Liars' Paradox

by Taylor Stevens

  The blade severed rubber and copper, throwing sparks.

  The axe head chunked into brick.

  On the edge of awareness, between hit and separation, she felt a twinge of power and let go. Scope sights cast scattered red beams into the room.

  She grabbed the fire extinguisher and slipped behind a tool table.

  Bullets and noise and gunpowder filled the air, feeding adrenaline and instinct. Darkness embraced her, darkness her friend, translating sound and vibration into mental images, the same way it had in the ship’s dank hellhole. She pulled the pin.

  The noise paused. She went up over the tool chest and onto the table, senses long honed for the dark, spraying foam, gumming scopes, clogging night vision, and turning the floor slick. Order turned into chaos, and silence into grunts, and she followed those grunts with the extinguisher’s heel, off the table and into faces. Quiet returned.

  She stood, lungs heaving, arms worthless.

  She waited for movement and, when there was none, dropped to her knees.

  Living rough on the land had kept her tough, she’d kept herself limber, stayed in shape, but this was so much harder than it’d been twenty years back.

  Her fingers roamed over shirts and collars until she found the chain that would lead her to Boris. She yanked metal off neck, grabbed shoulders, and inched the guy farther into the workroom.

  She splayed his right arm out wide, retrieved the axe.

  Blade to his limb, she swung.

  Wrist severed from arm.

  Her fingers gripped fingers.

  She carried key and amputated hand turn by turn back the way she’d come, and down to the cinder-block passage and the creeping ambience of soft running lights that brightened as she progressed, lights powered by the same backup batteries within the bunker that ran its ventilation and door locks.

  In twenty hours they’d fail.

  Steel doors and hydraulic locks were better protection than hired hands, but without intervention from inside or from without, Boris would be buried alive.

  He was old and frail but not so far gone into paranoia that he’d risk turning his safe room into a mausoleum. The fail-safe was keyed for a scenario like this.

  She placed the severed hand to the digital pad, and the circular key into the fitted slot.

  If she’d needed eyes for an iris scan, she’d have taken his head.

  The hydraulic system pulled the foot-deep door into its recess.

  She waited, allowing time and the unknown to raise questions and heighten tension on the other side. The minutes passed in silence: one, three, five.

  Boris said, “You’re a miserable coward, Catherine.” The words came out ragged and whispered, without any of the monotone vigor bestowed by computerized speech. “Your old bosses and friends would laugh if they saw you now.”

  She leaned against the wall, fiddled with her nails, and let time march on.

  He railed again. “You’re weak, always have been, always will be. The new generation, those fools that believe in your fairy tale, they’d kill you in disappointment if they knew what you really were and had become.”

  She closed her eyes and rested.

  He said, “Come into the light, where I can see you.” Desperation seeped into his tone. “You’re afraid of an old man and shadows.”

  She slipped the severed hand around the door as if it was her own.

  Suppressed reports responded.

  She counted and then peeked around the doorframe.

  Boris sat in a wheelchair ten feet in, blanket over his lap, darkened monitors around him, skin ghastly in the emergency green–tinged glow. She tossed the hand in his direction, waited until the shooting stopped, and moved into the room.

  Aged, arthritic fingers swapped one magazine for another but struggled to pull back the slide. She pumped a single round into his shooting arm.

  His body jerked.

  He switched the weapon to his other hand and rested his fist on his knee to steady the tremors. The muzzle followed her.

  She put a bullet in his other arm.

  The gun dropped and clattered to the floor. His lip curled. “You’re a disappointment,” he said. The sound formed as much through the hole near his throat as his mouth. “I expected more from you.”

  She ripped the blanket from his lap and scanned atrophied limbs.

  The shock of age washed over her. Boris was seventy-five, maybe, should have had another decade or more of decent health. Fallow color and hairless skin spoke of a body being destroyed from the inside out. She’d lost track of the men and women she’d deliberately targeted in this life of blood and death, but no matter what else those enemies had been, they’d been vibrant and strong, and she’d done herself, her children, the world a favor by ensuring they were gone. He was a corpse too bitter to die.

