizzying circle.

  Laser pointers on the ceiling tracked her, projecting red dots on her chest, beams bouncing in endless reflection from mirror to mirror. A CCTV camera shifted on a robotic arm, moving with the pointers—no, not pointers, but sights . . . and not a camera, but a magnetometer.

  She understood the ice pick. Understood the footsteps. A gun, a knife, a watch—anything metal—would have been enough to trigger the magnetometer that guided the sights.

  Boris had known she’d come empty handed and had provided her a weapon to trigger the onslaught.

  The mirrored passageway ended in a T.

  The laughter stopped, leaving a sudden, jarring silence.

  The sound of Brahms rose slowly from the left, and she stood motionless, listening. Over a quarter century since she’d last touched or heard the concerto, and still, she knew the music note by note, as her fingers had known it once.

  This was Dmitry’s music.

  This was Boris taunting her, predator toying with its food before the kill.

  She let go of logic and strategy, turned into the haunting and, fingers dragging against the wall as they had against the mirrors, followed the melody.

  The narrow hall curved past unmarked doors.

  Her fingers counted the space between ridges and interpreted them as placeholders that could be removed or shifted to close halls, open rooms, and reconfigure the floor plan by the push of a button.

  She rounded another corner.

  The passage dead-ended at a carpeted media room.

  Empty leather entertainment chairs provided auditorium seating for twelve, and a theater screen played a live recording of a concert performance, which explained the music. She scanned the ceiling, the walls.

  This room hadn’t existed when she last saw the building plans.

  She headed for the far wall, tracing her fingers across leather seat backs, and once there, ran them along the wood paneling until she felt the outline of a door against the molding.

  The screen flickered.

 
The music shut off.

  A face in shadow replaced the performance.

  A voice, larger than life, said, “I’d expected you sooner. Years sooner.”

  Searching out the hidden door, she said, “Me? Or just any one of us?”

  “Any one of you, I suppose, though I’d always hoped it would be you.”

  “There are less painful ways to commit suicide.”

  Boris choked down a laugh made garish by its mechanical delivery. “I’ll give you a choice,” he said. “Turn back the way you came, allow my men to take you into custody, and maybe you’ll live.”

  “Not much of a choice.”

  “Continue this mad quest of yours, and you’ll most certainly die.”

  She accepted the truth of the odds, and returned to tracing the door.

  “The warning is a favor,” he said. “For old times’ sake.”

  Her fingers found the pressure point.

  She said, “That’s your cost to bear, not mine.”

  “You won’t win. Whatever advantages you think you have, they’re smoke and mirrors. You will lose, and you will die. Those are the issues you should consider.”

  She nudged the panel. The door released and opened inward, and she stepped through the doorway into a tight, clinically bright between-the-walls passageway just wide enough to fit her. The panel door shut behind her back. A lock clicked.

  The media room went silent, and hallway ends that had been open swung closed, shutting her into a box smaller than the vault she’d escaped from on the ship.

  Claustrophobia filled her in the narrow space.

  Laughter soared above her, around her, crazy, manic laughter.

  “Wrong choice, Catherine,” the voice said. “You’re so pathetically easy to manipulate, always have been. Least you could have done is make your death a challenge.”

  The lights went out, and darkness swallowed her, complete and wholly black.

  Time slowed. Memories yanked control of instinct and shoved her to the floor. Live fire screamed overhead, too steady and too ignorant of her position to be human controlled. She belly crawled through the pitch black in a race for the endcap.

  The only way to win, to reach him, was through the back side of the maze, and the only way through the maze was to escape a trap he didn’t expect her to survive.

  That was the difference between manipulation and strategy.

  CHAPTER 48

  CLARE

  AGE: 54

  LOCATION: OUTSIDE LAKE CHARLES, LOUISIANA

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: PAPERLESS

  NAMES: NAMELESS

  THE VOICE BOOMED IN LIKE THUNDER OVER THE WEAPONIZED CHATTER. Laughter picked up again, manic with glee. His words bounced round her brain.

  So pathetically easy to manipulate.

  She blocked him out, shut down emotion, shut down anything other than the objective at hand, just as she’d shut down to get through the years.

  Her knuckles collided with a solid frame.

  She flipped feet to the wall, pounded boot heels forward into the dark, kick after kick in a fight to break through before the weapons shifted and found her on the floor.

  Drywall gave way between framing studs.

  Wrong choice. Wrong choice. Wrong choice.

  The whine of robotic arms crawled up her skin: weapons repositioning.

  A gap opened between studs, large enough to wedge an arm and shoulder through, not wide enough to escape. She climbed, boots and palms against the narrow passage walls, heart thumping, muscles straining to hold her flush to the ceiling.

  Bullets riddled the spot where she’d been.

  She blessed Boris, blessed his lying, traitorous legacy.

  The man who’d double-dealt and backstabbed every person he’d come in contact with couldn’t imagine a world in which others didn’t do the same to him. Paranoid, he limited human contact, relying on technology to replace the henchman’s hands.

  Had there been a person behind the trigger, she’d have been long dead.

  The shooting stopped.

  She dropped to the floor and threw her shoulder into the gap between studs.

