Liars' Legacy

by Taylor Stevens

  He’d taken from her what he had no right to take.

  One day, maybe, he’d earn her forgiveness.

  One day, maybe, everything with her wouldn’t have to be so damn hard.

  He pushed her away, sunk deeper into the seat, and let his mind drift through the two hours that separated the runway from the mirrored multistory hotel in downtown Cleveland. He lost another forty minutes at Walmart in between, time that was expensive and hard to spend, but a single detour that netted burner phones, tools, and change-making supplies had no substitute.

  The driver left him at the hotel curb.

  He waited, suitcase by his side and newly acquired goods in hand, for the Yukon to swing out of sight and then turned for the hotel’s front doors.

  He had two hours to lose everything that connected him to Russia and to lose himself. For that, he didn’t need a room, per se.

  He needed a focal point those hunting him could focus in on, and a hotel worked as well as anything else. This hotel or another, it didn’t matter. This had just been the first one to come to mind. The check-in process ate another ten minutes.

  In the room he emptied the suitcase out onto the bed, grabbed toilet paper, toiletries, and hotel towels from the bathroom, courtesy of the Russians, who didn’t yet know they’d be paying for them, and divided the pile between three shopping bags.

  He added those items to the supplies he’d purchased, stuffed it all into a larger duffel bag, and walked out into a late afternoon chill with everything but the travel documents and the empty suitcase.

  Not the wisest course of action.

  He was bleeding time faster than money, but to leave anything in the room was to throw it away, and he couldn’t bring himself to do that, not even now.

  He had Clare to thank for that, too, he supposed, a lifetime of uprooting and abandoning most of what he owned, and starting over somewhere new, again, and again, and again.

  “Belongings are chains,” Clare would say. “They mark you as a stranger, slow you down when you carry them, make it hard to move.”

  But they were kids, and like other kids, they hated not having.

  Worse was having to give up what little they did have, and so in compromise, each departure came with the promise of something new on arrival, always temporary, always to be left behind when the time came again, and the time always came again.

  In the days and hours counting down, Clare would ferry them into slums, orphanages, prisons that housed young children with their mothers and would have them hand off what they treasured to those who had even less.

  He had grown up detached to things but respectful of their value and could count on one hand the items he’d owned that hadn’t lived a second life with someone who needed them more. That was the one thing Clare had taught him that had been worth keeping, perhaps the only thing he’d deliberately adopted for himself.

  A few-minute walk took him to the Westgate Transit Center, and a bus took him toward his destination. At the halfway point, he stepped off in a detour for a nearby homeless shelter, and he walked the streets, searching for signs of those who preferred to live rough, handing off the grocery bags to those he met, shedding, adapting along the way, swapping the clothes and shoes he wore for what he’d purchased, and swapping again, all the while putting anything of value into the hands of those who could use it most.

  He was cautious of cameras and social interactions, passing in one door and out another, cutting through backyards and down side streets, as he made his way to Edgewater Park, and by the time he arrived, he had nothing but cash and the few purchased items he still needed.

  The park itself was 150 acres of fishing pier and public beach, picnic areas and walking trails, stretched out along the shores of Lake Erie. Not a big early-winter destination, but home to one of Clare’s drops, and that was why he’d chosen Toledo as an entry point, and why he’d made the run to Cleveland itself.

  He’d prefer to avoid raiding her cupboards.

  Anything that came from her was another string he’d have to cut, but he needed a clean identity, didn’t have time to build one of his own, and no matter how many of his own deliberate decisions had brought him here, this mess was still on her. If ever there was a scenario for which a drop was buried, he was in it.

  And that was the thing about this one, it was literally buried.

  To find it, he’d have to dig.

  A lot of work for a small box.

  But of all the resources she’d hidden in the United States, this was the closest he could get on the axis of least likely to have been raided by Jill and near a municipal airport he could afford to burn.

  He strode along the bike path in its direction, hands stuffed in pockets, chin tucked into a scarf to ward against the biting wind blowing in off the lake, searching for the statue that would guide his way.

  Clare had a thing for statues.

  “They’re usually cared for,” she’d said.

  Trees died. Creeks rose. Buildings got renovated. Businesses closed.

  But statues were meant to last generations, and even in cases of war or uprising or shifting politics, where the statue itself might be removed, the pedestal or evidence of its existence still remained.

  Clare was a lot of things, but she wasn’t stupid.

  Proving her point was Richard Wagner, all thirty feet of him, standing where he’d stood for over a hundred years in spite of recent calls for his removal.

  Jack reached the base, counted off the paces.

  In the cold ground beneath bare deciduous branches, he found the box he’d come for, and in it ten thousand dollars cash and a full set of ID.

  Passport, driver’s license—now expired—library card, and Social Security card, but every piece tied to a single identity: Clare.

  That’s all there was.

  He removed the contents, dumped the box into his backpack.

  Refilled the hole, folded the camping shovel, and put that away, too.

