The wall was right there, and Stasi headquarters, in the starkest reminders.
Of all the cities they’d traveled, this was the only one that had drawn her back, but never this neighborhood.
She made another pass, searching for signs the place was no longer be Clare’s. Best as she could tell, nobody was there right now.
That was good enough.
Patience had never been her thing.
She pushed through the ornamental gate, moved the largest flowerpot, and traced a finger in the grooves between the garden stones. The dirt was compact, a lot of rain, a lot of heat and cold and passing seasons since anyone had last messed with it.
Fingers were all she had to do the work.
She’d left the suitcase in a storage locker at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof—regrettable but unavoidable. Luggage was difficult to disguise and impossible to hide, and last thing she needed was to draw attention to this door.
She’d go back for it if she had to.
But if all went the way she hoped, then even what Jack had given to her for safekeeping would become redundant, because this was Berlin, and Berlin had stuff most cities they’d lived in didn’t. Well, had in the past tense.
Seventeen years was a long, long time, even for someone like Clare.
The groove in the dirt got deeper.
The center stone loosened. With a bit of prying, she got it free.
Beneath the stone was the silicone sleeve; and inside the sleeve, the key.
Jill slipped the metal into the dead bolt.
The lock turned, and the lever gave way.
She opened the door a crack, did a quick check, caught a whiff of stale, dusty air, and knew even before she saw that this was exactly what she wanted.
She shut herself inside the dark, flipped the light, and got nothing.
Her hand fumbled while groping for glow sticks, which should have been left hanging from a hook on the wall. She found one. Grabbed it. Cracked it.
The space lit up in ambient green.
She opened the nearest cupboard in search of bulbs, pulled out a four-pack, screwed one into the naked socket, and tried again. With light came the memories, and a wave of nostalgia as confusing as it was annoying. The room was exactly as her nine-year-old self remembered, albeit half the size, about as big as the cheapest cabin on a cruise ship’s lower level, and laid out near the same, with a bunk along the left wall—the type found in tight sleeping quarters, upper level folded up, bottom doubling as a storage locker—and on the right closets and a self-contained bathroom, in which toilet, sink, and shower all occupied the same tiny molded-plastic cubicle.
Clare had quite a few of these across Europe and the Americas, not so much safe houses as safe places. She also had drops in every city they’d lived in and in quite a few they’d only passed through, but those were just boxes or lockers with money, ID, maybe a weapon if it was small enough to fit. The hideaways contained enough to lay low for a few weeks, longer if a situation was dire enough to put up with the conditions that long, as well as everything needed to completely reinvent and vanish.
Each had a carefully crafted story to go with it, and well-paid caretakers who kept watchful eyes on the lights and the owner’s keys, and who knew how to get a message through if the unexpected happened.
Jill checked the bathroom, confirmed it still had running water, left the glow stick in the sink, and dragged a hand over the bottom bunk to examine the dust trail.
It hadn’t been that long since someone had been here—a few years, if that, definitely not seventeen—Clare, most likely, since Jack tended to avoid available resources for the same reason he avoided anything that kept him tethered to Clare.
Jill didn’t have that problem.
She’d made visits to several drops over the years, mostly because pilfering the cash out of them and arguing with Clare after the fact was easier than asking for money up front. Not that Clare ever said no—Clare fucking owed her and knew it, and guilt was useful in that way—but the ordeal of getting to yes meant paying Clare a visit, and it would take a whole lot more than Clare was willing to offer to make that worth it.
Jill lifted the plywood that held the bottom mattress and latched it in place.
Beneath was the lid to a metal storage locker, secured with a five-digit combination lock—nothing that couldn’t be snipped with bolt cutters or cracked with a little bit of patience—just a basic deterrent against curiosity should someone manage to accidentally stumble in.
Jill pressed the tumblers and rolled the numbers.
The lock was sticky, but it opened.
She raised the lid and secured it to the plywood.
Soft emergency lighting lit up the interior. That was new.
The rest was a time capsule of life on the run.
On the right, watertight, fireproof cases that held passports, driver’s licenses, birth certificates, all the paperwork necessary to backstop them, and a shitload of cash in multiple currencies. The rest were firearm and munition cases, sorted by purpose and stopping power, because Clare was, if nothing else, a hypocrite.
She’d started her kids with pellet-gun target practice when they were four, gotten them friendly with knives, fuck all lethal with a crossbow, decent with a compound bow, and to where they could play convincingly with any number of martial arts weapons, but she had never allowed them to keep or carry their own.
Her goal was knowledge and skill, not dependency.
In her view, they’d never be able to predict when or where an attack would come, and they traveled too much, crossed too many borders, and carried so little that they could never know what they’d have on them when it struck.
She wanted them smart, capable of thinking on their feet, able to anticipate and avoid confrontation in the first place, but for all that talk, Clare wasn’t big on following her own advice and always had reasons for playing by different rules.
