The Betrayer (40 page)

“It was necessary to maintain his cover.”

“Whose cover?”

Dickey stopped there.

“Whose cover?” Johnny demanded. “Smith’s?”

Dickey looked Johnny up and down for a moment, then nodded and said, “I’ll leave the rest up to him.”

It looked to Johnny as if Dickey were bowing out of the conversation.

Johnny found what it took to raise his voice. “Up to who?”

As though in an answer to his question, the sound of footsteps was suddenly heard crossing above them. Someone walking from one side of a room to another. Then Johnny heard the sound of a door opening and closing.

“I’m going to get out my cell phone,” Dickey said calmly. “Okay?”

Frustrated, desperate to understand, Johnny glanced down as Dickey reached carefully into his pocket and removed his cell phone, holding it up for Johnny to see.

The bright animation running on the display screen told Johnny that an active call was in progress.

Obviously, whoever was upstairs, and was now on his way down, had been listening.

“He thought I should talk to you first,” Dickey told Johnny, terminating the call and pocketing his phone again. “He thought it might be better if I explained as much as I could to you before he came down. You may not be in any condition to hear much of anything if we did this the other way around.”

“Did what?”

Johnny heard a door open in the kitchen. He also heard the sound of the pouring rain. A few seconds later the door closed, and then all Johnny could hear were footsteps again.

Wet rubber soles on wood planks.

Heavy.

Johnny glanced toward the kitchen door, then back at Dickey.

As casually as he could, he moved his right hand to his side, inches from the knife in his back pocket.

Despite his exhaustion, his heart was pounding fresh adrenaline into his veins.

Despite all his training, he knew he was on the verge of flight or fight.

All he could think of was Haley, getting back to her, getting away from all of this, whatever it was.

Johnny looked as the kitchen door swung open. His hand was now on the handle of the knife.

Ready to move, ready to act the moment he saw or heard something — anything — he didn’t like.

All Johnny saw was a man wearing a black mackintosh enter the doorway.

A large, powerfully built man who all but filled the door frame to frame.

Johnny looked for the man’s face but couldn’t see it yet.

The man took a few steps forward, edging closer to the rim of dim light cast from the dining room.

The man reached the light and moved into its periphery, but Johnny almost didn’t look at him, was too busy eyeing the possible exits and his routes to them.

Finally, though, Johnny saw the man clearly.

But what he was seeing wasn’t possible.

Made no sense at all.

He doubted his eyes, doubted his own mind.

Fatigue plays all kinds of games; Johnny knew this. It can trick the eye into seeing motion when there is only stillness, turn common shadows into dangerous creatures.

But this wasn’t that.

Johnny turned to Dickey in disbelief, his heart a wild animal throwing itself against his chest and ribs.

All Dickey did was nod once.

Then Johnny looked back at the man beside him — the man in the black mackintosh shimmering with rain — and uttered the only thing he could.

The only word he could form.

It came out as little more than the gasp of a lost child.

A stunned, simple plea that was barely loud enough to be heard over the pounding rain.

“
Dad
?” Johnny said.

Stepping into the light, John Coyle Sr. nodded and smiled.

“It’s good to see you, son,” he said.

He approached Johnny and held him by the shoulders, squaring the two of them off so he could take a good look at his son’s face.

Johnny stood there, frozen.

Then John Coyle pulled Johnny close and embraced him with powerful arms.

A lump rose in Johnny’s throat, and tears sprang from his eyes. It took a moment for him to find the presence of mind to embrace his father back.

“I’m proud of you,” John Coyle said softly. “Of everything you’ve done so far.”

Johnny felt as if he were in free fall. His mind was reeling, his senses as overwhelmed as they had been when he’d made his first parachute jump out of a C-130 Hercules.

The first in line, the first out the rear door —
Always be first
,
his father had told him.
Always take point.

John Coyle released his son and held him again by the shoulders, this time to brace him, because it looked as though Johnny’s knees might buckle.

“I’m sorry, Johnny. I’m sorry to have put you guys through this, but it was the only way. As long as Fiermonte believed I was dead, you three were safe.”

Johnny found one more word, and just enough air to gasp it.

“How?”

Before John Coyle could answer, Dickey spoke.

“We need to move, John.”

John Coyle nodded but kept his eyes on Johnny. “I’ll tell you everything on the way, son.”

Johnny’s tears only further blurred his already-diminishing vision.

He still couldn’t believe this, still didn’t fully comprehend what was going on, what he was seeing, hearing, feeling.

