The Betrayer (32 page)

Johnny made his way through the mazelike hallway of the Gershwin — through one swinging door, a sharp left turn, then through another door to finally reach the single elevator.

As he rode down, he checked his cell phone, saw that he barely had any reception at all. Exiting the elevator, the reception improved slightly. He pressed the single key assigned to Haley’s number as he backtracked through the hallway — a swinging door, a right turn, then another swinging door.

He held the phone to his ear and waited for Haley to answer.

“Hey.” Her voice was a whisper, more tender than conspiratorial.

“Put me on speaker. Hit the Mute button, too, just to be safe. I’ll see you in a bit.”

He slipped the live phone into his pocket as he reached room 729.

He knocked on the door.

“Son, are you okay?” Fiermonte asked.

Johnny closed the door. “Yeah.”

Fiermonte was standing in the center of the room, Cat to his right, closer to the window.

“Come in and sit down,” she said.

Johnny remained by the door. “I’m fine here.” It took all he had to stand. The pain in his collarbone was getting worse. He looked at Fiermonte. “Cat said you had information.”

“Before we start, I want you to know that I don’t care about what happened in Brooklyn last night. If anybody asks, and I don’t care who, I haven’t seen you since yesterday. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Johnny nodded. “Thanks.”

“The Thailand matter, however, is a different thing.”

Johnny thought of Haley listening in. He immediately regretted his decision to use his cell phone to let her and Jeremy eavesdrop. He even thought of reaching into his pocket and ending the call.

But he didn’t.

He held steady.

“Do you know how a request for extradition between Thailand and the US works?” Fiermonte asked.

Johnny said nothing. He glanced at Cat, then looked back at Fiermonte.

“It’s all laid out in our treaty with them. A request is sent to the US attorney general, and if he deems it valid, he passes it onto the local prosecutor, who issues an arrest warrant. Since your last known address is still the house in Ossining — the house you guys sold three years ago — the Attorney General contacted the prosecutor in Westchester County, who happens to be a buddy of mine. He recognized the name and called me to confirm that John Coyle Jr. was in fact the son of my friend John Coyle Sr. I asked him what was going on, and he told me.

“The case isn’t great, but it’s not complete shit, either. No fingerprints, no DNA, no actual witnesses to the crime. Just three dead Thais, one of whom was an undercover cop, in a room in a guesthouse — a room registered to an American woman named Haley Siner. Actually, all the Bangkok cops have is the testimony of the guesthouse desk clerk, who saw an American male leaving with the Siner woman — a striking redhead — shortly before the three dead bodies were discovered. The American male had a room in the guesthouse as well, but he paid with cash and gave a false name when he checked in. According the desk clerk, whoever this American was, he was clearly involved with Siner. They were seen together for weeks.

“The thing that actually connects you to all this, Johnny, is that you crossed from Thailand into Vietnam at precisely the same moment as the Siner woman. Your passport and hers were scanned within a minute of each other. And just three days after the murders. It’s the same when you exited Vietnam and entered Canada. Both passports scanned, one right after the other. And the same when you exited Canada and entered the US, after which you both just disappeared. Until last night, that is.”

He paused. “Cat told you about the thumbprint on the steering wheel and the red hair found on the passenger seat.”

Johnny said nothing. He looked again at Cat.

“Luckily for you,” Fiermonte said, “none of men who survived the crash seem to know what happened, beyond remembering that the accelerator stuck mysteriously and caused the crash. Mass amnesia, I guess. And the man whose trachea was crushed, well, no one knows what happened there, either. For now, anyway. Of course, that could all change, right? Someone could just suddenly remember.”

Johnny understood what Fiermonte was implying.

If Dickey decided that someone should remember, someone would remember.

But the fact that Dickey’s men were so far keeping silent struck Johnny as curious. What might Dickey gain by that?

And everything Big Dickey McVicker did — even a seeming act of charity — was ultimately for his gain.

“What am I supposed to say here?” Johnny said.

Cat spoke softly. “Could you maybe tell us what happened?”

“I told you, Dickey’s men were taking Haley and me to Dickey.”

“No, I mean in Thailand.”

Johnny hesitated, then said, “Haley went there with a friend, who turned out not to be such a good friend.”

“What does that mean exactly?” Fiermonte said.

“He went there to make some money running drugs. One of his deliveries came up short, and when the men he worked for came to collect, he told them Haley had it.”

“He betrayed her.”

“I don’t like that,” Johnny said. “It implies she was part of it.”

“She wasn’t?”

