Liars' Legacy

by Taylor Stevens

  Holden whispered each word out loud. In his distraction the accent broke through, the one from the life before, which normally stayed buried beneath the American years, the one she’d first heard when he’d taunted her from the upper floor on the day she’d gone after him to kill him.

  He leaned sideways and looked at her, bewildered.

  “This, you’ve got to explain,” he said.

  His tone held admiration and respect.

  Both flooded her senses with warning and the urgent need to fight or flee.

  She focused on the screen, rested her fingers on the table, trying to reconcile the conflict between mind and body that made it difficult to stay as they were, with skin nearly touching skin. Twenty-six years of Clare’s tutelage and its aftermath had taught her how to hide, how to kill, and how to keep anguish at bay.

  She knew hate and knew hunger.

  Knew rejection and how to suffocate pain.

  What she didn’t know was what it meant to be accepted as enough, and Holden’s words, the way he spoke, and the way he looked at her triggered every need to fend off threat, because this shouldn’t be.

  He shifted to give her space. “Archeology?” he said.

  Instinct took over, the cunning that let her give others what they needed to see and hear. A slow smile lifted her expression, and with the eagerness of a kid asked to explain an art project after the first day of school, she said, “It’s one of several words that let us search without getting a ton of false hits.”

  She scrolled for the attached photo, a watermarked image of Japanese macaques in a hot spring. “To anyone else, this is just random stock photography,” she said, “but it references an inside joke from when we were kids that only I would know. It’s a secret handshake. Between that and the words, there’s no doubt it’s him. As for the timing, he posted the message yesterday. Three days is self-explanatory. Travel, if necessary, means he isn’t certain where we actually are. Basically, he’s hoping we see this and that we can make it there in time. The artifact stuff, that’s all throwaway language, but Bolivia is a reference to when we were fourteen and Clare threw us into a live-fire ambush, using a mercenary team for the first time.

  “I mean, we’d worked under live fire before, and we’d been ambushed before, but never both by strangers at the same time. We were in this small town north of La Paz. Clare had gone off to do whatever Clare did, and we thought we were settled in for a typical wait. We had supplies and money, but not much in the way of weapons. That was the thing about her. She trained us incessantly in how to use them, but she never actually let us carry, so when the ambush hit, we were completely outgunned. We’d been trained hard enough at that point that we got out of the house fairly easily. We carried bags, tool bags . . . God, I can’t believe I’m telling you all this. It’s embarrassing.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s fascinating. Please don’t stop.”

  She sighed. “Okay. So, tool bags were the essentials. We could live for weeks, months with everything in them. We made it out with those and not a lot else and headed farther up the highlands. But these guys, they were hard core, and we were tired of being fucked with. John didn’t want to spend the next few weeks on the rough if this was just more of Clare’s bullshit. The way he saw it, these guys knew we were kids, and they were fighting for money, so the easiest way to end it was to figure out their lead and snatch him—torture him if we had to—to find out who’d hired him. John figured if it was Clare they were working for, we could kick the guy in the nuts and send him on his way, and if it was someone else, we’d cut off his nuts and save them for Clare.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah, that was it.”

  “No, what happened?”

  “Oh. Well, we set a trap, used me as bait—I was always the bait—and worked our way up the food chain. Once we had one of them, we had access to their coms and we used that to lure in their commander. Once we had him, we rigged a pulley system and roped him upside down off a tree. Jack lit a fire beneath him and just kept adding sticks. Didn’t take long before the guy offered up the number Clare used to communicate with him and gave us the city she’d hired him out of. It took a bit of sleuthing on our part to hunt her down, but the story ended with us waiting for her in her hotel room and me putting a gun to her head.”

  Holden stared.

  “Yeah, fucked up, I know. For what it’s worth, the gun wasn’t loaded. I did shoot her later, but that’s another story. Anyway, Bolivia is John’s strategy.” She tapped the contact information link. “The phone number has a San Antonio area code. Hundred bucks says it rings to a real location and gives us our rendezvous point.”

  Holden said, “And we meet at seven in the evening.”

  “Yep. Easy peasy. I’ll call the number tomorrow. See where it leads.”

  She closed the browser, as if that was all, but it wasn’t all.

  The post was missing context for who they’d be baiting or, more specifically, what the endgame might be. Jack wasn’t the type to inadvertently leave out that kind of detail, which meant he was handling it, and as much as she trusted the strategist in him the way she always had, she also didn’t. Not just because he had gone rogue in Prague and cut her out and was now forcing her to fly blind, but because Bolivia was a one-off scenario. It’d worked because they were fourteen, and because they were up against mercenaries, not patriots defending their homeland, and because no matter how lucky they might have been that Clare hadn’t accidentally gotten them dead, they’d always been able to count on knowing that in her own messed-up way, she was trying to keep them alive. This was different.

  She’d warned him that trying to play it both ways was going to get them killed. This would be so much easier without Clare as an unknown.

  Holden said, “Whatever it is you’re not saying, it’s only fair I know.”

