The Betrayer (36 page)

Johnny watched as the dark-haired woman dropped.

It was as if a trapdoor had opened beneath her.

It took a moment for Johnny to realize that she hadn’t fired, though.

Someone else had.

Someone behind him.

Johnny turned and saw a man — the shape of a man, a giant with a still-smoking gun in his outstretched hand.

His badly blurred vision, combined with the rain falling into his eyes, prevented Johnny from seeing who this man was.

What Johnny could see was that the man was walking toward them, and that three men were following closely behind him.

The giant reached Jeremy and stopped, looked down at him, then spoke to the men behind him.

“Get him to the Jeep.”

Johnny recognized the man’s voice and felt his heart turn cold with dread.

Richter McVicker
.

Two of the men picked up Jeremy and hurriedly carried him to a four-door Jeep parked in the middle of Bleecker. Its lights were on, its engine running, a man waiting behind the wheel.

Richter still had his weapon drawn and aimed — not at Johnny, but past him, at the downed woman at the corner.

Richter’s remaining thug ran past Johnny and took position behind him. Facing the corner, but keeping Johnny in his peripheral vision, the man had his weapon drawn and ready, covering their rear.

Only then did Richter lower his gun.

Johnny looked toward the Jeep and saw that Jeremy had been placed in the back compartment. The kid was barely conscious. The men who had carried him there were working frantically, one applying a mechanic’s towel to the gunshot wound below Jeremy’s collarbone, the other, as he climbed into the cramped space, tightening the makeshift tourniquet.

As he watched this, Johnny heard approaching sirens.

To be audible through the downpour meant they had to be close.

“C’mon, Johnny,” Richter said.

Johnny glanced back once more at the downed woman at the corner, around which lay Dragoi Gregorian.

What other choice did Johnny have?

In the backseat of the moving Jeep, soaked to the bone and stripped of his weapons and cell phone, Johnny felt everything slipping.

His strength, his wits, his will.

The Jeep moved westward through the city, then turned onto the West Side Highway and headed north. A few minutes later it was passing through Chelsea. Johnny had to strain to focus his eyes on the very building in which Jeremy had been held three years ago.

And a block east of there, the street from which their father had been taken, and where the brief countdown to the end of his life had begun.

According to Tambov, their father had lived only four hours before being hacked to death in the basement of a warehouse.

It was only now that Johnny wondered if that was the same warehouse where Dickey had taken him to meet with Cat and Fiermonte.

How long ago was that? Johnny couldn’t remember exactly; his thoughts were too clouded by exhaustion and pain. His face was on fire and he felt for a moment as if he were going to pass out.

He knew that he needed to understand what had just happened — what was happening now — but he just didn’t have it in him.

Too many questions — why had Richter and his men come between the hired killers working for his father and those they had been sent to kill?

Was Richter making some kind of move against Dickey?

Certainly, Big Dickey McVicker going to prison for the murder of an FBI agent would leave Richter in charge of all that Dickey had built and controlled. Was that what was going on?

But this only brought Johnny back to the same problem about the recordings of Jeremy’s recovered recollections: they were useless. Dickey had to know that, and had to have ordered Jeremy’s murder for the reason Fiermonte suggested — to ease his Stalin-like paranoia.

Maybe Richter didn’t know about the recordings, that they were no threat to his father. Maybe he was acting out of ignorance, foolishly launching a coup that relied on Jeremy being alive to take him to where the recordings were hidden.

If so, this was a coup that was bound to fail.

Johnny needed to come back from the brink he was now teetering on, and the only way to do that was to think of Haley — his true north, the direction in which he was always pulled.

It took all he had just to remember the smell of her, the feel of her skin, the sound of her voice in the darkness of their bedroom. It felt as if it had been years since he was last beside her. Decades. Another life, even.

But these thoughts of her did what he needed them to do.

The things he was losing were beginning to return.

Strength, wits, will.

He looked back at his unconscious brother in the rear compartment. The man beside Jeremy was applying pressure to his collarbone with one hand and monitoring his pulse with the other.

Despite the tourniquet around Jeremy’s upper thigh, Johnny could see that blood was seeping steadily from the wound.

“How far away are we?” the man said.

“Fifteen minutes,” Richter answered.

“I don’t know if he has fifteen minutes.”

