Liars' Legacy

by Taylor Stevens

  The dark was made for speed.

  He rushed that stage-right door. Two seconds was all he got, but he closed most of the distance, and when the next note rose and softer lighting followed, he was feet from a man in shooting stance, suppressor aimed six inches to Jack’s left and moving toward center chest. Every rubber-bullet bruise and hand-to-hand fight, lost and won, said he’d be dead before he could place a fatal round.

  Clare shoved him. Jill shoved him.

  He dove into the man’s feet, knocking him off balance, and they rolled, tumbling, fighting to incapacitate, to kill, to gain control of scattered weapons, while high schoolers crooned the lyrics to “Winter Wonderland” and the nearest audience members no longer watched the stage.

  The man was heavy, strong, and nearly as fast as Jill.

  His fingers scrabbled along the carpet, found his gun.

  Jack thrust his full weight down on that shooting arm, pinning it to the floor, and he hit and hit and hit, punching neck, elbowing head, landing strike after strike on a body that seemed not to feel the blows.

  The man’s free hand went for Jack’s eyes and nose.

  His knees went into Jack’s side.

  Jack drove forehead into face.

  Cartilage crunched. Blood sprayed.

  The man shoved, punched, forced range of movement on his shooting arm.

  Jack struggled to keep the muzzle pointed away and lost by the inch.

  He had been beaten by Clare, had rarely won against Jill, but not since he was thirteen had a stranger bested him.

  This first time would be the time that killed him.

  Acceptance settled.

  The song neared its final notes.

  Somewhere on the edge of awareness, the stage-right door creaked open.

  He was slow to register the muzzle slipping through the crack.

  The body beneath him went limp.

  Delayed recognition filled in a pattern of suppressed reports arriving with a snare-drum beat, and he rolled free, gasping, shaking.

  Jill hissed, “Hurry up, asshole. I’ve got places to be.”

  He wanted to hug her until she couldn’t breathe. Instead, he crawled after the knife, located his gun, stumbled to his feet, and pushed through the widening crack.

  Jill locked the door, shoved a chair up under the handle.

  He followed her through the dark, down a corridor, around a corner, into a tunnel that ran beneath the stage, and out a side door into a restricted area.

  The cart with his stuff was parked off in a corner.

  She tossed him an XXL sweatshirt, overpriced, tags still attached, probably shoplifted. “Been listening to their coms,” she said.

  Her fingers worked buttons and zippers.

  “They’re shutting down the park.”

  She pulled off the costume.

  “We’re both burned, but big boy up there can hold until we’re out.”

  Jack pulled his gear from the garbage bag, strapped the pack to his stomach, and pulled the sweatshirt down over the equipment belly.

  Returning to the woods and following the transmission lines back was a no-go. They weren’t equipped for a protracted run from eyes in the sky, with their heat-seeking sensors. They’d be dead within the hour.

  They needed people.

  Lots of them.

  That was why he’d chosen the park.

  They had to get ahead of the crowd.

  “We go front,” he said.

  Jill said, “You got what you came for?”

  “Need one last call.”

  She handed him a Santa hat.

  He shoved it on his head, then felt up his side for the tape that had secured Holden’s coms to his chest. He snagged the wire that had gone missing during the fight, pulled the earpiece back up through his collar, and tipped it back into his ear.

  Jill said, “Boo-boo is back online.”

  Jack scowled. “Cute.”

  She smiled and bumped her shoulder into his.

  Holden said, “Welcome back, bro. You’re clear for about five seconds.”

  Jack nudged the staff-area gate open and slipped out.

  Behind him, Jill went over the fence.

  It’d be a slow man’s race for the front gate.

  He fell in behind a trio of twentysomethings and stuck close, listening in on the conversation to gain a sense of common ground, and was their new best friend by the time they reached the front gate. They were out of Baltimore. He had an aunt there he wanted to visit. It was easy to hitch a ride. They dropped him off in Franklin Square, and he made his own way toward the harbor and sat on a bench outside Light Street Pavilion, adrenaline dumping, brain unspooling, watching the waves dance.

