The Betrayer (39 page)

Johnny and Dickey were standing face-to-face in that dimly lit dining room.

“What Jeremy heard that night,” Dickey said, “was Tambov talking to Fiermonte, not me. Jeremy didn’t see me till the next night because Tambov didn’t call me till then.”

“But Tambov got picked up.” Johnny said. “The cops got a tip and arrested him.”

“And he said everything I told him to say. Fiermonte has told you a lot of shit, but that much was true.”

“I don’t understand. You told Tambov to say those things about my father. That he was a traitor.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I’ll get to that, Johnny.”

Despite his confusion and his rapidly declining physical state, Johnny stood there, silent.

A clear question emerged then from his inner chaos.

“What else has Fiermonte lied about?”

“The day after Jeremy spoke to Atkins, Atkins was approached by Fiermonte. He told Fiermonte everything. Why do you think Fiermonte was so willing to send Jeremy to Atkins in the first place? One would think he’d want to steer Jeremy away from a known drug dealer, right? But Fiermonte needed to know what was up, and sending Jeremy to Atkins, someone he could easily lean on, was a chance for him to find out.”

“How do you know this? That Fiermonte approached Atkins?”

“Atkins told me.”

“When?”

“Early this morning.”

So that explains Atkins’s disappearance, Johnny thought. He hesitated, then asked if Atkins was still alive.

“He’s fine. Scared, but he needed a good scaring, I think. We’ll release him once this is over.”

“But how could Fiermonte convince Atkins to betray you like that? It’s pretty well-known what betraying Dickey McVicker gets you.”

“There’s one thing that stands between Atkins and his inheritance. Fiermonte offered to remove that obstacle.”

“He offered to have Atkins’s father killed,” Johnny said.

Dickey nodded. “What was it Nietzsche said about staring into the abyss? Stare into it long enough and you become it. Or it becomes you. Something like that. Whatever the case, it seems that Donnie Fiermonte may have learned a trick or two from me.”

Johnny only half-heard that. He was instead thinking now about certain other things Fiermonte had said.

Potential lies.

He almost didn’t want to ask — it was too much to hope for — but he had to know, one way or the other.

“What about the thumbprint the cops found on the steering wheel? Was he lying about that, too?”

“Yes.”

“And the strand of Haley’s hair on the passenger seat?”

“Also not true. All part of his bluff.”

“But how did he even know she was in the passenger seat? How did he know I had grabbed the wheel?”

“I’ll get to that, too, Johnny. But as you know, a good lie depends on the right balance of details — not too much, not too little. Donnie Fiermonte is an extraordinary liar.”

“So there’s nothing connecting Haley and me to what happened there?”

“Nothing. Except for Richter’s men, of course. The ones who survived, that is.”

Johnny thought of the man he had killed.

“He didn’t give me a choice,” he said.

Dickey shrugged as if it were an insignificant matter. “Richter needs to pick his men more carefully. I’ve been telling him that for years. It was a good lesson for him.”

“Can you count on the others to keep their mouths shut?”

“Like you said, the price of betraying me is well known.”

Johnny thought about asking if the man he had killed had a family, but instead turned his mind to the one question that remained.

One more thing for which he dared to hope.

“And what about the extradition request? Was Fiermonte lying about that, too?”

“Yes and no.”

“What does that mean?”

“Fiermonte’s not the only one with friends in the right places. It took some doing, but in the end, the request was refused. Insufficient evidence to proceed. Hers, too.”

“You stopped it.”

“I encouraged someone to make the right decision.”

“But how did you even know?”

“I knew you were hiding. Why else would you come to me and ask for off-the-books work? Why else would you live the way you were living? And I knew by the look in your eyes that whatever it was, it was something bad. I’d be a fool to offer you my protection without finding out exactly what it was I was protecting you from. Obviously you’re both still wanted in Thailand. The cops there might dig up a witness, or create one, for that matter, and then reapply, so I wouldn’t get too relaxed. But for now, here in the States, you’re both in the clear.”

