Liars' Legacy

by Taylor Stevens

  Her fingers froze.

  Thoughts scattered, and anger rose.

  There, in the boarding area, exactly where Angel had directed Nick, was a passenger wearing a hat identical to the one target had worn right before he’d vanished. Nick wouldn’t have seen the light in person, just as she hadn’t seen it on the concourse. But Angel, watching through the screen, most certainly had.

  Kara could see how, in the fog of war, two individuals with identical markings could appear the same on-screen and how, without an accurate sense of on-the-ground distance, it would have been easy to get confused. That the war room had stumbled wasn’t worth the anger, but that they’d gotten back into the race without ever allowing the team on the ground to account for the mistake most certainly was.

  Their target had had an accomplice.

  That factored into everything.

  A person, even the wrong person, didn’t simply get up from their seat, walk into the restroom, and vanish, and Nick had been right there.

  He’d needed to know about it while it was happening.

  Instead the war room had let him walk away.

  If she hadn’t taken to analyzing footage, they still wouldn’t know target had followed them to their hotel, and now there was this.

  These were failures so egregious, they felt deliberate.

  Kara tapped the trackpad and watched the hat in half time. The accomplice waited until Nick had gone, then entered the men’s toilet and never emerged.

  She ran the segment through gait analysis, got nothing, so searched the manual way, tracking every single body that had exited that door within a thirty-minute time frame—forty-two men in all—and then she traced every single one, jotting notes and time stamps, locations and interactions, until each had left the airport or boarded a new flight. The work was tedious and consuming and failed to point fingers.

  But four of the men had boarded flights to Berlin, so camera feeds for those departures came next, and on the third, recognition hammered through her chest, and for the second time in as many hours, she sat back and stared.

  This was the flight headquarters had flagged.

  While she and her team had been preoccupied, hunting for target in their hotel, he’d walked back to the terminal, through security, and boarded that flight.

  The realization felt personal, in the way feeling stupid always felt personal, but also intriguing. The accomplice had indirectly led her to where the war room had already gone, but the desk jockeys would have followed a different path to get there.

  She went back to the file notes, looking for it, found the connection in a gait match that linked target on the concourse, before he’d disappeared, to an unknown individual at the Berlin flight departure gate. The hit had come after the plane was already in the air, which was why they’d called up the Berlin station.

  She’d have done the same if the decision had been hers.

  But that’s all they’d had, just that flash of a match and no identity to go with it. The war room had scraped photos, birth dates, places of birth—addresses when available—off each travel document linked to that Berlin manifest and had dumped them into a mix-and-match search through national and international driver’s licenses, identity cards, mug shots, social media profiles, cellular records, insurance providers, Internet providers, utility companies, hotel chains, credit card companies, marketing aggregators, and law-enforcement databases. Hits had come back in the thousands. Those required human interaction. The desk jockeys would have to follow each lead, even the most absurd, in a laborious process of elimination. They’d find him, eventually.

  Nobody was truly invisible.

  People who did disappear didn’t get there through lack of data but rather because of low prioritization, and the resources required to find the connections.

  The data itself was always there.

  Commercial surveillance through banking, telecommunications, and travel alone was such an integrated part of life that, but for the most disenfranchised, it couldn’t be avoided. Staying off radar wasn’t something a person did for six months out of the year. It was a fully committed disconnected lifestyle, in which a single sloppy move last month was all it took for the truly persistent to find you today.

  The average person couldn’t do it.

  The average professional couldn’t do it.

  This guy might be good, but no one anywhere was that good. Friends, family, habits, patterns, he had them, and the war room would find them. What jumped at her now wasn’t what the queries were pulling, but what was missing.

  Nowhere in any of this did anything point to the accomplice.

  And also, nowhere was there an obvious link to Emilia Flynn.

  Kara clicked over from cameras to the internal data system.

  She stopped.

  There was a fine line between watching out for her team and the accusations of misuse of authority that could arise because of it. But combine a query on Emilia with the Emilia-and-Nick rumors, add in the Kara-and-Nick rumors, and doing this would mean handing Liv Wilson a knife and asking her to stab her whole team in the back with it. She’d have to stick to looking in places she’d already been.

  She went back to the cameras instead, found Emilia at the taxi stand, and worked a reverse search through the feeds, tracing a backward journey through the airport, right into the Jetway of their own flight out of Dallas.

  She should have been surprised. Wasn’t. She searched for context.

  Emilia had deplaned late, had seemed oblivious to their target’s existence, and whatever had put that look of death on her had happened before arrival, because the distress was already obvious from her first step into the terminal.

  Kara shifted to stretch, looked up into Nick’s face, and yelped.

  She hadn’t heard or seen him come in.

  Had no idea how long he’d been watching her.

  He raised his eyebrows and gave her that look, the one offering pity while also laughing at the way she lost sense of time or place.

  Aaron and Juan trooped in, carrying a plastic locker.

  She pulled the buds out of her ears.

  Nick nudged the bed with his knee, said, “You get something?”

  She glanced toward the door.

  The pieces she’d found made lies out of what the war room had given them, but she didn’t have enough yet to know what truth might look like, and these weren’t things she could discuss in front of the others.

