Liars' Legacy

by Taylor Stevens

  They hadn’t been spotted since Prague, but that didn’t mean they’d vanished. If her theory about the three of them working together held up, then they, too, were headed for the United States, and Jack showing up in Texas pointed to the southern border as their entry point, and what they had on their hands here was a tri-assassin rendezvous, and she was headed straight for that mix.

  She said, “This will lead us into another trap.”

  “We have a terrorist on American soil, preparing to assassinate one of our political leaders,” Hayes said. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting for ideal circumstances.”

  The answer made her bristle, not its bite or the condescension that treated her concern as cowardliness, but that, terrorist or not, assassination plot or not, the same foreign operation that had already taken her best friend and half her team had moved to US soil, and there were now jurisdictional issues at play and the potential complication of interagency collision or an accidental bullet in her back from local law enforcement responding to the scene of a perceived crime.

  None of that seemed to matter.

  She chose her words with as much caution as someone used to speaking her mind could summon. “Is the operation still dark?” she said. “Because extrajudicial killing of a US citizen in a high-density urban area carries high risk of civilian injury and heightened exposure to scrutiny.”

  Hayes said, “We have no record of target as a US citizen.”

  Kara’s breath caught at the flagrant denial.

  Data analysis and fact-checking kicked in.

  She opened her mouth and shut it again.

  This wasn’t about facts. Hayes already had the facts.

  This was one of those between-the-lines things that people not like her easily grasped, and in catching that, everything she knew, everything she’d experienced, everything she’d learned from Frankfurt to Vienna flooded her head, reconfiguring and reshaping memory. She understood now, in this instant, the indisputable fact that Hayes, in asking her to fill Nick’s shoes, hadn’t overlooked the ways not being good with people made her a poor choice for team lead. He’d taken advantage of it.

  Her head pounded.

  She fought to prevent awareness from seeping into her voice and continued on as if he’d never spoken. “What about jurisdiction?” she said.

  “We’ve got a twenty-four-hour lock. After that, it’ll be touch and go.”

  “Understood,” she said, and he ended the call, and she threw the phone hard onto the bed. So much brainpower, so much ability to work with data, and yet only now she finally fucking understood.

  Nick had wanted her on his team specifically because she was an analyst.

  As far as the rest of headquarters was concerned, that made her redundant.

  And Aaron, he was new, just a kid, so no great loss to them there.

  They’d both just become the sacrificial offering to flush a target.

  They were reverse bait playing bait for the trap.

  And they were there to take the fall if the rails collapsed.

  She stared at the phone as if it was toxic, trying to find a way through.

  She didn’t know where the new guys fit into this, didn’t care. Far as she was concerned, they were on their way to facilitate the plan that would get her killed. But Aaron, she cared about Aaron. He had every right to know what was about to go down, and telling him would be treason.

  CHAPTER 28

  Rio Grande Valley, East of Matamoros

  Tamaulipas, Mexico

  JILL

  SHE CREPT TOWARD THE RIVERBANK, CAREFUL TO AVOID DISTURBING the marsh grass and desert foliage that grew lush off the rich water supply, and stopped just short of the edge. Behind her, to the left, Holden squatted low, and beside him, José Luis guarded the open-deck kayak he’d carried on foot from where they’d left the truck.

  They were about fifteen miles inland from the ocean.

  Desert to the south.

  Irrigated farmland to the north.

  The outskirts of Matamoros, city of half a million, a few miles to the west.

  Here the land was quiet and parched and sunbaked, even in winter, even at the banks of the Rio Grande, where the river, nearing the end of its eighteen-hundred-mile journey to the ocean, meandered in long, languid curves. The slow-moving water separated border from border.

  At this spot it was maybe thirty feet from bank to bank.

  Not much to cross, and yet it was everything.

