Liars' Legacy

by Taylor Stevens

  In the shock of the unexpected, a laugh escaped.

  Jack glanced up, smiled, and stood, every movement perfect.

  He leaned out to hug his sister, and surprisingly, Jill let him.

  And he offered a feminine hand in Holden’s direction.

  Holden shook, and only then did the facade break.

  Eyes that had been smiling hardened. Delicate grip turned firm. “Thank you,” Jack said. “I appreciate you coming.” The sincerity beneath the words was a gut punch that spoke of a man who’d truly believed he’d lost his sister and who credited Holden for bringing her to him.

  Holden clasped left hand over right. Lips tight, he nodded.

  Nothing needed to be said.

  It was what it was, and that was enough.

  Jack let go and sat.

  Jill leaned over him and, in a low growl, said, “Apologize.”

  The server, catching the mood, said she’d be right back.

  Jack flipped tresses over his shoulder.

  “I’ll apologize properly when I can,” he said. “Words will have to do for now.” He paused for emphasis. “I’m sorry. I hope one day you’ll let me explain, and maybe one day after that, forgive me.”

  The anger went out of her like air in a deflating balloon.

  She sat, and Holden followed, and he made a finger circle in Jack’s direction and said, “What’s with the . . . ?”

  Jack went back to studying the menu. “Drag makes the best disguises.” And after a disbelieving beat, “My choices were either do this using Clare’s ID or ride the hobo rails. I’ve gone soft for pillows, so Clare it was.”

  Jill said, “Which stash did you raid?”

  “Cleveland.”

  “Clear it all out?”

  “Every bit of it.”

  “Clare knows?”

  “I’ll tell her after, assuming we live.”

  “Still no word from her?”

  “No. But this isn’t her doing.”

  Jill looked askance at him, as if she wanted to believe but couldn’t, and that brought a pause to the rapid-fire volley, which would’ve felt like the lead-up to a fight if Holden hadn’t seen it before and known it as a high-speed debriefing.

  He shifted, got comfortable, kept quiet.

  If the past was any indication, these two were just getting started.

  Jack said, “I’m not saying she doesn’t know. She very well might be hanging around, watching the whole thing unfold. Hell, for all I know, she’s got a line tapped right into it, but one hundred percent, no doubt, she’s not the one driving it.”

  The server returned, interrupting the conversation before it had a chance to get going again. Jack handed his menu to her and, without the slightest bit of apology, placed an order for the table. He waited until she’d gone, said, “We don’t have a lot of time, and there’s a lot to cover.” Then, turning to Jill and picking up where he’d left off, said, “Dmitry, the DNA donor, exists. He was the source of our tickets and the original invitation. I don’t know who he is and don’t know where he is. But he is alive, and he’s not our enemy.”

  Jill said, “Proof.”

  “A collection of documents that go back fifteen, twenty years—birth certificates, handwritten notes, times, dates, sightings—curated with the meticulous detail of someone who had a personal interest in finding us.”

  Jill said, “Source.”

  “Emotional blackmail handed to me by the guys who sideswiped him.”

  She said, “Source.”

  “Kremlin. Maybe GRU. Can’t confirm.”

  She said, “Motive.”

  “Active measures.”

  She sighed. Sat back, slouched, and crossed her arms.

  Jack said, “And I’m near certain the solitary spotter in Frankfurt was Dmitry.”

  Jill’s eyebrows lifted in question.

  He said, “Once all the other pieces connect, I can’t see it any other way. Clare might have dropped off radar within the US intelligence community, but Moscow hasn’t forgotten. In their eyes she extends to her kids. So going back to the beginning, right? Dmitry’s high enough up the food chain that he can afford the risk of ignoring policy in regards to her as long as no one takes an interest in what he’s done, so he sends us an invite. We say yes. But then, oops, the Broker gets dead.

  “That throws Moscow into turmoil.