  He couldn’t stop yet.

  This was almost over, but not quite.

  He pulled out the last of the burner phones and, like Jill putting the gun to Clare’s head in that Belizean hotel, dialed Hayes for the final time.

  The voice on the other end had lost its indifferent calm.

  There was exhaustion, concern, maybe an edge of anger, but mostly an interesting readiness to listen. Jack said, “Tomorrow the junior senator from Tennessee and the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives will die. Whether or not their actual bodies take the knife is up to you. You’ve been given an opportunity to control the narrative, and you should use it.

  “The intel that makes assassination possible has your fingerprints and DNA all over it, literally and figuratively. The evidence in my possession has been parceled and, together with recordings of our conversation, is ready for delivery to your peers within the intelligence community, the congressional leadership, and the media. The only thing standing between you and going down in history as a traitor is the choices you’re about to make.”

  Hayes said, “I cannot stand down and allow these assassinations to happen, not even with a body switch. You know this.”

  “I do.”

  “Then what, specifically, are you asking for?”

  “There are names I want taken off your kill list, and I want all the accompanying data completely removed from physical and digital repositories and destroyed. Think long and hard before you agree, because failing to deliver will be worse than no agreement at all.”

  “I can put a hold on the kill list,” Hayes said. “But not today.”

  “And the rest?”

  “Some of that is beyond my paygrade.”

  Jack stood and strolled toward the water’s edge. “Keep me and my friends alive,” he said, “and I guarantee your paygrade will rise.”

  “Twenty-four hours is a long time for circumstances to change.”

  “Twenty hours,” Jack said.

  More precisely, twenty hours and eighteen minutes.

  Jack flung the phone into the water, watched it sink.

  He turned and trudged back toward McKeldin Square.

  Hayes would hunt him, the FBI would hunt him, local law enforcement would hunt him, and they’d run him hard, catching glimpses, getting close, discovering he’d slipped away again, and when the assassinations hit, they’d be confused, because that’s what happened when you became so focused on finding the man, you forgot about the idea.

  Anyone could be taught to vanish or fight or plan an ambush. Most anyone could even be good at it.

  Not everyone could think ahead of the enemy.

  Legerdemain. Mental prestidigitation.

  That’s what Clare had always been after.

  The only person within Hayes’s headquarters who’d figured out that Holden was working with them was sitting out this fight in front of a television.

  And the only person within Hayes’s headquarters under whose leadership the war room operated at its most effective, cohesive best was sitting out this fight on the other side of the same house, away from the television.

  And though Hayes could tap into unlimited manpower via official agencies, those requests came with paper trails, jurisdictional issues, and cover-your-ass p
olitical jockeying. His own outside-the-law shadow force had been nearly decimated tonight due to peak stupidity. What was left of that shadow force would chase him.

  And they’d chase Jill passing herself off as him.

  But Holden would make the kills.

  Legerdemain.

  CHAPTER 37

  Atoka County

  Oklahoma, USA

  KARA

  SHE RODE WITH THE WINDOW DOWN, SUN ON HER SKIN, WIND IN her face, parsing memories with prairie and grassland as the miles rolled by. Jack was behind the wheel, just him and her now on the last of the long-ass drive from Pennsylvania.

  They were both comfortable with silence. She liked that about him.

  It’d been hours since they’d last spoken.

  Another few minutes and they’d turn off State Highway 3, and another half hour and she’d be home—not the house of her childhood, the one she’d built for her parents years later. It’d been too long since she’d been back.

  The more judicious choice would have been to return to headquarters, but she wasn’t ready, not emotionally, and not psychologically. She had contacted Hayes to let him know she’d been set free, had told him she wasn’t okay, that she needed time.

