Liars' Legacy

by Taylor Stevens

  The man in the suit said, “Now you make toast.”

  Jack tipped the glass forward. He said, “Cheers.”

  The man growled. “This is not toast. For what we do drink?”

  Jack waited until silence begged for interruption. “Truth,” he said. “We drink to truth.”

  The man in the suit nodded appreciatively. “Yes, this is reason to drink.”

  Jack brought the alcohol to his lips and paused.

  He said, “Answer me a question.”

  “Drink.”

  “One question first.”

  The boss man emptied his glass, followed alcohol with a pickle, exhaled, and said, “What is question?”

  Jack returned the untouched liquor to the table. “Why?” he said.

  The suit man laughed. “Why is very big question. Make smaller.”

  “There’s a man,” Jack said, “a Russian man. He has a woman, an American woman. She gets pregnant but leaves the country before the baby is born. The man doesn’t know where to find her. Time passes. The man learns the woman birthed twins, a boy and a girl. He searches for them, but they are gone. Years later he gets news. His grown children have been located. He asks them to visit. They make the trip at his invitation, but when they arrive, they discover another person has taken his place. Why?”

  The man in the suit pushed a plate in Jack’s direction, and when Jack didn’t respond, took a canapé for himself, ate it slowly, wiped his fingers on a napkin, and said, “This is the story, you think?”

  Tone earnest and honest, Jack said, “I don’t think. I know. The part where the story gets hazy is at what point you got involved.”

  “Is good question. Is all good question.” The man nodded toward the untouched vodka. “Drink.”

  Jack answered with silence.

  “Okay,” the man said. “American boy wants to talk American way.”

  Jack raised the glass in salute. “A toast to business.”

  The man said, “What are you called in America? Your name.”

  The question had no right answer, so Jack gave him the truth insofar as any name was truth, and offered what the man most likely already knew.

  “John,” he said. “Jonathan. Smith.”

  “Smith. Is nice, simple name, yes?”

  “Bland. Boring.”

  “Easy to be invisible. Is good name.” The boss man reached for the pouch, opened it, retrieved a packet, and tossed it across the table. He snapped for the bodyguard’s attention, and motioned to Jack. “Prinesi vody,” he said.

  Jack ignored the summons for water, as if the thing he wanted most in the moment had no meaning at all. He picked up the packet, slipped a finger through the seal, and pulled out a stack of documents about thirty pages thick.

  They were photocopies, all of them, more than half of which related to Clare: photographs in which he wouldn’t have recognized her if she hadn’t been pointed out, and segments of classified material that had been lifted out of both US and Soviet files, and a history that documented a hole-filled variant of the stories she’d told throughout their childhood. And there were copies of his and Jill’s true birth certificates, and a trail of documented sightings, and crossed-out dead ends littered with handwritten margin notes, which ended abruptly at the Savoy in Berlin when he and Jill were nine, and picked up again with a single entry in Houston two weeks back.

  What was left constituted a separate dossier that ran nearly as long as Clare’s, a convoluted web of legends and lies surrounding a man who, given the contents, could only have been the Broker, a man whose history had intertwined with Clare’s starting years before he and Jill were born and had remained intertwined until a series of macabre photos that, if genuine, pointed to the night Clare had left them.

  Noticeably absent was any detail on Clare’s current status or location, and in that absence he found answers he hadn’t deliberately come here to find.

  Clare hadn’t died that night.

  She’d made it out. She was alive.

  Jack flipped back to the beginning, searching for and confirming what his subconscious had grabbed on the first pass.

  He hadn’t been handed intelligence documents.

  If that was the case, Clare’s file alone would be six inches thick on the light side. This hand-notated, curated collection had been extracted and distilled from multiple sources slowly over time, and that said nearly as much about the person who’d put it together as it did about the subjects within.

  This wasn’t Clare’s handiwork, and wasn’t the product of a bureaucratic intelligence-gathering machine in some basement-level government office. What he held here was the persistent decade-spanning quest of someone who cared about what had happened to Clare and her children and who had a personal reason to find them.

  These were Dmitry’s files.

  Everything, except the final page.

  Jack tugged that piece of paper free, laid it flat, and studied a photo that had no earthly business being in this packet—an image so far removed from reality that if he didn’t know better, he’d assume it had been sitting in the photocopy tray when these copies were made and had been gathered up by mistake.

  It had no label and no explanation, but he knew the face.

  Everyone knew the face.

  Clean. Wholesome. American.

  US senator Alex Ford Kenyon.

  The man was an outspoken, polarizing firebrand, a pro-Russian populist heading into a huge political win in an election that half the country believed was already hacked by the Russians, and this was his assassination order.

  Jack tapped the pages to align them and flipped to the beginning again, because any kind of movement was better than sitting in dumb silence while the man in the suit scrutinized him. He would have asked why—why now, why this target, why him as the assassin—but his brain, on fire, drew all his body’s wattage and left his mouth with nothing to operate it. The questions were pointless, anyway, because he’d already been given the answers.

