Liars' Paradox

by Taylor Stevens

  With patience, she’d morph from prisoner to punisher, but not yet.

  This dark vault wasn’t her end destination.

  She was a prisoner in transit, a troublemaker whom unwatched transport guards punched and pummeled because they could, because it satisfied a perverse need.

  A razor-thin margin separated daring from danger, and the ability to discern one from the other was what divided the living from the dead.

  Reacting was danger, overcompliance was danger, manipulation was danger when a quarter-century wait could end only if the journey began, and the ship had yet to leave port.

  She needed the ship to move, needed the journey to begin.

  She inched toward the center of the room, counting space and measuring time.

  Hands clenched, she faced the door and waited for the freezing rush.

  The squeak stopped. Metal jangled. The lock engaged.

  Some patterns couldn’t be helped.

  The door swung open. Light flooded the room, and a torrent of cold hit her with the force of ten thousand needles, a fire hose stream that knocked her feet out from under her and drove her away from the door, as if she’d be fool enough to attempt an escape when they were most prepared to prevent one.

  She screamed against the pain and didn’t care that she screamed, and she fell hard and slid backward, fighting to find air outside the force pinning her to the wall.

  The water shut off. The world went silent.

  Arm up to shield her eyes, she watched the shadow at the door, a hulking, blurry shadow that moved slowly into focus and separated into two distinct bodies, henchmen with tools who knew nothing and were nothing and meant nothing.

  One held the hose, the other carried a wireless speaker.

  She struggled to her feet and turned to face a spying eye in the corner. She no longer had anything to gain by silence. To the infrared watcher, she said, “Hello again, Boris.”

  Mechanical laughter crackled through the speaker.

  She bowed theatrically.

  She’d known this was him. How could she not?

  In the world’s dark underbelly where assassin supply was matched with illicit demand, there was only one king, and regardless of who had ordered and paid for the hit, the torture and interrogation reeked too strongly of personal vendetta to have come from anyone without a shared history.

  Tone dry, sarcastic, she said, “What could you possibly want from me now?”

  He said, “Your bodyguards.”

  She huffed, leaned back against the wall, and slid to the floor. “Already gave you them.”

  “But then, you’ve always been a liar, haven’t you?”

  The corners of her lips tweaked. With those nine little words, he’d rewritten history and turned the past inside out.

  She said, “Never so good a liar as you.”

  “I’ve seen them,” he said. “They’re not what you’ve claimed.”

  The words thundered into her ears and down to her chest.

  Relief breathed into her.

  If he’d truly seen them, this would be a different conversation.

  She pressed her lips in grim contrition and, in silence, thanked him for telling her that her children were still alive and free.

  The computerized voice said, “Last opportunity, Catherine.”

  “For?”

  “The truth. About them.”

  Questions were danger, revealing more of the asker than the asked, and he’d already revealed too much.

  She said, “Yes, I hired protection. I imagine you’d do the same if you’d heard rumors that old friends were out looking for you.”

  “Contractors skilled enough to meet your standards aren’t easy to come by, especially without telecommunications access. How did you recruit them?”

  Questions revealed what he didn’t know. What he needed to know.

  She said, “Through a broker.”

  He waited, waited so long she thought he’d fallen asleep, waited until the smirk drooped off her face from the exhaustion of holding it in place, and said, “I’d have thought the last time would have taught you the joke’s not nearly as funny as you think it is.”

  Her shoulders slumped from apparent dejection, and she sighed. “They’re just a couple of kids I brought back from Colombia.”

  “The more you lie, the worse you’ll suffer.”

  “Fine. I found them through Craigslist. Happy now?”

  “How high a price are you willing to pay to drag this out?”

  Questions revealed the truth in power dynamics.

  He could hurt her. Torture her. He could hold on to her and stretch the wait into unbearable torment, but he couldn’t kill her. Someone, somewhere, had invested heavily in a capture, not a death. She was worth too much alive.