  She’d expected an argument, perhaps recrimination.

  Instead, he’d been conciliatory, told her that her job would be waiting when she got back, whenever that might be.

  Clearly, she’d underestimated Jack’s promise.

  The one he’d made right before he’d re-shackled her to that stupid chain.

  He had come that morning with a television and had set her free to shower and step out for fresh air while he ran the digital antenna. It’d been kind of endearing, the way he’d spent so much time trying to get her the best reception the remoteness would allow. After, they’d sat on the porch, eating lunch out of cans and boxes, a proper hobo picnic, and he’d told her what he had planned, and she’d told him that letting Hayes control the narrative was like putting a chicken in front of a terrier and expecting the dog not to chase.

  Hayes would use the opportunity to grab more extrajudicial power, and for all they knew, he was as much a partisan hack as the next guy, and there was no guarantee that whatever spin he spun would be in the country’s best interest.

  “No,” Jack had said. “But he’ll do what’s in his own best interest.”

  He hadn’t elaborated on how the two aligned.

  Power grabs and politicking would go on regardless, he’d said. He wanted to prevent civil war, and wanted his freedom. Attempting to control more would make him yet another person trying to impose their worldview on the masses.

  They talked until Jen stepped out to tell him it was time, and he guided Kara back to the shackle.

  “I’d prefer to ask you to stay and wait, and to take you at your word,” he said. “But there’s too much at stake for that. Not just for us but you. Anyone finds you before we get back and you’re not locked up, then you’re an accomplice.”

  She shoved her leg at him, hating that she was forced to understand logic that shouldn’t exist in the first place, hating that he’d do it whether she agreed or not.

  “We’ll be gone three days at most,” he said.

  She hoped to God he was right, because Hayes was about to go all out in an effort to scratch him off the Broker list. He’d have already called up every kill team not on active assignment, he’d have a small army at his back, and if they made it past round one and continued on to targets, there’d be SWAT teams and Capitol Police and FBI and probably multiple Boomerangs—gunfire locators mostly used against snipers.

  That was simply the way things worked.

  She would say as much to Jack if stating the obvious wouldn’t insult them both. She had her own reasons for wanting Hayes to lose.

  For the sake of her freedom, she needed Jack to stay alive.

  “I’ve made sure you’ll be okay,” he said. “No matter what happens to us, you’ll be all right. You have my word.”

  He left her with nothing but television and time.

  It was a hell of a wait.

  The first episode didn’t break until the next day’s late-evening news: A bomb threat. An amusement park forced to evacuate. A false alarm.

  Helicopter footage showed armored vehicles and multistate law-enforcement personnel, and she saw Hayes in that strategy, but it told her absolutely nothing about who’d lived or died.

  Twenty-four hours later the senator pinged the news cycle: Emergency hospitalization. Critical condition. Previously undiagnosed health issues.

  Twelve hours after that, the world erupted and sent Jen’s words from the train round and round Kara’s head.

  All your guys trying to find my brother will never see me coming.

  I will put a bullet between the eyes of a sitting member of Congress.

  The Russians wanted a spectacle, and that’s what they got.

  Every channel played variations of the same clip: Speaker of the House outside an immigration detention center. Bullet strike. Body fall. Chaos.

  In the background, beyond the noise, she heard the crack-bang.

  Kara listened for it each time the clip replayed.

  Sound delay told her the hit had come from beyond 450 yards.

  Even with multiple Boomerangs, there’d have been enough time for the shooter to bug out, but so much of this was wrong. Jack had given Hayes a head start, an opportunity to prevent an actual killing, and everything about this was real.

  The spin machine kicked in all the same: a name, a face, a manhunt.

  A suspect with a lengthy criminal record and a long unstable history. An armed engagement. Eventually, suspect suicide.

  And a collective sigh of relief and space to grieve.

  Kara shut off the television, conflicted, confused.