  Sand bled from life’s hourglass.

  Behind her back, the whine started again. This time she had no way to predict in which direction the bullets would fly. The gap widened. She wedged her torso between the studs, forced the framing loose, and tumbled over a metal arm that had guided the end wall into place.

  Rounds punched drywall, passed through the gap, passed through the wall.

  She rolled to the side, hands over her ears, face tucked in against splinters and shrapnel. Laughter rose above deafness and picked up speed.

  She swiveled to kick against the unfinished framing at her back, broke through, pushed into a crawl space, and squeezed toward the hydraulic arm. She traced her fingers over joints and bolts, found the release, and dismounted the Tavor SAR that should have killed her. Compact and agile, the fully automatic short-barreled rifle would have been perfect for tight-quarter protection if not for the hundred-round magazine protruding awkwardly from its body. She checked the ammunition.

  Five rounds left.

  She racked the charging handle, confirmed the chamber was empty, and snapped the high-capacity magazine back into place. Stock to her shoulder, she pushed back through the gap and, rat in a warren, re-entered the maze’s second layer.

  No gunfire. No footsteps.

  Laughter turned into screams of nightmares and torture.

  Lights switched on and off in motion sickness–inducing bursts. She oriented to the map in her head, gauged distance by the seams and panels she’d counted to get to the media room, and moved corner to corner, hallway to hallway, in a web of walls designed to provoke panic, claustrophobia, and desperation, up a floor, down again, all the while screaming overlapped laughter that rose louder and more frantic.

  She almost missed the footsteps.

  There were two of them tracking her, moving faster than she was, jumping ahead and behind in a way that defied physics. With enough time, she could find the hidden doors and floor traps, but under these circumstances that would be a time-wasting diversion.

  The walls, like the screaming and the lights and the laughter, were illusions.

  She paused at a hallway junction, reversed with a slow backward count, flipped the rifle, and slammed the butt into the wall. Sheetrock caved, as it had in the passageway.

  In response, footsteps pounded from the left and right, the sound of urgency and intervention moving fast and closing in.

  Boris hadn’t expected her to breach the second maze.

  They’d be armed. She had only five rounds, couldn’t spare even one, and couldn’t risk engagement in a kill zone. Beat against beat, she raced them in her assault against the wall, shoved through, and stepped out of the maze onto deep carpet.

  She knew where she was now, knew how to find what she needed.

  Every beast had a soft side, and this fortress, too, had an underbelly.

  She ran along the hallway, past an empty library, skidded into a lifeless kitchen, and kept going out the rear, taking each turn according to the diagrams laid down by memory.

  Footsteps followed above her head.

  She reached the utility room and slipped inside to a temperature several degrees warmer. Shelving played host to computer servers, and fans kept the air moving. At the far end, set into the wall and leading to the outdoors, were the metal boxes she’d come for. She opened the second one and flipped the breakers, grabbed the nearest shelf, braced a foot against its leg, and tipped it toward the floor.

  Gravity and momentum took over.

  The servers slid forward until their power cords gave, and metal and plastic hit tile in a cacophony of dents and splinters, killing the camera feeds that Boris depended upon for sight.

  Radio chatter filtered in to her from the hallway—three, possibly four, men communicating with their boss. They called to her by name.

  “Maria Catalina.”

>   “Catherine.”

  “Karen.”

  They ordered her out. She moved backward to the first metal box, rested the blade of her hand against a row of breakers, squeezed between metal filing cabinet and wall, and waited for them.

  Bullets punched through the walls and door.

  Seconds passed. The door opened.

  She shoved the breakers. The world went dark.

  She vaulted up onto the servers, counting precious seconds, and slid feetfirst into the doorway. Her boots connected with a body. Breath expulsed.

  Muzzle flashes rolled into an arc of short burst fire.

  She slammed the Tavor SAR into the enemy, hit after hit of adrenaline and anger until he went limp, and she tumbled beside him, and rolled his body on top of her.

  The emergency system kicked on.

  Soft LED running lights turned night into dawn, and with the light, each body in the hallway formed a shadow. Hand on his rifle, fingers on his fingers, she pressed the trigger, firing burst after burst until the magazine emptied.

  One went down. The other two disappeared behind corners.

  Predictable and foolish they’d put themselves between her and the passage that led to the underground bunker, led to Boris. She shoved out from beneath deadweight and rushed in the opposite direction, guided by light running off the same emergency system that would prevent unauthorized access to the bunker.

  Up the hallway, down a corridor, down a stairwell she went, past the laundry room where the LED lights stopped, into darkness, past water heaters and propane pipes for the workroom where underground cables entered the building from an off-site generator and fed power to the main electric panel. She traced the wall, searching beyond power tools and hand tools and between gardening tools, found the fire extinguisher, then the axe. And she crawled, following concrete and brick beneath workbenches, until she reached the conduit sleeve and she traced the rubber up to the electrical panel. The sound of pursuit rose behind her.

  She measured distance in the dark, torso to brick, shoulders to conduit and, with all she’d lost at the Broker’s hand crushing in, stepped aside and swung her soul into the sleeve.