  He’d notify Clare that the stash had been cleared out, though at this point he wasn’t sure why he should bother. He’d put out lines, trying to make contact.

  He’d heard nothing back.

  She had her reasons, always had her reasons.

  A betting man could make good money on long odds that even if she hadn’t been responsible for Dmitry’s invitation or involved in the Russians’ scheming, she was aware of it. He wouldn’t want to be the man in the suit right now.

  What he did want to be, though . . .

  He’d had one opportunity to grab a clean identity, and all it had netted him was Clare and Clare and more Clare. He didn’t have time to make a run on another stash.

  He flipped through the ID pieces again, pondering the options.

  Swapping genders was a pain in the ass that required a lot more work for him than it ever did for Jill, but he’d done it often enough that he could convincingly become her. And Jill looked so much like a younger Clare that if not for the way photos aged, it’d be easy to mistake them for each other in pictures.

  He tapped the plastic against his fingers.

  Pondered some more.

  A woman inevitably drew less suspicion than a man.

  And a woman had more costuming options—massive sunglasses, stylish hats, the ability to wear dresses or pants, not to mention the oversize purses, which were so ubiquitous they were near invisible, making it possible to haul all kinds of shit as an inconspicuous matter of course in a way a man never could. The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea, and the more he laughed.

  For years he’d done everything possible to get Clare out of his head.

  Now he’d willingly become her.

  CHAPTER 27

  Aloft Hotel, Cleveland

  Ohio, USA

  KARA

  SHE LOST HERSELF IN THE WATER’S FLOW, HEAD DROOPING, EYES closed, palms braced against the shower tiles while wet heat pounded down her neck and back, easing the ache at center chest that made it har
d to breathe. Steam filled the bathroom.

  Solitude brought relief, release.

  The water took what it wanted, washing pieces of her down the drain.

  She was stopped, again, for however long this new pause lasted, mobilized in haste out of Bratislava to Cleveland, where target had been reliably identified. She’d known even before boarding that he’d have already vanished before their wheels lifted off, and now she waited for the reinforcements promised by headquarters, she in this room, Aaron next door, both of them two floors up from where target had spent all of eight minutes before walking out again.

  —Jacques Lefevre.

  —Jack, as he’d come to reside in her head.

  Chasing him was like chasing summer fireflies as a kid, running barefoot through the backyard, following blips of focus-grabbing light that changed direction in no predictable pattern, showing up again but never quite where you’d been looking.

  The unpredictability that had captured her attention as a child captivated her now—blips of focus-grabbing light—a series of actions that didn’t fit the official narrative. She explained the inconsistencies to Nick in her head the way she’d have explained them to him in person.

  This guy, this assassin, he comes into town on clean papers.

  Never would have known he was here if not for the chatter.

  He has a connecting flight in Detroit that will take him to DC.

  But instead of catching the flight, he changes destination, divests himself of everything he brought, including the papers, and then disappears.

  Why?

  She wasn’t an investigator.

  Interacting with and questioning witnesses wasn’t her thing, the war room sent others for that. But she had access to the raw data in real time now.

  They’d tracked down the Gulfstream flight crew while she was in the air.

  They’d found the driver who’d delivered target to this hotel.

  They’d spoken to desk staff and cleaning staff and followed a physical trail out of downtown toward Edgewater, and then, in a routine with which she’d grown well acquainted, target had disappeared.

  Like a firefly.

  War-room analysis said he’d gotten wind of his cover being blown, that his actions in Prague spoke to inflexibility and aversion to plan deviation, and that he’d still be on his way to DC. They were working to pinpoint whom he’d been sent to kill and, as a precaution, had put out a general alert to the Secret Service and the Capitol Police. Alerting all of Congress was nonviable. The news would inevitably leak, and a media frenzy would follow, and the resulting panic would complicate their job and make it easier for the assassin to carry out his objective.

  Analysis of competing hypotheses said the flight to DC had been misdirection, that heavy security at the capitol made DC a less than ideal location, and that because round-the-clock protection was provided only to congressional leadership, non-leadership senators and representatives were softer targets, especially vulnerable while away from the capitol and in their home states. He could have gone anywhere.

  She couldn’t fault either analysis.

  But something more, something abstract wasn’t showing up in available data. At its most basic, it was what she’d told Nick before they’d left to recon Republic Square. Target had gone to great lengths to reach that rendezvous, but he didn’t trust whomever he’d gone to see. Didn’t trust them in Prague and didn’t trust them now.

  —Didn’t trust who, exactly?

  —Didn’t trust them, why?

  —Because, logically, his employers would want him to succeed.

  These actions created inconsistency. What didn’t add up in the present somehow tied to the inconsistencies in Republic Square and to the shooting in Prague that had taken place the following day.

  She’d gotten wind of that while she was in Slovakia, holed up in a ski resort, scouring raw data, trying to force logic over senselessness. It’d come in as an unrelated alert, and it’d added another layer of context.