“No. She went there to study Theravada Buddhism and meditation. Her friend was someone she had known for years and was supposedly interested in the same thing.”

“What happened then?” Cat prompted.

“The men came to her room the next morning.”

“Did you know one of them was a cop?” Fiermonte said.

“No. But it wouldn’t have mattered if I had.”

“Why not?”

“They didn’t leave us much choice.”

“It was self-defense,” Cat said.

Johnny nodded. “They meant business. They were going to take us somewhere private, made some pretty troubling threats about what they were going to do once we got there.”

“So you killed them and ran,” Fiermonte prompted.

Johnny’s gut told him not to acknowledge the first part of Fiermonte’s statement. “We had to cross the border,” he said. “I knew a guy who worked up in Chiang Mai, at a place that’s part monastery, part rehab center. He’s a former Ranger who worked as mercenary before taking his vows. He’s a legend, actually, there’s even a book written about him. That’s where I learned that one of the three men was an undercover cop. A corrupt cop, obviously.”

“Why obviously?” Fiermonte said.

“He said he was going to take Haley’s arm as a trophy. He meant it, too. I knew that it wouldn’t matter that he was corrupt. We’d both be arrested. And I knew Haley wouldn’t have survived a single night in a Thai jail, not in the state she was in. She was a wreck. So my monk friend drew us a map through the jungle to Vietnam, so we could avoid as many towns and cities as possible. He gave us supplies, everything we’d need. There’s a code among Rangers: ‘Once a Ranger, always a Ranger.’ Haley and I left first thing in the morning. We had made it across the border. It took days. We were waiting for our flight out of Ho Chi Minh City when I got a text from my buddy. Haley’s photograph was in the paper. She was wanted for questioning in the murder of a police officer. A decorated police officer. They described her as an accomplice. An hour later we were taking off for Montreal. It was the longest hour of my life, just sitting there, looking at every police officer that walked by us.”

“Why Montreal?” Cat asked.

“Another Ranger buddy had moved there after his discharge. I was hoping he could maybe help up cross into the States illegally. That way there’d be no reason for anyone to look for us here, they’d think we were somewhere in Canada.”

“What happened?”

“He had moved. His neighbors didn’t know where to. I was broke, Haley only had a little bit of money. We couldn’t get work visas and stay, that would have made us too easy to find. We only had one choice. Cross the border while we still could — if we still could — and go to Dickey. If anyone could help us, it would be him.”

“You could have come to me or Cat,” Fiermonte said.

“It would have been too much of a risk, for all of us. And anyway, Haley was shaken by the whole thing. Bad. What happened in that room, then me dragging her through the jungle and all those narrow escapes, it had all taken a big toll on her. It was a month before she could sleep more than an hour or two. And even longer before she stopped waking up drenched in sweat and screaming. She needed me beside her, every night, and I wasn’t about to turn myself in and trust that the bureaucracy would get it right. That it would all just work out and I’d be returned to her before she knew it.”

“I wouldn’t have made you turn yourself in,” Fiermonte said.

“If the attorney general knew I was in New York City and ordered your boss to get a warrant for my arrest, would you have been able to stop him?”

“No.”

“Then I couldn’t risk anyone knowing. Not even family. It was as much for your sake as ours.”

“What I would have been able to do, Johnny, was give you a heads-up now and then. Which is what I’m going to do right now. That thumbprint on the steering wheel, they’re in the process of running it. If I could stop that, I would, but I can’t. The national fingerprint databank is compiled from a number of sources, one of which is the US military. If that print is in fact yours, then it’s proof that you’re in New York — or at least were as of last night. I was able to convince my friend up in Westchester to put this on the back burner and hope that it would get lost or forgotten. Sometimes bureaucracy can work to our advantage. And anyway, the evidence wasn’t all that great, you were nowhere to be found, and there were bigger crimes — local crimes — that needed his attention and resources. If I hadn’t done that, you’d be on the wanted lists, which is a whole different story.

“But this — your fingerprint at a crime scene in Brooklyn — this will put the attention back on you again. And the hair they found on the passenger seat — the hair of a redheaded female — is going to ring some bells. All it would take is a simple comparison to prove that woman with you in that car last night is the same woman with whom you fled Thailand. At that point, my prosecutor friend will have no choice but to call me again, only it’s not going to be so friendly this time. He’s going to ask me if I’ve seen you. I will of course lie, but if I get caught, that’s it, I’m done. The prosecutor is going to contact Cat, too, which is what he should have done before, and would have done, had I not talked him into letting this float around in limbo for a while. And if she lies and gets caught, she’s done, too. I’m not talking about the end of our careers done, I’m talking prison terms. Aiding and abetting a fugitive, lying to federal investigators, the whole thing. And I’ll be disbarred, so once I am out — if I’m not killed in prison — then what? Sling drinks at a bar somewhere? Go begging Dickey McVicker for a job?”