Despite his confusion — and elation — he nonetheless was able to recognize changes in his father’s face.

Something not right here, something different there.

Something more than the man advancing in years — fifty-seven when Johnny had last seen him, so sixty now.

Sixty, and still vital.

Johnny knew that what he was seeing were indications of broken bones that hadn’t properly healed.

John Coyle was aware of his son’s line of vision.

“Tambov, doing his job,” he explained. “Trying to find out what I knew.”

Johnny was able to form two words. “Then…how…?”

“He only has a brief window,” Dickey said. “And it’s closing soon.”

John Coyle nodded again. “Okay.” He looked Johnny over one more time. He was smiling wildly, proudly.

But it was time to get down to business.

“Richter gave you the change of clothes?” he said.

Johnny managed to nod.

“Get changed, then.”

“Where are we going?”

“To meet with Smith.”

Haley did a quick search of the room — the bed, which was actually only a metal-framed cot on metal rollers, and a dresser with empty drawers. Nothing else, not even curtains or shades. She found a closet, but it, too, was empty.

The cot’s mattress was covered with a cheap sheet and single blanket. She pulled the blanket off and wrapped it around her shoulders against the damp and cold.

Walking to the window, she looked down at the end of the driveway — fifty feet away — and the two cars parked in it, one behind the other.

She could have easily opened the window and jumped down to the soaked ground, but her captors were certain to hear that. And anyway, where would she go in this rain, with no clothes? Wrapped in a blanket and barefoot? Nothing but deep woods in three directions and open space in the fourth?

How far could she get before being hunted down?

More than all that, though, she couldn’t just leave Cat behind.

Stepping to the cot, Haley sat down. She thought about Johnny. Of course he was alive. Of course he was. She feared for the man, any man, who got in his way.

But without her cell phone there was no way for him to contact her.

No way for her to tell him where she was.

After a few moments Haley heard the sound of the door to the farmhouse opening and closing. She returned to the window and watched as someone crossed to the second car.

It wasn’t Fiermonte or the bloodied hulk, so the other guy, the one who had made her and Cat undress.

He reached the car but paused before getting in.

Then he looked toward the upper windows of the farmhouse.

Haley could have sworn that he saw her there.

And that he had nodded at her before getting in and driving away.

Spies are useful everywhere.

— Sun Tzu

Dickey was driving the black Mercedes SUV south along a rain-swept road. John Coyle was in the backseat beside Johnny, who was now dressed in dry clothes and a light rain jacket.

“When he realized Tambov had betrayed him, Dickey went searching for me,” Johnny’s father explained. “If the abduction had gone quickly and quietly, I would have been dead before anyone even knew I was missing. Jeremy doesn’t know this, Johnny, but he saved my life. Because of him, shots were fired and the police were called. Dickey was driving home and heard the dispatch calls over the scanner. He put two and two together.” John Coyle paused. “I’ve been waiting three years to tell Jeremy that. It’s something I think he should know, don’t you?”

Johnny nodded, then said, “You could have gotten word to us, no? To me or Cat, at least. Explained what was going on. We could have let him know. You could have trusted us.”

“It wasn’t a matter of trust, Johnny. We knew Fiermonte would be watching all of you closely. He needed to believe I was dead.” He paused, then said with regret, “He needed to see the three of you mourning your father, otherwise you’d all be in danger.”

Johnny thought about what Fiermonte had in fact seen: Cat all but giving up on the career that had once been everything to her; Jeremy guilt-ridden and struggling with addiction; Johnny’s pilgrimage to oblivion by way of Vietnam and Thailand, a pilgrimage financed by his share of his father’s minor estate.

“It wasn’t just that we thought you were dead,” Johnny said. “That was bad enough. But what came out after, that you were a traitor and always had been…that was just…” Johnny trailed off.

John Coyle nodded. “I know. But like Dickey said, it was necessary. Fiermonte and Morris were getting men killed. Lots of men, dedicated men, men with families — families that would never actually see them again. I had to trust that in your hearts you kids would know better. I had to trust that you would survive it, that you would take care of yourselves in the meantime, which is what your mother and I raised you to do. The fact that you three were estranged actually helped keep you safe.”

Johnny said nothing.

His father watched him, sensed his son’s mixed feelings — shock still, yes, and joy that his father was alive, of course.

But there was also disapproval and hurt in Johnny’s eyes.