  The timing had been too close, the details too similar to Republic Square, to have been coincidental, and so she’d swapped one search for another and found Charles Square, a park that formed the center of a large downtown rectangle not far from Old Town, and she’d found police-scanner transcripts and camera feeds.

  The two dead in that shooting were Russian.

  They’d been long-distance kills, sniper kills.

  And if she’d had any doubt that two shootings in two squares over two days in Prague involving Russians might be coincidence, a glimpse of a blonde—the accomplice, the sister—in the corner of a two-second frame had obliterated doubt and everything else she thought she knew about the day Nick died.

  She’d sat there, frozen, staring.

  And when she could move again, she enhanced the footage and replayed it, and her own words to Nick came back home.

  Everything we’ve seen, we’ve seen because that’s what he wanted.

  First time she’d seen the blonde had been in footage at the Berlin airport.

  It’d been that footage that had connected accomplice to target.

  Second time she’d seen the blonde had been at Hotel Kings Court.

  It was vindication, then, proving she’d been right about the accomplice.

  But the same vindication that fed her ego blinded her to what should have been glaringly obvious. The master of disguise had chosen no disguise at all for that distinguishing head of hair.

  We’ve seen because that’s what he wanted.

  The woman thrown into the van at Hotel Kings Court hadn’t been the sister.

  The blonde was the misdirection.

  —An illusion set up all the way back before Berlin.

  But if the blonde was the misdirection, what was she not meant to notice?

  —No, not her. The illusion wasn’t just for her.

  She could see it in her head then, target and body double, misdirection for whoever had grabbed him. The sister had still been running loose. She would have been vindictive, would have wanted her brother back, and it explained how the drama would have carried over into the next day.

  —Except the blonde was the one in that two-second frame.

  —They’d been long-distance kills, sniper kills.

  —The sister hadn’t been the one to make them.

  —So if not the sister, then who?

  For the second time, her words to Nick came home.

  Our guy wasn’t the only assassin on that Dallas flight.

  It made no sense, but the evidence was there, staring her in the face. Christopher Holden, the assassin whose last confirmed target was Karen McFadden, had aligned himself with McFadden’s children.

  They were dealing with a trifecta.

  Not one assassin, three—three who wanted something badly enough to lure her team into that rendezvous—three who trusted the Russians so little, they had expected betrayal and had set up a long-game misdirection to avoid it and then had killed two in retaliation—three who were likely now in the United States, or would be soon, to carry out an assassination, and meanwhile the SIGINT and HUMINT pointing headquarters to target continued to be Russian sourced....

  She shut the computer down.

  Disconnected. Disengaged. Quit.

  Nick’s death still sat on her chest like a hundred-pound weight, and these convolutions were more complex than she had the emotional and mental capacity to process. But that was then.

  If she’d been on speaking terms with Hayes or headquarters, if she’d been willing to offer the thoughts inside her head, she’d have said that while Jack very well might have returned to the United States as an assassin, nothing he did was ever straightforward or simple. He was lining up to play them all against each other.

  Just like Prague.

  She stretched her neck and stretched her arms, adjusted the temperature hotter, and let her mind free-fall, becoming him, trying to see want and fear through his eyes.

  Ringing from the room, inces
sant, persistent, refused to give her that space.

  She shut off the shower, pulled a towel off the rack, buried her face in it, and wiped water from her eyes.

  The ringing stopped.

  She toweled off her hair, slowly, in no hurry.

  The war room knew where she was.

  For something urgent, they’d call back.

  The ringing started up again.

  She wrapped the towel around her hair, stepped from steam to the shock of cold, carried the phone back into the bathroom, sat on the toilet lid and, with a puddle pooling around her feet, answered there.

  She’d expected Liv Wilson or one of Liv’s deputies.

  Instead she got Steven Hayes.

  He said, “We have a match on target in Dallas, Texas.”

  The news seeped into her brain, filling the cracks between what she already understood. She hadn’t seen the footage, wouldn’t conclude prematurely—target may have finally made a mistake and unwittingly pinged their radar, as statistically it was inevitable that he’d eventually slip—but she’d seen enough of this now to know that if it wasn’t accidental, and with him it was really damn hard to know what was an accident, then they were meant to see this.

  She said, “Where and when?”

  “Greyhound. Bus departed for Houston ten minutes ago.”

  Just like a firefly.

  She did the math in her head. Dallas to Houston by bus . . . Depending on stops and average speed, they were looking at roughly four or five hours, give or take.

  Hayes said, “We’ve got a plane on its way to Burke Lakefront. Should be landing within the hour. Equipment and new team members all on board. Briefing material will be to you shortly. Be on the tarmac to meet it.”

  She ran those numbers, too.

  Adding an hour for the plane to arrive and time for departure, Cleveland to Houston was also four or five hours, give or take. Factor in travel within Houston and they’d still be behind him, too slow, too late, chasing blips of light.

  There was also the issue of Christopher Holden and the blonde.