Liars' Legacy

by Taylor Stevens

  The need for sleep faded.

  Anticipation took its place.

  The early morning dark, when the straitlaced and normies slept, and the freaks and artists and addicts roamed, and the raves and parties were just getting started, these were the hours in which she truly came alive. Berghain was where she would have been, high on music and ecstasy, if this purer rush hadn’t come to fill that restless space.

  The club was inside a former power plant in the middle of an industrial old East Berlin estate. People traveled the world in order to try to get in. Rich people, cool people, famous people, beautiful people, turned away by tatted and pierced doormen who could smell fake and taste fear. She’d never been denied.

  Berlin, Berghain, these were places she belonged, but she belonged to the thrill of a life-or-death hunt more, and so she strode on to meet it.

  An hour and fifty brought her to the edge of Savignyplatz. In theory, the place was a good place for the suspicious to meet. It was easy to find, had plenty of foot traffic, and offered multiple access points. But this time of year, with leaves mostly fallen, a tightly defined space surrounded by multistory buildings was a literal canyon gorge. Any kid who’d watched any old Western knew what that led to, and her idiot savant brother planned to set up camp down there anyway.

  The part of her that loved him hoped for the small but existing chance that this whole thing with Dmitry was true, that the real Dmitry was alive and had been searching for his children and genuinely wanted to get to know them.

  The rest of her preferred just about any other possibility.

  It was easy for Jack, the Golden Son, to want this.

  It was easier for her to not.

  She reached the northwest corner.

  Hook pick and torsion wrench let her inside the building, and she took the stairs up until she reached the ladder, and followed the rungs through an access hatch to a rooftop bathed in a half-moon glow that came and went with the clouds.

  She shoved a shim between hatch and rim to ensure egress stayed open, unloaded equipment within the shelter of the rooftop wall, used a drain gap as the opening through which she minimized her heat signature to nearly nothing, and worked a slow, tight grid up the face of each park-fronting building.

  If there were others, they’d come ahead of the rendezvous, just as she had.

  If there were others, they’d be searching, just as she was.

  She couldn’t know when, couldn’t know where.

  Focus pulled her into a Zen trance state: she and the rifle, she and the scope, probing rooftops and windows and doorways and shadows, just as she had in the past, hunting for threat, hunting to win. A matte Mylar blanket kept her warm.

  She maxed out the drain-gap range, crawled to the next, and started again.

  When she reached the end, she’d start over.

  This would be her routine until the sun rose.

  Movement on a fourth-story balcony caught her eye.

  She broke from the pattern, searching for what training and natural sight had alerted her to. Curtains and shutters blocked normal sight.

  Glass, if no one was touching it, did well enough at blocking heat.

  The thermal scope let her peek between the overlap.

  She found the heat signature on the floor, in a narrow gap between balcony doors, and with that find, euphoria rushed in. What she saw here was too elongated for a dog or cat, looked as close to a prone sniper as she’d probably ever get, but she had no way to know if the body was Russian or American or civilian or something else.

  She could put a bullet through that window.

  Taking the shot was easy.

  The aftermath was what had the potential to hurt.

  She’d need to get closer.

  She searched the streets and trees for signs of a trap, the way she would have had this been Clare’s doing, then dosed a few syringes for a range of bodyweights, and tossed them into a purse, together with standard kill-kit fare. She stuffed padding up her bra, pulled a blond wig over the black cap that hid her hair, tugged on a tunic blouse with enough color and frills to belie the truth of the black skin suit underneath, and pulled on a jacket, like a normal person would in these temperatures.

  She headed back down the ladder.

  Jack would try to stop her if he were there.

  He’d say what she was about to do was going to draw unnecessary attention and put her at unnecessary risk, and he’d offer her a half dozen brilliant but time-consuming and patience-zapping nonconfrontational options to solve what she’d just as soon fix with a few broken bones.

  For him, fighting was always a last resort.

  She found it a particularly useful tool as a first. Especially when the violence was dirty and unexpected. Doubly so when it came from a woman who looked the way she did—no—because it came from a woman who looked the way she looked.

  Her targets were nearly always men.

  This lifestyle seemed to draw the worst of them.

  And the one thing that she’d yet to prove wrong was the inverse relation between a man’s respect for women in general and how hard he’d be to send to his knees.

  Whatever faulty wiring induced a guy to tell a woman with twice his education and four times his brains that she’d get further in life if she was a little friendlier and smiled more, and to think he was doing her a favor, was the same faulty wiring that made a guy feel entitled to a woman’s time and attention and grow abusive when she didn’t give it, and the same faulty wiring that prompted a guy to laugh at the little lady when she told him to back off and then to tell her he liked ’em fired up and she should give it her best shot when she threatened to break his nose.

  Same candy, different flavors.

  Anyone who handicapped a person on account of double X chromosomes was also one to miss the signs that double X was about to knock them on their ass. “Hit hard, hit once,” that was her motto.

  Those kinds of guys never saw it coming, and her world was full of them.

