Books by Taylor Stevens
Vanessa Michael Munroe Thrillers
The Informationist
The Innocent
The Doll
The Vessel
The Catch
The Mask
Jack and Jill Thrillers
Liars’ Paradox
Liars’ Legacy
Liars’ Legacy
TAYLOR STEVENS
KENSINGTON BOOKS
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
About the Author
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2020 by Taylor Stevens
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: TK
Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1865-5
First Kensington Hardcover Edition: January 2020
ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-1866-2 (ebook)
ISBN-10: 1-4967-1866-6 (ebook)
To Kae and Kim,
who showed me what real sibling rivalry looks like.
CHAPTER 1
DFW International Airport
Dallas–Fort Worth, Texas, USA
HOLDEN
IF ONE MEASURED KILLERS BY APPEARANCE, SHE WASN’T MUCH OF A threat, the young woman with her back to the pillar near the boarding line, short black hair, pale and petite, head bobbing slightly to some inaudible beat while thumbs, polished blacker than her hair, tapped a phone screen with game-playing rhythm.
But if one measured killers by appearance, he’d already be dead.
He didn’t know her, knew only what she was.
Knew she wasn’t alone, and that she’d come for him.
Another time, a different objective, he’d have laughed at the irony.
Of all the contracts and all the death, of all he’d lived and survived, this—the first time the job meant more than work, the first time he had an emotional stake in the outcome—this was when they came for him.
Any move he made to defend his life carried an equivalent risk of alerting those he hunted to his presence, and that he couldn’t afford.
The interference felt like raw personal theft.
One whiff of what he’d caught here and it wouldn’t matter who the woman and her team had come to kill.
His targets would bolt. They’d vanish.
By the time he tracked them down again, he’d be too late.
Kill or be killed at thirty thousand feet and his hands were tied.
He leaned back, tipped the fedora low, stole another glance at the pillar.
He didn’t know the woman but knew she’d die before he did.
She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, an unconscious gesture that told him she could feel herself being watched. She had good instincts.
His gaze moved on across the boarding area, taking in body language and facial expressions from beneath the brim, just as it had in the hours leading up to departure, and as it had when she’d first strolled in, head high, cold and aloof, wheeling a thousand-dollar luggage set that pegged her somewhere between stripper and rich kid.
He wouldn’t have given her much thought if she hadn’t positioned herself for an uncomfortable wait with an unobstructed view and, in so doing, piqued well-honed assassin sense. So he’d observed, watching without really watching, searching for the unknown and unknowable, until betrayal had surfaced in a single wayward glance.
The object of her attention was a Caucasian male, ten, fifteen years her senior, in scuffed shoes and worn suit, dragging a beaten pilot bag toward the boarding line, but recognition and acknowledgment had flowed in that butterfly blink, followed by the furtive evasion of an actor who’d realized a heartbeat too late that she’d mistakenly looked at the camera.
She hadn’t come up from her phone in the forty minutes since.
Not so much as a pause when his own target had boarded with first class, and not a hint when her partner in the well-worn suit had stood to brush off crumbs and throw away an empty sandwich wrapper. Nothing, until he himself had leaned forward to reach for a water bottle and her thumbs had stalled and shoulders tensed.
He had been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.
He’d seen no reason to risk his own objective or add a fresh bull’s-eye to his back if, by extreme coincidence, she’d come in pursuit of someone else.
But with that final tell he’d known, and knowledge forced him to act.
He wasn’t an easy man to find, yet here she was.
Who’d sent her and why controlled his response.
He uncapped the bottle and took a long swig.
Death was never just death.
Eliminate a team of contract killers midflight, disembark before they were discovered, and that’d be the end of this; take out a government task force, and each fresh body would give rise to ten more fighting in their place.
Infinite possibilities converged into a pinprick overlap that held only one possibility: an identity used one too many times.
A compromised passport had led her to him.
He rolled the half-empty bottle between his palms.
Timing, location, and circumstance rolled into a Venn diagram inside his head.
She’d come on behalf of the United States government.
She’d come because the Broker, the man who’d played king against king and bartered souls for national secrets, who’d negotiated hits between buyers and assassins, and who’d forced order onto lawless chaos was dead. Dead without a protégé, dead without a plan for succession, dead to a sudden void in which the highly skilled killers he controlled were now unchained, free to pursue private agendas and vendettas.
The powers that be would never afford that risk.