  These pages collectively, in totality, were a map, a chronology that walked down a chain of decision-making logic the same way comic book panels walked readers through a story, all of it leading to that final, incongruent photograph. Except this story didn’t start at the beginning—it started at the end, started with the Broker’s death—and this story had never been about him or his sister, not at first, not even now.

  This was about chaos.

  The maze inside his head snapped and re-formed.

  Clare vanished from it completely.

  The tightness constricting his chest, the sense of entrapment and double-blind doubt that had made it hard to think dissipated, and for the first time since he’d stepped off that flight in Frankfurt, he understood that whatever mistakes he made going forward, were his mistakes to own completely.

  Clare had had nothing to do with this.

  He’d been set free.

  The man in the suit said, “Your mother was intelligent woman.”

  “Is,” Jack said. “She is an intelligent woman.”

  And that was part of what kept him tongue tied.

  The story in these pages, Clare had seen it all years ago.

  She had known fate would snag him and had tried to warn him.

  Not the micro-level stuff that related to this particular target in this particular scenario. Even if she’d had that kind of foresight, she wouldn’t have cared.

  Clare didn’t give a shit about politics or politicians.

  To her, they were glorified bureaucrats, interchangeable, replaceable self-serving pawns in love with the idea of importance, for whom she held varying degrees of contempt and animosity, and not without good reason.

  Her own government had turned its back on her, had labeled her a traitor and an enemy of the state, so she’d become one, hiring out to anyone if the money was right, but she was a patriot all the same. She was loyal not to any flag or nation-state, but to the ideals her country was founded on and that she’d sworn to uphol
d.

  She’d have put a bullet in any assassin foolish enough to take this job.

  He could hear her in his head even now, the paranoid rants he’d tried so hard to tune out, the desperation that bled into her insistence that he listen and learn, as if what he believed or didn’t had any bearing on reality.

  But it made sense now, all of it.

  She’d known this day would come, and needed him to understand. “Democracy isn’t perfect,” she’d say, “but it’s better than the alternative. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, due process, a government of the people by the people, everything that makes us strong makes us weak, and the Russians are experts at exploiting that weakness.”

  “Masters of the long game” was what she’d called them.

  They were fully vested in American politics, but not the way most people thought. They didn’t care which party won or lost or who lived in the White House.

  They didn’t have a “side.”

  Their goal was to erode trust in elected officials, to erode trust in democracy itself, their target was the American voter, and their wet dream an ungovernable America, because what better way to convince less powerful nations that democracy was dangerous than to point to its beacon as it tore itself apart from within?

  Political warfare.

  The Russian intelligence apparatus had been at it for years.

  “Active measures” was what she called it, a term that combined the ideology with the methods—propaganda, disinformation, deception, assassinations, counterfeit documents, political front organizations, nonprofit research. Anything and everything that targeted the human condition was fair game.

  “Vietnam,” she’d said. “The protests you see in old news footage don’t do justice to the anger and unrest on the ground at the time. The energy was raw and electric, felt organic . . . hundreds of thousands of people fighting for a cause. The Soviets were pouring millions into activist and political organizations to keep the antiwar movement going, but who would want to believe that? It’s psychological suicide to admit this thing you were willing to die for wasn’t actually yours. That’s what makes the Russians so successful, so dangerous. They’re experts at finding divisive issues and feeding and fueling fear and anger until they take hold, and once they have taken hold, a person would sooner attack someone trying to save them than admit that their beliefs weren’t their own.”

  Legerdemain.

  According to Clare, Russian psyops were responsible for all the biggest conspiracy theories running amok in antigovernment communities. Fluoride in the water as a plot to control the population? Russian psyops. Moon landings as a hoax? Also the Russians. “Don’t even get me started on AIDS as a CIA-manufactured virus,” she’d said. “For that one, they forged documents, turned that paper trail loose in academia and political circles, and let democracy give it wings.”

  He’d listened, but he hadn’t really listened.

  Clare had so many paranoid fantasies of her own that it’d been hard to know where hers ended and others began, but that was the thing he understood now and hadn’t then. Clare might be paranoid, but she wasn’t delusional.

  The Cold War had ended, but the world hadn’t changed.

  Russia’s end goal was still the same. Everywhere you looked, active measures were on display: fear stoked into outrage, ideological differences reinforced until they turned violent, the worst of human nature fed and nurtured until some no longer saw their opponents as human at all.

  And now they wanted him to kill their biggest proponent.

  This wasn’t an assassination. This was the start of a second Civil War.

  Brilliant, really. Or at least it had been until the Broker had pissed Clare off, and she’d gone rogue and killed him, and the world’s underbelly had lost its shock collar, and governments, panicked at the idea of assassins running amok, sent out their own hit squads in preemptive strikes, and now every killer for hire with the skills and smarts to carry out this kind of job had a target on their back.

  He bet these genius masterminds hadn’t seen that coming.

  Not that the Kremlin lacked for killers, per se.

  Journalists and dissidents and people who knew things suffered such a high rate of clumsiness that their deaths barely blipped the news anymore.

  But European borders were small and porous.