  His shoulders heaved. He choked on saliva.

  “Well, here you are,” he said. “Do what you came for. Get it over with.”

  She said, “Where are the rest of your men?”

  The hand in his lap waved dismissively from the wrist. He said, “Lost, stumbling about in the dark.”

  She ignored his words and watched his fingers inch down the outside of his thigh. “Don’t,” she said.

  “Or what? You’ll kill me?”

  He moved faster than his frailty warranted.

  She kicked his knee. The chair tipped sideways. The weapon beneath his leg skittered under the desk. She knelt and studied him.

  Drool rolled down from the corner of his mouth. He choked again. “You’ve always been slow,” he said. “Sentimental.”

  “You shouldn’t have meddled.”

  “Oh, that’s it, then? This is because I meddled? You’re stupider than I gave you credit for.” He laughed, and dragged in a rattling breath. “Dmitry never existed,” he said. “The boy was a fabrication, a psychological ruse that CIA analysts fell over themselves to court, and you, dumb bitch, fell for him even harder.”

  She patted Boris’s cheek, tugged the phone out from his jacket pocket, and plucked his dangling hand from across his lap. He watched, slack-jawed, confusion creeping across his face, as she pressed his thumb to the screen to unlock it.

  She’d known the truth about Dmitry even before the trail led her to Raymond—the truth insofar as Dmitry, the student, had been nothing more than a KGB legend—but there’d been a living flesh-and-blood man behind that legend. Whatever his name, whoever he was, she’d laughed with him, learned with him, and had eventually borne his children. That Dmitry had existed. That Dmitry had vanished. That Dmitry may have even loved her. And whenever she surfaced to find that Dmitry, killers came hunting. Boris said, “Stupid whore. The past doesn’t forget. Not after a year. Not after twenty.” His mouth curved in the sneer of triumphant gloating. “Word of your sighting started a bidding frenzy. You should have stayed in whatever hole you crawled out of.”

  She said, “Maybe.”

  His sneer faded slightly.

  She said, “More than fifteen years, I’ve watched you. Watched you build this place, hired the architects who drew your plans and the contractors who put in your wiring, tracked the women who’ve shared your bed.” She glanced at his legs. “When you still had a bed.” She put the muzzle to his chest. “You shouldn’t have meddled.”

  He mustered a shrug. “I’m old. Sick. Tired. I die laughing.” The sneer returned. “I die knowing you’re a pathetic fool still pining for a man who wants you dead.”

  The words slowed between his mouth and her ears.

  Clarity rushed in, clean and cold.

  Boris mistook that precision for pain.

  His smugness thickened, and widened into a smile. “Yes,” he said. “Your precious Dmitry was the one to outbid all the others.”

  Relief filled her lungs, and she inhaled the sweet, sweet stench of betrayal’s victory. Of all the facts she’d held, and all the hopes she’d hoped, this was more than hope had ever granted, more than in this ghoulish hell, more
than in all the grueling years when every search for answers returned as a killing card.

  The kids had come first. They’d always come first.

  For them she’d waited, biding her time as they grew, holding off until they no longer needed her, and longer still, until they no longer wanted her, long enough that she no longer had the time or connections to begin again on her own. So she’d sold information on her location and brought hunters to her door, had let the past take her, knowing that those who’d sought her would provide the quickest starting path toward those she sought, and that if she died in that pursuit, she’d die with the peace of knowing that what she loved most was safe and hidden forever. That had been the plan, anyway, until Boris’s surrogates had placed pictures of her children in her hands and she’d abandoned hope of finding answers, but in that abandonment, Boris had gifted a finish beyond hope.

  Your precious Dmitry was the one to outbid all the others.

  Perhaps Boris really did think her that stupid.