Johnny closed his eyes.

For a brief second, all his pains were gone, washed away by the exhilarating waves of relief gushing through him.

They were free.

Free to live normal lives, if they chose.

But then he remembered what had happened an hour ago.

The man he had shot.

The undercover cop.

All joy vanished.

Dickey, as if reading Johnny’s mind, said, “Smith isn’t dead. He was wearing a vest. So were the others. Oh, and his name isn’t Smith. And he isn’t a cop.”

“Who is he?”

“He’s FBI. One of the men your father trained, in fact.”

“You knew?”

Dickey nodded.

It took Johnny a moment to make the connection.

“Smith gave Fiermonte the details about the car crash,” he said.

Dickey nodded again. “After I questioned Richter’s men, I told Smith to feed the details back to Fiermonte and see what happened.”

“Smith is an FBI agent posing as an undercover cop, and he takes orders from you?”

“You’d be amazed the partnerships that can arise when needs align. I’m sure you’re familiar with the old adage, ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’”

“You both want Fiermonte.”

“Of course we do. When Tambov’s men started turning up dead over a year ago, we thought Fiermonte was just getting rid of anyone who knew that he had turned Tambov against me. Even anyone who
might
know. The dead men had all been beaten before they were executed, but that could have been Fiermonte’s mutt Gregorian having his fun. Fiermonte’s recent activities, though, were an indication that he might possibly know something else.”

“What?”

“That things may not have gone exactly the way he thought they had the night your father was taken.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Fiermonte knew about the existence of your brother’s recordings and needed to know if they implicated him. Jeremy’s therapist was killed a week ago, and Fiermonte would have listened to the recordings as soon as possible. It’s likely Gregorian uploaded the audio files to an online site that Fiermonte could download them from. So Fiermonte would have known then that he was in the clear, that Jeremy didn’t mention him by name. Instead of backing off, though, he amped things up.”

“Amped things up how?”

“By pressing Jeremy’s buttons, to begin with. Then Cat’s, and finally yours.”

“I’m not following.”

“Legally, the recordings are useless. But how they might sound to a murdered man’s children, that’s a different matter, now, isn’t it? I said it to you and Cat in the warehouse yesterday. The man who shot at Jeremy shot at him to drive him.”

“To whom? Me? Cat?”

“As part of the means to his end, yes.”

It took Johnny a moment. “You? He wanted us to think it was you. He wanted one of us to kill you.”

“That certainly would have been a bonus, yes. But what he really wanted was all three of you in danger. That’s why Gregorian was told to shoot at Jeremy but not kill him. And why Jeremy was taken, beaten, drugged, and then let go. It’s why Cat was attacked in Chappaqua, why Atkins lied to you, and why Fiermonte wanted you to think you and your girlfriend were in serious trouble. It’s also why Elizabeth Hall was murdered.”

Johnny opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. He was lost, hopelessly lost, just a moment now from collapsing.

Dickey saw this and said, “Fiermonte wasn’t after the recordings; he already had the originals, knew they were harmless to him and useless against me. Everything he did, everything that happened from the moment Jeremy left your father’s apartment last night — from well before that, actually — was done to drive you kids out of your hiding places and into the open.”

“But why?”

“Remember, Johnny, Fiermonte didn’t just want your father killed. He wanted information, too. Information Tambov, and Tambov alone, was told to extract from your father before killing him.”

Johnny was struggling. “What information?”

“Whether or not your father was on to him.”

“On to Fiermonte?”

Dickey nodded. “He was the one on the take, Johnny. Morris, too.”

“The detective Jeremy went to for help.”

“It was probably the luckiest day in Fiermonte’s life when Jeremy did that. But of course, that’s why Morris helped Jeremy out in the first place when he got busted two years ago. Trust is a valuable commodity, Johnny, much more so even than money. We live and die by trust, don’t we? Trust in others, trust in ourselves. It’s not even gold that runs our economy. It’s the
trust
in gold. And to a kid like Jeremy — cut off from his family, in and out of trouble — having someone he could trust, someone like a New York City detective willing to help him out when he needed it most, was as good as gold.”