The Broker was dead, now the ecosystem had to die with him.
This, then, was assassin’s suttee—a modern take on that old Hindu tradition in which living wives threw themselves onto their husbands’ funeral pyre—more specifically, the part in which unwilling wives were forcefully thrown into those flames by others. This hit squad had come to do the throwing.
Holden tucked the bottle back into the bag and took another look.
Where there were two, there would be others. Only a fool would send a pair to hunt him, and she hadn�
�t come at the behest of fools.
Speakers overhead announced another boarding class.
The departure area emptied in the direction of the gate.
He shoved thick-rimmed glasses onto his face, stood, and wound between seats, moving with the herd.
The woman at the pillar shoved the phone into her pocket, reached for her roll-along, and fell in not far behind, lips twitching with the ventriloquist movement of throat whispers into an unseen mic. His left eye watched it happen courtesy of the pinhead camera in his hatband, watched it in the lens of those thick-rimmed glasses the way drivers watched cars in the rearview.
The line congested. He slowed. She moved in closer.
Proximity added ten well-concealed years to her face and changed the shape beneath her cropped jacket enough to confirm that, had she been a normal traveler, she’d have set off enough alarms going through security to lock down the airport.
He stepped out of line, checking pockets, scanning the floor.
By assassin standards he might as well have tipped his hat and nodded hello.
Passengers jostled him.
Legs and luggage moved forward.
He found the boarding pass that had never been missing, tucked it into his passport, and followed her down the Jetway and into the belly of the plane.
Flight attendants split the passenger feed between two aisles.
He ignored them, followed where his killer led, studying seated passengers without studying, watching those at his back as well as those ahead, searching for another glimpse of recognition or subconscious betrayal, and got nothing.
She stopped, hefted her carry-on into the overhead.
If she’d looked at him, he’d have smiled.
Instead, she squirreled in for the window, and he continued on, matching seats to faces, noting positions and patterns, ruling out young children, discounting large family groups, analyzing the old with a critical eye, and mistrusting the flight crew.
Kill or be killed at thirty thousand feet; three hundred potential threats.
A father paused to lift a kid-size suitcase into stowage.
The line stopped, and in that beat, fate looked Holden square in the face.
He’d have missed it if he’d blinked or turned, the pupil-expanding, heart-pounding, unguarded shock that registered on the face in the aisle seat ahead.
The guy was Asian, late twenties, with straight black hair, thick black glasses, wearing a plain collared, button-up shirt, and damn near invisible in the stereotyped cliché, caught by surprise in the beat between stowing a bag at his feet and rising for the entertainment system, and coming eye to eye with the one person whose eyes should have been avoided.
He recovered fast, but Holden knew, and knowing was enough.
They were good, this team of assassin hunters.
They’d boarded the airplane armed.
He’d come empty-handed.
They had him outnumbered no idea how many to one, and if their kill skills came anywhere close to their ability to hide and blend, then he was vulnerable here, in what would soon be a dark, pressurized aluminum tube hurtling through the sky at five hundred miles an hour.
CHAPTER 2
Flughafen Frankfurt am Main
Frankfurt Airport, Germany
KARA
SHE SHOVED SHOULDER FIRST BETWEEN A WIDE MAN AND A SLOWER-MOVING elderly couple and swerved around a lanky teenager, fighting against foot traffic, pushing to keep pace with a target that slipped farther and farther away.
An errant suitcase drifted into her path, shifting the obstacle course.
She ducked, sidestepped, nearly stepped on a kid, and knocked into the plywood construction barrier that walled off half the corridor.
Heads turned and murmurs rose in her wake. She was aware of that somewhere on the edge of focus, knew she was moving too aggressively and drawing unwanted attention, but it didn’t really matter anymore.
The target had most certainly made her, had probably made the whole team.
These weren’t the evasive movements of a man dodging suppositions and shadows because he suspected being followed. He was bolting.
She had to close the gap, had to get close enough to tag him.
Twenty feet ahead a cluster of women in burkas moved to the right.
The jostling crowd parted long enough for her to see him slip behind them.
A suitcase wheeled into her knees.
She glanced down to avoid tripping and in that second lost sight of him.
She elbowed forward, pushing against slower walkers, eyes fixed where she’d last seen him. She projected his path, searched heads and shoulders, clothing, shoes.
Her lips mouthed, Come on, come on, come on.
Nothing. And more nothing.