Richter said to the driver, “Faster.”

Johnny looked forward again. He was seated between two men — the third thug who had covered their rear, and the man who had helped carry Jeremy to the vehicle. Richter was in the passenger seat — turned sideways, though, so he could keep an eye on Johnny.

It wasn’t long before Johnny glanced toward the driver, and the steering wheel the man was gripping with two hands.

“Don’t even think about it,” Richter said.

Johnny met his stare.

“The recordings are useless,” Johnny said. “And anyway, you’re too late. Fiermonte has them.”

The young McVicker said nothing.

The Jeep crossed the Harlem River, then headed north on the Saw Mill River Parkway.

Toward Westchester.

Where Johnny had been born and raised.

And where, once they used him to make his brother talk, he would likely die at the hands of a son eager to betray his own father.

Cat was seated on the couch in Johnny’s room in the Gershwin Hotel, Haley standing at the window and looking down at the corner of Twenty-Seventh and Fifth.

Waiting, watching.

Over an hour had passed since Cat told Haley the lie Johnny had wanted her to tell: everything was fine, Johnny would be back soon, don’t worry. There was no way for Cat to know whether or not Haley believed her; she didn’t know the woman well enough, couldn’t tell if her reserve was an indication of a calm mind or mild shock.

All Haley did was listen and nod.

As more and more time passed with no word from Johnny, Cat began to fear that her lie would soon unravel.

Cat made the effort at conversation now and then, but Haley was clearly too fixated on watching the street for Johnny to hold up her end. Eventually Cat ran out of small talk and decided to settle into the tense silence that Haley clearly preferred.

And then she remembered what Johnny had said about Haley having gone to Thailand to study Theravada Buddhism.

Maybe silence was Haley’s way of keeping her mind calm and her heart from exploding in her chest. Cat decided to give it a try for herself, but her wrist was throbbing too hard and she couldn’t concentrate. She was past due for a pain pill, but she had left her bottle downstairs with Fiermonte, who she heard occasionally speaking on his cell phone — his voice came through the floorboards but not the words he spoke. Cat expected that he’d finish with his calls at any moment — to the super, his ex, to arrange a detail to provide protection — and chose to wait out Johnny and Jeremy’s return up here. But he never came up, simply kept making and taking calls — not nonstop, but close enough.

As the silence between Cat and Haley grew, and the insistent pain signals from her broken wrist wore away at her coherence, Cat found herself remembering her encounter with Fiermonte — waking to a building sensation in her pelvis, her orgasm breaking suddenly, being unable to stop it even if she had wanted to, then Fiermonte climbing on top of her, entering her, moving inside her.

All of it pleasurable enough, despite the lovely opiates numbing her. And, yes, it was a cheap shot, his sneaking up on her the way he did, but she wasn’t at all surprised by his tactic, knew the moment she realized he was taking her to his place and not her own that something might occur.

And, truth be told, she really couldn’t blame him for trying; it probably wouldn’t have happened any other way. But now that it had, now that he had broken through her defenses, there was always the chance that it might happen again, if she got bored or drunk enough.

Sex with strange men was one thing, but sex with someone who knew her — who
really
knew her, knew where she had come from and the dead end her life had become — was something else altogether.

It was while Cat was lost in this train of thought that Haley broke her silence.

“Something isn’t making sense to me,” she said.

Cat looked at the redhead. “What?”

“Your friend said that the prosecutor from Westchester was contacted by the US Attorney because Johnny’s passport led him to your old house in Ossining. Right?”

“Yeah.”

“The address on my passport application is my father’s place in California. If the Thai police were looking for Johnny, wouldn’t they also be looking for me? I mean, wouldn’t they have contacted the prosecutor in California, too, and requested that he swear out a warrant?”

“No one came to your father’s house?” Cat asked.

Haley shook her head.

Cat thought for a moment. “It’s possible the local authorities decided to stake out your father’s place instead of approaching him directly. In case you came back on your own.”

“I don’t think that happened.”

“Why not?”

“My father lives on two hundred acres in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. It looks like a ranch, but it’s actually a self-sustaining compound. If someone were staking out his property, trust me, he’d know it.”

“What exactly does ‘self-sustaining compound’ mean?”

“He’s an outlier.”

“A survivalist.”

Haley nodded.

“Is he part of a militia group?”