  “They’ve had a long-game strategy in play and an assassination about to go down, but every intelligence agency is now out for blood, and their go is now no-go. They’re looking for a way to salvage it. Enter Clare’s kids, whom they know how to find—thank you, Dmitry—and whom they feel they have dibs on because of Clare’s past. Not only are these kids American, but they’ve also been trained by one of the best, and Moscow knows this—thank you, renegade sister working favors for the Broker.

  “The invitation has been sent. The kids are already on their way to meet a father they’ve never met. So, whoever’s managing the now no-go operation inserts into Dmitry’s business. Dmitry’s not untouchable. He doesn’t have the power to complain, not if he doesn’t want to get dead, too, so the scenario shifts. The guy who metaphorically stood in the midst of a battle and raised a white flag to force a cease-fire so the kids he’s been looking for since birth didn’t die before he had a chance to meet them, has the whole thing yanked out of his hands by overlords who’ve gotten other ideas. What’s someone in a position like that do?”

  “I don’t know about him,” Jill said, “but I know Clare would have counted on us being smart enough to figure out what was happening and probably would have found a way to follow close, ready to interfere if things got out of hand.”

  “Ergo, Dmitry in Frankfurt,” he said. “But then the Americans showed up, and that complicated things beyond his ability to meddle. I can’t prove it, but I think the Russians waiting at the Berlin airport were his guys, too. That’s as far as he gets.”

  “What about Clare?”

  “She’s got more vested in finding Dmitry than we ever did. If I had to put money on it, I’d say she’s in Moscow, and the reason we haven’t heard from her is that, well, she’s in Moscow.”

  The siblings glanced at each other. A pall fell over the table, and in that break of silence, the server arrived with drinks and appetizers, and Jill’s assessment of Jack filled Holden’s head.

  John wants this thing with Dmitry more than he’s ever wanted anything.

  He understood now why Jack had gone to the effort of bringing them all together face-to-face. Dmitry, the question the twins had set out to Europe to answer, had become Dmitry the sword hanging over their heads.

  Holden said, “Who’s your target, John?”

  “Senator Kenyon, but it doesn’t really matter. Moscow sacrificed me as a decoy within hours of touching down. Who they really want dead is”—he looked at Jill—“who exactly?”

  “Speaker of the House.”

  Jack let out a low whistle. He glanced at his nails. “Gonna be a whole something else trying to pull that off. It’s almost like Moscow had some backward idea about which one of us was made for the harder stuff.”

  She kicked him under the table but grinned as she did it.

  Holden studied brother, then sister and pondered the dilemma.

  Assassination wouldn’t weigh heavy on the conscience—certainly not on his or Jill’s—and whatever it weighed on Jack’s wouldn’t be enough to offset the risk to someone he cared about. But they were also smart enough to understand that in doing this, they’d press thumbs hard on the world’s political scales, and there was a difference between indifference and being the spark that ignited civil war.

  He said, “Is Dmitry worth it?”

  Jack said, “That’s not the question that needs answering.” Holden laced fingers and rested hands on the table.

  Jill crossed her arms again.

  Jack said, “From a purely self-preservation perspective, right? We’ve got the Americans, we’ve got the Russians, and we’ve
got ourselves caught in the middle. Whether we do or we don’t, the Americans consider us a threat and want us dead, so they don’t factor. That leaves the Russians. If we don’t do this, they’re also going to want us dead, and we can pretty much write off ever meeting Dmitry, which means we basically get to repeat Clare’s life for the past twentysomething years.

  “If we do go through with this, we keep the possibility of meeting Dmitry open, and assuming we survive, we’ll have a safe haven in Russia. Problem then becomes the Russians own us, and there will always be one more thing they need us to do. And there’s also the inconvenient fact that the whole reason the Americans are trying to kill me in the first place is that the Russians pointed them my way.”

  Jill said, “Seriously?”

  “Gave them my flight details out of Dallas. There’s a kill team in Houston now, waiting for me to surface.”

