Liars' Legacy

by Taylor Stevens

  “Never exactly like that.”

  “Similar?”

  “It’s like Cold War tradecraft mixed with stage magic.”

  He said, “You don’t pull off a stunt like that without a lot of practice.”

  “Nope. But this isn’t what I called you for.”

  “There’s more?”

  She shut down half the tabs and started over with the others, tracing time stamps for Nick the way she’d done on her own. She showed him how their target had followed her into passport control and out of the terminal, and how he had loitered within throwing distance of the crew as they gathered, and the way he’d trailed them to the hotel, and then she played the footage from the lobby cameras that had made her reach for the phone.

  Nick sucked in air. “He still in the building?”

  “Hard to tell. He hasn’t left the way he came, but last time stamp I’ve got on him is from over an hour ago, and the cameras aren’t mapped, so I haven’t been able to locate all the exits yet.”

  “What’s the war room got on it?”

  She dragged her gaze from the screen to his face and let silence do the talking.

  “Goddammit,” he said.

  He swung his feet to the floor. “See if you can get a trace on him, figure out if he’s still in the building and, if not, what exit he took and when.”

  She said, “Nick.”

  He said, “Yeah, I know. Just do what you can.”

  “Nick.”

  He stopped. “Look, due diligence, okay? If you can’t ping him within the next few minutes, package it. This is their fuckup. They need to fix it.”

  She clicked over to the array of camera feeds.

  If target was still in the hotel, then they had a very narrow window of opportunity to find him, and she didn’t have the speed, access, or manpower to make meaningful use of that time. But by the time she got it to the war room, he might already be gone.

  Nick headed toward the door, stopped, and said, “Hey.”

  She glanced up.

  “You did good work,” he said. “Make sure your name’s attached.”

  Her fingers paused. Few people realized how hard it was to be recognized for the work she did. Where the best of them wouldn’t try to steal credit, Nick went out of his way to ensure bias didn’t mistakenly misappropriate to him what belonged to her. That he was still conscious of it while running under pressure made her love him that much more, but Liv Wilson would be among the first to get anything she sent, and there was always a chance someone higher up the food chain would see it, and to anyone who truly looked—or cared—the details highlighted war-room incompetence, or worse.

  Both made Liv look bad, and Liv already despised her.

  The team didn’t need that kind of poison.

  She said, “Maybe not this time.”

  Nick understood. He might not agree, but he understood.

  He circled a finger and to Juan said, “Get your gear. Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 5

  JACK

  THE AISLE STRETCHED INTO FOREVER, ROW AFTER ROW OF HEADS AND seatbacks beneath recessed lights, passenger after passenger boarded and seated but no sign at all of the passenger. She should have been here first. That was the plan. But three minutes to scheduled departure and she was God only knew where, while he was stuck in this metal tube, with no way to make contact and no line of sight.

  He shoved earbuds into his ears and cranked up the volume.

  A cabin attendant moved down the aisle, shutting luggage compartments.

  Inside his head, information blocks shifted and reordered.

  She was in the airport, or at least she had been when his flight out of Dallas had deplaned, watching for him and watching for those who watched him and watching for those who watched for whoever else might be watching for him. He’d detoured for the flight board and then for coffee, giving her time, and she’d leapfrogged to where he had a line of sight, communicated what she’d observed, and slipped away.

  She’d had one job, just one simple job.

  All she’d needed to do after was lay low and board this flight.

  That she was missing now said either she’d been grabbed or this was her deliberately taunting him. The first worried him a whole lot less than the second.

  God help any team that tried to grab her.

  God help him if they hadn’t.

  She was the most capable person he knew, at the top of the game when the game was in play—so long as the game was in play—but lulls and in-between silences led to situations like this, and she’d had five hours.

  He glanced at the time.

  Two minutes past scheduled departure and the doors were still open.

  Flight attendants at the front turned plastic smiles toward the Jet bridge.

  A young couple boarded, and after them a woman, followed by an older gentleman, and then she materialized in boyfriend jeans and jacket, wearing sunglasses atop short-cropped hair and looking nothing like the middle-aged matron who’d been waiting for his Dallas flight, and he knew just what she’d done.

  Her lanky body entered the space between the first-class seats.

  He watched her make that long walk, as if watching a reflection in the mirror.

  He knew her voice, her gait, her mannerisms, knew her many iterations and could imitate them at will. He was taller by two inches, and her features were softer by millimeters, but they were closer to true doppelgängers than fraternal twins had any right to be, similarities and nodal points so evenly matched that, with a few subtle tweaks, even facial recognition often pegged them for the same person.

  She caught his eye and winked, teasing and testing his temperament.

  He stared through her as though he hadn’t seen it happen.

  The captain’s voice came over the intercom.

  Flight attendants moved through the cabin in preparation for departure.