  Four days she’d been on the move, dodging Russians who wanted to control her, avoiding Americans who wanted to kill her, hopscotching across Europe, out of Spain, into the Dominican Republic, and then to Mexico, traveling dark, until she and Holden had reached Matamoros, and she’d lost a day trying to find José Luis.

  She’d been forced to use a phone to track him down.

  She was dirty. Tired. Hungry.

  Still had no idea what had happened to her brother, and everything she needed and wanted was on the other side of a river that the full might and weight of the United States worked to prevent people from crossing.

  She needed over it tonight.

  Not tomorrow, not the day after.

  Tonight.

  And the problem with urgency, as she knew well from pain and personal experience, was it upped the chance of getting caught.

  Insects crawled up her legs and biting gnats swarmed her head.

  She powered on the drone.

  Fingers working the remote control, she sent the little beast with its little burden high up over the water, where it would be hard to see and harder to hear. Twenty-five minutes flying time start to finish was all she’d get.

  The sun, low in the sky, would give her less.

  Dusk, that perfect mix of low light, which caused detail to blur, and ambient light, which kept night vision from being of much use, was her opportunity window.

  She angled the drone, searching the road for border patrol.

  Ground sensors worried her less, they were easier to avoid.

  The camera picked up a small dirt plume a half mile or so west.

  She figured five minutes, give or take, before the border patrol vehicle turned and headed back. Another minute or two before it reached this spot.

  She motioned José Luis forward.

  The boy picked up the kayak with gangly arms and hauled it toward the water, brushing off Holden’s offer to help, insisting again that no one touched the boat but him.

  A dead-serious sixteen-year-old warding off a grown man twice his size and with the skills to break him in half made it hard to keep a straight face.

  She wouldn’t laugh.

  The kid had been her gatekeeper since she’d caught his thirteen-year-old hands in her twenty-three-year-old pocket, trying to relieve her of her decoy wallet.

  He’d tried to fight her, and she’d knocked him out, then bought him a meal, and after he’d eaten enough to kill a horse, she had insisted he take her to meet his parents, which had turned out to be parent, singular. He’d been the oldest of five living out of a roughshod two-room home that more resembled a shack than a house. She’d left a month’s worth of grocery money with his mother, conversing in Spanish, which she’d once spoken more fluently than English, and then hired the kid on as her eyes and ears.

  It’d been nearly a year since she’d last seen him, a lifetime for a teenage hustler. She hadn’t known if he’d still be around, or alive. He’d rolled up to his mother’s place at noon, six inches taller than she remembered, pants too short, shoes too small, wary of Holden like a jealous lover facing competition, and she hadn’t known whether to hug him or feed him and had ended up doing both.

  Her route would be the same with or without him, but tracking him down had saved her the extra time she’d have needed to go it alone, and had avoided the risk of bringing on someone new.

  He settled the kayak broadside against the bank and held it steady against the current. She watched the camera, seconds ticking down inside her head
.

  Holden boarded.

  She tossed him her rucksack and two push poles, handed the remote off to José Luis, clipped a carabiner onto a custom ring at the kayak’s tail, double-checked that the line was secure, clipped the line to José Luis’s belt, and monkey crawled onto the craft.

  Push poles to muddy bottom, she and Holden guided the kayak across, working in tandem, moving three times faster than when she made the crossing alone.

  A couple minutes, maybe less, that’s all it took.

  Behind them, José Luis, eyes in the sky, watched the road.

  They reached the northern bank.

  José Luis chirped, alerting them to border patrol approach.

  Jill slid from kayak to United States soil, held the craft in place while Holden tossed their belongings off and scurried for land, and she secured the poles to it and let the boat go. The kayak drifted off, nearly the same color as the water, difficult to see in the lowering dusk, and she and Holden lay flat in the foliage, hidden by grasses, silent, killing time in the wait for the all clear.

  An engine approached. Wheels against dirt and gravel rolled slowly past.

  Another couple minutes ticked by.

  José Luis chirped again.