She couldn’t safely transport weapons and ammunition across the globe, so she stockpiled and stashed them instead. They were her tools, she’d said, and she couldn’t afford to have to hunt them down through old contacts when she needed them in a hurry.
At the time, it’d been just one more convenient lie in an ever-changing story.
Nuance had been wasted on the young.
Jill understood it now.
The same reasoning that had driven Clare to bury her tools propelled Jill to raid this hideaway now. She reached for the fireproof cases, pulled them free, unlocked them, rifled through documents and identification, and retrieved the passports.
Like the dust that had been disturbed in the not-so-distant past, some of the photos and expiration dates pointed to Clare having returned within the past several years.
Jill pocketed two of Clare’s older passports.
The resemblance between mother and daughter, which was unmistakable enough to have drawn out killers from Clare’s past, made swapping ID a given.
She thumbed through the cash, about two hundred thousand dollars split between euros, Swiss francs, and US currency.
She took about half the dollars and most of the euros.
She would have emptied the bank if that wouldn’t have required notifying both brother and mother that the stash had been compromised. It was a safeguard meant to ensure the others didn’t get screwed over by expecting to rely on matériel that no longer existed. No way in hell was she giving brother dearest that kind of heads-up on her movements. Same went for Clare. But fail to follow through and Clare would make it a priority to change the locks and codes on every hideaway from here to Timbuktu.
She couldn’t take it all, but half was fair game.
By taking no more than half she could leave Jack out of the notification scheme and put off letting Clare know until after this whole thing was finished.
Jill slipped a thousand euros into one of the extra envelopes made available for the purpose and slid the envelope beneath the boarded-up door that separated this room from the hou
se itself.
That was the arrangement.
The money let those on the other side know that whoever had entered belonged there. Without it, they’d alert Clare, and Clare would assume the hideaway had been burned, and it’d be a fantastic way to fuck with her if it wouldn’t also mean losing access to all of Clare’s hideaways and drops forever, and even she wasn’t “don’t give a shit” crazy enough to pick that kind of fight.
Jill moved to the closet and pulled the doors open.
She’d left the airport buxom and blond.
She was back to being a brown-haired tomboy now.
She’d traveled light, as they always had, planning to pick up what she needed as she went, but the American killers and Russian game players had run out the clock faster than expected, so she’d come for weapons, cash, and ID, but mostly she’d come for Clare’s costuming.
Appearance was a better weapon than any bullet or blade. That’s what Clare had taught, and it’s what had made her dangerous, even to her children.
She could be anyone, anything.
Sometimes it was hard to tell where the real Clare began or ended.
Sometimes it was hard to tell if even Clare knew.
“All self-betrayal comes from mannerism, habit, appearance, or speech,” she’d say. “Of those, appearance is easiest to control, and only an idiot would let that be what gave them up.”
There wasn’t much from the past worth claiming.
This, though, was hard to let go.
Jill liked the high, the power it gave to slip between persona and personality and play with perception, but there was a particular thrill in moving through enemy territory while in disguise that made everyday interaction feel like cosplay.
She lived for this shit.
Only in life-or-death stakes did she truly feel alive, and that it might be feasible to escape Clare’s shadow, and that there could possibly be such a thing as free will.
No weak-ass chemical alternative could ever come close, which made a joke out of Jack’s accusations in Frankfurt.
She’d have thought he’d have figured that out by now.
She’d been late for the flight, true. And, sure, she knew where his assumptions would travel, and hadn’t gone out of her way to dispel them, because it’d been amusing to watch him squirm. But that had all been a bonus, not the goal.
While he’d been off gathering intel on the Americans, which he wasn’t willing to share, she’d set out in search of the old-school spy guy. It’d taken her forty-eight minutes, but she’d found him, travel documents in one hand and phone to his ear, people watching over the rim of his glasses like a man absentmindedly staring at nothing in the middle of a call. His beard was gone. His jacket was a different color. He had more hair.
Unlike the Americans, he’d had nobody in his ear.
She had been certain by the end that he was really alone and relying entirely on tradecraft, and had become convinced that he was indeed male. His age had been impossible to pin down, but she’d gotten close enough to hear him speak, which had confirmed he was Russian.
She’d stuck with him until he’d boarded a flight for Vienna.
More challenging had been getting the flight manifest.
That list of names had almost caused her to miss her own boarding, but she had it with her. Subtract the women, and subtract those so clearly foreign or unique that no self-respecting spy would dare travel on them, and she had twenty-eight ways to go hunting in Moscow. Nine, if only the Slavic ones mattered.
She’d have given the information to Jack if he hadn’t been such an asshole.
No. That wasn’t true.
He had his secrets, she had hers.
She took two wigs off the shelf, one as replacement for what she’d left in the suitcase at the station, the second for variety. And she perused the hangers, pulled out pieces that she recognized and others that were new, and held them close, sniffing the age and dust. The smell would be a problem if getting in close for a surprise strike became a thing. She’d have to deal with that in its own time.