  She turned her face toward the floor and stayed silent.

  He said, “And here we circle back to where we were when last we met—me seeing the bigger picture, and you, dim-witted and naive, screwing yourself over. Perfect bookends to your sad life, don’t you think?”

  Questions revealed ignorance.

  “Perfect,” she whispered.

  Her gaze drifted toward the speaker and then back to the camera.

  He hadn’t come for truth, he’d come for control, to reinforce the power he had over her. Had she dropped to her knees, pleaded for her life, and spilled her soul onto the hard, cold floor, the end result would have been the same. She said, “You poor, poor man. You’ve become a living, breathing version of the liar’s paradox.”

  “Better than rotting in a putrid cell.”

  “It’s been a long day . . . night . . . whatever. I’m tired, and you’re still a bore.”

  “Give me names, Catherine. Biographical details, histories.”

  “I’d tell you all that if I thought it would settle anything, but it won’t. That’s the problem with you, Boris. You’ve lived lies, double lies, triple lies, betrayal, and backstabbing for so long, you can’t even recognize truth when it’s wrapped in a bow and handed to you as a gift.” She shifted forward. “You know, I know, and you know that I know that you see everything out of my mouth as a lie. Sets up quite the psychological game.” She paused, then pitched her voice to a precise mimic of the computerized speech and added, “Don’t you think?”

  The speaker hissed with the emptiness of a disconnection.

  She drew a deep, deep breath, grabbing air before the hose turned on, and in that breath, she stretched for a glimpse of what stood behind her tormentors.

  Machines. Tools. No corridor walls.

  This vault was at the back of a larger room.

  Arms to her face, she protected her head from the bruising power while the man with the hose moved forward in a slow, steady march, rubber boots squeaking against the floor, wading pants repelling the harsh cold.

  Two feet away, he shut off the torrent.

  His partner reached for her.

  Her body rebelled in protest, every part of her demanding she attack in defense. She struggled, kicking and flailing enough to force him to work for his keep, tamping down momentary self-preservation for the sake of long-term gain.

  Illusion was her greatest power.

  Their complacency was quicksand to their minds.

  The speaker man grabbed her by the hair and dragged her to the room’s center.

  The hose guy turned on the flow again, flooding her face with a stream so strong the water forced its way up her nose and into her throat.

  The cold paralyzed her and stole what little oxygen she’d grabbed.

  She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t fight.

  She relaxed and allowed the flood to swallow her.

  She would not die on this ship.

  They couldn’t afford to let her die.

  They brought her up for air just to drown her again, every plunge followed by a demand for answers that wouldn’t change no matter how hard they pushed.

  The truth had many faces, and she’d given them one.r />
  With each wretched, gasping breath, she held on for another.

  CHAPTER 26

  CLARE

  AGE: 25

  LOCATION: MOSCOW, USSR

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: ECUADOR

  NAMES: MARIA CATALINA MOLINA NIEVES

  THERE WEREN’T WORDS TO DESCRIBE THE MOSCOW WINTER IN A way one who’d never lived it could understand. This cold had to be felt to be known. Bitter and biting, it blew through wool and goose down, stole body heat out from between synthetic fibers, and turned fur into a necessity that even the poorest found ways to possess. The Russian winter had defeated the armies of Napoleon and Hitler when horses and cannons, then rifles and tanks had failed to do the same, and it felt like it would defeat her now as she trudged along the icy street, collar turned up, hat swallowing her ears, fingers encased in lined gloves, maneuvering within the bleak pedestrian crowd, because Boris had called to let her know he was in town and had invited her to visit.

  Eyes were on her, they were always on her. From the hallowed prestige within Moscow’s music conservatory to the endless lines in which she waited for bread and eggs and milk—toilet paper, if she could find it—colorless, humorless lines for every basic necessity, they watched her.