  She stood and led Holden on, through the foliage and onto the road, as if she belonged—which she did—and across to a fallow field, and from there to a footpath. Behind her, somewhere in the dark, José Luis brought the drone back to its starting place and hauled the kayak out of the water, and he’d soon be strapping the watercraft into the back of his thirty-year-old F-150 and returning to his mother’s cinder-block house on the outskirts of town. And in the coming weeks, construction on the last room would be finished, and the exterior would be plastered and painted, and a new pump on the well would go in, and he’d have made his mother proud. This was why it didn’t matter if another year passed before she saw him again, or if she never saw him again.

  The kayak would be waiting, as would the drone.

  She led Holden a quarter mile northwest, to a well-lit, low-slung farmhouse surrounded by irrigated land. Three well-fed dogs came to greet her, circling, tails wagging, checking out Holden’s legs and shoes, and when the butt sniffing had gone on long enough, she continued around to the back, where a forty-foot fifth wheel was parked on a concrete pad, up against a recently stained deck.

  Beside the deck stood a small carport, a five-year-old Fiesta beneath.

  She strolled past the car and up to the deck, ran her fingers beneath the handrail, found the key hooked in place—signal that no one had come asking questions—and she unlocked the trailer door, flipped on a light, swept a hand forward in welcome and, speaking the first words in hours, said, “Home, sweet home.”

  Holden stepped inside.

  She followed him in.

  Temperatures in the valley rarely dropped below fifty, even in the heart of winter, and the trailer, having been closed up for the past several months, had a sunbaked, stale-air, mold-tinged taste to it. She powered up the air conditioner.

  “Give it a few minutes,” she said. “It’ll clear out pretty fast.”

  She reached into a cabinet and pulled out a clean towel, offered it to him. “A little musty,” she said. “Humidity is hard to fight down here.”

  Holden took the towel, and his gaze tracked along the interior.

  If thought bubbles could appear above a person’s head, his would have read, Cozy, clean, all the necessities of home, but not a home.

  Humans were pack rats by nature.

  Small, tight spaces were difficult to keep tidy.

  The lack of life detritus was a giveaway.

  She pointed him toward the bathroom. “Shower’s in there, if you don’t mind cold water. I’ll get the heater pilot light lit soon as I’ve said hi to the parents and let them know it’s me.”

  He looked at her funny, but parents wasn’t something she wanted to explain.

  Clare had her stashes, Holden had safe houses—surely, he did—Jack had safety valves she couldn’t even pretend to guess at, and she had Paul and Janet Moore, parents without living children, grandparents with two grown grandbabies now out of state, fifth- and sixth-generation Texans, who years ago had found their home in a sudden no-man’s-land when one of the first border fences, a tall, slatted metal monstrosity, cut a swath through their property.

  They weren’t naive enough to think of her as the daughter they’d lost, and she wasn’t innocent enough to view them as the parents she never had, but they were retirees on a fixed income, and she had more than enough money to share, and she needed a legitimate reason to hang out on this side of the fence when she needed access to the river, and they were content to let her come and go as she pleased.

  The situation worked out well for everyone for as long as it did.

  She knocked on the back door, waited for an answer and, when none was forthcoming, checked the garage. The truck was gone, they were out.

  She continued around to the front porch, turned the door knocker up, and returned to the trailer or, more specifically, to the Fiesta under the carport and its key beneath the passenger seat. She tried the ignition, got nothing, and so lugged the battery charger and extension cord out from trailer storage, hooked that up, and returned inside to now-conditioned air and a chance to catch her breath and finally stop moving.

  Holden was out of the shower when she walked in. Hair wet, towel low around his waist, chiseled abs still damp as he dug through his bag on the dining table.

  She paused at the threshold, glanced at him, sighed on the inside, and turned away.

  He said, “Got the tank heater going. Water’s not hot yet, but not cold, either.”

