Liars' Paradox

by Taylor Stevens

  She spun the chain, let it loose, and snagged the third camera.

  The key worked into the lock. The lock tumbler rolled.

  Time spliced into micro-slivers and disassociated presence.

  Senses on overdrive, adrenaline feeding her blood, she watched the chain snake upward. Light from the opening door fractured shadows with dizzying color.

  The chain rode high. She yanked it back, got close enough to knock the fourth camera off position. The water came. She dropped down and slid for the door, slid beneath the force that powered into the room, slid feet first, invisible to the electronic eyes and hidden by the spray.

  Momentum, lubricated momentum, took her hard into the hose-holder’s legs.

  She knocked him off balance. He lost control of the jet.

  Water whipped from side to side, a wild cobra escaped from the flute master’s basket. Legs around his torso, hands to the sides of his head, she gripped and flung herself left, taking his neck with her. She let go before he dropped, and she rolled to her feet.

  A baton crashed down into the space she left behind.

  Chain in both hands, she swung prisoner’s nunchakus, lashing right and left, clearing a path around machines in a room that had become crowded with too many bodies.

  Metal snaked around a neck in a strangling coil.

  She yanked and pulled him into her, relieved him of wallet and keys, slammed his head into the wall, shoved him aside. She grabbed the items, shoved them down her shirt. Momentum, dry momentum, took her into another bowling pin. Elbow to nose. Cartilage crunched. Blood kissed her face.

  Hands across his chest and into his pockets, she found a phone, grabbed it, stashed it. Lighting shifted. Shadows changed shape.

  She rolled away from a crowbar.

  Two more men stood in the doorway, batons and Tasers in hand.

  She scrambled up, vaulting foot to tool chest to machine to wall, over their heads, chain between her hands in a dragnet. She snagged a chin, and gravity took the head backward with her. He hit the floor hard, went out cold. Foot to his chest, she propelled into his partner, grabbed a wrench off the tool chest and, with every last ounce of energy, beat him until his body went limp.

  Time unspooled, film spilling from a cartridge run amok.

  Water sprayed wildly and furiously around the machine room. She squatted beside the nearest body, stripped the jacket off, and was up and moving down the passageway before her arms found their way into the sleeves.

  A ladder welcomed from ahead. Pounding boots echoed from behind.

  She ran, and hand over fist, she climbed up through a hatch and onto a catwalk that circled one of the ship’s holds. She sealed the hatch behind her, crouched on the walk, and pulled the items from her shirt.

  The wallet held eighty-three dollars, a start.

  She dropped it, checked the phone.

  Smartphone. Password protected. Worthless. She dropped that, too.

  She examined the key ring.

  No ignition key, no easy way out, but the other keys might be useful in getting through padlocks and secured hatches in her run off the ship.

  She glanced at the stolen watch.

  Two minutes since freedom, a hundred to go.

  The wall vibrated behind her.

  She worked the shackle chain off her waist, mind conjuring sounds and movement that may not have existed, body begging to stay and rest. A wisp of fresh air stirred across her face, and she pushed on, following the catwalk through a stale, dank, dark bitter with salt and rust toward its source. Another ladder led up.

  Shouts filled the cavern below. Air horns promised a ship roused to life.

  She forced weary legs to climb up through one hatch, around, and then up through another—one level, two, maybe three—while justice and revenge and love and hate and past and future drove her closer to the sky.

  She reached the end, cranked the hatch open, and slithered onto the main deck.

  Halogen lights atop the ship’s tower stole dark from the night, and spent diesel and fetid water hit her nostrils with each burning breath. She lay seven yards off the rails, panting, dizzy, facing a thousand feet of murky black between her and the ships and industry lighting on the channel’s other side.

  Twenty years ago, she’d have braved the danger of crossing a shipping lane at night—might have even now if she’d been fed and rested—but she was lucid enough to realize that in her current state she’d drown. She belly crawled around the coaming, timing the boots and shouts and searching.