  Suspicion ruled daily life, for her, for her friends, for most of the population, because if the intelligence agents or the police weren’t spying, nosy neighbors were quick to make reports. Even at home, in the narrow one-room khrushchyovka apartment four flights above the neighborhood post office, she had no privacy. Not that she had proof her apartment was wired—because to look would arouse suspicion—but she was a foreigner, and all foreigners were suspect, and her friendship with Dmitry made her especially suspect, so she lived and behaved as if it was.

  Teeth chattering from the cold, she reached the corner in time for the bus.

  She rode to the center of the Yakimanka District and walked into the wind for a series of grim five-story concrete apartment blocks. She let herself into the nearest of them through the middle entry and took the stairs up, unwinding her scarf as she climbed past broken lights and peeling paint in a stairwell nearly as derelict as her own, though here the stairwell was wider. The flats were bigger, too, with only two doors to a floor instead of four.

  She stopped on the second landing, at the apartment on the left, and knocked.

  Hinges creaked, and the door opened to a familiar face with milky-tan skin and light brown eyes beneath a mop of lush black hair. He was in his late forties, if she had to guess, trim and tall and wide shouldered, exuding the good looks and charisma to which even stonehearted commissars weren’t entirely immune.

  Her stomach churned with nausea and disgust at the sight of him.

  He hugged her, and she hugged him back with formal politeness for the sake of the listeners and watchers.

  Her mouth smiled, but not her eyes. She said, “You look well.”

  “Come, come,” he said and invited her in.

  He knew her as Catherine, as Maria Catalina. She knew him as Boris, though surely, he had other names, just as she did. And he was watched intently, just as she was watched, every interaction scrutinized and analyzed, partly because of who he was and his frequent travels, but mostly because of his association with her. Because of Dmitry.

  She stepped over the threshold into the same cloying heat found in every building during the winter, shed her outerwear and exchanged boots for slippers and, following him into the living room, said, “How long will you be in town?”

  “Only a night, maybe two. I have business in Quito that requires quick attention.”

  She forced elation into disappointment. “So sorry to hear it.”

  “Don’t be, don’t be. Have a seat. I’ll make tea.”

  She’d have preferred to be anywhere but here, alone in this room with him, but she didn’t have the luxury of options. She cleared architectural books off a chair and sat, uncomfortably comfortable in the familiar surroundings. His home, furnished with a mixture of old handcrafted quality pieces and the newer mass-produced Soviet industrial crap, was bigger than hers, with more windows, a larger balcony, and a wider hallway, but still austerely Russian.

  He set about making tea on a two-burner stove, and she did her best to avoid looking at him. He laughed at her, the type of laugh that listening devices—both CIA and KGB—would interpret as friendly, but that he and she both knew was taunting.

  He brought two cups to the seating area and handed her one.

  She held the cup, relishing the warmth, but wouldn’t drink anything he served.

  Amused, he watched her and said, “Tell me about school.” So she did, and from there the conversation drifted to other things, mundane things, all for the eyes and ears.

  He invited her to meet with friends in the evening, and she begged off, saying she couldn’t. “Then lunch,” he said. “Let’s do lunch tomorrow.”

  For that, she had no choice but to find the time.

  This was the way it always was with her and him.

  According to their legends, Boris’s connection to her Ecuadorean parents went back to before she was born. There wasn’t anything important about this conversation now, just as there likely wouldn’t be much importance to whatever they discussed over lunch, but that was the point of these frequent inconsequential visits between student and family friend. The routine had been going on so long that they’d slowly become invisible, and within that invisibility, the sleight of hand took place, though not without suspicion or incident.

  Boris had been hauled in by the KGB more than once, questioned, and let go.

  His legend was impeccably backstopped, as was hers.