“No, not at all.”

“Is that where you grew up?”

“He only moved there five years ago, after he retired. But I lived there for a while, yeah.”

“So you know all those end-of-the-world survival tricks.”

“Some.”

Cat was beginning to understand the attraction between Haley and Johnny — beyond, of course, the obvious reasons.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why didn’t you go there when you came back to the States? Why’d you go to Dickey instead?”

“Johnny thought Dickey was the safer option, for everyone involved. And anyway, he needed to work. ‘A man works,’ he kept saying.”

Cat recognized the expression. It was their father’s. Another part of the Coyle tradition — one that Jeremy strayed from all too often. Johnny had adhered to it, until his accident and their father’s death. Then he strayed from it, too, living on his minor inheritance, wandering New York City first, where his father had worked undercover, then through Southeast Asia, eventually wandering into serious trouble.

“The ranch was our fallback position,” Haley said. “But I told my father what happened in Thailand, so he would have tipped us off if anyone had come there looking for me. He and I have a system in place so he could do it easily enough without it being traced back to him.”

Cat thought of the similar system she was going to set up for Johnny.

“Has your father ever had any run-ins with the local authorities?”

Haley scowled. “No. Why?”

“If he had a history of violence, or even violent speech, the cops might want to avoid anything that could lead to a standoff. Since Waco, everyone — the cops, the Feds — have had to adopt a less-than-aggressive approach to your father’s type.”

“My father isn’t an antigovernment nut job,” Haley said. “After his discharge from the service, he worked his way through college as a boxer, then taught philosophy at Stanford for twenty years. He pays his taxes and minds his own business. There’s no reason for the cops to fear him, no reason for them
not
to drive out to his place and knock on his door if they were looking for his daughter.”

Cat explained that she didn’t mean anything, was simply trying to come up with an explanation for why the US Attorney would be looking for Johnny but not the woman with whom he had crossed so many borders.

Had Johnny left something out, Cat wondered, when he told me and Fiermonte his side of the story?

But why would he do that?

There was also the possibility, Cat realized, that Haley didn’t know everything about her own father.

Cat, after all, had for so long known precious little about her own.

“I take it you heard what Donnie told Johnny, right? Johnny had his phone on, so you and Jeremy could hear, right?”

Haley nodded.

“So you heard what he said about bureaucracy working to our advantage sometimes. It could also be a simple matter of economics. Budgets have been cut to the bone since the economy tanked, departments all over are underfunded and undermanned. The locals could have done just enough to determine you weren’t there, then let the whole thing drop. I mean, someone wanted for a crime way the hell over in Thailand isn’t going to be a top priority for some California sheriff, even if the request comes from high up. To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if the US Attorney was counting on the whole thing just going away.”

It seemed to Cat that Haley wanted to believe this.

But wanting wasn’t enough.

“I just don’t see how they could have watched my father’s place without him knowing.”

“Law enforcement is pretty sophisticated these days.”

“My father’s pretty sophisticated himself.”

“I don’t doubt that. But believe me, they would have done this as quickly as possible, then moved on.”

Haley nodded but said nothing. She resumed looking out the window again. Whether she was satisfied or not by what Cat had said, Cat couldn’t tell. She watched the woman for a while, wondered what else there was to learn about her.

A student of Buddhism, the daughter of an ex-military-turned-boxer-turned-professor-turned-survivalist, the woman Johnny had guided through the jungles of Thailand to a narrow escape from Vietnam.

What was next?

It didn’t take long for Cat to get her answer to that question.

Haley had turned her attention from the corner to the west, where it had been as they waited for Johnny’s return, to lower down and slightly to the east.

At something right there on Twenty-Seventh Street.

Cat asked Haley what she was looking at.

“A car has been parked outside the hotel for the past hour.”

“Aren’t there a lot of cars down there?”

“This one is different.”

“How?”

“Every so often the windows fog up, which means someone is inside. And every ten minutes or so whoever’s inside starts the motor and lets it run till the windows are clear. Like they need to be able to see out.”

Cat rose, stepped to Haley’s side, and followed her line of sight down.

A sedan was parked a few doors to the east, on the opposite side of the street.

“Donnie said he was going to arrange protection,” Cat said.

“It’s been there since you came up. If your friend got them here this quickly, then it would probably be a detective’s car, not a deep-cover car, right? So the markers should be city markers.”

