The Betrayer (27 page)

Knowing that someone he cared for had been brutally beaten, interrogated, then executed.

Murdered by a stranger in a state of heightened terror.

And all because of him.

The two brothers stood in the near darkness, looking at each other. Johnny knew what was coming, what Jeremy had to be thinking and feeling.

And then Jeremy said it.

“I want to kill them, Johnny. If not the person who did that to her, then at least the person who gave the order for it to be done. Which can only be Dickey.”

“Is that why you wanted to know if Atkins could get you a meeting with him? So you could kill him? Face-to-face, like Michael Corleone or something?”

“If it came to that, yeah.”

“That’s understandable, Jeremy. It is. But it’s not that easy. It’s also not the answer. Trust me.”

“I don’t care. Dickey had Dad killed three years ago, and now Beth is dead because of him, too. Someone has to make him pay for that. And for God knows what else. Someone has to stop him.”

Johnny ignored that. There wasn’t time for this.

There was only one thing left to do now.

“Jeremy, tell me what happened,” Johnny said. “Tell me everything you remember about that night. Maybe between the two of us we can piece this together once and for all and figure out what to do.”

“So you’ll help me?”

“I might not be able to do much.”

“Because of what happened last night.”

Johnny nodded. It was only part of the reason, but Jeremy didn’t need to know the rest. “I’ll go as far as I can, though. I promise. Okay?”

“Yeah.” Jeremy balked suddenly, then laughed nervously. “Now that you want to listen to me, I’m not really sure where to start.”

“The last time I saw Dad he was going to get you from an apartment in Chelsea. Do you know how you got there?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why don’t you start with that.”

“I was staying in Greenwich Village. Charlie Atkins knew a friend of a friend whose family had a rent-controlled apartment on MacDougal Street that a bunch of us used as a flophouse — sleeping on mattresses scattered on the floor, partying all night till we passed out at dawn. I hadn’t worked in months, but I didn’t care. I didn’t have to pay rent, I barely ate, and when we needed money, we’d steal a car and sell it cheap and fast to a chop shop in the Bronx.

“That had to have been how Dickey was able to find me. When Dad hadn’t heard from me in a while, he turned to Dickey for help, and Dickey put the Russian — Gregorian — on it. The Russian must have found out I was part of that half-assed car ring and staked out the chop shop till we showed up one night, then tracked us back to the apartment on MacDougal.

“For the longest time I didn’t know why things went the way they did after that. I didn’t know if the Russian had orders to avoid bloodshed, or if it was supposed to look to my friends like I’d just disappeared on my own. But one day a woman showed up, a friend of a friend. No one thought twice about it; people would come and go like that. We were living the bohemian life, you know. Walking the same streets that Kerouac and Ginsberg and Dylan Thomas had walked. That meant something to me. Anyway, this woman appeared the day after we had unloaded an Audi we’d stolen. She said her name was Penny. She wouldn’t tell any of us what her last name was, so someone started calling her Penny Flame, after some porn star. The name stuck. She and I hit it off right away and paired up. We would get high with everybody, sneak off and fool around in the bathroom or out in the stairwell, then crash together on the same mattress. She said she was hiding from an ex, and that her parents had been killed in a car crash a year ago and she had nowhere to go. Her life was a mess, my life was a mess — so, kindred spirits, you know.

“Two nights before Halloween she told me she wanted to go out and look for a costume. Halloween is a big deal in the Village. She wanted this to be just the two of us, though. A night out, away from the others. We went into the bathroom and she cooked up some heroin. She told me it was something special. There wasn’t a lot of it, not enough for two full doses. I told her that, and she said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ She prepped the syringe, handed it to me, and I shot up. Then she switched out the needle — she and I never shared needles with anyone, not even each other — and shot up what was left. I had gotten most of it, but she told me that was okay, she didn’t mind the smaller dose. She had tried this stuff before and wanted me to experience the full effect. Then we left. By the time we walked out onto MacDougal, I was feeling really good. I mean, really good. Couldn’t-remember-who-I-was good. But by the time we reached the end of the block, I could barely walk.