  If Dmitry had wanted her dead, the contractors would have come to kill, not to exfiltrate. No matter what else Dmitry had planned, he’d outbid the others to keep her alive. The relief of knowing didn’t erase twenty-seven years of running and raised more questions than answers, but it answered the question.

  She rolled a chair to the desk and sat, gun on her lap, muzzle pointed toward the old man. She’d cut the power and, in so doing, had cut access to the Internet, his archives, and the brokerage system, but his phone still provided all of that.

  Her fingers scrolled and tapped.

  He watched her in silence, and his expression shifted, confusion transforming to understanding, and understanding to anger. Anger told her that he’d finally grasped what had just happened, that she hadn’t come to kill him, and that in his wrong belief, he’d inadvertently given her what she wanted—that he’d been the one manipulated, not her.

  He said, “What are you doing?”

  She didn’t look at him. “Exactly what you think.”

  She’d come for answers. She’d come to protect her children.

  Karen. Maria Catalina. Catherine. Clare.

  Spy. Thief. Mother. Killer.

  She was everyone and no one.

  She’d paid for hits under one legend and had been the assassin from others. She’d completed missions, real and imagined. She knew his operation from both sides, and now she controlled the back end. She transferred money from his brokerage accounts to hers, used his phone to log in to her own private server, uploaded a pending dossier that had been updated over the course of a decade, and established a fully funded contract.

  She accessed the full associate list from his account.

  To killers one and all, she sent the link.

  Target: Henry, Alan. Location: Lake Charles, Louisiana.

  All-call, no confirmation, no check-in.

  Eighteen million. Upon proof, winner takes all.

  The assassins would come, from all over the world they’d come, professionals and wild cards alike, hurrying in a race against each other and in a race against time.

  They’d kill each other to kill him.

  There’d be casualties, so many casualties, in the clawing, scraping fight for the money. And in death, Boris would provide a measure of life.

  Others far worse would rise to take his place.

  And because she’d surfaced and because her children were now known, the past would come seeking revenge. But there’d be fewer killers left to fill the contracts, and this bunker, and the bloodbath to follow, would raise the cost of doing business and would stand as a permanent warning to anyone foolhardy enough to accept the challenge.

  She pocketed his phone and knelt to look at him one last time.

  He reached for her. She backed away.

  Fear crept over his face like shadows up a wall.

  He said, “You’re leaving.”

  “You’ll have company soon enough. You’ve paid well. It shouldn’t take long.”

  Boot steps echoed down the cinder-block hall, someone running with the intensity of a man late for work. Boris hadn’t been lying about having more men in the house.

  She stood, hefted the SAR, three final rounds in the magazine, and turned and faced the door.

  CHAPTER 49

  HOLDEN

  AGE: 32

  LOCATION: SPRING, TEXAS

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: CANADA

  NAMES: TROY MARTIN HOLDEN

  HE STOOD AT THE FOOT OF BAXTER’S BED, EQUIPMENT AND WEAPONS at his feet, toothpick in his mouth, grinding scattered thoughts and possibilities into pulp. The IV bag continued its steady hydration drip. Heavy curtains blocked streetlight and security light, and the air conditioner’s hum held the room in reverent stillness, but optimistic hope had displaced the supplicant’s pain and pleading.

  He was at twenty-four hours, nearly to the minute, since first heading out in search of closure. He’d chased and found his ghosts. Revenge would have to wait.

  Robert sat in the chair beside the bed, body language expectant, waiting for answers to unasked questions.

  The kid had been head back, mouth slack, sleeping like the dead, when Holden had walked in, and woken somewhere between checking Baxter’s vitals and checking his bandages. The kid had stood, then, and joined him.

  Holden shrugged out of his jacket and tossed it on the chair.

  He’d called hour by hour, grilling Robert for details, and had been assured there was nothing more he could do in person than from afar. But seeing Baxter now, color good and wounds infection free, was Christmas, Easter, and birthdays all wrapped into one.

  The big guy had a long recovery ahead, but he’d live.

  Holden said, “You did good.”

