The Betrayer (38 page)

“He won’t answer,” Haley said. “He’d know that any call from my phone wouldn’t be from me.”

“There must be something you could text him that will leave no doubt in his mind that the message is from you. A code, something.”

Haley said nothing.

And neither did Cat.

“You guys have a system. You must. Johnny’s clever, and so are you, right? What if you couldn’t wait for him to call you? Or something happened to your phone, or you lost it? There has to be some kind of fail-safe, some way to communicate with him, some word or phrase or series of numbers you could text him from any phone.”

Again Haley was silent.

Fiermonte took a step forward then.

An aggressive step, the step of a desperate man.

But something was wrong — something, Cat thought, was decidedly uncharacteristic about this.

Cat took a step back, moving Haley back — and closer to the door — with her.

Then Cat moved her left hand away from her thigh and raised it slightly.

She wasn’t aiming at Fiermonte, instead she was pointing her Sig at the floor between them.

But her message was nonetheless clear.

Stay back, please.

“Johnny wouldn’t need to answer his phone for us to get his location,” Cat said. “Just calling it would show what tower the call ended up at. So if there were a secret code, why would you even need it?”

“Cat, we’re wasting time here.”

“What’s going on, Donnie?”

Fiermonte said nothing.

It was like a switch flipping in Cat’s head.

The man facing her — the man she’d known most of her life, the man who had just hours ago awoken her by going down on her — was on the verge of anger.

Not the reaction of a man eager to help.

Desperate to help.

The reaction of a man who wanted something, or was hiding something, or both.

Without turning around, Cat said to Haley, “We’re leaving.”

Haley opened the door, and the sound of rain suddenly filled the room. It was a chaotic static. Haley was ready to go, but Cat saw something she didn’t immediately understand.

It seemed that for a second Fiermonte was looking at something past Haley and herself.

A quick, involuntary glance, as if something outside had caught his eye.

Something just beyond the now-open door.

Cat turned to see what had caught Fiermonte’s attention, and what she saw, what was out there in the darkness and the rain, made no sense at all.

Two people were standing just feet from the door.

Two
men
— one holding a rag to his bloodied mouth, and another beside him, holding his arm as if to guide him.

Their clothes and hair were soaked.

The man with the bloodied mouth was looking down at the ground, unable or unwilling to lift his head.

Despite this, Cat recognized him immediately, and her heart shuddered in her chest.

This was the man she had seen in the preschool surveillance video.

The man who had pursued Jeremy, then and since.

The Russian named Dragoi Gregorian.

She also recognized the man beside him.

The smoker she had seen at Dickey’s warehouse.

The undercover cop named Smith.

Before she could do anything — get Haley out of the way, raise her Sig and take careful aim — someone emerged and stood between the two men and the doorway.

A third person, who had been standing to the side of the door.

Cat found herself face-to-face once again with the young woman from Chappaqua.

Not blonde now but dark-haired, dressed not in a field jacket but a long black raincoat — enough of a change in appearance to slow Cat’s recognition of her, not prevent it.

But the confusion it caused, however brief, was enough of a delay for the woman to get the upper hand.

She stepped forward — two fast, determined strides were all it took — and pressed the muzzle of her semiautomatic against the side of Haley’s head.

Roughly, decisively.

“Hand over the weapon,” the woman said.

Her accent was Slavic, and her eyes were fixed on Cat.

Johnny followed Dickey to the building on the edge of the Hudson. As they got closer, he could see through the windows that this wasn’t a home but a restaurant.

And an empty one.

Inside, Johnny followed Dickey into the center of the dining room area. It was lit by overhead dimmer lights that were set as low as a child’s nightlight. A wall of sliding doors led to a deck on which stood several umbrella tables. Beyond the deck was the Hudson River, its dark surface pocked by the heavy rain.

A few miles south was the George Washington Bridge, and beyond it, the lights of New York’s west side.

Dickey gestured toward the bar. “You want a drink?”

Johnny shook his head. It took all he had to keep from folding, and he could barely conceal the small gasping grunt his lungs emitted through his nose each time he moved.

He had only moments, he knew that. Now that he was out of the cooling rain, he felt heat returning to his face.

“You might need a drink,” Dickey said.

There was no point in dragging this out, Johnny thought.

“Did you kill my father?” he said.

“No.”

“Did you have him killed?”

“No.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said.

Dickey smiled. “Who could blame you, right? But why would I kill him, Johnny? He was my oldest friend. We grew up together.”

“That’s supposed to matter?”

“It did to your father and me.”

Johnny thought of those times Dickey would visit the house in Ossining — discreet visits, one or two a year, never falling on actual holidays but being treated as good as holidays — better, even.