  The docks stretched on in an endless expanse where ships larger and smaller, fore and aft, were loaded and unloaded in a port that never slept.

  She scanned for a way off, a way down.

  She had a minute, maybe less, before they found her, and when they did, they’d use more than water. Escape had a way of scratching a bounty out of the asset column and turning it into a liability easiest to write off with death.

  She turned back the way she’d come and bolted for the rails.

  Shouts followed after her, and with the shouts came the clap-pop of live fire from a suppressed weapon. Elbows in tight, hand over her mouth and nose, other hand bracing that wrist, she plunged fifty stories down.

  The water hit with bone-jarring power.

  She sank and kicked and broke the surface fifteen feet out from the ship’s hull.

  The whine of bullets punctured the water.

  She dove and swam, fought waves and wake that would slam her into sharp rusted metal, and crawled for the bow, around the bow.

  The dock rose six feet above the waterline.

  Waves that had rocked the ship washed her toward the concrete.

  Exhaustion consumed her. Hypothermia danced around the edges of borderline temperatures, and the channel threatened to take her where the Broker’s men had failed.

  She swam for the next ship’s stern.

  Salvation arrived by way of a line tied to a bollard and left dragging in the water. She grabbed the nylon and held on to catch her breath, then wrapped the line around her waist and arms, placed weary feet against barnacle-crusted concrete, and climbed from water to dock. She slumped sideways over the metal containment rail and lay gasping, staring up at the hulking bulk of the ship beside her.

  Inertia set in. Her eyes closed against her will.

  She wanted sleep, wanted to sleep for a year.

  Men running down the gangway kept her moving.

  She rolled onto her stomach and into a crouch, waited for an opening between crane and shipping container, and limped on cut and bleeding feet for the cover of the nearest building.

  CHAPTER 37

  JACK

  AGE: 26

  LOCATION: HOUSTON, TEXAS

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: USA

  NAMES: JASON FRANCIS WHITE

  HE DROVE THE NIGHT, PROWLING THE STREETS, TIGER ON THE HUNT, coiled energy and the vicious need to pounce pushing him toward an apartment complex that would bookend the day between battles. He was late, far later than he had any right to be, still covered in dirt and sweat, burning into midnight because staying off grid while disposing of and hiding evidence had chewed up minutes and spit them out as hours.

  Urgency propelled him.

  Urgency and unknowns, guilt, and the escalating need to scrub his conscience clean. Clare was still a blank space in the fog. He hadn’t seen or spoken to Jill since she’d swung out of her nest to take Christopher’s bait. Reports executed with her trademark timing and the subsequent radio silence would have been enough to reassure him that she was alive if they’d come yesterday. But today wasn’t yesterday. Today was certainty transformed to second-guessing, and instinct turned to self-doubt.

  He’d been outwitted and outplayed.

  He was an eight-year-old kid up against Clare again.

  Too smart for his own good, blind to the blind spots, he’d kept the burner phones moving to buy distraction, had planned for reversal, for hostages, for a third party, and for intervention that fav
ored either side, but he hadn’t planned on leveling up past “Clare crazy” to a psycho insanity that would burn the world down to win, even if winning meant dying in the self-inflicted flames. And, in that lapse, he’d turned an innocent bystander into human collateral on a debt that could only be paid by blood.

  Failure made him angry, and anger pushed him hard.

  The only strategy against madness was greater madness.

  He pulled into the alley beside the complex and stopped where aging trees shaded aging asphalt from light pollution, holstered a knife, shoved a handgun into the small of his back, swiped a packet of ninja rocks from the tool bag, and left everything else behind. He’d come for the burners. He’d retrieve them one way or the other.

  He’d followed their movement until they stopped in early afternoon and powered off. Luck would say he’d mistimed battery life, but even his eight-year-old self knew that hoping on luck was for dead men and losers.

  He needed the phones as a lifeline for Jill, for Clare.

  More than that, he needed them as a lifeline for his own conscience.