Cat glanced at Haley. Who was this woman? Then she looked down at the sedan. The distance was of course too great, the angle all wrong. She couldn’t see the markers.

“The windows are tinted, too,” Haley said. “It’s that heavy privacy tinting they use on limos. Unmarked detectives’ cars don’t have that, do they?”

Cat again glanced at her.

“I’ll take a walk down and have a look,” Haley said.

“No. I’ll call Donnie and ask him.”

Cat entered his number into her cell phone, but after four rings the call was forwarded to his voice mail.

“He must be on the other line,” she said.

Haley glanced at the floor. “I don’t hear him talking.”

Cat was about to hit the redial button when there was a knock on the door.

Removing her Sig, she stepped to it and looked through the peephole.

“It’s him,” she said.

She stepped back, holstering her weapon as she opened the door.

“We need to get out of here,” Fiermonte said.

“What’s wrong?”

“We don’t have a lot of time. C’mon.”

Cat didn’t move. Haley was standing with her back to the window.

“Something has happened,” Cat said.

“I just got a call. I’ll tell you on our way.”

“What’s going on?” Cat demanded. She stood firm.

Fiermonte glanced at Haley, then said to Cat, “Shots were fired on MacDougal and Bleecker.”

Cat turned to look at Haley, but the redhead was already more than halfway across the room.

Walking with long, purposeful strides.

“Take me down there,” Haley said.

Fiermonte shook his head. “I can’t do that.”

“Then I’m going there myself.”

Haley was about to move past the prosecutor, but he put up his arm, blocking her way through the door.

“We need to get you to a safe place. We still need you to keep out of sight.”

“I don’t care.”

“I think Johnny would,” Fiermonte said.

Haley grabbed his arm, was ready to pull him out of the way if she had to. He put a stop to that with what he said next.

“Johnny may have shot a cop.”

Haley froze.

“I promise, you’ll know everything I know as soon as I know it,” Fiermonte said. He was speaking to both Haley and Cat now. “But we need to move you, okay? We need to keep you safe.”

He glanced at Cat as if to enlist her help.

Cat stepped to Haley. “He’s right. We need to go.”

Haley looked at Fiermonte. Her face was red, her eyes wild.

“There’s a car parked out front,” she said. “Do you know anything about it?”

Fiermonte was clearly puzzled. “No. But this is a busy street—”

“It’s a watch car,” Cat assured him. “Is there a back way out of here?”

“I don’t know.”

“There isn’t,” Haley said.

They both looked at her.

“Johnny checked when we came in.”

“Then I guess we go out the front,” Cat said.

She took point as they left the room, Haley close behind her, Fiermonte bringing up the rear. In the elevator Cat asked Fiermonte where he was parked.

“On the north side of Madison Square Park.”

Twenty-Fourth Street, Cat thought. The watch car was on the south side of Twenty-Seventh, facing west.

There was, Cat knew, really only one play to make here.

Once downstairs, she led Haley and Fiermonte through the lobby, but switched places with Fiermonte prior to exiting the hotel, putting herself between the car and Haley.

Fiermonte turned right, heading west toward Fifth, Haley following him, Cat behind her. The rain was heavy, drowning out everything but the sound of Cat’s own breathing.

After they turned the corner, heading south, Cat paused. She counted to three, then peered back around the corner, doing so just in time to see a man dressed in black and wearing a plain baseball cap with its bill pulled low exit the sedan.

Exit and follow.

The vehicle pulled away from the curb then, shadowing the man as he headed toward Fifth.

That was all Cat needed to see. She ran then, caught up with Fiermonte and Haley at the next block, and hurried with them to Fiermonte’s car.

Fiermonte got in behind the wheel. Cat waited till Haley was in the backseat before climbing into the passenger seat and pulling her door closed, sealing out the sound of the rain.

Cat turned in her seat and looked through the back window. The man in the baseball cap had reached the corner of Twenty-Fourth but stopped there. He was barking urgent commands into a handheld radio and watching them drive off.

Fiermonte turned right onto Madison — the wrong way down a one-way street — then backtracked via Twenty-Third to Fifth, turning south there. He made turn after turn, blowing through red lights, zigzagging his way first southeast, then, when they finally reached First Avenue, heading straight north.