She opened drawers, sorted through random accessories and added a few select pieces to the growing pile, and then turned to the bags and suitcases. There were two wheeled carry-ons where there should have been three, a guitar case with a guitar shell inside, and an accordion case with the false accordion missing. They’d never had the real things while growing up.
Clare was a classically trained violist.
They knew that because she’d told them, and believed it because Raymond Chance had confirmed it, and they trusted that his stories were real, but Clare couldn’t be bothered to find out if her kids had an interest in music, and in all those years they’d never once heard her play. Instruments were impractical and learning required practice, and practice made noise, and unless they were looking at a harmonica or something of equal size, they weren’t about to carry a thing from city to city as she dragged them across the planet. But if one needed to move an arsenal from one place to the next, particularly if one was a young teen, hopping on a bike and wheeling across town with a guitar case on one’s back was an inconspicuous way to do it.
Jill pulled a battered duffel bag off the top shelf and dragged it toward the guns and ammunition. Where she was going, a guitar case would just get in the way.
She opened the firearms cases, studied their contents, reached for the Blaser Long Range Tactical, and paused. It was a German sniper rifle used by armed forces, counterterrorist operations, and law enforcement across Europe and Asia.
It belonged to Clare.
Taking money and clothes and ID was one thing.
Removing firearms was another.
You didn’t touch Clare’s guns except in an emergency.
And this wasn’t an emergency. Not justifiably. Not yet.
But if she didn’t take the weapons, there’d damn sure be an emergency, and the only way she wouldn’t get them back in place before Clare realized they were missing was if there was an emergency. Even Clare couldn’t argue with that logic.
Jack would argue. That’s why Jack didn’t need to know.
She took two pieces.
The Blaser for precision work.
A Glock 23 for close range.
More would only slow her down.
That was the thing about firearms in movies and news stories that had always baffled her, the way a trunkful of guns was supposed to show a well-armed team, and how nutjobs hauled around suitcases filled with them. Twenty firearms were nothing but twenty clubs if you didn’t have the ammunition to use them.
Ammunition was heavy.
Guns were heavy and bulky.
She’d take two good working pieces and as much ammunition as she could carry over a dozen different weapons any day. She pulled out a box of bullets and eight spare magazines, set them on the floor, and sat beside them.
Rendezvous was set for nine in the morning, and Jack planned to walk right into a potential trap without any defense. He made her crazy at times, crazy enough to want to choke him out, crazy enough to want to hurt him—fuck, she’d hurt him now if she had half a chance—but hell if she was going to stand by while someone tried to kill him.
She might be an asshole, but she was his asshole.
She picked up the first magazine and started loading.
He wanted her as an observer? Fine, these were her terms.
If this were any other scenario, she’d trust he knew what he was doing. She’d argue with him just to be an irritating dick, but she’d still trust him.
But this wasn’t like other times.
For the first time since they were kids he truly wanted and needed something for his own reasons, reasons beyond survival or a need to win, almost as if down in his murky center, where the deep, dark thoughts were buried, a lying voice kept telling him that tracking down the past could change what had happened. He wanted it so badly, he was blind to the way it was changing him, making him dumber.
The Russians, the A
mericans, they were peripheral problems.
Jack losing his grip on reality was the real nightmare.
CHAPTER 11
Alexanderplatz
Mitte, Berlin, Germany
KARA
THE ROOM FADED INTO A DARK, COOL, QUIET BACKGROUND, AND THE information on the screen became everything. The little ratter tugged her along, leading her down into the underbrush trails, while the rest of her sat cross-legged on the bed in front of the laptop.
Another hotel, another round of hurry up and wait.
The guys were out, all three of them, securing equipment headquarters had shipped in. Not that they all needed to be out. But this time the war room had booked them four to a single room, beds arranged along the walls almost hostel-like, and clearing the guys out had been Nick’s way of giving her space to work.
She had a few hours, maybe, before they returned.
She was racing the clock.
They were all racing the clock.
The war room had located target and lost him again.
Angel had called, confirming he was en route to Berlin—no small consolation considering Nick, Juan, and Aaron had wasted an hour hunting for him in the hotel—and headquarters had drawn on the Berlin station to mobilize a surveillance unit to the terminal. They’d managed to get an officer on board before the passengers deplaned, but hadn’t been able to confirm target arrival.
So either the war room was wrong about target boarding that flight or the Berlin operatives had missed him. She was willing to let time bear that one out.
Her questions went a different direction.
She returned to the Frankfurt Airport footage, all the way back to when she’d first realized they were dealing with something different, and searched the cameras at gate twenty-four for whatever had made Angel so certain, she’d wantonly wasted their time and squandered their resources.
She found the answer in a bright patch of white.
Liars' Legacy Page 8
