The Betrayer (10 page)

Johnny nodded but
said nothing.

“I have to find him,”
Cat said. “I know how you feel about him, Johnny, but I’d be grateful if you’d
help me.”

“You’re FBI, Cat.
What could I do that you couldn’t?”

“I took a leave
of absence this morning.”

“Still, you have
friends in the Bureau, no? And Donnie here has the resources of the state at
his disposal. What ground could I cover that the two of you couldn’t?”

Cat deferred to
Fiermonte.

“I think it would
be better if we kept this in the family for now,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because someone
betrayed your father, Johnny. Everyone in this room knows that. Someone set him
up the night he was killed, then fed lies to the press about him after he was
dead. Clearly, killing him wasn’t enough, someone wanted him
destroyed
.
His reputation, all the work he’d done, everything about the man, who he
was — gone, just like that. If your brother does know something, if he has
remembered something after all these years, then I think it would be wise if we
knew what that something was before anyone else did. Whoever betrayed your father
was close to him —  close enough to know enough about the work he did to
distort it and turn it into lies. Whoever that someone was, he hid his tracks
well, because I’ve never been able to find him. If this is our chance to
finally expose him, well, it’s a chance I’d rather not miss.”

No one said
anything.

Cat stepped
closer to her brother. “Will you help us, Johnny? Will you find Jeremy and
bring him home?”

Johnny felt
trapped, and couldn’t help but be reminded of the last time he had felt that
way, the last time he’d been cornered in small room by three people.

There was only
one way out then.

And he could see
only one way out now.

Johnny returned to the apartment
just as the hour he’d predicted he would be away was ending.
A promise kept
.
That mattered to him. Haley wanted to talk, particularly when she saw the look
on his face, and he assured her they would, that he’d tell her everything, but
not yet. He needed her, he’d said, and she understood what that meant and led
him to their dark back bedroom and kissed him as they undressed each other.

Afterward, they
lay naked together under tangled sheets. She was prepared to give him all the time
he needed and began counting her breathing. But before she got too far into her
meditation, he spoke.

“Dickey took me
to see my sister.”

Haley knew enough
about his family situation to understand the significance of that. “How’d it
feel to see her again?”

Johnny shrugged. “About
how I thought it would.”

Survivors usually
did one of two things — avoided each other, or clung to each other. Haley knew
this, was grateful that she and Johnny were the latter. Johnny and his sister
were of course the former. And the fact that Haley and Johnny were potentially
fugitives, and his sister was a federal agent, was yet another reason for
Johnny to maintain his distance from her.

With that in
mind, Haley asked, “Was it just you three?”

“A guy named
Donnie Fiermonte was with her.”

“Who’s he?”

“He’s a state
prosecutor. He used to work with my father.”

“Are we in
trouble?” she said calmly.

“No.”

“Can you trust
him?”

“He and my father
were close. He was like family.”

“So that’s a
yes.”

“Yeah.”

“What did they
want?”

Johnny paused
before answering. “I never told you much about the night my father was killed,”
he said.

Haley shrugged. “I
figured what I knew was enough. And that if I needed to know more, you’d tell
me.”

“I think you need
to know more now, Hay. I owe that much to you.”

“Something is
about to happen.”

Johnny nodded. “I
need to do something tonight. But I need you to understand why I have to do it.”

“You don’t have to
explain anything to me.”

“I want you to
know. I owe you that much.”

She nodded. Johnny
sensed no fear from her, only calm determination. She’d come a long way in a
year. Through meditation, her grace had only deepened. He had so much further to
go if he was going to catch up with her.

“It was just
after I was discharged,” he began.

Johnny was still on crutches,
staying at Riverview, the house in Ossining, trying to figure out what the hell
to do with his life. Jeremy was missing, he often disappeared, but no one had
heard from him in close to a month. John Coyle Sr. had grown concerned and asked
Dickey McVicker to find his wayward son.

The last thing
John Coyle knew was that Jeremy had been crashing with some friends in Greenwich
Village and getting into trouble. It wasn’t anything new — Jeremy had gotten
wilder and wilder in the years since his mother had died. But John Coyle needed
his youngest son home. With Johnny back, there would be someone at the house to
keep an eye on the boy. And maybe, just maybe, his two sons forced to be
together in that way just might cause them to reconcile, once and for all.

A father’s hope.

It was a chilly
night late in October when John Coyle got the call from Dickey McVicker. One of
Dickey’s men had located Jeremy and was keeping him in an apartment in Chelsea,
one of the many apartments around the Greater New York area that Dickey
McVicker maintained for various reasons.

John Coyle hung
up the phone and went upstairs to Johnny’s room.

“You’re coming
for a ride with me,” the man said.

“What’s up?”

“We’re going to
get your brother.”

Johnny pointed
out that he was on crutches, asked what good he could do. Anyway, he just
wanted to rest. But his father insisted. “I might need someone to drive back,
depending on what condition Jeremy is. And the ride will give us a chance to
talk.”

They were less
than an hour from the city. Johnny thought his father was going to tell him
that he should consider joining the FBI now that his military career was over,
but the man actually surprised Johnny, said he thought Johnny should look into
becoming a teacher, maybe at a high school, so he could also coach track or
cross country. Somewhere nearby, something — anything — that had nothing at all
to do with the criminal world.

John Coyle wanted
to keep his family — what was left of it — together.

Johnny had no
idea at the time that this would be the last moments he and his father would
have together. He didn’t really want to hear what his old man had to say, was a
bit abrupt with him. He just wasn’t in the mood to think about the future, at
least not a new one. He was too busy being pissed off about the future he’d
been denied. Too busy feeling sorry for himself.

Coyles simply
didn’t do that.