Johnny thought about that, then said, “You make it sound like they’ve been watching Jeremy for years.”

“They have. Cat, too. And you — well, till you disappeared. Though it’s possible Fiermonte may have located you recently.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Smith believes Gregorian was provided a current photograph of you. And your girlfriend.”

Johnny felt a small but powerful rush of panic. “How could he have found us?”

“Where else would you go if you needed to hide? My turf isn’t what it used to be. New York isn’t what it used to be. I only have so many legitimate businesses, and your nature wouldn’t allow you to take the kind of illegitimate work I have to offer you. All Fiermonte needed to do was to look around.” He paused. “Thus the men watching your girlfriend while you went to meet Atkins. Thus Richter trying to bring the two of you to me after that.”

Johnny needed a moment to take that in — that he and Haley may have been photographed without his knowing it.

And that, had he not escaped from Richter’s men, Haley would likely be in a much safer place right now.

But how could I have known? Johnny thought.

Again, as if reading Johnny’s mind, Dickey said, “That, too, was Richter’s error. He should have been more clear about what was going on.”

Johnny nodded, then said, “Fiermonte’s on the take how, exactly?”

“He has been providing protection to a Russian cartel in exchange for large sums of cash.”

“What kind of protection?”

“Through Morris, Fiermonte gathers information about the cartel’s rivals in New York — information that has led to the murders of countless men. Fiermonte himself would provide information about ongoing federal investigations — information that no doubt cost the lives of a number of undercover agents. When Fiermonte began to fear that your father might have been on to him, he had to come up with a plan to get rid of him. It involved giving Tambov everything he would need to discredit your father posthumously. Carefully doctored files, the right incriminating photographs — all of it based on Fiermonte’s intimate knowledge of everything your father had done during his years undercover, and all of it also exposing everything I had helped your father do. He wanted your father dead, and he wanted me, the man your father had allegedly betrayed the FBI for, to be the only one who could have killed him.”

“Which is what happened.”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

Dickey spoke carefully, as he needed Johnny to understand this next point perfectly.

“The nature of undercover work, Johnny, is such that, in order to maintain his cover, an operative often has to go along with things he normally wouldn’t. He has to come close to certain lines without crossing them. But there are times when he’ll have no choice but to cross those lines, because if he doesn’t, he faces blowing an operation he has spent years on. That’s the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is a prolonged, gruesome death. Your father had done some things in order to build and maintain his cover, and Fiermonte had collected proof of those ‘indiscretions’ and was going to use them against him by having Tambov leak them to the media after your father was killed. That was part of the conditions of the job. Abduct your father, get the information from your father, kill him and dispose of his body, then, in a few days, leak Fiermonte’s info to a certain reporter on Fiermonte’s payroll. Unless all of these conditions were met, Fiermonte wouldn’t consider the job completed. He was relying on this to start the feeding frenzy, knew that the media — particularly the New York papers — would love the story of a legendary FBI agent that turned out to have been corrupt all along. Part of the mob, not a brave crusader against it. And Fiermonte knew that this frenzy would help cover his own tracks further, not to mention draw attention away from his other illegal activities.”

“How do you know this?”

“Tambov told us.”

“But he got busted the next day.”

Dickey nodded. “That’s right.”

It took Johnny a moment to put it all together. “You found Tambov before the police did.”

“Yes.”

Johnny thought he detected a hint of pride. “You were the informant. You told the cops where to find him. But if you and Smith knew he was going to say all that bullshit about my father, then why didn’t you stop it?”

“When we figured out what was going on, we considered killing Tambov, silencing him — and Fiermonte’s lies — for good. But we realized it would be better if Tambov was encouraged to carry out that last part of Fiermonte’s job.”

“Why would you want that?”

“So Fiermonte would be convinced that in spite of Tambov’s quick arrest, everything still had gone as planned.”

“Why was that more important than my father’s reputation?”