  She slipped out the back and into the dark, stride changing, gait loosening, shape-shifting, and stepped out into the open like a party girl finding her way home after a few drinks too many, and made her way to the entryway that would lead to her quarry. She dropped a set of keys, struggled to pick them up, and fumbled them toward the keyhole. Her fingers, sheltered by a drunken body hunched for concentration, picked another lock. She made her way up with the same uncoordinated steps and reached the apartment and pounded on the door, calling out in French, “Goddammit, Anton. I came all the way from Paris to see you, and you’re going to tell me you’re not here?”

  They couldn’t shoot her.

  Not through the door, not after all the noise, and not with the neighbors, who would have taken note. Easiest way for them to resolve this would be to open up and let her in.

  She counted down those seconds in her head, digging through the purse, swearing and complaining about losing her door key, punch knife between her fingers as a just in case, and then she pounded harder, making a drunk-ass ruckus.

  Voices came through from the other side, one near, one far.

  Russian, spoken clearly enough to grasp snippets.

  “. . . Some drunk bitch . . .”

  “. . . Make the noise stop . . .”

  The door opened.

  Head low, eyes focused on legs, she placed a playful, drunken hand on the guy’s chest and, before he had a chance to speak, pushed past him into the apartment. She tossed her jacket on the couch as if she belonged there, and kept right on going for the kitchen, talking the whole way, as if the man who’d opened the door was her friend or lover or roommate, as if the second guy didn’t exist, babbling nonsense about the night in a psychological maneuver so brazen, it bought her a few confused seconds and let her cross the room and round the corner for the kitchen.

  She opened a cupboard and slammed it shut in an ostensible drunken search for a water glass. The man who let her in trailed behind her. She met him with a brea
dboard to the face and followed him to the floor with a needle to his arm. She depressed the plunger, rammed her shoulder into the wall, faked a cry for help, and was up and moving toward the second guy before he reached her.

  He rounded into the kitchen.

  She swung that board with every pound of force she could muster.

  She clipped him beneath the jaw.

  His head whiplashed back, and he went down, crumpling like a test-drive dummy in a high-speed head-on collision. She stomped his balls and got no response, pulled handgun from thigh holster beneath her tunic blouse and paused, waiting, listening.

  The radiator rattled.

  A siren in the distance wailed.

  She stepped aside, pieing the corner into the living room and then into the hall, quick checked the bedrooms, and ascertained that the place was empty. If this were one of Clare’s setups, there’d be a body or two rappelling in through the balcony doors right about now, maybe another through the kitchen window, and after she took them out, she’d still have to fight her way down the stairwell to get free.

  But this wasn’t Clare.

  She shoved the handgun back into place.

  The absence of more made it hard not to feel cheated and sad, and for a brief moment she actually missed Clare and wanted to punch herself in the face.

  She tugged industrial zip ties from a pocket and dragged the second guy deeper into the kitchen. She’d clipped him hard. He wouldn’t need anything else. She secured his hands to the radiator, grabbed his partner’s shoulders and pulled him in close, pushed the two of them together so they were nice and snug and nearly mouth to mouth, and secured the second set of hands. She checked pockets and shoes, looking for electronic devices and identification, and used the punch knife to slice shirts and pants to check for tattoos or distinguishing markings, and for all that trouble, the only thing she got was the apartment key.

  It should have concerned her, not knowing whom they worked for, but the absence of information didn’t change the situation.

  These guys were Russian. Either they worked for Dmitry or they didn’t, and that’s exactly where they’d been with this yesterday morning.

  The keys, though, those were interesting.

  Keys were things people carried when they owned or rented or borrowed things, and usually not when the thing was stolen or taken by force.

  These guys hadn’t broken in. That added a whole new layer of context to this invitation from so-called Dmitry.

  What it meant, though, was still a question.

  CHAPTER 13

  Savignyplatz

  Berlin, Germany

  JILL

  SERVICE STAFF AND DELIVERY VEHICLES MARKED THE START OF A NEW daily grind, and soon after came the lightening sky. Light gave color and depth to the hustle below, the workday pedestrian trickle thickened into a rush of morning commute, and from her rooftop vantage she searched slow-moving figures and fast-moving strides for her brother, for Dmitry, and for the source of unease, which had grown stronger with each passing hour.

  She’d left the apartment as she’d found it—rifle, ammunition, and equipment exactly where they’d been placed—and returned to where her hunt had begun.

  Morning had broken without any sign of the Americans.

  No Russian presence, either, other than those she’d decommissioned. But there was something out there, something more, something she hadn’t located.

  She sensed it the way wild things smelled threat on the wind.

  Jack came into view across the plaza, hands stuffed into pockets, shoes shuffling along the cobblestones, slouched and sloppy in grays and browns, everything about him well worn and local, as if he’d walked into someone’s house and chosen clothes straight out of their wardrobe and dresser drawers.

  For all she knew, that’s exactly what he’d done.