“All I can remember after that is being helped into the backseat of a car by her and someone else. I never saw who. I knew she didn’t have a car, and I remember looking at her like, ‘What the hell?’ She was telling me that I was going to be okay. But when she didn’t get into the car with me, that’s when I knew something was wrong. The door swung closed, I looked at her through the window, she looked at me, and that was the last I ever saw of her. The car drove off, turned onto Bleecker Street, and that was it, I was out.

“The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a dark room. It was small, no bigger than a closet. No windows. I was on a mattress. I tried to sit up, but it was like my head was full of water. I could barely lift it off the pillow, let alone sit. So I just lay there, drifting in and out.

“For three years I’ve been thinking I had just laid there for two or three hours at the most. All I could remember was listening to the Russian make a bunch of phone calls as he paced back and forth outside my door. I would pass out, come to, then pass out again, and every time I woke up, the guy was on the phone, talking in Russian.

“And then at some point there was someone in the apartment with him. I could hear them talking in Russian. Then that person left, and someone else arrived. This went on and on. I only ever heard anyone speak Russian. Then, finally, Dad was there. I heard his voice out in the apartment. He came into the room and got me up and was helping me out the door. That was pretty much all I could ever remember.

“What I didn’t know until my sessions, though, was that the Russian had kept me in that apartment for twenty-four hours, not just a few.
Over
twenty-four hours, actually. And then I finally understood why it had gone the way it had gone, why Penny had been sent to drug me. The Russian needed those twenty-four hours. He needed me safely tucked away and unconscious for them. He needed me to think I was only in that room a short time, that my high was just another high, nothing unusual. And sending Penny meant that I would be standing on MacDougal at the right moment. And with me on the verge of passing out, getting me into the car would be a breeze. There would be no chance I’d get hurt or killed.

“All I’d ever been able to remember of my time in that room was what my conscious mind heard those few moments when I’d wake up. And that wasn’t much. My subconscious, on the other hand, heard a lot more. Heard, in fact, everything. Through my sessions I could remember not only what had happened while I was being held — while I was unconscious, thanks to Penny’s wonder drug — but what had happened after Dad came to get me, which, according to my therapist, I had blocked out.

“The first gap in my memory that got filled in was that someone showed up at the apartment not long after I was first brought there. There were two voices outside the door — the Russian and the other person. They weren’t arguing, but they weren’t friendly, either. And they were speaking in English.

“This man had a lot of questions for the Russian — how well did it go, were there any witnesses, could the girl be trusted? The Russian told him it was a clean grab and that the girl knew to keep her mouth shut.

“The man told the Russian that there couldn’t be any loose ends. The Russian said nothing for a moment, then he said that he’d take care of it.

“Just like that, it was decided that Penny would be killed.

“Then the Russian asked what the plan was now that they had me.

“The man answered, ‘I need you to kill my friend.’

“The Russian wanted to know why — he sounded very nervous suddenly — but the man told him not to worry about the why. He reminded the Russian that certain immigration problems his son was having would disappear if he did this. That was their deal. He also reminded him that this was a chance at a better life. Away from the city, a fresh start. The Russian didn’t reply at first, but finally he asked the man how exactly he wanted him to proceed.

“The man instructed him to hold me for twenty-four hours. During that time the Russian was to assemble his team. Once everything was ready, the call would be made and the target — Dad — would be lured in, just as originally planned. That’s when the abduction would take place.

“The man told the Russian that he wanted Dad taken alive, and the Russian asked why.

“This time the man answered.

“‘I need information from him before he is killed. And I need you to extract that information yourself. You and only you. I’m sure you have ways of doing that.’”

“There was silence again, and then the Russian said, ‘There will be fallout. Repercussions. And then there’s the matter that your friend is FBI. That’s a lot of heat.’”