John Sr. found a place
to park three blocks from where Dickey’s man was holding Jeremy. Johnny would
wait in the car. His father wasn’t involved in undercover operations anymore, hadn’t
been for a while. He was a supervising agent now, working nine to five, more or
less, for the first time in his life. His secret life was behind him, and he
was enjoying being able to live without taking the precautions he used to have
to take. For his sake, and the sake of his family.

Even after he had
parked, even with Jeremy waiting not far away, John Coyle still wanted to talk.
Johnny was getting irritated. Finally, though, the man had enough of his son’s
mood — he understood it, sympathized with it, but he’d had enough of it for
now.

He got out, but
before he closed the door, he looked in at Johnny and said, “I’m proud of you,
son, and always will be, no matter what you do, as long as you always do your
best. That’s all I ask of you. Always do your best.”

Then he closed
the door, walked around a corner, and that was the last Johnny ever saw of him.

Fifteen minutes
later Johnny heard gunshots. He knew right away that they involved his father
somehow. His gut told him this couldn’t be a coincidence. He wanted to get behind
the wheel, figured if he couldn’t run toward the shots, he could at least drive
toward them. Rangers ran toward, not away. Coyles ran toward, not away. But the
crutches, and the cast around his leg, made sliding over a surprisingly
difficult thing to do. When he finally got behind the wheel and started the
engine, Johnny hit the accelerator with his good foot and headed toward the corner
his father had turned just moments ago.

As he neared it, two men came running around it, and instinctively Johnny slammed on the
brakes to avoid hitting them. But the car skidded, and one of the men got
clipped by the front bumper and rolled onto the hood.

Johnny and this
man looked at each other through the windshield. The man was wearing a ski
mask, and all Johnny could see were his eyes.

They were filled
with fear.

The other man pulled
his partner off the hood, and the two took off.

Johnny continued,
turning the corner and driving to the next block. It was there that he once
again skidded to a stop.

Ahead, in the
middle of street, lay a dead man. He was wearing a ski mask.

The entire block
was deserted, and the only sound Johnny could hear was approaching sirens.

Johnny sat up and moved the edge
of the mattress. Haley untangled herself from the sheets and sat beside him.

“What happened?”
she asked.

“Six men were
waiting to ambush him. He managed to kill one before he was taken.”

“I mean what
happened to your brother?”

“Don’t know
exactly. Whoever was holding him just set him free, apparently. He actually didn’t
turn up till the next morning. He was a fucking mess, as high as a kite,
couldn’t remember much. Nothing that would help, anyway.”

“Someone used him
to bait your father,” Haley stated.

Johnny nodded.

“And so you blame
him for your father’s death.”

Johnny nodded
again. “Yeah.”

“But wasn’t
Dickey the one who called your father, got him to come into the city? And you
said one of his men had found Jeremy. Didn’t anyone suspect him?”

“Another one of
the men who ambushed my father was caught the next day. He testified that he’d
been hired by some Russian, that this Russian was working for Dickey but had
betrayed him, and had been paid to do so by someone else.”

“Who?”

“No one knows.”

“And everyone just
believed that?”

“What would
Dickey gain by killing my father? He had risked his life for him again and
again over the years. And my father had risked his life for Dickey’s. And
anyway, Dickey knew where we lived, he could have just sent someone to the
house, wouldn’t have had to lure my father out like that.”

“Maybe coming
straight to the house would have been too obvious.”

“Dickey tore his own
organization apart afterward, turned into Stalin for a while there, looking for
anyone who might have been in on it, anyone who could identify the man the
Russian had been working for.”

Haley needed a
moment after that. More and more the idea of their lives being in the hands of
such a man was difficult for her to reconcile.

Finally, she
said, “So the men who kidnapped your father killed him?”

Johnny nodded. “For
three days we only knew that he had been taken. The FBI was all over this, and
Fiermonte was leaning on the police. It was crazy. The man they caught, the one
who said the dead Russian had been paid to betray Dickey, he confessed that my
father had been killed just hours after he was taken. He said they’d kept him
alive long enough so the man who wanted him dead could see him die.” Johnny
paused. “His body was disposed of in a way I don’t even want to think about.”

Haley placed her
hand on Johnny’s back. Though the room was warm, he was shivering wildly.

“You’re cold.”

“I’m okay.”

She sensed that
he needed to continue, to get this out while he could. She waited for him to
resume, drawing small circles on his back with her hand. It was the only
comfort she could offer.

“It was about a
week after my father was killed that all the shit started coming out about how he
was on the take, and had been for years. People started to say that he’d never
actually risked his life when he was undercover because the men he had supposedly
infiltrated were actually paying him large sums of cash to look the other way.”

“But it wasn’t
true.”

“Of course not. We
couldn’t do a thing about it, though. We were just…helpless. For a while it was
headline news. The
Daily News
loved it. Everybody got dragged into it — my
sister, Fiermonte, even Dickey, to a degree. He’s smart, though. He keeps
himself insulated from the men who work for him. Finally, the whole thing died
down, but by then my father’s reputation was shit. His life’s work was just…gone.
I was done with my surgeries, my ankle was as good as it was going to get, but I
still had no idea what I was going to do with myself. I knew I wanted to get
out of New York, there were too many memories, but where would I go? And then
one day it came to me: Vietnam, just to have a look around. The rest you know.”

When she had met
him, he looked about as lost as a man could. Long hair, long beard, a faraway
look in bloodshot eyes. He’d come to Thailand to flame out, and many who
traveled there managed to do just that.

And yet within
days of their meeting, Johnny had shaved off his beard and cut his hair.

And a look of
life had returned to his eyes.

She looked at him
now and saw once again a hint of that faraway look.

“What is it you
have to do tonight?” she asked.