  But now he was here, saying hello, letting her know he was around, and giving her a chance to communicate anything she might need him to know. That was how they operated, always had, traveling dark, carrying no electronics—not even burners, because anything capable of sending a signal was trackable if they knew where to look, and in Clare’s paranoid world, they always knew where to look—leapfrogging and leap-of-faithing, trusting that the other would do what needed doing. In the best of times they’d handed off the same position as if they were a single person.

  They’d had some fun, the two of them.

  The memories hurt and they made her smile.

  She hated her brother and loved him and couldn’t escape him.

  He crossed the plaza and rounded the corner that led off toward the station.

  She rescanned windows and doorways, rooftops and rail lines, tracking commuters and service staff, trying to locate the source of unease.

  Minutes ticked on. Her insides itched.

  Jack reentered the plaza from the opposite side, different clothes, different shoes, different demeanor, and he crossed to the corner café, ordered coffee, and chose an outside table, newspaper in hand. He sat fully exposed with his back to the sun, offering a clean shot to about half the buildings on the square, his way of telling her that, all evidence to the contrary, he didn’t perceive a terminal threat.

  Time to rendezvous counted down in her head.

  She studied faces and clothing and shoes and gait.

  Her skin tingled in subconscious recognition, and it took a beat for logic to process what instinct had homed in on.

  The subject was male, late forties to early fifties, balding, five feet six if he stretched, and carrying forty pounds of genuine paunch around the middle. He wore a midrange suit and low-end dress shoes and carried a satchel like any other cubicle slave heading to the station for the weekday commute, but he didn’t fit.

  He was similar, but not the same.

  He read as a well-fed bureaucrat shielded by two degrees of deniability.

  The only way to avoid the tells of being an outsider was to buy local, and he didn’t belong, even by Berlin standards.

  He made a direct line for Jack’s table.

  Jack stood, shook hands.

  The bureaucrat sat.

  Jill loathed his face, not for lack of aesthetics but because he wasn’t Dmitry—at least not Dmitry in the photos she’d seen—and he wasn’t the spotter in Frankfurt, and he wasn’t one of the two who’d been waiting for their flight in Berlin, and they hadn’t crossed the ocean and dodged assassins to meet with this joke of a man.

  She scanned the periphery, scanned him over.

  She found no nervous tics, no subconscious gestures to send adrenaline dripping or betray this rendezvous as more than a conversation, but without a doubt, he was a new variable, and new was a problem. She still didn’t know what Jack had learned about the kill team in Frankfurt, didn’t trust he’d give her a full accounting of this, either, and she didn’t have enough of an angle to play bad lipreading to figure out for herself what went on below. Away from the action was not where she wanted to be.

  She inched back from the edge, paused, and debated.

  Jack would be vulnerable until she got out of the building, but he’d stated his opinion by putting himself out in the open, and she’d already taken out the immediate threat. Well, except for the sense of more, which still itched her insides, but hours of searching hadn’t given her its source and overactive instinct was as much an explanation as anything.

  If she hurried, she could get to ground in sixty seconds.

  She could take a handgun, come back for the rest later.

  Jack stopped her, Jack running his fingers through his hair, absentmindedly scratching the back of his neck, asking her to join him at the table, and just like that, he’d taken what had been her idea and made it his.

  She swore under her breath, packed up the rifle, stashed her kit behind an electrical box, where it’d be days, or forever, before someone noticed it, and she jogged down to street level empty-handed, all big blue eyes and big blond hair, extra padding still up in her bra, looki
ng a whole lot more like Barbie than Beatrix Kiddo.

  She rounded into the open at an angle that kept her out of Jack’s line of sight and put her dead-on for collision with the guy across from him, and she strode forward, eyes locked, fists clenched, coming in hard and fast like a brawler looking for a fight.

  The man caught sight of her, tensed, as if he couldn’t decide whether to bolt or stay, and that told her more than any interrogation would have.

  Told her brother she’d arrived, too.

  Jack’s right hand dropped off his lap. Fingers dangling toward the ground, he signed to her the way she’d signed to him in the airport, spelling out Belmopan, taking her back to a time and place where unified silence had netted information.

  He pointed to the chair at his right.

  She slapped his shoulder, slid around him, said, “Sorry I’m late.”

  The newcomer stood and stretched a hand in her direction.

  “Luka Marinov,” he said. “I’ve come on behalf of your father.”

  He had the easy fluency of Moscow buried under decades of London and was about ten years and two countries removed from the voice on the phone that’d arranged to get them to Berlin.

  She gripped his hand in a power grab.

  He wasn’t Dmitry, wasn’t the solitary spotter, wasn’t either of the superspy wannabes at the Berlin airport, most definitely wasn’t the voice that had started this all, and wasn’t connected to any of them, because the one thing they all had in common was that they knew exactly what they were looking for.

  This guy hadn’t recognized her from Eve.

  She let go, sat, crossed her arms.

  Marinov cleared his throat. “As I was telling your brother,” he said, “you came to meet your father, and clearly, I’m not your father, and for that I apologize.” He chuckled, more fake than nervous. “It’s not a good look, is it? A last-minute change like this? I assure you it’s not what your father had in mind, either.”