  Robert waited, hesitated, and said, “Did you find Jen?”

  Holden nodded in answer, offering both truth and lie.

  They’d gone for coffee, he and she and the brother, who’d joined them later, and morning had turned to evening with a speed that made a mockery of time. With humor, she’d given him a glimpse of a pain-filled past that rivaled his own, and with seriousness, glimpses of a mother he’d have loved and hated. She’d told him her name was Julia, though that wasn’t any truer than that her name was Jen, or that her brother’s name was John, or that he was Troy or Christopher, because names were placeholders that imparted a sliver of life story within a discrete slice of time, and Julia fit this one perfectly.

  So yes, he’d found her, but he hadn’t found Jennifer White.

  Robert could have found her, too, if he’d thought to look one floor up and eight rooms over. They’d closed down a bar, the three of them, and the siblings, needing a place to sleep, had invited themselves along to his hideaway.

  He’d been in no mood to decline.

  Robert said, “Did you kill her . . . ? Is she . . . ?”

  “She’s alive, still in one piece, not hurt.”

  A partial dose of tension drained from the kid’s posture. He kept his face toward the bed and, avoiding eye contact, said, “What happens to me now?”

  Holden put a hand on his shoulder and waited for him to look up. “You able to permanently forget and forever keep your mouth shut?”

  Robert nodded.

  Holden didn’t doubt the sincerity, even if the confidence was misplaced.

  Silence under pressure was a learned skill that came from life experiences the kid could only pray he never had.

  Holden pulled a few hundred dollars from his wallet and stuffed them in the kid’s pocket. “You can finish the night out here if you want or leave now,” he said. “It’s entirely up to you.”

  Robert glanced at the door, as if trying on the idea of freedom, and unwilling to test fortune or risk waking to a change of plans, made a beeline toward escape.

  Holden debated the need to warn him.

  The kid would never truly be free.

  The disappearance and suspected murder of Jennifer White would follow him for life, would always be there
when employers, schools, and girlfriends searched his name, and any clarification of facts would be an afterthought or an unread footnote in a trial-by-Internet, guilty-even-when-innocent world.

  Holden watched him go.

  The kid was smart, headstrong, resilient.

  He’d be as okay as okay could get.

  The door closed, and its thud echoed with resounding finality.

  Holden sank into the sofa seat, slipped the envelope off the bedside table, and flicked the paper against his fingers. The emergency numbers were still secure behind the seal. Decisions bounced like pinballs, lighting up the bumpers in his tired head.

  Vibration and an unmistakable tone interrupted the flow, set his pulse racing in the way only bounty alerts from the Broker could. Hatred rekindled anger and a deep, unquenchable need that he’d managed to forget for a few blessed hours.

  He didn’t want to look.

  There’d be nothing good waiting, not when death was the only truce to satisfy the rage. That the Broker dared contact him at all, much less by an alert, only heightened the relentless thirst.

  He retrieved the phone and thumbed through layers of obfuscation and passwords to get to the link that led to a newly released bounty packet.

  The payout shouted like chest pains before a heart attack.

  He mouthed the words into the dark. “Eighteen million Swiss francs.”

  Eighteen million free and clear upon proof of kill, no questions asked.

  His thoughts bogged down, bottlenecked by questions.

  The packet contained photos, multiple photos of a man who’d been surveilled over many unkind years, and a geographical marker, architectural drawings, and security schematics. Holden zoomed in for clarity and clicked for more.

  All-call bulletin. Upon proof, winner takes all.

  It didn’t matter who made the kill, only who submitted evidence first.

  Assassins would come in a race for that win, young and old, novice and hardened, killing to kill and killing to steal from one another, next to the next to the next they’d come.

  He understood in a way most wouldn’t.

  He almost laughed.

  This bloodbath in the making, initiated by the Broker, was a hit on the Broker himself. These pictures were of the man behind the voice, the schematics a map through his lair, and the bounty fee would likely be paid out of his own pocket.