She wove toward a seating area, boosted herself up onto an armrest, and scanned the crowd. To the mic at her collar she said, “I’ve lost visual.”
She had watched it happen and had no idea what she’d seen.
Nick’s voice answered. “Talk to me, Angel,” he said. “Give me something.”
Desk jockeys across the ocean chased camera feeds, hunting facial recognition and body measurements, trying to grab hold of a target who’d become his own rabbit in his own magician’s vanishing hat.
Kara dropped back to the floor, glanced at the ceiling.
Bodies and suitcases, sounds and color continued on in a blur of motion.
She turned a slow circle, measuring distance, and continued in the direction he’d gone. They’d already lost him. She knew it in her gut, knew it from the way the anxiety racing through her system outshouted the adrenaline.
He’d slipped away like a raft pulled by a riptide out into the ocean.
Her feet kept moving, eyes scanning, but her thoughts had already rushed headlong into the mental underbrush, a fierce little four-legged creature chasing scent along a labyrinth of thorny tunnels, searching for an answer as to how this had happened in an international airport with cameras every few meters and a crackerjack team working the feeds.
Angel’s familiar voice said, “Target at gate twenty-four.”
Kara’s brain froze, and her steps hitched mid-stride.
She said, “No, that’s too far, too fast. It’s not him.”
Angel spoke over her, irritation bleeding between syllables in an unarticulated reminder that opinions—Kara’s specifically—were unwelcome and unwanted. “Target confirmed at gate twenty-four,” she said.
Kara stopped moving.
Words muddled in her head.
She could only process so much so fast, and she struggled, searching for sentences that would make Angel listen. This new data was wrong.
Frustration welled on top of frustration.
Hers was a world of facts, of cause and effect, of stray threads that tied together in ways most didn’t see. She said what she thought and meant what she said, and that earned her no favors, especially not with people like Angel, who mistook hyper-focus on accuracy and pointing out logic errors as a personal affront, as if the job had anything to do with her at all. Mission objective should matter most, ability, not personality, and priorities, not politics, but that’s never the way things worked.
She wasn’t good with people.
She should keep quiet, let Nick handle coms.
But she was on the ground. She’d been closest. She had a physical sense of time multiplied by distance, and every part of her rebelled against losing target because Angel, for whatever reasons, insisted on sending limited manpower in the wrong direction. Kara was right and knew she was right.
She said, “Gate twenty-four means he covered two hundred yards in ten seconds. Whatever you’re seeing at that gate is not our guy.”
Nick said, “Where is he, Angel?”
Kara heard frustration and, behind his frustration, doubt.
Nick would question headquarters before he questioned her.
She appreciated that about him.
He didn’t ca
re that she was missing the “be nice,” “find a friendly way to say things indirectly” chip most women seemed to be gifted at birth.
He respected her and trusted her implicitly, which was why he’d insisted on bringing her onto his team in place of others better suited for boots-on-the-ground hunt and chase and why she’d agreed to do it.
Angel said, “Hold.”
Nick said, “We’re losing the window.”
No, they’d already lost the window.
Airports were great for taking targets unaware if the targets weren’t smart enough to see you coming, but were damn shitty places for quick, quiet elimination of those who did. There were too many witnesses. Too many cameras documenting what needed to remain unseen.
If they couldn’t get him clean in the international zone, they’d have to nab him on the other side, and getting to him clean in here meant getting up close, and that wasn’t gonna happen now.
They’d have been better off if they’d arranged to have German intelligence on-site, already briefed and ready to assist before the flight landed. Even if they had missed him on deplaning, they’d have been able to grab him at any of the exit-slash-choke points, but he wasn’t that kind of target, and this wasn’t that kind of assignment. Heck, they were on the outer end of normal even for a black op.
They’d known what their target was but not who he was.
They’d had his flight number, moderate confidence he’d be in first or business class, and that was all. No name, no nationality, no description or history or prior connections. Not even age or gender. Only a critical window of opportunity and the urgency of a national security threat if he boarded without them.
They’d had a couple hours to make the flight.
Headquarters had snagged Nick a seat in first.
They’d put her and Juan on opposite ends of business, which had gotten them both relatively close on deplaning. Aaron had taken the rear in coach on the chance they were wrong on target’s position within the aircraft. The cost of last-minute tickets alone must have been more than all of them made in a month combined, but the intel had been solid. Target had been seated two rows behind Nick.
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