John Coyle had always put his career ahead of his children; it was the cost of the work he did, it was why he waited till relatively late in life to start his family. He had never put his work ahead of their safety or well-being, but he was for the most part an absent father, living his secret life in the city, coming home on weekends only, though sometimes not even then.

But this was something else.

“Dickey was looking out for all of you,” John Coyle said. “He had Jeremy under surveillance at one point. Twenty-four hour surveillance, in fact. He made sure that wherever Jeremy applied for a restaurant job, he got hired. How do you think he was able to keep quitting jobs like he did and still find work? Dickey even offered to have a team of men follow you to Vietnam, and pay for it himself, keep it running for as long as needed. But I told him to let you go. I knew why you were going there. Or at least I thought I did. And you’re a Coyle, for Christ’s sake. You were 101st Airborne, like me, like your grandfather; you had qualified as a Ranger. If anyone could take care of himself, it was you. If I had known why you were really going there, I would have had Dickey send his best men. I would have gotten a fake passport, gone there myself, and gotten you the hell out of there.”

Johnny thought about that.

If he hadn’t gone in search of rock bottom — and found it, smacked hard against it — he would have never met Haley.

And where would he be without her?

John Coyle paused, then said, “I’m sorry, son. I’m sorry for putting you through this. I need you to know that I woke every day hoping it would be the day I would see my children again. Expecting it would be. I went to bed every night praying that you were okay, and that the next day would be the day. It was all I could do, and it wasn’t anywhere near enough. But I had to trust in Dickey. I had to trust in you kids. And I had to trust in myself, that I was doing the right thing. I had to remind myself every minute of every day that I was part of something bigger than myself. That sacrifice is what elevates us. I had taken an oath and I couldn’t break it.”

Johnny took all that in, then said, “I’m sorry, too.”

“For what?”

“The way I acted the night we drove in together to get Jeremy.”

“You were disappointed, Johnny. I was disappointed for you. I just wanted you to know that you still had a future. You could still find a way to contribute. Trust me, I’ve had moments of despair over the past three years. Moments when I couldn’t wait any longer. When I thought of giving up, too, and just walking into that bar of yours one afternoon, or knocking on Cat’s door, or going to my old apartment and telling Jeremy that he had saved my life, that he wasn’t the fuck-up he thought he was.” He paused, then added, “Each moment of despair only ended up deepening my resolve.”

Johnny glanced at the rearview mirror and saw Dickey watching him. Then he looked back at his father.

“You said you knew Fiermonte would be watching us. Why?”

“Because he’s smart. Smart enough to know that when something looks too good to be true it probably is.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tambov was supposed to get the information out of me, kill me, get rid of my body, and then contact Fiermonte. That was the plan. They figured four hours, tops. But Tambov didn’t report in after four hours. Or six hours, or eight. By noon the next day Fiermonte had to have been wondering what was happening, that maybe something had gone wrong.”

“What
was
happening?”

“Like I said, Dickey saved me. Tambov was using one of Dickey’s empty warehouses. Where else in the city was he going to find the kind of privacy he would need to do what he’d been told to do? I was tied in a chair, had taken some punches to the face, but it was about to get bad — he was about to start cutting off pieces of me. He turns to get his shears, I look up, and there’s Dickey walking out of the darkness, coming up behind Tambov. I was never happier to see anyone in my whole life. Even someone as ugly as Dickey here.”

Johnny glanced again at Dickey’s eyes in the rearview mirror, saw that he was smiling, then looked back at his father.

“Fiermonte and I had worked together for over twenty years,” John Coyle said. “I’d begun investigating him in hopes that I would prove myself wrong, find that he
wasn’t
involved at all. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, figured I owed him that at least. Any hint that I suspected him of this kind of corruption could have damaged his reputation, not to mention end our friendship. The more I looked for proof that he wasn’t involved, though, the more I realized that it wasn’t just a matter of him being involved. He was the top of it, he was the ringleader. And by sending Tambov to question and kill me, he had tipped his hand. He knew I was on to him. And Dickey and I knew that we had a chance to turn Tambov and use him against Fiermonte.”

“By faking your death.”

John Coyle nodded. “We needed proof that he was the one calling all the shots. It had to be rock-solid proof, and for that we needed an official investigation. But Fiermonte had to think Tambov had done his job, despite not hearing from him for more than sixteen hours after I was abducted, otherwise he’d just close everything down. Or worse, use my kids against me. Send someone after one or all of you. Use you to keep me silent. Or kill you as a warning.” He paused. “We had to think fast.”