  She said, “You led them there.”

  “I did.”

  “So you’re saying what? We do a Clare, twist this to our advantage?”

  “No. Clare spent her best years paranoid and on the run. To come out on top, we’ve got to arrange the board so the powers that be are better served by keeping us alive. It’s not Clare we want to pattern after. It’s the Broker.”

  Holden said, “You see a way to do that?”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. He looked right at him. “Bolivia.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Prospect Hill, San Antonio

  Texas, USA

  HOLDEN

  THREE MILES WEST AS THE CROW FLEW, A TEN-MINUTE DRIVE FROM the downtown River Walk or, if one was inclined to travel on foot, a straight-line one-hour stroll, the city had another face, a poor and tired face that even few denizens ever saw. Here, chain-link-lined houses were old and small and proudly maintained, and the streets were cracked, and windows barred or boarded up, and favors in any flavor were cheap and easily found, and rooms could be had for thirty dollars a night instead of hundreds.

  Here was where Jack would trip the radar.

  The motel he’d chosen was more of a compound than a building, two old bright blue cinder-block structures set perpendicular to each other on a corner lot surrounded by a weed-strewn privacy fence with just a single entrance. Across the street a convenience-store rooftop offered a direct view into the compound and a clean line of sight on half the doors and windows.

  It was a perfect setup for suicide by sniper. The kind of place anyone with a modicum of tactical sense would avoid, even if they didn’t have a target on their back. That they’d come here deliberately screamed trap so loudly that about the only thing they could have done to be more blatant was add an Acme arrow and a birdseed sign.

  “Mental games upon mental games,” Jack had said.

  By his reasoning, the kill team expected a trap regardless. Making it obvious would mess with their equilibrium, and the vulnerability worked both ways once the attackers got beyond the fence. So, here they were in the middle of a gallery, waiting for the shooting to start.

  Jack had already gone.

  Holden was on the bed, killing time by studying watermarks on the ceiling, and Jill sat in the corner chair, working something over on a notepad.

  They had arrived together in Jill’s Fiesta, the three of them, and had unloaded the trunk onto the bed, adding to what Jack had retrieved from the sizable stash they’d left behind in Houston last month. The X-Caliber was what he’d gone for, a gauged and scoped CO2 projector used for tranquilizing large animals from a distance.

  The rifle was part of the history that had brought them together, and it felt right having it here, more so given that this time it’d be in Holden’s own hands.

  Jack had dosed the syringes for weight in twenty-pound increments and had labeled each accordingly. Too much and Holden would kill the killer, too low and the killer would feel nice and happy while trying to kill him.

  Eyeballing for accuracy was the best he could do.

  Jack had run them through a map of nearby buildings and the surrounding streets, diagramming positions and strategies the way he’d mapped out Republic Square in Prague, and they had gone into crawl spaces and had timed distance, and when they’d prepared as much as they could, Jack had tripped the countdown, taken the car, and gone.

  The kill team would come, because they had no choice but to come.

  When and how many and how hard the fight, were yet to be determined.

  Holden had spent the first hour disassembling, cleaning, reassembling, and loading weapons, busy work that didn’t substitute for boresighting and zeroing a scope and making a rifle his own, but it had kept him occupied to a point. He was a mechanic relying on another man’s tools, and on a high-stakes night like tonight, where an inch could mean the difference between life and death, it left him with a sense of foreboding and dread.

  That wasn’t helped by whatever was going on with Jill, who hadn’t volunteered a word to him since leaving the restaurant and had met each attempt at conversation with deliberate monosyllabic indifference.

  If she were anyone else, if there wasn’t so much riding on his participation this evening, he’d have already gotten up and left.

  Instead he shoved a pillow beneath his head and closed his eyes.

  The silence dragged on.

  He had no patience for passive aggression, not even on a good day.