  Nick motioned her up and out.

  Kara shut the laptop and carried it toward the door. Behind her, Aaron made a kissy noise, just loud enough that she wasn’t sure she’d heard right.

  But Nick had heard it, too. He stopped short, doubled back and, voice low, almost a whisper, said, “Do that again, you’ll be using those lips for teeth.”

  Kara, one foot over the threshold, froze.

  Juan, arm buried elbow deep in the locker, stopped moving.

  Nick didn’t anger easily, and a quiet Nick was a terrifying Nick.

  Aaron put both hands up, defensive, apologetic.

  Nick turned without a word, and Kara followed him down the hallway, toward the stairwell, conflicted, concerned. Belittling behavior like Aaron’s was everywhere. She’d had a lifetime to grow inured to it. More here wouldn’t make much difference to her, but a rift between Nick and his men certainly would, and to a kid like Aaron, what had just happened wasn’t a superior quashing insubordination and disrespect so much as white knighting. That would make things worse.

  Nick reached the stairwell. He said, “What’s the damage?”

  It took a second to switch from no good options to no good way to put this.

  Her mouth opened. Words were slow in coming.

  She said, “Did you know Emilia was in Frankfurt this morning?”

  Nick’s head tipped right. “Emilia Flynn, Emilia?” he said.

  “Yeah. On our flight out of Dallas.”

  “Emilia Flynn?”

  “Yes, Nick. That
Emilia. On our flight.”

  If they were different people, Emilia might make for a touchy conversation, but things weren’t like that between them.

  He said, “And you know she was on our flight because . . . ?”

  “Because I saw her outside the terminal—stared right at her while she was getting into a taxi—and because she was in footage with deplaning passengers.”

  “Emilia alone or Emilia plus team?”

  “She got into the taxi alone, but Daniel Cho and Peyton What’s-his-name were on the flight. There might be someone else. Did you know?”

  “No.”

  Kara said, “Clues to why she was there?”

  “I assume she had a target of her own.”

  “On the same flight?”

  Nick let out a loud frustrated exhale.

  He knew exactly where she was going with this.

  Frankfurt as major gateway into Europe was a logical transit hub, but two sandboxed liquidation teams in such close proximity created a high risk of right-hand, left-hand confusion. If Emilia and crew had been in pursuit of a target that wasn’t on that flight, headquarters would have never booked them on it. But Emilia had been there, which meant there’d been a second target on board, or it meant more than one tactical team pursuing the same target.

  Both scenarios created a shit storm of potential problems.

  He said, “You didn’t want me out here to ask about Emilia.”

  “I did,” Kara said. “But there’s more.”

  She sat on the floor, opened the laptop.

  She didn’t like making statements without a clear set of facts to back her up, and right now she was about to point fingers in the war room’s direction while doing just that. “You need to see this to understand,” she said.

  Nick slid down the wall and sat beside her.

  She said, “You remember the feeds earlier today, when target did that disappearing act?” She tabbed the window, zoomed in to enhance the hat.

  She outlined its shape and highlighted the panel seams.

  “That’s him on the concourse,” she said. “Now follow this. Angel sent you to gate twenty-four, and I couldn’t figure that out. Too much distance in too little time, but she was convinced, confirmed it twice.”

  Kara flipped the feeds and enhanced the frame.

  “Gate twenty-four,” she said. “Same attention-grabbing hat.”

  Nick leaned in toward the screen. A low growl rose from his throat.

  Earnestness seeped into her voice. “He has an accomplice, Nick, someone just as skilled as he is, and while we were busy hunting for him in our hotel, they both boarded that flight for Berlin.”

  He inched his shoulder away from hers and looked her in the face.

  She said, “It gets even better.”

  She opened a new window and set both feeds running simultaneously. “The accomplice heads for gate twenty-four and sits there until—watch the time sequencing—about a minute before our target vanishes, then the accomplice flips on the light. The coordination is so on cue, it’s impossible for it to be coincidental. I keep asking myself how they did it. How do you get that level of precision without communication? And that’s not even the point. The point was misdirection, right? Misdirection for the cameras, Nick. To do this, they knew they were under . . . they were under, were under sur-surveillance before we left Dallas. This isn’t some, some, something you plan and coordinate from twenty-eight thousand feet. And that’s not even, not even, that’s . . . Look, that’s only half, be-because the real point . . .”

  She stopped. There were too many threads.

  She could see them as a matrix in her head, understood the way they intersected, but her words were choking from the same damn speech disfluencies that always rose when she got animated or agitated, the ones that had made it nigh impossible to communicate complex concepts for the first half of her life and left silence as her safest option, which had only reinforced the accepted belief that the poorest kid in a poor rural school really was a fucking moron. Panic screeched inside her head, wings beating in a wild attempt to escape pain and shame and humiliation.

  Nick waited, patient, nonjudgmental, understanding.

  He said, “Hey. It’s okay. This is me you’re talking to, right?”