  She had her straitlaced, unforgiving, community-pillar Omaha parents partly to thank for that. They’d pushed her hard to excel from the time her tiny hand was strong enough to hold a bow, and in so doing had provided a path out from under their late-night-yelling, liquor-swilling, serial-philandering roof. She’d been eighteen, naive and starry-eyed, determined to make her own way in New York City. Had found disappointment, hunger, and had been facing homelessness when a newspaper ad offering full-time work for the right classically trained violist led down a rabbit hole, in which she’d vanished.

  Two years of training and language and culture immersion later, she’d established a new identity in Moscow-friendly Ecuador and, under the agency’s guiding hand, applied for the opening at the conservatory where freedom had turned to handcuffs, and handcuffs to prison.

  Metaphorically speaking, she’d been sent undercover into a supermax facility, where, for the sake of authenticity, warden and guards, judge, jury, and public all believed her guilty. Without a lifeline to proof of innocence, the truth would cease to exist. Boris was that proof, her only link to the chain of command.

  Through him her orders came, and through him she sent information back, and yet she couldn’t trust him enough to drink his oversweetened tea. Her life and safety had become dependent upon a man whose motives and priorities, she suspected, had diverged diametrically from hers.

  Boris rested his hand on her shoulder and, making small talk, crept his fingers lower until they cupped her breast. She shrugged away and stood.

  In flawless Ecuadorean Spanish, the common language of their shared legend, he said, “Your family misses you. Take a break from your studies. Travel with me.”

  The words made her heart skip a beat. “My parents sent for me?”

  “Let’s surprise them,” he said.

  She turned away, bitter with disappointment.

  The agency wasn’t calling her in. This was Boris propositioning her, asking her to break protocol and put her life and mission at risk. She said, “You know how mother is, crazy with details, needing everything to be just so. This isn’t the type of surprise that would please her.” She paused, caught Boris’s eye and, voice strained to make the point, said, “I could write ahead. That would provide plenty of time for her to make arrangements.”

  Boris touched his nose
and tipped his finger, as if both to compliment the cleverness and to acknowledge the threat. He drew close to her again, arms out to embrace her.

  She took another step away and, putting distance between them, turned for the hall. “It’s getting late,” she said. “I’ll be missed at school.”

  He walked with her toward the door.

  Heart picking up tempo, she forced her breathing to remain steady.

  Boris was a dangerous man—not just to her, but in principle—and she was about to walk a bridge she couldn’t uncross. She risked cutting herself off from support, risked being branded a traitor, risked having no way to defend her name or her decisions and, worse, risked being turned over to the KGB for torture, if not death. Palms sweating, she turned to face him. “You’ve been good to my family,” she said. “You’ve known me since I was a child, and for that, I’m grateful, but you have no right to touch my body as you have been. Please stop.”

  Boris’s mouth opened, and his face blanched. Tone light and teasing, he said, “What a silly girl you are, telling silly stories.”

  “I don’t want to inform Father,” she said. “I will if it’s the only way to make you stop.”

  Boris’s lips turned up in a nasty snarl that belied the sweet tone of his voice. “If I didn’t know you as such an innocent girl, I would imagine these ugly words were threats.”

  “Is truth ugly?” she said. “Are promises threats?”

  She reached the coatrack.

  He said, “Don’t think I don’t know how you put out for your boyfriend.”

  She grabbed hat and scarf and clenched her teeth.

  By boyfriend, Boris meant Dmitry, a fellow student at the conservatory, beautiful and gifted and as fascinated with her as she was with him. She’d been handpicked to appeal to his personality and tastes and had been trained to adjust in ways she lacked. For nearly a year she’d studied beside him and flirted with him while living life with all the normalcy of every other student at the conservatory. She hadn’t been told why he mattered or what she sought to gain from his friendship, but he was the son of the minister of defense, so she could guess. Get close to him, were her instructions. The closer the better. She’d done her job well, and it had turned into a physical relationship, and somehow, by Boris’s twisted logic, that made her a whore, and because she was a whore, she was no longer a person with a right to her own preferences or desires.