  Jill left the chair and dug through a bag, carried it to the sink area, dumped the whole thing on the floor in a clattering heap, and repacked it, each movement louder and more extreme than the last.

  Holden said, “You wanna talk about it, or do you prefer throwing things?”

  She pulled out whatever she’d just stuffed in the bag, and shoved it back. Voice sweet, mellow, she said, “Talk about what?”

  “The jealousy,” he said.

  “Oh?” she said. “What are you jealous about?”

  Holden opened an eye, followed her a bit, and closed it again.

  The closer they’d gotten to San Antonio—the closer to Jack—the odder she’d behaved, and he’d seen the way her face darkened when Jack had shaken his hand, and was aware of how she’d grown sullen every time Jack had spoken to him directly, and of the subtle attempts to cut him out of the discussion, as if strategy talk was meant for just her and her brother. For someone who’d spent a lifetime wearing character masks and disguises, she was easy to see through when she thought no one was looking.

  He said, “My friendship with your brother takes nothing away from you.”

  She said, “Whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

  He sat up and swiveled to face her. “What is it you need to be happy? You want me to stop speaking with John? Ignore him, refuse to respect him, not be his friend?”

  She looked him dead in the face and, with spite he’d never heard out of her, not even in Prague, when she’d been murderously angry, said, “I want him to not win.”

  It took a beat to process that.

  “Win?” he said. “Is that what I am to you? Some object or trophy you’ve claimed, and that you’re afraid your brother is going to take away?”

  She went back to stuffing the bag.

  He said, “You’re a vortex, Julia, sucking everything into your storm, destroying anything you could possibly have that’s good, and it’ll never stop until you’re willing to face the thing that scares you so bad.”

  Her lip curled in visible disgust. “I’m not afraid of anything.”

  “Oh, but you are. Fear drives everything you do.”

  “All right, smart-ass,” she said. “What’s it I’m so afraid of?”

  “That maybe your mother was right.”

  She glared, and he hesitated, truly pained, because the things he’d say would hurt, and she’d had enough hurt in her life, and he didn’t want to be the one to add to it, but she needed to hear it, and he might be the only one who ever had the chance.

  “You spend so much energy taking from your brother, not because you want what he has, but because
you don’t want him to have what you don’t, as if keeping him from having will keep him from being worth more than you. You treat relationships, connections, people, as if they’re disposable, because it’s safer that way because no one can ever confirm how little you matter if you never let them matter in the first place. And Dmitry, you’re terrified John might actually find him, because what would it say about you if after all these years, it turns out even your own father loves him more?”

  With each added word, the whole of her had darkened.

  Her fists had clenched. Her jaw had clenched.

  She’d stood and inched toward him, and he’d kept going, because this would be the one and only time he could say what needed saying, and he had to say it all, but on that last sentence she came at him, swinging.

  He dodged the first hit. Dodged the second.

  Clipped her hard on the third, and she went out cold.

  He shook his hand, irritated at himself, not for hitting her, per se—in a world like this, notions of chivalry were sexist bullshit that’d get a man killed—but because genuine connections in this life were hard to find, and he genuinely liked her, and he’d hoped . . . he’d hoped. But this was too toxic, even for him.

  He flexed his fingers.

  His knuckles were already bruising. He knew better than to use his hands. A head like hers, he was lucky if he didn’t fracture something.

  She groaned, rolled to her back, and opened her eyes.

  He stood over her, scanned her over to be sure she was okay, and said, “You’ve forgotten who the fuck you’re dealing with.”

  She pulled herself up and stayed motionless for a woozy minute.

  He kept a cautious distance, dug a bandage out of his bag and, wrapping his hand, said, “Just because I like you, just because I get you, doesn’t mean I’m your doormat. You want to hurt me, you’re going to have to find a better way to do it.”

  She moved to the chair and sat, sizing him up, and he could see her brain plotting, scheming, unable or unwilling to quit, because all she knew was how to brawl dirty and she had no concept of tapping out.