The Betrayer (11 page)

“Cat wants me to help
her find my brother.”

“Is he in
trouble?”

“Yeah.” Johnny
looked at her. “Listen, I promised I would never leave you alone, not even for
one night. I won’t break that promise. I won’t do this if you don’t want me to.”

They had, since
Thailand, never been apart, not even for one hour. They worked, ate, and rested
together.

Survivors’
bond.

“You made that
promise a year ago,” Haley said. “Things have changed since then. I’ll be okay.
Anyway, you need to do this.”

“Dickey’s closing
the bar for a few days, just as a precaution. You’ll be safe here, Hay. A man
will be posted outside. He’ll be watching, every minute of the day and night.”

“Is there someone
there now?”

“Yeah.”

She hesitated. “Richter?”

“He’s taking the
first shift.”

“How long is he
going to be there?”

“A new man will
be posted every five hours. Fresh eyes. I know you don’t like it, Hay, but I
feel better knowing he’s there.”

Haley said
nothing.

“If you don’t
want to stay here, we’ll sneak out and I’ll take you to a hotel so no one knows
where you are. Some place where you can actually turn on the lights.”

“No, I’d rather
be here. I’d rather be home. Don’t worry about me.”

“My cell will be
on. Keep yours close.”

“I always do.”

“This should only
take a few hours.”

“Stay focused on
what you have to do.”

“I’m just going
to be knocking on a couple of doors, asking questions. Certain people in
Jeremy’s life probably wouldn’t want to talk to an FBI agent, even if she is
his sister. So nothing dangerous. I’m not risking my life over him. I’ll be
back, I promise.”

She touched his
face. “I’m not worried, Johnny. To be honest, I feel sorry for the man who
tries to keep you from coming home.”

He kissed her,
and she felt his heart pounding.

Of course she was
worried. Of course she was feeling a rush of fear, thinking thoughts she didn’t
want to think.

But she was
determined not to show it.

Later, as it was
getting dark, Johnny left. Haley tacked up blankets over the two front windows,
thought about looking down on the street, seeing if she could spot the man who
was playing lookout.

But she decided
not to do that to herself. She lit candles, drew a bath, soaked in it till the
water turned tepid.

Then she dried
off and dressed, complete with the black hiking boots she had bought in case the
day came that they would need to once again run.

Like two animals
heading for deeper woods.

Draw
the enemy in by the promise of gain, then take him by confusion.

— Sun Tzu

Jeremy was in a hotel room,
waiting for dark. A pointless thing, putting everything on hold till the sun goes
down, he thought. I’d be just as visible under streetlights as I would be in
daylight, just as vulnerable.

But he needed to
be smart, to make only good decisions, wanted that more than anything, and
waiting around for the cover of night seemed the thing to do.

There was also
the fear to take into account — the fear of having been shot at, yes, but also
the fear of being in over his head, of having started something he shouldn’t
have, something he maybe hadn’t completely understood. The man who had showed
up at the park last night was like a ghost from the past. The fact that he had
emerged now, after all this time — just appeared out of nowhere — could not have
been a coincidence.

I’ve stirred
something up and pure evil has arisen again, he thought.

It was this fear —
this realization — that at times today all but paralyzed him.

He’d gone to the
Gershwin Hotel, just north of Madison Square Park, because it was a place he
knew well. A small, inexpensive boutique hotel — part hotel, part youth hostel,
a favorite of young, budget-minded Europeans, so there’d be a lot of people
coming and going, people who looked enough like him. He had stayed there a
number of times before, during one of his affairs with a married woman — older,
of course, and perfumed, polished, plucked. She’d had a hunger he’d never experienced
before. Memories of her — her touch, the smell of her, the sound of her voice —
had hit him like a flood the moment he turned onto Twenty-Seventh Street and seen
the entrance to the hotel. In the lobby, and then riding the elevator up to his
room, he remembered their first time — she was already in the room, and when he
opened the door, he saw her there in the dim light, waiting for him with her
back to the only window, and naked save for a long string of pearls and black
four-inch stilettos.

They went at each
other for hours till each was spent, then fell asleep, lying together till
morning.

Despite these
memories and the loneliness they stirred, he knew that he’d made the right
choice by coming here. The hallways were narrow and divided every fifty feet or
so by heavy swinging doors. This gave every floor a mazelike feel, and it was one
that just might disorient anyone unfamiliar with the hotel’s strange layout. Such
disorientation, Jeremy hoped, would last long enough to give him the advantage,
allow him to move unseen as he made his way to the back stairs that led to the
crowded lobby, should it come to that.

Should the man
from last night — the man from that terrible night three years ago, the man he
had only recently remembered — somehow track him here.

Though he wasn’t
a trained soldier like Johnny, or FBI like Cat, Jeremy was nonetheless a Coyle.
He’d been raised by Coyles, in a house full of Coyles. He reminded himself of
this, repeated it like a mantra. Free now of his addiction, he was thinking in
ways that could only be innate.