  She pulled a drawer open, grabbed a clean T-shirt and sweats.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  He said, “Your parents okay?”

  She kept her back to him. “They’re out. I’ll check in on them in the morning. Battery on the Fiesta was dead. I’ve got it charging.”

  He said, “The car yours?”

  She glanced over her shoulder. He’d added a shirt, was still wearing the towel, and damn if she didn’t still want to rip it off with her teeth.

  “Define yours,” she said. “I have free use of it.”

  He nodded appreciatively. “I like it,” he said. “Mostly farmland, not a lot of eyes, United States soil but south of the fence. There’s an unmanned pass-through, right? Motorized gates, keypads, secret codes, so citizens who live this side can get into town?”

  “Nearest gate’s right down the road thataway,” she said.

  “You have the code?”

  “Of course.”

  “And that’s linked to Homeland Security records for . . . ?”

  She returned to digging through the drawer. “A girl’s gotta have some secrets,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve got your own backdoor route.”

  “Canada sometimes. Usually through the islands into South Florida.”

  “You have a boat?”

  “Same way you have a car.”

  “Cars.”

  “Well, just one boat.”

  She turned. The towel had been replaced with track pants.

  She moved next to him and hip bumped him away from the table. “Need to get something out of storage,” she said.

  He dragged his bag to the floor and stepped aside.

  She lifted the dinette bench. Boxes of unused equipment waited below, phones and laptops mostly, most of them of dubious provenance, bought cheap for quick cash, and accumulated over time.

  Holden let out a low whistle. “What’s on the other side?”

  She tipped her chin in its direction, inviting him to look.

  He raised the bench to a small armory.

  She pulled an iPad mini from inventory, closed the bench, and sat on it.

  Priorities were priorities, and one final obligation stood between her and washing off the road stench and crawling into bed.

  She unboxed the device.

/>   Holden watched her.

  She motioned to the weapons. “Take a few pieces, if it’ll help you sleep better.” She wasn’t being facetious or patronizing.

  Utilizing air travel had meant leaving all the firepower behind in Madrid.

  Holden had made a few calls, had told her he would put the weapons in the hands of someone he trusted, had given her a number and a name, and had promised they’d be waiting whenever she was ready to collect them, which would be sooner than later, because she still needed to get them back to Berlin before Clare discovered them missing.

  This was her returning the favor.

  Holden picked up the Desert Eagle, turned it over, glanced at her, and she nodded. He added a couple magazines, a box of ammunition, and lowered the bench.

  She tuned him out.

  Four days of traveling dark meant four days of not knowing if brother dearest had attempted contact. If Jack was alive and if he was free—as Holden believed he would be—then there would be a message for her out there somewhere. To check just this once, and to respond once, a VPN and TOR browser on a clean device over a borrowed satellite connection was enough to avoid worrying about drawing the cavalry to her door.

  Holden encroached on her peripheral space.

  He said, “May I?”

  She scooted over to make room and continued with the setup, loaded the browser, and began the search, hunting through gig-economy Web sites and message boards—Fiverr, TaskRabbit, Craigslist—searching for Dallas–Fort Worth postings when possible, because that was the last place stateside she and Jack had seen each other face-to-face, and that was how these things worked.

  She found him in a miscellaneous Craigslist post.

  Seeing his words, knowing without a doubt he was alive brought just enough relief to piss her off and make her angry again.

  She said, “John wants to rendezvous in San Antonio day after tomorrow, and his grand strategy is playing bait and catch with the bad guys.”

  Holden squinted at the screen, as if trying to make sense of tea leaves.

  She shifted the device so he had a better view of what she’d read.

  Looking for someone with an archeological background or who specializes in South American history to check out an artifact my grandfather brought back from Bolivia when he was a kid. Photo is for attention. Will send pictures of the actual artifact once we have a chance to discuss. Willing to compensate for time and travel (if necessary). Need this done within the next three days. Best time to call is evenings, after 7:00.