  The Broker wanted blood.

  The crazies wanted blood.

  So be it. He was coming for blood.

  There’d been at least one shooter in his ear at the preserve. The question now wasn’t if crazy had chased this lead. It was: How many of them had come along for the ride? They’d have shown the Uber driver his picture. They’d have learned he’d gotten the guy’s number. They’d have turned the burners off to maintain the upper hand and force him to make that call. This was assassin’s hide-and-seek.

  Jaw clenched, gut clenched, he scaled the wall between alley and complex, dropped to the other side, and moved through shadows, scanning balconies and well-lit stairwells, inhaling the smoldering remains of grill fires and catching the straggling wisps of beer-fueled conversation, hunting for familiar vehicle plates.

  Clare’s voice cycled through his brain, warning him off.

  Threat is easy to find and elude in the quiet, but it hides without worry in windows and on rooftops, along busy streets.

  She’d dragged them through forests and across savannas, left them in the care of others all in the name of training. She’d taught them how to handle multiple weapons, how to fly, how to sail, how to dive, and how to survive the elements, but the worst of her efforts had put them in urban settings where she’d forced them to slip from one disguise to another while on the move, and that hadn’t stopped until they were able to outwit her.

  He’d been five the first time, on Zeil, Frankfurt’s downtown shopping street. Clare had knelt beside him, handed him a slip of paper with a number on it, and told him he had to convince someone—anyone—to give him money for a phone call.

  Without that, she’d said, he’d be lost forever.

  She’d pushed him into the crowd.

  His baby-fat fingers had grabbed for her, he’d been swallowed by a whirlwind of legs and color, and then it was him, just him, alone on the cobblestones, surrounded by strangers hurrying by. He’d fought the tears and failed.

  That had been the first formal lesson in learning to rely on body language, facial expressions, and the outward signs of socioeconomic status to size up a potential mark to get what he wanted. Those same lessons were with him now as he hugged the shadows, listening to the accents in late-night voices, feeling laughter’s rhythm in the outdoor movement, smelling a melting pot of foreign culture, all of which spoke to neighbors who knew their fellow citizens, of socializing done as much in person as online, of residents who stayed aware to protect each other against the law and crime alike.

  This was everything he’d been taught to avoid.

  The apartments, small and tight, would turn any fight deadly fast.

  Attention would come quickly. Invisibility would be difficult to maintain.

  Training insisted he cut his losses and abandon the phones, told him that closing ranks, staying invisible, and protecting his family were higher priorities than returning to save a man he’d met once from the backseat of a car.

  He shoved training aside and continued out into the open, chasing color and shape beneath covered parking, searching for the familiar Corolla. He found the car, door and windows locked, near the end of a forty-foot line of covered spaces that abutted a grassy incline toward a pair of three-story buildings.

  Dirt-crusted streetlamps mounted end-middle-end cast enough light to provide tenants the illusion of safety and to keep him out of the shadows. He slipped between vehicles, alerted to potential witnesses by the hint of weed drifting down from a quiet group on lawn chairs two stories up and over, and to potential interruption by nearby laughter and louder music.

  He fished the packet of ninja rocks from his pocket—aluminum oxide infused ceramic that had been chipped off spark plugs—lightweight, easy to carry, illegal in some states, and capable of shattering glass far faster and quieter than a crowbar or hammer.

  He leaned back for leverage and flung a piece hard at the driver’s window.

  Tempered glass split into a thousand pieces.

  The clock inside his head began counting.

  Gloved hand through the empty frame, he unlocked the door.

  One second.

  He released the trunk. Opened the back door. Searched beneath the backseat. He touched plastic, snagged plastic, retrieved and stashed the Blackphone and personal phones.

  Nine seconds.

  Movement passed through shadow up beside the far breezeway, and shadow turned to form, and form slipped from breezeway onto the grass, moving fast in his direction. He swung around for the trunk, searched beneath the floorboard, around the spare tire, around the emergency tools, and in the crevices on the chance road wear and motion had knocked the burners deeper down. They were missing. He knew they would be but had needed confirmation before killing.