  Getting into the United States meant crossing an ocean or a whole heck of a lot of land, and acquiring legal transportation and accommodation and vanishing within a surveillance state on high alert were whole other issues. Whoever they’d lined up was either dead or suddenly unable to get within a hundred miles of a US border.

  Dmitry, intentionally or not, had handed them the perfect Moscow-connected, familial replacement. But that’s where Jack’s understanding stopped and where the data didn’t fit. He slid the senator’s face toward the man in the suit.

  The bodyguard approached, a liter of bottled water in one hand, drinking glass in the other, interrupting where interruption was least appreciated.

  Jack skipped the glass, cracked the seal, and drank straight from the plastic, downing gulp after gulp in an attempt to drown the desert, and set the half-empty bottle on the table. “I’m useless to you on this,” he said.

  The man shrugged. “Maybe yes. Maybe no.”

  “To pull this off, you need someone who can slip undetected through the American landscape, and I’ve already got one of their kill teams chasing me. In my position I’d be better off using this information as a bargaining chip.”

  The man in the suit harrumphed and leaned forward. “We talk like Americans, okay? Business. No more pretend.”

  “All right,” Jack said. “No more pretend.”

  “The woman with you, she is not sister, Jillian.”

  “Correct,” Jack said. “And you are not Dmitry.”

  “This also is true.”

  Jack placed his finger in the center of Senator Kenyon’s forehead. “You want an assassination,” he said. “I want Dmitry.”

  The man nodded toward the vodka. “Drink.”

  Jack dumped the liquor into his mouth. Swallowed, ate, rolled the glass between his palms, and held on to it to prevent another refill.

  The man said, “There is work, and when work is done, you have Dmitry.”

  “But, as I said, I’m useless to you on this.”

  “Is only part true,” the man said. “There is work, and is other work. We speak with Jillian also.”

  Those words, so casually spoken, implied that all the effort he’d gone through to keep Jill away had been wasted, but inferring that her compliance was a done deal was where the suit man went wrong. “You don’t have her,” Jack said.

  The man made a mewling sound, as if to say, “Who knows?”

  No, they didn’t have her, but they would speak with her.

  In his head, he could see it, the table in Berlin, the way the emissary had pushed the phone toward him—specifically toward him—and the way his sister’s body had tensed. He’d needed her to have it for reasons of his own, but it’d been the emissary who’d manipulated her into wanting it.

  The maze snapped again, ordered and reordered, and the kill team that had followed him out of Dallas blinked to the far edge. He knew now exactly how they’d found him, and why it’d been him, not Jill, that they’d pursued.

  To the suit, he said, “My sister won’t be easy to convince.”

  “We have you,” the man said. “This is enough.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Hradany

  Prague, Czech Republic

  JILL

  SHE CAME TO SLOWLY, FALLING IN AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS, WITH each rise a little more cognizant, a little more confused. She knew the room, its texture and smells and size, knew the single bed, the small table that doubled as a desk, and the hardback wooden chair. Knowing amplified the anxiety. All of this was wrong.

  She’d left this room. She shouldn’t be here.

  And she drifted down again,
grasping for a sense of time within space.

  Somewhere in the fog, a voice said, “How’s your head?”

  She knew that voice, warm and cozy. She liked that voice.

  But that, too, was wrong, and her thoughts startled, scattering with the beat of a thousand wings. She struggled to see, to think.

  A shadow filled the blur, the outline of a face.

  The voice said, “Here, drink this. It’ll help you feel better.”

  Warm, sweet liquid touched her lips.

  A hand slipped behind her neck to support her head, and she drank, and with each swallow, awareness built and memories returned—Jack down in the square, the van, the gunfire, the blur of madness and motion—and everything she knew was wrong collided in panic, and she lunged to swing off the bed.

  Liquid splashed down her chin.

  Her torso caught, and she heaved, struggling to move, until understanding dawned and the desperate need to find her brother morphed into rage. Her hands and feet—her fucking chest and thighs—were all strapped to a fucking bed.

  The voice with the face came in closer.

  She hated that voice and that lying, lying rat-bastard face, with its assurances and promises that no matter how big the contracts got, he had no interest in the money, and all that talk about wanting to be friends and keeping them alive.

  She should have killed him when she had the chance.

  He put his hands up, placating, soothing, like he was caught somewhere between trying to shush a baby and being terrified it’d breathe fire and burn him alive. “John’s okay,” he said. “He’s okay. You’re okay. You’re not hurt. Everything’s good.”

  Memory shoved her back on that rooftop, and she was there again, legs scrambling, adrenaline coursing, anger rising, the whole of her racing toward that van, and then a tackle out of the blur and she was rolling, fighting, and a rifle stock swung toward her face, and the world went black.

  That had been nine in the morning.

  Ambient light in the room said this was late afternoon.

  The dry mouth, the discombobulation said she was coming to after sedation.

  Inside her head a megaton bomb rained fire down into a debris field of revenge, but she needed out of these restraints, and so her body lay passive, and her brows furrowed in innocent confusion.