Gifts, food, drinks, laughter, all behind closed doors, all after certain precautions had been taken.

Johnny was just a boy, Cat not yet a teenager, and Jeremy still a few years away when one day the man they called Uncle Dickey came with his own child, a boy named Richter.

It was a name that Cat and Johnny secretly ridiculed over the years, till the day they were told why Dickey had named his son that, and then they thought it was too cool and almost envied the boy.

None of the Coyle children knew at the time what those visits meant, only that their father and his friend cherished them.

The two men would always sit and talk, after too much wine, about the old days, growing up poor in a place called Hell’s Kitchen, stealing food for their families, fighting side by side with rival street kids, Uncle Dickey finally finding sanctuary from his abusive father with John Coyle and his own father.

Eventually those visits stopped — had to, was what the children had been told. Presents on birthdays and at Christmas continued, though, especially for Johnny.

But Uncle Dickey faded from their lives, at least officially.

For years his name didn’t even come up anymore, not among the children, anyway — until the night John Coyle was abducted and murdered.

And then it was spoken with reluctance between Cat and Fiermonte.

He was the last man to speak to your father, called him an hour before he was taken.

I don’t want to think that.

Me neither, Cat…

“You know, you wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for me,” Dickey said. His voice brought Johnny back to the dimly lit dining room. “None of you kids would.”

“What does that mean?”

“Another time, perhaps,” Dickey said with a shrug.

Johnny focused his mind, or tried to — he was spent, felt himself wavering just slightly like a man who’d had too much to drink.

But what had Richter said after giving Johnny his knife back?

Your night has just begun.

“You were the only one who could have betrayed him,” Johnny said. “The only one close enough to him.”

“You’re certain about that, Johnny? That there wasn’t another? Someone who worked closely with your father, and who also knew enough about
my
business to set me up for his murder?”

Johnny said nothing.

“Tambov was my man, yes, and he went looking for Jeremy on my orders. All that is true. I sent him because your father asked me to help. He was desperate to find his son, the one he barely knew, the one he lost years ago to madness. You were back, discharged and pissed off, and your father thought it would be good for both his sons to come home and look after each other. He wanted nothing more than that — nothing more than for the two of you to reconcile. So I gave the job to Tambov, but instead of calling me when he picked up Jeremy, he called someone else.”

Again, Johnny was silent. He was thinking of the last time he was with his father, on that drive into the city to get Jeremy, his father trying to talk to Johnny about his future plans now that his military career was over, Johnny wanting nothing to do with that conversation because he was too busy feeling sorry for himself, too busy being bitter.

He’d always regretted his behavior that October night, the way he had shut his father down, the way he couldn’t hear what the man was trying to tell him.

But Johnny was all too aware of Dickey’s ability to manipulate, so he quickly pushed aside his memories and the regrets they stirred and focused on the present.

On the man — the dangerous man — in front of him.

“You heard the recordings, Johnny. Jeremy heard a man talking to Tambov, giving orders, making threats about his son’s immigration status, then promising to relocate them both. Does that sound like me? You know enough about the world I live in, the things I do to stay alive in it. Does that sound like something I’d need to say to one of my own men? One of my most trusted men? Or does that maybe sound like something someone else would say? Someone with connections to the INS, someone whose job is to arrange for criminals who cooperate to disappear?”

Johnny knew where Dickey was going with this, but he chose to focus on a different matter first.

“So you have heard the recordings. Which means you got them from Jeremy’s therapist. You had him killed.”

“No. That wasn’t me. I heard the recordings for the first time two hours ago, when you heard them.”

“How?”

“A pair of PIs equipped with a listening device in a watch car outside the hotel. The same men who were following you when you went to talk to Atkins.”

“Another conversation you listened in on.”

“And good thing I did, because it was all bullshit.”

“What do you mean?”

“Atkins never contacted me, never told me that Jeremy had come around looking for me. He never told me about the woman in Chappaqua or the memories Jeremy had recovered.”

“Then why was Richter waiting for me when I got back? Why did he take Haley?”

“For the same reason I had the two PIs tail you in the first place. To protect you.”

That threw Johnny, but only briefly.

“Why would Atkins lie to me?” he said.

“He was told to.”

“By whom?”

“Do I really need to say it, Johnny? Can’t you see it? He’s been pulling all the strings from the start.”

It took Johnny a moment to say the name.

“Fiermonte.”

Big Dickey McVicker nodded. “Fiermonte.”

Cat slipped the safety to the on position and surrendered her Sig. She saw then that the wrist of the woman’s free hand was wrapped tight with silver duct tape.

The wrist itself was swollen to the size of a baseball. And the woman’s eyes — the eyes Cat had seen in the rearview mirror of her Mustang — were bloodshot and bleary.