  She reached his row, glanced at the empty space beside him, and swung into the open seat across the aisle. Neither spot was hers—not on the pass she’d boarded with anyway—but they’d paid for enough tickets under enough identities to guarantee proximity without drawing the attention of database hunters who might be looking for exactly this kind of connection. That was the difference between buying tickets and using them, and the benefit of flying where carriers didn’t overbook to the same degree as in the United States. Any name would do for a reservation if you were willing to burn the cash and there weren’t thirty people on standby waiting for the first open seat.

  Jack removed the earbuds.

  She shoved her bag down by her feet and said, “Hey.”

  Hey, as if she was right on time, playing this according to plan.

  Hey, as if she hadn’t sought out a tight connecting flight, become part of the group rushing to make the next leg, and nearly missed this one in the process.

  Hey, because hers had been a tri-purposed strategy that kept her invisible to watching eyes while tormenting him to the last minute while leaving him no way to confront her about the second, because the first was in itself perfect.

  He said, “You got tagged?”

  She searched for the seat-belt ends. “Just lost track of time.”

  The lie exploded inside his head.

  If she’d truly lost track of time, she’d have never admitted to it. And if there’d been a legitimate reason for the delay, it’d have cost her nothing to give it. She lied when there was no need to lie, lied because she knew he’d know it as a lie.

  This was the game she played.

  This was how she maintained control.

  He leaned back, shut his eyes, and blocked her out.

  Voice low, she said, “Those weren’t Russians, John.”

  Her words were a question, not a statement, but he was in no mood to share his mental toys. He pushed the first earbud back into place.

  She jabbed his arm. He refused to look.

  She punched him harder, and knowing she’d keep it up even if that mea
nt drawing attention until she sabotaged this whole thing, he turned and glared.

  Her hands uttered words her mouth left silent.

  What the fuck?

  His said, Agreed. They weren’t Russians.

  The cabin jolted, and the plane began to move.

  Her hands demanded explanation.

  Training and old grudges split him down the middle.

  Withholding what he knew could get either one of them killed, but cooperation was a two-way street that she’d just blown up.

  His said, Later.

  Tell me now.

  That was the thing, though. Tell her what exactly?

  They’d expected he’d be shadowed the moment he showed up on radar.

  His ticket had been bought and paid for by a man they knew only over the phone. He’d claimed to speak for Dmitry Vasiliev, a person who didn’t technically exist—ghost of a former KGB officer, present-day enigma, father they’d never met—and they’d have been a disgrace to the blood running through their veins if they’d accepted the invitation at face value. But that was obvious, and the obvious was easy, and easy made for carelessness and created blindness to what the obvious obfuscated.

  It was never the trap you could see that snared you.

  That was Clare 101.

  To see the obfuscated, they’d need an unknown observer, and so Jill had flown out a day early to get that observer’s vantage, and he’d been the lure, traveling on the ticket Dmitry’s guy had sent, a ticket purchased in a name that, until last week, they’d believed only they and Clare had known. So it wasn’t that he’d drawn attention that had come as a surprise, it was whom he’d drawn attention from, and what she really wanted to know was why the US government had sent a kill team after him.

  He’d like to have had that answer for himself.

  She said, “Someone went through a lot of trouble to put that team on your flight, John, but I just don’t get it. Those guys were slow to adapt, got panicky over losing visual, and moved like they were wading through knee-deep mud. The woman has your level of pain-in-the-ass potential, but other than that they didn’t exactly send their best, so why bother? Some sort of dry run? A setup for distraction?”

  Jack weighed his response.

  By any measure they should have had to work harder to shake what was, he assumed, a highly trained operative team. But that didn’t mean the killers were second rate or lacked skills, it meant their own frames of reference were skewed. Compared to what Clare had thrown at them, anything else would be easy. That had been the whole point of their insane childhoods—day after week after month trapped inside her paranoid nightmare of psych-outs and blindsiding tests—never knowing what would come at them or when, because her whole purpose in life was to prepare them for a war she saw coming but that never arrived.

  “Just their first taste of what they’re chasing,” he said. “Took them by surprise, is all. It’s going to get harder.”

  Jill gave him a heavy dose of side-eye. “Why would anyone come after us in the first place if they didn’t already know what they were chasing?”

  He didn’t have an answer for that, either.

  “I marked four,” she said. “How many you think we missed?”

  He shrugged in noncommittal nonanswer.

  There was no we here. He knew exactly how many operatives had followed him off that flight, and he also knew they weren’t the only ones who’d come looking. There’d been another spotter in the waiting area—he’d made the guy right about the time he’d caught sight of Jill—and where there was one, there’d be others. Priorities had forced him to keep moving and trust that she’d find what needed finding and let him know the rest later.

  The whole truth required quid pro quo, and she was holding out.

  The aircraft started forward under its own power, and the long taxi to the runway began. Tarmac and grassy areas and position markings filled the windows. He said, “When were you planning to tell me about the Russians?”

  The corners of her lips twitched in that way they always did when she realized she’d overplayed her hand. “Not Russians,” she said. “Russian. Singular.”

  His brain measured her assessment against a history of half-truths and lies.