  He was right, but that was more than she had energy to deal with, so she gave him the half-truth. “I’ve posted a few of these for Clare,” she said. “I’m sure John has done the same. There’s been no response. Part of me is certain that once we get to the end of this, there’ll be no Dmitry, just her and another lecture on everything I did wrong, and John will get the credit for the successes, and whether we win or lose, I lose and he wins. Again.”

  Holden nudged his shoulder into hers.

  She looked over at him.

  “You were dealt a shitty hand,” he said. “For your sake, I’m sorry. But selfishly, what you lived through made you who you are, and I happen to like who you are. I mean, I hate that you had to go through it, but there’s this version of you on the other side . . .”

  She put a finger to his lips and shushed him.

  She knew where this was headed, and it set off all the same fire alarms as before. She wasn’t ready to go there now or maybe ever. She said, “What were you up to at fourteen? Pickpocketing tourists in Bogotá?”

  He chuckled. “That story needs more time than we’ve got tonight.”

  “Oh, you’re gonna make me fight you for it?”

  He slid off the bench. “You’d need a tree branch, pulley system, and a fire. Nothing less.”

  She scooted out behind him, pulled a clean towel from the cupboard, waited till his back was turned, and mock lunged in his direction.

  His reflexes were faster than she remembered.

  He caught her wrist, spun her round, and locked an arm around her neck.

  Instinct overrode playfulness.

  She flipped him hard onto his back.

  He took her down with him.

  The whole trailer shook, and the floor groaned.

  She froze, tight up against his side, half on top of him, half on the floor.

  In stillness there was his breathing and hers, his heartbeat and hers, and the terrifying sense of losing control. She let go and pulled herself up, grabbed the towel and clean clothes, and strode for the bathroom.

  He called after her.

  She stopped. Didn’t turn.
<
br />   He said, “Are you planning to play fair when we meet your brother?”

  The question, out of the blue, threw her.

  She could lie, but they both knew she wasn’t yet ready to forgive.

  She’d gone along with Jack’s plan in Prague and called the Russians because Jiminy Cricket here wouldn’t stop reminding her that her brother hadn’t acted in a vacuum and that, as much as she hated what he’d done and what he’d continue to do, she didn’t want him dead. But what Jack had asked of her wasn’t just a phone call. The Russians wanted an assassination, and until she knew Jack was clear, that meant following through, which meant going to the trouble and expense of sneaking back into the United States so she could put a bullet between the eyes of the goddamn Speaker of the House, all to support whatever he’d gotten himself into behind her back.

  So much depended on if his explanation matched this bullshit.

  “I don’t know,” she said, and she started forward again, frustrated, irritated at Holden, at her brother, at the world.

  Holden said, “Hey.”

  She stopped again. This time she turned.

  He was still on the floor, on his back, where he’d fallen.

  “What?” she said.

  He propped up on an elbow, glanced at the fifth-wheel overhang, said, “There’s only one bed up there.” He nodded toward the sofa in the slide out. “If you’ve got extra sheets . . . ?”

  She debated. Long and hard, she debated.

  “Bed up there is big enough for two,” she said, “but keep to your side. Much as I want to shoot you, I don’t want to do it in my sleep.”

  CHAPTER 29

  San Antonio Museum of Art

  San Antonio, Texas, USA

  HOLDEN

  SHE TURNED THE FIESTA OFF THE STREET INTO A HALF-EMPTY LOT across from the museum, pulled into the nearest parking spot, and shut off the engine, then flashed a teasing smile, leaned over the center console, put her head in his lap, reached between his legs, and stuffed the keys up under the seat, somewhere in the cushion. She took her sweet time about it, too, as if she didn’t know what she was doing and as if trying to get a reaction wasn’t her idea of entertainment.

  She was bad in that way, relentless, and he loved that about her, just hated that it came as part of another rotation through a revolving personality door.

  That had started yesterday morning.

  The farther they’d gotten from the border, the worse the cycling had become.

  She’d been real, honest, and genuinely human one moment, shut off, brusque, and sullen the next, and twenty miles later out had come the flirtatious coquette.

  Confusing as hell, but what he minded more was the way she’d also become evasive, doling out information as control and reward, twisting truth to where it became difficult to tell where the lie began, making it hard to figure out what exactly was going on inside that head of hers and even harder to trust her.

  He’d known she’d eventually slip into that mode.

  Just hadn’t expected it this soon.

  She disentangled from his lap, offered a mischievous smile, grabbed a purse off the backseat, and stepped out of the car.

  He followed her lead.

  She looked nice—stunning, really—dark brown hair, mid-thigh, figure-hugging dress with over-the-knee boots that she’d picked up during the same shopping spree that had put him in a button-down shirt, jeans, and dress shoes.

  He’d cleaned up okay.

  Not as nicely as she had, but more eyes on her meant fewer on him, and under the circumstances, he preferred it that way.

  She linked her arm in his and led him toward the museum.