  She took a long, deep breath to calm the mental chaos, forced herself to think through to the end, and came back with what she’d been aiming to communicate from the beginning. “The misdirection wasn’t for us on the ground,” she said. “Angel caught that eventually, but right there in that realization, she had to have also realized that for misdirection to work, there needed to be a second person. You see it. I see it. She had to have seen it. She knew before we did, but never told us.” Kara waited and then continued. “If we’d known, Nick, if we’d known from the beginning that there were two of them, if we’d known what we were looking for, we’d have been able to get ahead of them.”

  Nick didn’t engage the accusation. He said, “All right, so our new baseline is target plus accomplice. What do you have on accomplice?”

  “As far as I can tell—and this is just preliminary—accomplice wasn’t on our Dallas flight. I’ve followed the time stamps forward from Dallas–Frankfurt and backward from Frankfurt–Berlin, and the only trace I have is at a restaurant about fifteen minutes before accomplice heads to gate twenty-four. With enough time and energy, we might be able to get a hit on when and from where. But in an airport this crowded, with thousands of people arriving in any given hour, multiplied by an unknown number of identity changes, multiplied again by the way these guys are able to manipulate perception and toy with the cameras, I don’t have the resources to do it.”

  “Send it all to headquarters.”

  “They might already have it and have chosen not to share.”

  “That’s their prerogative,” he said. “Send it anyway. They’ll know we know.”

  Nick started up off the floor.

  Kara said, “There’s something you need to consider.”

  He let himself back down.

  She relaxed her fingers and rested them against the keyboard. She said, “When we got called up, all we had on target was a flight number, which came in last minute and left us rushing to make that departure. Then we got a seat number, which gave us passport data and, from there, name, photo, whatever. And what that means is, we knew target’s seat number before we knew who was in the seat. You follow?”

  “Not yet, but I’m sure I will. Keep going.”

  “We start out looking for just one guy, who turns into two. Headquarters knows but doesn’t tell us. Emilia’s team happens to be on our flight, which headquarters also knows and also fails to mention, and all this raises questions about what else they know and aren’t telling. Protocol is protocol, and reasons are reasons. I’m sure it’s all legit, but we got lucky in Frankfurt, Nick. We were sitting in a trap, and he left us there. We might not be as fortunate next time.”

  Nick’s expression clouded. He said, “What are you really getting at?”

  “I can’t do my job unless I’m given all the data,” she said. “Maybe, you know, maybe there are things you’re aware of that you can’t mention, and if that’s the case, I respect it, but I really need to know if there’s something going on with this op that’s above my paygrade.”

  He sat silent for a beat and said, “Everything I know, you know. It’s always been that way, Kara, and always will.”

  She accepted his words at face value. If he, the one person she truly trusted, was lying, there was no point to anything else. “Okay,” she said.

  He said, “I agree, there’s a whole lot here that doesn’t add up. But just because it doesn’t fit the official narrative doesn’t mean the alternative you’re hinting at is accurate. This thing with Emilia doesn’t have to be one or the other. It could be something else entirely. And Angel might have held back on letting us know about an accomplice because she wanted more answers herself first.”

  Kara shifted a
nd eyeballed him.

  She said, “Really, Nick? That’s what you’re going with?”

  “Look, I’m just saying there are always alternative explanations—you know that better than anyone—so let me ask around, put out some feelers, see what comes back before you go all baby bulldog on it, okay?”

  The baby bulldog forced a hint of a smile.

  It was a shortcut back to the first time Nick had jumped on her for latching onto an issue and refusing to drop it. He’d been angry and she’d hated that, but she had been right and had refused to concede.

  He’d turned away from her, face red and fists clenched. “You get your teeth into something and you just can’t stop until you shake the thing to fucking death,” he’d said. “How about you learn some fucking tact.”

  Tact would never be her strong suit.

  He knew it, she knew it, and this was his way of reminding her that there were ways to get questions like these answered, but they’d be better off if she wasn’t the one asking about them. “You do what you do,” he said. “Dig where you dig, and find what you find. That’s what you’re good at. But for now everything this side of the conversation stays between you and me. Clear?”

  CHAPTER 12

  Friedenau

  Berlin, Germany

  JILL

  A WARENESS KICKED IN WITH THE SOFT BELL OF AN ALARM, TELLING her the time to move had come. She dropped a foot to the floor and groaned upright. Her eyes burned. She had cotton for brains. Four hours was just enough to make her regret doing the responsible thing and wish she’d forgone sleep altogether.

  She stretched chin toward toes and arms over her head.

  Blood flowed where it mattered.

  She dressed in the dark, finding her way into a black bodysuit that, with the right layers, could pass for real clothes when daylight came.

  She had a few pieces to work with tonight.

  She’d get the rest of what she needed along the way, because the only way to avoid the mark of being an outsider was to buy local, and besides, most of Clare’s stuff was old. She slid another envelope with another thousand euros beneath the boarded-up door, bookending her stay for those on the other side, them strapped on her bag of borrowed treasures, and stepped out into the deep, dark cold. Six kilometers stood between her and the rendezvous point, a two-hour walk if she didn’t hurry. She locked the front and reburied the key and followed shadows along mostly empty streets and piss-fragrant underground walkways.