Liars' Paradox

by Taylor Stevens

  Jill’s throat hurt. She couldn’t swallow.

  Maybe Clare was dead, and they were just saving this box for her.

  She squeezed her eyelids tight and pretended to be blind again.

  She would be blind for all her whole life if that meant Clare would come back.

  CHAPTER 6

  JACK

  AGE: 26

  LOCATION: NEAR BLANCO, TEXAS

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: USA

  NAMES: JONATHAN THOMAS SMITH

  STALE BREATH AND BODY STINK STIFLED THE AIR, MADE WORSE BY the way captivity slowed time to a crawl. Nights like these used to be a matter of course, he and Jill holed up in hiding or planning or biding time, entwined like twins in the womb, just as they’d been entwined before birth and entwined in subconscious memory and entwined throughout the years since. The regularity had toughened him, had made his mind stronger than anxiety, boredom, or the need to piss.

  But that was then.

  Rubbing shoulders with his sister now, breathing her breath, and sweating her sweat just rubbed him raw. He wanted out, wanted away from the squirming and spoiled-ass complaining, meant to ensure he stayed as miserable as she did.

  Noise from the hunt outside had faded.

  His watch said predawn had already begun its slow march into the sky.

  Reason held him firm, told him the longer they waited, the better off they’d be. And that same reason burned him from the inside out.

  The night had been wrong. All wrong.

  Clare had nothing to gain by starting this crap again—even when viewed through the lens of her delusional worldview—not after last time, when trap and assault had turned their twenty-first birthday celebration into a war that ended with Jill putting a deliberate bullet in Clare’s thigh and threatening to kill her in her sleep if she so much as considered coming at them uninvited again.

  The aftermath had forced a cease-fire of sorts.

  The surprise attacks stopped and the guilt-inducing demands to visit became fewer, providing an opportunity to break free from Clare’s orbit and yet they returned, couldn’t help but return, seeking out bloody, life-threatening competition across thousands of raw acres the way cubicle slaves pursued paintball and laser tag, because nothing else offered the adrenalized pressure release that hunting and hiding from another human predator provided.

  A graduate degree in biochemistry hadn’t done him any better than part-time student, full-time party girl had done for his sister—wasted time, money, and talent, all of it—because a kid who’d fired his first automatic weapon at the age of five, who’d teethed with his fists as an outsider in Jakarta’s dirt slum streets, who’d learned to use wit and strategy for safety, and who’d grown up knowing better than to trust the one person he should have been able to rely on, could only ever play pretend in a world of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and microaggressions.

  He’d never fit behind four walls or abide taking orders from fools, might stay stuck barely above broke freelancing in the gig economy because nothing else gave him the freedom he craved, might never find a way to turn a string of short-term relationships into something deeper than surface attraction, and might be forever consigned to having many acquaintances and no true friends, but, Clare be damned, even that was better than going back to the way things were before.

  To break free of her now, he had to finish out the night, and the night kept bringing him back to the explosion. Either Clare had blown her own house up or someone else had, and he wasn’t sure which was worse.

  Thumping in the distance stopped the pendulum swing.

  Jill’s head ticked up. She whispered, “Helicopter.”

  Explosion.

  Silent dogs.

  Clare’s absence.

  Helicopter.

  One more thing that didn’t make sense.

  He knocked the latch, shoved the lid aside, and like some monster rising from a swamp in a B-rated movie, crawled, bedraggled and dirty, from the earth.

  Early morning underbrush light blinded him.

  Jill shoved his bag out and clambered up.

  He dragged sweet, clean early morning air into his lungs, and listened. The thump came in from the south.

  It didn’t take a genius to guess where it headed.

  He grabbed his gear, slung the rifle strap over his back and, with his sister breathing down his neck, squirreled through the brush. He reached the trail, rose, and ran, winding through the trees, jumping fallen logs, and dodging branches, chasing the projected flight path.

  The helicopter passed overhead.

  He raced against time, too slow and too far away.

  Inconsistencies wound round his head, pounding, pounding with each foot beat:

  Explosion.

  Silent dogs.

  Clare’s absence.

  Helicopter.

  The blades descended.

  He ran faster, second-guessing the decision to wait in the hide as long as he had, hating Clare and the way she made him doubt his instinct and his senses, hating that even after all these years she still could.

  His chest burned. His legs burned.

  No amount of weekly endurance training could keep him fit the way Clare’s daily onslaughts once had. He hated the weakness.

  The blades went up again, this time heading east, and he slowed, heart pounding, lungs seizing, and he knew that no matter who had blown up Clare’s house, the hope of a normal life had gone up with it and this thing, whatever it was, already had him.

  CHAPTER 7

  HOLDEN

  AGE: 32

  LOCATION: BUTTFUCK NOWHERE, TEXAS

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: CANADA

  NAMES: TROY MARTIN HOLDEN

  HE STOOD AT THE CLEARING’S UPPER EDGE, LOADED STRETCHER AT his feet, toothpick in his mouth, grinding disgust into splinters and watching the blemish in the sky grow larger.