Steps ahead, all
contingencies considered, each fallback plan possessing a fallback plan of its
own.

Even last night,
as he watched that Russian approach him and eventually recognized the man, he’d
managed not to panic — not completely, anyway.

He had quickly
aborted his original plan and put into action his fallback.

In him, somewhere,
were remnants of his father.

These fragments,
he thought, are what will keep me alive.

I will — I must —
trust them.

It was eight o’clock — an hour
since full night had fallen — but he still hadn’t left his hotel room.

On the small,
round table under the wall-mounted TV lay what was left of his cell phone. In
his right hip pocket when his motorcycle had spun out from beneath him, it had
been crushed when he hit the pavement and now it no longer worked. As he slid
along Delancey Street, he’d instinctively rolled onto his back, which smashed his
laptop as well. He had been, then, unable to send the text he had promised to
send to Elizabeth after his meeting. He knew she was probably under the
impression that he had been killed, and he had felt the pressing need all day
to contact her and let her know that he was okay, to relieve her of the fear
she was certainly feeling. But he didn’t dare call from his hotel room — that
would have been too easy to trace. There was a pay phone on the second floor, where
the hostel was located, but he didn’t dare use that for the same reason. And though
there were desktop computers available to guests and he could have easily
e-mailed her, the computers were set up in an area that was accessible to just
too many people, and he would have been too exposed.

If that Russian
had known about last night, what else did he know?

So Jeremy had no
way of letting Elizabeth know that he was okay, and he had no way of knowing
whether or not she had kept her promise to contact his sister. For that matter,
he didn’t know if Cat had found the hidden note he’d left for her at their
father’s old apartment. And if she had, had she figured out what it meant?

Too many
questions, and only one way to answer all of them.

Get a new phone,
get it activated, and go from there.

It took another
half hour, but finally Jeremy summoned the courage necessary to leave his small
room. He knew there was a Sprint store just a few blocks east. He’d be able to
purchase a replacement phone and would be back within an hour.

As the elevator
door opened, he braced himself for the worst, but the elevator was empty. It
was the same when the elevator reached the lobby — certainly that Russian would be
standing there when the door opened. Someone was, but not him. Jeremy walked
through the crowded lobby, his heart pounding. He wanted to pause before
stepping outside but didn’t dare. He just kept on going, pushed himself through
a fear that was growing more and more wild.

He exited to an
empty sidewalk and looked around as discreetly as he could as he turned right
and followed Twenty-Seventh Street across Fifth Avenue.

He walked for
three blocks, studying every approaching face, making quick checks of those
behind him.

He thought of his
father, the work he had done, the life he had lived.

He was reminded
of why he was doing this by the time he reached his destination. And though his
heart was still pounding, all hint of wildness had been replaced by a clarity
he’d never quite known before.

Whenever she went for a run, Cat
pushed herself hard.

On her days off,
when it was warm, she went to Central Park and ran the loop. During bad weather
and when it got cold, she ran on the elevated indoor track of a health club not
too far from her place. Running was crucial to her, and she did it as much for
her emotional well-being as her physical conditioning and overall health. Every
one of the Coyle children ran track.
Running tests a person like nothing
else
,
her father used to say. Even Jeremy ran track, though for only
his freshman year. He was actually better than she or Johnny — broke several
long-standing records, was a natural. But his mental illness got the better of
him after their mother died, and he quit the team, preferring to party, first
with fellow students at his high school, and then with a crowd from the city.

From there it was
a short road — a downhill run — to addiction.

She thought of all
this as she ran. Outdoors tonight, following a circuit through her Long Island
City neighborhood — her least favorite route, but convenient — out her door and
back home in less than an hour. It did the trick, though, because she wasn’t
even at the halfway point and her lungs and legs were already burning.

Her mind was
running, too. She found it difficult to focus on anything in particular, to
hold on to a single thought for any length of time. One second she was thinking
about Jeremy, the next she was remembering something from her childhood, from
the time — a rare time, thanks to her father’s work — when they were all
together, father and mother and three children.

After a while she
gave up fighting her lack of focus. Obviously, her mind needed to run as well.
Roam free, wander about. So she let it. The harder she pushed herself, the
faster her mind moved from random thought to random thought. She began to hope
that maybe a pattern would emerge out of this chaos, that her subconscious
would ultimately reveal something to her, something her conscious mind couldn’t
or wouldn’t understand. She thought of her father, recalled a quiet moment
between the two of them one winter evening when she was maybe ten. She hadn’t
thought of this in years. He had come to her bedroom, knocked on her door and
entered, then spent a half hour with her, just talking to her, asking her about
school, her friends, giving her the attention that she craved. She could barely
remember now what they had said, but the memory of his presence — the softness
of his voice, the way he listened to her, the trust he engendered — was still
vivid.