“What are you telling me?” Johnny said.

“You and your girlfriend, you need to leave the city and never come back. Do you understand? Cat and I are both prepared to lie for you, but you have to promise us you’ll make sure it never comes back to bite us in the ass. Am I being clear?”

Johnny thought about all the running around he had done in the past twenty-four or so hours. Certainly surveillance cameras would have caught him — subway stations, street light cameras — but the likelihood that anyone would put in the man hours necessary to scour all the available footage throughout the five boroughs was low.

But then he thought of the one camera that could easily be checked, even by the laziest of detectives.

“There’s a surveillance camera over the front desk,” he said. “But I haven’t seen one on any of the floors we’ve been on.”

“There aren’t any,” Cat said. “Jeremy seemed to pick the right hotel. The only camera is the one above the front desk. It’s positioned at a downward angle, so its view is limited. It doesn’t catch the lobby or the front door. Did you approach the desk at all?”

“No. But Haley did.”

“If we need to, I can make that disappear.”

“You’re going to hack their system.”

Cat shrugged. “It’s a good thing I got assigned to the Cyber Crimes Division, huh?”

“It’s the only way to protect all of us,” Fiermonte said. “I just need to know that you’ve been smart, Johnny. In the last twenty-four hours, I mean. I need to know that you haven’t left any kind of paper trail, that there’s nothing out there that connects you to me or Cat.”

“No paper trail,” Johnny said. “Nothing at all.”

Fiermonte was pleased, and a little relieved. “Good.”

“But what are you going to do about Dickey? You have the names of the men who abducted Dad. You listened to the sessions.”

“That’s where we run into a problem,” Cat said.

“What kind of problem?”

Fiermonte answered.

“There were six men who came after your father. The Russian named Gregorian, his son, and four others. Gregorian was killed, one of his men was arrested and later testified for us, then was put into the Witness Protection Program, so that leaves just the son and three others. The man who testified that your father had been killed just hours after his abduction was named Tambov. He claimed he didn’t know the names of any of the other men. The one thing he did know was that they all scattered when the job was over. Tambov also claims he didn’t know the identity of the man who ordered Gregorian to assemble a team, so he wasn’t any help to us there. Of course, that’s how Dickey works, isn’t it? He insulates himself. Unfortunately, Jeremy’s repressed memories aren’t going help to us prove it was Dickey. I was hoping he actually witnessed Dickey giving the orders to Gregorian. To be honest, even if he had, it probably wouldn’t be enough to convince a grand jury. Which means what we
do
have won’t do the job either.”

“But what about the remaining three men? If you can find them, maybe one of them can give you Dickey.”

“I asked a colleague of mine in the Justice Department to run the names. I didn’t want to involve Morris, just in case. It turns out that every single one of those men is dead. Beaten and then killed execution style. One out in Los Angeles, one in Kansas City, and one in Atlanta. They were all found in their respective apartments. No signs of struggle or forced entry, which means whoever tortured and killed them was probably someone they knew, someone they trusted enough to just let in.”

“Gregorian’s son,” Johnny said.

Fiermonte nodded. “Yeah. Now, two of the crime scenes were clean. No trace evidence at all. But in one, down in Atlanta, they found skin under the nail of the victim. Something his killer overlooked. Enough to get DNA.”

“And?”

“It’s a match to the DNA that was extracted from blood found on the visor of Jeremy’s helmet. The man who attacked him is the same man who killed the three remaining Russians.”

“What do you know about him?” Johnny asked. “About Gregorian’s son?”

“His name is Dragoi, but he goes by an alias. He entered the US on a falsified temporary visa four years ago and then disappeared. He was in the Russian army till he went AWOL, after killing a fellow soldier in his bunk. He shoved batteries down his throat till he suffocated. Apparently, it took a bit of time for him to die. Dragoi has an uncle in Moscow. He’s part of the Solntsevskaya gang. Five thousand strong, and every one of them wild, brutal men. Before he came to the States, presumably to work with his father, who worked for Dickey, Dragoi was linked to the murders of six women. All before he was nineteen.” Fiermonte paused. “And, interestingly enough, every time one of the three Russians were killed, a woman also turned up dead. In the same city, within twenty-four hours of a Russian’s death. Which makes Dragoi a serial killer
and
a killer for hire.”