  Hayes could have averted this but hadn’t, and that troubled her deeply, and she couldn’t point to why, exactly.

  It wasn’t death. The entirety of her adult years had been spent as a cog in death’s machine.

  And it wasn’t the assassination itself. Her job at headquarters had been to support extrajudicial killing.

  And it wasn’t even that it’d been a US citizen or on US soil. She’d been preparing to do the same thing before she’d been snatched.

  Nor was it the taking of presumably innocent life. She’d argued out that issue with Nick after her first six months.

  It took a while to shut off her mind, but finally, she slept.

  She awoke with Jack’s arrival.

  He’d returned before the others, a single set of footsteps tromping up the porch, through the front, and to her room. He looked like he’d been awake for days.

  He unlocked the shackle, handed her a couple grand in cash, and told her she was free to roam, or to leave entirely if she preferred, but that would mean walking a long way, and if she was willing to wait until Jen and Chris got back, he’d take her wherever she wanted to go. She didn’t know exactly why she stayed.

  —Because she liked him.

  —Because all evidence pointed to him telling the truth.

  —Because she wasn’t sure where she’d be safe just yet, and as long as she wasn’t locked up, another twenty hours here made no difference.

  She wandered while he slept, opening cabinets, peering into closets, everything except Liv’s room. The odd assortment of shoes and clothing, suitcases, camping supplies, and first aid confused her until she found the gun safe—locked—and the fireproof boxes, also locked—and she understood what this house really was, and was afraid to touch anything after that.

  Jen and Chris arrived in the predawn and headed right back out again, with Liv Wilson in tow. They’d taken her to a hospital in Philadelphia according to Jack.

  They could have gone round trip to Toronto for as long as they took.

  They returned that evening, loaded up on groceries and supplies, and she kept out of sight at first, unsure of her place in the order of things, listening to t
hem knock about in the kitchen, until curiosity and hunger got the best of her.

  Jen was first to see her. She lit up with a welcoming smile and motioned her in, and it felt a lot like being a fly on the wall at another family’s holiday get-together, all the inside jokes and rapid-fire banter, Jack and Jen bustling around each other while cooking, and Chris trying to be useful but mostly getting underfoot.

  They spoke openly about Frankfurt and Berlin and Prague in her presence, as if their secrets weren’t actually secrets. Glimpses of those same events as seen through their eyes were like stepping through the looking glass.

  The war room’s data hadn’t been wrong, it’d been incomplete.

  Where headquarters saw a legacy killer about to rendezvous with a handler in a lead-up to an assassination, there’d been a son trying to escape his mother’s past and hoping to find a father.

  Everything had ultimately been about that, about finding Dmitry.

  And Dmitry was still unfinished business.

  Jen tugged a piece of paper from her pocket, unfolded it, and spread it flat on the table. Dot-matrix type and peg-holed edges pointed to a flight manifest printed directly off a gate agent’s printer. Jack and Chris leaned in for a closer look, and Jen said, “When I lost track of time in Frankfurt, it’s because I’d tailed the spotter to his flight and was trying to get this. If you still think he was Dmitry, then this is where we start hunting.”

  She slapped a set of keys down on top of the paper.

  “Took these off a couple Russians holed up in an apartment overlooking the café in Savignyplatz.” She nudged them in her brother’s direction. “Front door, apartment door,” she said. “They were set up long before we got there. What are the odds those weren’t Dmitry’s guys?”

  Jack hooked a finger in the ring and dangled the keys above the manifest. He waited a while before speaking. “We went after answers and got them,” he said. “There’s no question Dmitry’s alive or that he’s real. There’s also no question that finding him will be the lesser challenge. So do we go, or do we let it go?”

  Jen sighed, and the guys seemed to understand what the sigh meant, because the mood turned somber. She said, “I’ll go for you.”

  “It can’t be like that,” Jack said. “We mess this up, and there are real-world consequences on the other end.”