“‘I’m not worried about that.’”

“‘You wouldn’t be, would you? I’m the one on the line here.’”

“‘You and your son will be far away before anyone knows what happened. You’ll be protected. And anyway, by the time I’m done, my friend won’t have any friends left. Trust me, no one will care.’”

“‘His children will. The girl and his namesake.’”

“‘I’m not worried about them, either.’”

“That was it. The man left, and that’s when the Russian started making all his phone calls and people started coming and going.”

In the dimly lit hotel room, Johnny considered everything he’d just heard, then said, “You never actually saw Dickey, though, did you?”

“Not then, no.”

“But you did at some point.”

“He came back the next night. I heard the Russian call him and tell him everything was set.”

“What did you hear, exactly?”

“‘Let me talk to Dickey.’ Then after a moment, ‘It’s Gregorian. I have the boy. We’re all set.’ Dickey showed up about a half hour later. He came into the room, looked down at me, told me everything was going to be okay, then left. On his way out he told the Russian that Dad should be there in a half hour or so.”

“That was all Dickey said.”

“Yeah.”

Johnny paused for a moment, then said, “So the guy who beat you up last night, and took shots at you the other morning, do you think he’s Gregorian’s son?”

“I do.”

“Gregorian is the guy Dad killed the night he was taken.”

“Yes. The father gets killed doing a job for Dickey, and Dickey keeps the son on. That makes sense, right? That’s how Dickey works, that loyalty bullshit thing.”

What Jeremy was saying made sense, yes, but Johnny’s mind was on something else now.

Something that concerned him deeply.

The Russian kid had had two chances to kill Jeremy — the son of the man who had killed his father. Yet he had not done so. To Johnny, that meant the younger Russian was disciplined, able to put aside his personal feelings for professional gain.

There was a fine line, Johnny knew, between being disciplined and being a psychopath.

Between men who could control their feelings and men who felt nothing.

Though his own military career had been brief, Johnny had served long enough to encounter more than a few men who walked that line.

And one or two who crossed it.

“He couldn’t have been the one to kill Beth, though, right?” Jeremy said. “The Russian kid, I mean. Beth was attacked around the same time the Russian and Smith were grabbing me. So there’s no way it could have been him, right?”

“Right.”

“So do you think that could have been Dickey?”

“Cat said it was a woman,” Johnny said.

“I know, but she also said she got hit from behind by someone. Someone she hadn’t seen. And when she came to, the woman and whoever had hit her were long gone. That could have been Dickey, right? He could have been there.”

“Dickey doesn’t get his hands dirty, Jeremy. He has people get their hands dirty for him.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“Yes, I can. He got to where he is because he insulates himself. He puts layers between himself and the crimes he orders. Otherwise, someone like Donnie Fiermonte would have nailed him a long time ago. The woman probably had a partner.”

“Another one of Dickey’s men.”

“Maybe,” Johnny said. He thought suddenly of Richter. But no, Richter had been with him and Haley in Brooklyn at the time Cat was attacked. He couldn’t have made it up to Chappaqua in time.

So someone else, then.

But who?

Johnny looked away for a moment. There was simply too much to take in, too much to process. He was tired — his
mind
was tired, overwhelmed by information as well as the steady stream of pain signals radiating in pulses from his injuries.

He needed to rest, needed Haley beside him.

But he had yet to hear the very thing he had come into this room to hear.

“You said you also remember what happened after Dad came to get you,” he said to his brother.

“Yeah.”

Johnny took a breath.

For three years he had been in the dark about these events.

For three years — every hour of every day, easily — he had wondered about that night.

The abduction of his father — as he sat with his crutches in a car parked three blocks away.

Helpless.

But just as his kid brother had done moments ago, Johnny found himself suddenly balking, unable to utter a word.

It was a reaction that he was able to counter easily enough, though, despite his condition.

Rangers run toward, after all.

Johnny let out his breath, then said, “All right, Jeremy. Tell me what happened.”