And then that
memory was gone, replaced by another, and then another. It went like this,
consuming her, pulling her attention from the street in front of her. At one
point she managed to focus on her surroundings and realized that she had run
three blocks without noticing. She had crossed three streets but hadn’t looked
prior to crossing them, or, if she had, she hadn’t retained what she’d seen
when looking.

Not good.

She stopped for a
breather, and to get control of herself. She wasn’t far from McKinney’s, the
Irish bar she had gone to after having drinks with Fiermonte a week before,
after hearing about the feelings he had for her. She wondered if the man she
had met there and gone home with was inside right now. Not that she really
wanted to see him again. If anything, his presence would be reason enough for
her
not
to enter. And if she did, what then? A quick drink or two, a
look around? She was on leave, so she didn’t have to worry about work in the
morning. She had, in fact, nothing to do till she heard from Johnny, and that
wouldn’t be for a few hours at best. Waiting was such a helpless feeling. She
needed to do
something
. Something stupid would even do, no?

No, she thought. I
need to be patient. I need to trust Johnny.

Their father had
served in an elite unit in Vietnam — the LRRP, Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol,
born out of the 101st Airborne. Teams of six men, sometimes fewer, would
penetrate deep behind enemy lines, often remaining there for days. Their goal
was either to gather intelligence on the enemy or to capture an enemy combatant
and return with him to base, then hand him over for interrogation.

Johnny had been
fascinated by that unit as a boy, had studied everything he could about its
history, its tactics, its tools. He would have volunteered for it if it hadn’t
been disbanded after Vietnam. But its role had been taken over by the Army
Rangers, so he had set his sights on becoming one of them, by way of the 101st
Airborne, like their father and their father’s father.

 If anyone could
find Jeremy and bring him back, if anyone had what it took to do that, it was
Johnny.

She had to trust
him, had to wait, but doing that would leave her with hours to kill.

Hours, once her
run was done and she had showered and dressed, with nothing at all to do.

A bored Cat was a
dangerous Cat.

Like her father,
she worked long hours, sometimes seven days a week. She had no family, didn’t really
want one. Well, maybe someday. She had learned that it was easiest to hide from
loneliness when you were busy, and when you weren’t, when you had to step away
from the job or there was nothing for you to do, simply go out and have a few
drinks. And when that wasn’t enough, just bring a stranger home and hope he was
halfway decent. Hope he knew what he was doing — and knew enough not to
overstay his welcome.

Tonight, though, for
a few hours anyway, she would have to face her loneliness, sit with it, and she
wasn’t looking forward to that at all.

She stared at
McKinney’s for a moment more, then turned around and started the run back home.
Running toward something was always better than running away from something. Her
thoughts were calmer now, easier to hold on to. She thought of Jeremy out there
somewhere, scared. She had studied the surveillance video over and over, and
each viewing had only served to convince her even more that he was straight,
not high or strung out.

But the problem
with being straight was that there was nothing between you and your feelings. No
veil, no buffer. You couldn’t hide from fear.

Back at her
building, her legs spent and her lungs raw, she stopped to grab her mail, then
headed upstairs. Once inside her apartment, she stripped, showered, dressed
again, just in case the phone rang, just in case Johnny found something and
called her, needed her to do something, go somewhere.

Please, Johnny,
find something, she thought.

She was about to
make something to eat when she decided to look at her mail first. Bills and
junk, that was all she ever got. She’d been late on a few credit cards lately
and needed to do better, needed to put her life in order, even if only on that
level.

As she flipped
through her mail, the return address on one envelope in particular caught her
eye.

Verizon Wireless.

She was looking
at her cell phone bill.

She opened it, scanned
the bill, and saw the phrase “Save time, pay online.”

She had put the
paper she’d found in their father’s apartment in her desk drawer for
safekeeping. Retrieving it, she looked at the eight-digit code just below
Jeremy’s cell phone number.

Could it be?

She called
Fiermonte.

“Hey, Cat.”

“I need to know
which cell phone carrier Jeremy used.”

“What’s going
on?”

“The number
Jeremy left, it was a cell phone number, right?
His
cell phone, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know
which carrier it was?”

“Not offhand.”

“Could you find
out?”

“I’d have to call
Morris.”

“Call me back as
soon as you know.”

“What’s going on,
Cat?”

“Please.”

“Okay, okay.”

She ended the
call, stepped to her laptop, powered it up, and went online.

Less than three
minutes later, her cell phone rang.

“It’s a Sprint
number,” Fiermonte said.

Cat hurriedly
went to the Sprint home page and located the account member login box. Under “Username”
she entered Jeremy’s phone number, then under “Password” entered the
eight-digit code.

Within seconds
she had access to Jeremy’s account.

“I think you’d
better come over,” Cat said.

“What’s going
on?”

“I think I maybe
found what Jeremy wanted me to find.”

A pause, then: “Give
me a half hour.”

She ended the
call, then tried her brother’s cell again. But just like before, her call went
to his voice mail without ringing once.

Laying her phone down,
she proceeded to search Jeremy’s account, starting with his call history.