  They were thirty minutes past sunrise, four hours behind schedule, half his team was dead at the hands of a target he was required to keep alive as an explicit part of the contract, and somewhere out in the rough were two complications that had gone abracadabra, poof, into the night like vanishing magic.

  He couldn’t afford loose ends and didn’t have time to crawl the godforsaken land chasing ghosts.

  He flipped the toothpick and ground harder.

  Ten years, five continents, innumerable contracts, and not once had he come close to a mess like this—not even in Buenaventura when he was young and wet and stupid, and that had been a disaster.

  He spit out the splintered wood and dropped another toothpick into place.

  The bounty, high as it was, wasn’t damn near high enough to account for what he’d just walked into. She’d expected them, had to have known they were coming.

  The helicopter whomp grew louder, and the blemish bigger.

  The Bell 407 flared above the landing site.

  Sand kicked up beneath the blades, gusting over shredded tires and the charred innards of a house that had disemboweled from the earth and turned hilltop into caldera. The explosion’s timing gnawed at his insides the way his teeth made use of the pick. Another few feet closer and they’d have all been smears in the debris field.

  The helicopter skids settled, and the rotor blades wound down, leaving the single pilot exposed behind the glass of his shiny cage.

  Baxter, standing guard below, clomped toward the bird.

  His face and biceps were red and raw with burns, and his finger twitched near the trigger guard of the M16 cradled in dirt- and soot-smeared arms.

  They were all a little twitchy now.

  The transport’s arrival should have signaled a plan gone right, should have meant they could get the bounty on its way and haul ass back to civilization, but with half the team dead by ambush, they weren’t taking chances.

  The big guy reached the helicopter, pulled the cabin doors open, and peered inside. The pilot, none too happy, emptied out of the cockpit.

  Baxter patted him down, disappeared into
the cabin, and a minute later motioned him back in and waved an all clear. Holden tossed the toothpick into the dirt, reached for the stretcher and for the gagged and straitjacket-bound body it carried.

  Honey-brown eyes, dark and soulless, met his.

  Hair on his arms lifted in warning, just as it did every time he looked at her.

  She was small, possibly old enough to be his mother, with the sinewy frame of a woman who’d never grown soft by city living and who might out-endure him on a trail while wearing a fifty-pound pack, but what made his hair stand on end, he’d realized, wasn’t what he saw but what he didn’t.

  Her face held no defining features. She could have been any combination of races within a wide range of ages and staring into that void he knew that he observed a phantom, a shadow capable of slipping unnoticed between the world’s social layers.

  This was a creature who shouldn’t have allowed herself to be taken alive but had, and he scanned the length of her body, searching past the mud and blood, wondering for the first time who she was and why he’d been sent to hunt her.

  Irritation shoved curiosity aside.

  He knelt and checked her bonds.

  In a world where only the best survived, selective ignorance was life. He never knew—never cared to know—because knowing turned targets into humans, and humanization opened up weakness and invited mistakes.

  He tugged the strap at her wrist.

  Her gaze, electric with intensity, tracked him.

  He recognized the look—the promise from one hell-bound soul to another—the kind of promise that had no expiration date and knew no borders, a promise one didn’t take lightly, even when made from a position as helpless as hers.

  He cinched the strap across her chest tighter as a precaution.

  The corners of her bloodied lips twitched in laughter against the gag.

  With that laughter, the night’s inconsistencies rushed back to the fore—the ambush, the calls she’d made, the car arriving shortly after his team had, the timing of the explosion, the ghosts in the night—all tempting him for a blinding second to undo the muzzle and let her spit in his face if it meant extracting some iota of understanding. Instead, he moved to her legs and tightened those straps, too, then grabbed hold of the handles and stood.

  Rafi, at the stretcher’s feet, raised the bottom half.

  Holden refused to acknowledge the man.

  First mistake on this messed-up mission had been pulling Rafi onto the team for extra manpower at the last minute. Second mistake had been keeping him. Last night’s bullet would have done better to find his head instead of his thigh.

  Without Rafael Vega and his macho ego, their immediate concern would be ID’ing and disposing of two bodies instead of being forced to waste time and resources figuring out where they were, who they were, and why they were here.

  Holden gripped tight and strode for the clearing just fast enough that Rafi and his gimp leg struggled to keep up. He shoved the stretcher headfirst into the belly of the bird and stepped aside. Baxter and Rafi clambered up. Holden hesitated at the doors, then shut them, pounded the panel, stepped back, gave the pilot the thumbs-up.

  He watched as the blades rotated faster and the skids left the ground.

  He had no words for this.

  There should have been four heading up to guard delivery.

  He should have been able to keep Baxter behind to tag team on tying off loose ends. Instead, he had one man and an idiot to accompany the transport, and he was left to exfiltrate alone and mop up a mess that split his focus between a phone call urging him toward Louisiana and building a trail to find the ghosts.

  Holden hefted his pack and weapon, and slipped into the brush.

  There wasn’t a single reason events should have turned out as they had, not if the information he’d been handed was accurate.