  He dropped the lid with a near silent click and ducked around a Jeep Cherokee parked to the left.

  Seventeen.

  Shoes and legs hurried between wheel wells and paused beside the driver’s door. Realization turned to muttering, and muttering turned to swears. A cell phone screen lit up, casting a Gorilla Glass glow on windows and asphalt.

  Jack slipped out of hiding, knife in hand, blade obscured behind his forearm. The guy glanced up, made eye contact. Jack knew the hair, the eyes, the face, had seen the same angled cheekbones in the picture taken by the camera at the preserve. Recognition coursed in kind, tightening posture, sending a hand reaching for its weapon.

  Blade low, Jack rushed him, stabbed his leg, slashed up, and pulled him tight into a choke hold with the speed he’d have needed to take down his sister.

  Knife tip to neck, mouth to ear, he whispered, “Up we go.”

  The man struggled. Jack held tight.

  Hands reached for Jack’s arm, dug into his jacket, slipped, and swung back, punching and clawing for his face. Jack pressed the blade deeper in warning. Flailing hands gave up on his face and sought control of the knife. Jack squeezed harder, squeezed while his opponent punched and yelled through a jaw forced shut, squeezed until blood flow failed and the guy choked out.

  One minute, twenty.

  Jack opened the driver’s door and shoved the slack body in, head over the center console, hips onto the seat. Knife tip to his opponent’s fingernails, he scraped against the chance a random scratch had carried off a piece of him, then put blade to neck and jabbed for the carotid.

  The guy would bleed out before he woke: one less killer, one reason fewer to run. Clare would have been proud.

  He retrieved the ceramic shard and shut the door.

  One minute, fifty.

  He strode up the grass and into the breezeway, up the stairs two at a time to the third-floor landing. They never should have holed up here. He had the driver’s name, had his plates, had his number. Any idiot with an Internet connection could have found the address, but burn-down-the-world thinking made for happy triggers and sloppy long-term strategy.

/>   He slid over the guardrail, leapt from third-story ledge to adjacent deck, dropped to the balcony rail beneath and, balanced there, waited with his back to the wall while voices from the inside carried out too softly to place, but loud enough to separate and count. He booted up an unused burner.

  Two minutes, forty.

  They wanted him to call. He’d give them what they wanted.

  He dialed the driver’s number.

  A ringtone sang beyond the blinds.

  Shadows danced against the light. Voices rose in excitement.

  A familiar accent choke-whispered a cautious hello into his ear.

  Jack turned his face away so his voice wouldn’t carry and lilted into the slur of good times and drink. “Hey, man. Sorry to call so late. I was one of your rides today. Got your number in case I needed pickup tonight. You available?”

  Muffled talking filled the other end of the line. The driver’s voice shook, and his words arrived slowly. “I am not free,” he said. “But maybe you left some things in my car?”

  “Things?” Jack smiled like a drunken fool, because smiles carried over the phone. “Nah, dude, I’ve got all my stuff. Must belong to someone else.”

  “You don’t lose some phones?”

  “Got everything with me, man. Appreciate it, though.”

  “Wait please,” the driver said.

  Another pause. More muffled speech. Another strained sentence.

  “Yes, I can do pickup. Where you?”

  “Don’t sweat it, man. I’m good.”

  In his ear, hesitancy turned to desperation. “I come get you.”

  Jack hit MUTE and flung a ninja rock into the balcony glass. The door shattered. Yelling rose over the clash. Suppressed reports hissed out from the room, spitting and popping with the craze of a tweaker’s panic. He ended the call, pulled the handgun from the small of his back, waited until the shooter’s magazine emptied and rattled bickering filtered through the pane, then gripped the eaves and swung through the vertical blinds.

  Seconds slivered into silence and served up rapid-fire knowledge.

  Living room. Furniture. Door.