She was as worse for wear as Cat.

The woman took the weapon with her injured hand and tucked it into the waistband of her jeans. Doing so obviously caused her a degree of discomfort.

“Turn around,” she said.

Cat did, and was looking once more into the living room.

She wasn’t sure what she was expecting to see — Fiermonte rushing to throw himself into the fray, or maybe, as he retreated into the farmhouse to call 911 while he still could, no sign of him at all.

What Cat did see, however, was the last thing she wanted to see.

And nothing she could have expected.

Fiermonte was exactly as she had left him.

In the middle of the living room, his arms hanging at his sides.

When he finally spoke, his tone was calm but authoritative.

“Everybody get inside,” he said. “Now.”

Smith led Gregorian through the living room to a couch, then sat him down.

The Russian, still holding the rag to his mouth, leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. He didn’t lift his head, as if, Cat thought, he didn’t want anyone to see him in his condition.

Fiermonte stepped to the sulking hulk and placed his hand on his shoulder, the way a coach might when comforting a tired player who gave his all but lost.

A favored player, even.

“Just keep your eyes on the floor, son,” Fiermonte said softly.

It was a whisper meant for just the two of them, but Cat heard what he’d said.

The Russian nodded obediently.

Cat knew then that the Russian wasn’t trying to avoid being seen. He was avoiding looking up and seeing Fiermonte’s face.

Fiermonte was his employer, not Dickey.

And Fiermonte employed the Slavic woman with the dyed-black hair.

The woman who had garroted Cat and killed Elizabeth Hall and her husband.

Cat was overwhelmed with a sickening mix of fear and nausea.

Fiermonte said to Smith, “Get the redhead’s cell phone.”

Smith stepped to Haley and held out his hand.

She didn’t move — refused to, in fact.

Smith looked at Fiermonte, as if for permission. Fiermonte nodded once, and Smith began patting Haley’s pockets till he felt her phone. Reaching in, he dug out the device and tossed it to Fiermonte.

Fiermonte caught it and began issuing orders — there were two rooms upstairs, and he wanted Cat in one and Johnny’s girlfriend in the other.

He didn’t once look at Cat.

“We need to make sure they don’t even think about escaping,” he said to Smith. “Do you understand me?”

The undercover cop nodded. He quickly took point, leading Cat and Haley toward the stairs. The dark-haired woman began to follow, her own gun still drawn and Cat’s Sig tucked into her waistband.

Fiermonte told her to stop, and she did. He approached her, removed Cat’s Sig, then said, “Go ahead.”

Only then did Fiermonte glance at Cat.

“I’m sorry it has to be this way,” he said. “But he’s left me no other choice.”

Cat was too stunned to say anything.

In deep shock, her exhaustion overtaking her.

That familiar desire to surrender.

Fiermonte saw the look on her face and said, “You’ll understand soon enough, Cat.” He turned to Smith. “Let us know when she’s ready.”

Ready for what? Cat thought.

Smith continued toward the stairs. The dark-haired woman moved, too, driving Cat and Haley to follow the undercover cop.

Cat looked at Fiermonte as she climbed the stairs.

She remembered him finding her up in Chappaqua.

Taking her to his place.

What she saw Fiermonte doing now was an all-too-familiar sight — he was talking on his cell phone.

“We’re here,” he said. He listened for a moment, then said, “No, we’re going with plan B. We’re drawing him out tonight, once and for all.”

Drawing out
who
? Cat thought.

Dickey?

Then he ended the call and walked to the Russian.

Still seated on the couch, his eyes still on the floor.

“There’s a back room,” Fiermonte said. “After we take care of Cat, why don’t you go there and rest? We won’t need you for a few hours.”

Gregorian nodded but said nothing.

The last thing Cat saw was Fiermonte touching the Russian’s shoulder with the same tender concern.

Smith reached the top of the stairs first. He felt the wall for a light switch, flipped it, but the hallway remained dark.

“Fuck,” he said.

The ceiling-mounted light fixture had no lightbulb.

The dark-haired woman lit the narrow hallway with a small pocket light.

Instead of splitting Cat and Haley, Smith ushered them into one small room, where they stood side by side.

He flipped the switch by the door, and this time the light worked.

A weak bulb — twenty-five watts, tops — but it was enough.

He said then that he needed them to undress.

Cat laughed. “Fuck you.”

The dark-haired woman pulled back the hammer of her semiautomatic. She was aiming at Cat’s head and returning the small flashlight to her pocket.

“Don’t make this difficult,” Smith said. He clearly wasn’t in the mood for a hassle. His eyes were those of a man who hadn’t slept in a long time. Cat noticed, too, that he was rubbing his chest as if it were sore.