  If.

  He’d never had reason before to question the data or its source.

  Now questions burned with doubt, fevering in betrayal’s possibility, and words that had been shouted in the dark played round inside his head.

  Having fun yet . . . ? Hope she’s paying you good.... Gonna get pounded. . . .

  His thoughts twitched with paranoid suspicion the same way Baxter’s finger had twitched at the trigger guard.

  On a marionette stage, all were disposable save those who pulled the strings.

  A fat branch on a bur oak became a hide from which he could watch what was left of the hill. He sighted in on where the house had stood, weighing the odds that the ghosts hadn’t come on behalf of the target but rather because he was theirs, and that of all the loose ends left to be tied on this contract, he was the last.

  Only one person had the power to send surrogates to kill him.

  Holden pulled the phone from its zippered pocket. He powered on the device, opened the encrypted channel, and filled in the requisite update.

  Acquisition successful. Bounty en route to drop.

  Contract fulfilled and payable.

  He slipped the unmistakable accusation between the lines.

  Packet incomplete. Bounty alert to status and waiting in ambush. High likelihood associates at large. New contract required for further action.

  He hit SEND, tucked the phone away, and returned to watching the hillside.

  Time marched on.

  Mosquitoes and biting gnats drew blood from his skin, and he ignored them.

  The sun rose higher, and with its ascension came more heat, and with the heat, impatience and the acute awareness of passing opportunity.

  The phone in his pocket vibrated. Debate chewed through him.

  Noise, any noise, would carry far.

  Balanced on the branch, phone pressed between ear and shoulder, Holden took the call without speaking.

  A mechanical voice filled the silence. “You’ve never been one to whine,” it said. “Shame, Christopher, that you’d start now.”

  Holden raised the rifle and peered through the scope. In a low whisper, he said, “I took a contract based on specific parameters and a risk-reward calculus.”

  The voice, derisive, if computerized speech could be derisive, said, “Neither had I pegged you as a crybaby with a penchant for drama. This new you is surprising.”

  “Half my team is dead. Your so-called isolated target with no known associates and no access to telecommunications placed three calls prior to contact and had armed professionals on-site at the time of the hit. She was waiting for us.”

  There was a hiccup of silence, not even a full beat.

  “You accepted a contract, Christopher, one that called for no witnesses and no trails. Complications are your problem, not ours.”

  Holden’s brain crawled into reptile mode. “I want what you left missing from the bounty packet.”

  “For your sake, we’ll pretend that insult was unintentional.”

  Holden chose his words carefully.

  On this answer, the Broker would rise or fall.

  “Bystanders and accidental witnesses are one thing,” he said. “Tracking down a team of trained assassins is something else. Taking them out doesn’t come free. Provide the missing information, tell me what I’m dealing with, and renegotiate, or I’m out.”

  “That was a lovely tantrum, child. Anything else?”

  Holden didn’t answer.

  The Broker said, “Final payment releases when you report back clean. Rescind now and forfeit the balance. This discussion is over.”

  The connection went dead.

  Holden gripped the phone.

  His skin burned hot with betrayal, begging him to call Baxter, to reroute the drop and hold the bounty hostage until the Broker paid what was due.

  Experience and cunning warned him off. Open confrontation would get every killer from here to Timbuktu hunting his ass.

  The honey-brown eyes and their dark promise flashed inside his head.

  He tucked the phone away as if the thing was toxic.

  There were other ways
, subtler ways.

  He’d buy time and feign the appearance of ignorance by cleaning up this contract, he’d get paid, and then he’d create his own form of payback. But, for that, he’d need to know who this bounty had been and to whom she mattered.

  Movement arrested his attention, a flash of unnatural color from across the clearing. His breathing slowed. Eye to the scope, he swung a slow scan, searching through the crosshairs for what natural vision had brought, and stopped short on a male face between the trees, looking him dead on as casually as if he’d walked up and said hello.

  Holden moved his finger past trigger guard for trigger, and in that nano-slice of time, the face vanished.

  Adrenaline surged with the unexpected.

  Holden tossed his gear to the ground and scrambled down after it.

  He didn’t get to where he was in life by showing up unprepared in a kill zone.

  There were two of them out there, and he was position-compromised.

  He had already been ambushed once today and wasn’t about to let it happen twice.

  CHAPTER 8

  JACK

  AGE: 26

  LOCATION: NEAR BLANCO, TEXAS

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: USA

  NAMES: JONATHAN THOMAS SMITH

  HE STALKED THE CLEARING’S EDGE, WINDING BETWEEN TREES AND through the brush, hunting for color, movement, anything that didn’t belong while nature held its breath, suspending the woodland in the post-scattered hush of birds flown and timid creatures hiding.

  The attack was over, the area deserted.

  Man and metal had taken flight.

  He’d reached the lower perimeter in time to watch the helicopter vanish over the horizon, and he’d stood in awe of the barren destruction that spanned the stretch between him and what had once been Clare’s home.

  Questions had begged for a closer look.

  Instead, he’d turned away.