  They were a good thirty-minute walk from where they needed to be in the city center. With her in heels, that might be a generous estimate. She hadn’t explained why she’d brought him here instead, and he hadn’t asked, because he had no tolerance for the head games, and every request he made gave her another opportunity to withhold information and lie.

  He reached the museum door, held it open. She squeezed his bicep, headed past him for the admission desk, and paid the entry for two.

  It was five in the afternoon now.

  Museum doors stayed open till nine.

  Rendezvous was at seven, at a restaurant in the heart of downtown, not far from the Alamo, right smack in the heart of the city’s tourist mecca. He knew that much because two hours out of Brownsville, she’d pulled off the road and called the number on the Craigslist post and, after she’d hung up, said, “River Walk. You ever been there?”

  He’d seen pictures.

  As far as he’d been concerned, that was as close as he needed to get—to the River Walk or the Alamo or anywhere else that attracted slow-moving, selfie-snapping hordes by the thousands. If the point of a place was in the experience, he’d had enough of that to satisfy two lifetimes. He’d suspected it’d be much the same for Jack, which had raised questions about why he’d choose the most tourist-infested part of town over a quiet resort or a nature trail or, heck, even a museum.

  Jill, tracing her finger in a daisy-chain loop along the edge of the steering wheel, had answered the unasked. “He knows that if we meet in private, I’d greet him with a punch in the face and possibly break his arm. He figures the more public the place, the better chance he has of me behaving. Having you there is a backup, because he thinks me causing a scene in front of you would embarrass me enough not to do it.”

  Holden ignored what was written between those lines.

  He said, “Is he right?”

  Her finger continued tracing. “I’d much rather meet him alone than with you there, so yeah, probably.”

  Holden took her hand, held her fingers, waiting for her to look at him, and when her gaze tracked over to his, said, “Listen, if you need to fight him to make it better, by all means get it out of your system. But that’s going to create exposure that puts us all at risk—me included—and I don’t want to be there when it happens.”

  “I’ll behave in public,” she said.

  “I have your word?”

  She had given him that, but hadn’t given him the name of the rendezvous location until they’d settled in at the rental secured off Airbnb, a one-bed, one-bath rural cabin on the north edge of town that didn’t require ID verification and had keyless check-in. She’d tossed the restaurant name out in passing, as if she’d already mentioned it hours ago, as if he’d automatically know what she was talking about.

  Which he had, but that had been beside the point.

  He’d stood, picked up his jacket.

  She said, “Where are you going?”

  “Need to see the river,” he said. “Map the area.”

  She cocked her head and studied him. “John’s not going to sell us out.”

  He strapped on the Desert Eagle. “It’s not him I worry about.”

  “We weren’t tracked here, either.”

  He leaned down and kissed her forehead. “You, my dear, might be fully comfortable walking into unfamiliar territory and improvising your way out, but I like to know where the exits are.”

  She stretched out on the bed like a long cat exposing its belly, daring a hand to touch it, and said, “Are you coming back? Or do I have to come find you?”

  “Would you?” he said.

  She offered a sly smile. “I think so.”

  That was probably the last bit of truth he’d gotten out of her.

  She led him now in a slow stroll through the museum, down hallways and past exhibits, then out the back and along a walkway toward the river.

  He understood then.

  The museum provided free parking, a place to stash the car. The river taxi that passed by once an hour provided a way into town that bypassed the traffic and the camera grid. A simple plan. Easy. Convenient. It’d have been simpler and easier and more convenient if she hadn’t tried to turn it into a power play.

  The flat-bottomed boat took them south along landscaped hike trails and bike trails, p
ast overlooks and beneath pedestrian bridges, then through floodgates into the downtown loop, where the roar of music rose and crowds thickened and colorful seasonal lights draped bridges and filled the branches of hundred-year-old cypress trees, and let them out a stone’s throw from their destination.

  The boarding zone and the bridge became bottlenecks.

  Bodies clustered, hemming him in.

  His insides tensed, the whole of him uneasy in the thick, where the human press made it possible for an unknown assailant to get in tight for an up-close kill.

  She glanced back, grabbed his hand, threaded her fingers between his, and pulled him along, navigating the throng like a shark through territorial waters. She’d flipped again, offering a warm, playful version of herself, not so much real as needing him to believe it was real, and she led him off the walking path onto a sectioned-off patio, where, putting on airs for the young twentysomething at the hostess station, she plied a drawl so thick he’d only ever heard similar in movies and on ranches and in sororities.

  “We’re here to meet someone?” she said. “Bolivia, I think?”

  They were early, even with the stroll through the museum, the wait for the taxi, the slow ride into town, and fighting to move through the Friday evening throng. But the hostess smiled, as if she knew exactly what Jill intended, and handed them off to a server, who led them away from the low, rumbling roar to a quiet interior, where the decor and dishes were high end, and the tables spaced widely enough to allow room to breathe.

  Tension eased. Holden’s hands relaxed.

  He followed around a wall to the far back corner, where a Hispanic brunette in a maxi dress sat alone, looking over a menu, nails impeccable, makeup flawless, and Holden recognized the face, because its twin currently led him by the hand.