She also noticed that he was wearing something under his shirt.

A bullet-resistant vest.

A quick look at the dark-haired woman told Cat she was wearing one as well.

“If we have to, we’ll bring our Russian friend up,” Smith said. “I’m sure he’d be happy to tear your clothes off for us. Your brother cost him part of his two front teeth tonight. From what I understand, he was quite fond of his smile.”

Cat still didn’t move.

“Now,” Smith said. “Please.”

Cat looked again at the woman, this time more closely, and saw the cuts in her scalp — cuts that Cat had made when they crossed paths up in Chappaqua.

With cold, detached, strangely lifeless eyes, the woman continued to aim her semiautomatic at Cat.

But now her target wasn’t Cat’s head.

It was Cat’s knees.

“He needs the girl more than he does you,” Smith warned. “I don’t need you naked. Down to your underwear will be fine.”

Cat moved first. It was slow going because she was one-handed. Haley looked away, and so did Smith, but the dark-haired woman watched Cat carefully.

“You, too, red,” Smith said to Haley.

She stood defiant for a moment, but then she also began to undress. It was faster for her because she had two good hands. But she wore no undergarments, so once her boots and shirt and jeans were off, she was naked.

There was nothing for her to do but stand there, facing Smith and the woman. She made no attempt to cover any part of herself. The woman looked her up and down with the same indifference, though her eyes did linger for a moment on Haley’s narrow strip of pubic hair.

Finally, Cat was done, too, standing there in her bra and panties and nylon cast.

Smith gathered their clothing and footwear off the floor, then stood. To Cat’s surprise, he maintained eye contact with Haley and herself, never once, as far as Cat could tell, glancing down.

Smith said to Cat, “You come with us.”

They left Haley alone, Smith locking the door behind them.

It was an old door with old locks, Cat noted. The key was a long, wrought-iron skeleton key with an oval loop at one end.

Cat was directed to the room across the hall. She entered it, expecting the door to be closed and locked behind her as well, but instead Smith and the dark-haired woman followed her in.

They suddenly grabbed her, the woman holding one wrist, the one in the cast, and Smith holding the other as he pushed at the back of Cat’s head, bending her at the waist till she was facedown over the edge of the bed. She did what she could to resist, but they were too strong.

She was still now, bent at the waist, her feet on the cold floor, her torso across the hard mattress. Her face was being held down by someone’s hand. She had to turn it sideways so she could breathe. They had positioned her across the mattress so her backside was facing the door.

She’d never felt more vulnerable in her life.

Her heart froze in her chest.

“Okay,” she heard Smith call. “We have her.”

A moment later there were footsteps coming up the stairs. Two pairs, so Fiermonte and the Russian.

They reached the top, turned, and entered the room. The light came on.

It wasn’t long before Cat sensed that someone was standing directly behind her.

“Give him room,” Fiermonte said.

Him? The Russian? Cat thought.

Room for what? To fuck me?

Some Russian code of payback?

Cat listened for the sound of a belt being unbuckled or a zipper being opened. Instead, she heard what sounded like some kind of packaging being torn. Long seconds passed, and finally the Russian moved closer still. She closed her legs, tried to bring her knees together, but the Russian was already between them. She felt his own hard knees prying her legs farther apart as he moved in even closer.

Someone grabbed her good arm, then pulled it from the dark-haired woman’s hand and twisted it so it was behind Cat’s back.

She knew then what was going to happen.

Knew it even before the sharp point of the syringe pierced her forearm and entered her vein.

But she was helpless. All she could do was close her eyes tight as the Russian slid in the plunger.

“It’s just a little ketamine, Cat,” Fiermonte said. His voice was soft, reassuring. “Just to help you relax till we need you.”

The needle was pulled from her arm, and she felt the effects of the drug almost immediately.

The next thing she knew she was being brought to her feet and held upright as someone pulled back the blankets. Then she was being placed on the bed and turned onto her side. Despite her condition she recognized Fiermonte’s touch, smelled his cologne. He lifted her legs, placed them under the blankets, and then covered her.

As tenderly as a lover.

They left one by one, shut the light off, and locked the door.

She heard the sound of footsteps on creaking steps as Fiermonte and the others made their way downstairs.

There were muffled voices for a few moments — Fiermonte and Smith conferring, then Fiermonte on the phone again.

Cat couldn’t help but think of Jeremy as he was being held in that apartment in Chelsea, listening to voices as he passed in and out of consciousness.

Her last murky thought to cross her mind before the drug took hold and she slipped into unconsciousness was the realization that she now, and Jeremy back then, were listening to the same disembodied voice.