  “Nobody sends one-man surveillance,” he said. “Not for people like us.”

  Her tone caught a corner and edged toward offense. She said, “Well, if he did have partners, they were better than anything Clare’s thrown our way, because I sure as hell didn’t make them.”

  “Clearly.”

  She sniffed in disdain. “A little credit, dickface. If I was gonna lie about it, I’d offer you something plausible.”

  Jack pinched the bridge of his nose.

  That in itself was a lie, but she was right about the Russian, not that he believed her, per se, but her version confirmed what he’d seen for himself, even if he still questioned what he’d seen exactly. The spotter had been aware of him—recognized him—and hadn’t tried to hide it, and he’d seemed to be aware of the kill team and seemed to be there simply to observe.

  Jack said, “The guy knew I was being hunted?”

  She leaned back with a wistful exhale. “Yeah. He saw it all. He was good, old school. Like Clare in the body of a sixty-something-year-old man.”

  Jack let the description settle.

  Disguise was personal, not some generic Halloween costume that anyone could pull on and off at will. Age, body structure, physical agility created constraints, and those constraints made it a whole lot easier to pass off a woman in her late fifties as a male of similar age than to give a sixty-year-old man the swagger of a teenage gang-banger.

  Jill was too smart, had too much of Clare in her, to assume what she saw was anything other than what she was meant to see, which was why she hadn’t identified the spotter by age or gender and had instead identified the tradecraft.

  The tradecraft was an issue.

  He said, “You sure it wasn’t Clare?”

  “Thought crossed my mind more than once, but no, wasn’t her.” She leaned into the aisle. “He knew who I was, knew I’d made him, and never once tried to evade. If anything, he was amused by the whole thing, like we were both in on a private joke.”

  “Amused,” Jack said. “By watching killers try to take out your brother.”

  “Ohhh, your little girl feelings are hurt.”

  “No, my big girl feelings are appalled.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, you were fine—you knew it, he knew it, I knew it—and now you’re missing the point. Forget about the esta-dounidense for a minute and try explaining that Russian super-tradecraft spy guy, singular.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Such a drama queen.”

  He waved her off.

  “Think he was Dmitry’s guy who bought the tickets?”

  Her fingers punctuated Dmitry with air quotes, but the question still assumed there even was a Dmitry in the first place—that the KGB agent who’d donned the persona of Dmitry Vasiliev twenty-seven years ago was who’d extended the meet-and-greet invitation that had brought them here—and not someone else using his name and familial connection.

  He said, “Anyone else would have tried to put a bullet in your back, the same way the Americans tried to put one in mine.”

  Voice singsong and teasing, she said, “Clare would beg to differ.”

  As if two weeks ago they hadn’t both valued Clare’s opinion somewhere between dementia and psychosis. But that had been before mercenaries had stormed her house and she’d been abducted, and assassins had come after the two of them, and overnight a lying, paranoid, delusional narcissist had morphed into an information repository critical to survival. Even Clare hadn’t known who’d put the hit out on her. Or them.

  “The past doesn’t forget,” she’d said. “I had a lot of time to make a lot of enemies, and there’s not one among them who wouldn’t kill you to get to me. The Broker, knowing who’d pay most for that information, is at the head of the line
.”

  Clare had left them to cut off that head.

  She’d promised to let them know if she made it out alive, but promises for her were as situational as her ethics. They hadn’t heard from her—might never hear from her—because Clare did what Clare wanted, when she wanted, for reasons only she understood, and none of that changed the baseline. The world’s underbelly now knew she had children, and knew where those children had last been seen.

  The possibilities as to who might be interested in their movements were endless, reliable information on those movements was valuable, and just because someone didn’t want to kill them here and now didn’t mean they weren’t planning to kill them later.

  He didn’t have the energy to articulate all that, so he said nothing.

  Jill said, “Fine, I’ll try one for size. We get a call from someone claiming to be Dmitry. You fly on the ticket he bought, and somehow coincidentally there’s an American hit squad on that same flight. My bet is that the spotter was there to confirm the pieces were falling into place. You only need a single pair of eyes for that.”

  Jack rolled his eyes.

  She said, “What?”

  He said, “The Russian was amused, like you were both in on the same joke.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And he knew I had killers at my back.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t call in a hit squad for shits and giggles, and a joke is only an inside joke if everyone in on it is amused by the same thing, so either he didn’t want me dead or you did. Which was it?”

  The aircraft slowed and turned. She said, “He knew the Americans were outclassed. We both did. That’s what made it funny.”

  Jack held up a finger.

  He needed her to stop talking.

  In his head he saw the hit squad, saw their picket pattern in the airport like beacons inside a cubed map. It would have made better logistical and strategic sense for them to have picked up the trail in Frankfurt than to fly a four-person crew with him across the Atlantic with no ground support on the receiving end. But to get ahead of him like that, they’d have had to have had his itinerary in advance or known who they were looking for ahead of time. They hadn’t.