“How did you do that?” Johnny said. “How’d you convince Fiermonte that everything had gone as planned when it didn’t?”

“Dickey did what Dickey does. He let Tambov know what would happen if he didn’t do what we told him to do. What would happen to his family. And we let him know what was in it for him if he did work for us, which happened to be exactly what Fiermonte had promised him.”

“Witness protection.”

John Coyle nodded. “We instructed Tambov to go to his apartment and wait for the cops, and after he was arrested all he had to do was tell them everything that Fiermonte would want to hear — that I had been killed and my body disposed of, that a man he didn’t know, but that he suspected worked for Dickey, had assigned the job to him. We decided that since Tambov couldn’t leak the information Fiermonte had given him from jail, it would be best if Tambov used it as a bargaining chip. Tambov would give them me, a corrupt and high-ranking FBI agent, in exchange for a plea deal. That would satisfy Fiermonte because his lies would become part of the public record, which was what he wanted. But it would also look right to Fiermonte that Tambov had used that info to save his skin, and that was what we wanted. We needed Fiermonte to believe this, not just
want
to believe it. We needed him to believe that despite Tambov’s having gotten arrested, everything still went as planned.”

“How would the fact that Tambov hadn’t contacted Fiermonte within four hours be explained?”

From the front seat, Dickey said, “Hacking a man to death turned out not to be as easy as Tambov thought it would be. And scattering all the pieces in the various waterways took much longer than he thought it would.”

“Tambov’s story,” John Coyle said, “if Fiermonte ever got him alone and asked for it, which he did, was that he had just gotten back to his apartment after the longest night of his life and was having a drink to settle his nerves when the cops came busting in. Most criminals get caught for one reason and one reason alone — their own stupidity. As a prosecutor, Fiermonte would know this, so it wouldn’t be such an outlandish thing for him to believe. We also instructed Tambov to tell Fiermonte the other thing Fiermonte wanted to hear: that I was on to him but that no one else knew. It seemed better to give him that than to say I wasn’t. Fiermonte is the kind of man who needs to know he’s right. And it was another way for us to account for Tambov taking so long that night. He needed to make sure I was telling the truth on both counts — that I knew but no one else did — before he actually killed me.”

“And Fiermonte bought it?”

“It seemed so.”

“But why was he having Tambov’s men killed? In case they could identify him?”

“He wasn’t just having them killed,” John Coyle said. “Fiermonte sent Gregorian to extract information from them first, then kill them.”

“What information?”

“We could only assume he was trying to find out which one of them had tipped off the cops. It had to be one of them, right? Who else could have betrayed Tambov? And if it wasn’t one of them, then why did the cops show up when they did? And since it wasn’t any of them, Fiermonte was left with that one crucial question unanswered. Like I said, he’s smart. He needs everything neat and tidy, every possibility addressed and accounted for before he can call a case closed. After Tambov skipped out on witness protection, Fiermonte saw his chance to address his remaining doubt once and for all. If Tambov’s men couldn’t explain it, then maybe Tambov could. He sent Gregorian to hunt him down. Tambov knew what would happen to his family if he betrayed Dickey, but Gregorian is a cruel piece of shit, just like his father. He loves to hurt; it’s like sex for him. And anyway, a man can only hold out under torture for so long. Tambov spilled everything — that I was alive, and that Dickey and I had used him against Fiermonte. But the one part of Fiermonte’s plan that went perfectly was his effort to discredit me. Because of him I’m a traitor to the FBI. I died in disgrace and was tried and convicted in the media. Add to that the fact that for the past three years I’ve been living under the protection of the very man for whom I had supposedly betrayed my oath. With all that against me, what could I possibly do to Fiermonte? And if I could have done something, wouldn’t I have already?”

“How long ago was Tambov killed?”

“Close to a year. You were back by then, also under Dickey’s protection, so I wasn’t worried about you. Fiermonte was keeping a close eye on Cat, we knew that, but she’s FBI, and he wouldn’t dare risk coming after her. That left Jeremy. Fiermonte watched him like a hawk. When Jeremy recovered his memories, Fiermonte knew he had to get his hands on the recordings. He needed to know if they implicated him. But once he heard them, he realized this was his chance to draw me out of hiding once and for all.”

“To kill you.”

“Yes. With my children in danger, I couldn’t just sit back.”

“Why not just abduct one of us, or all of us, like you feared he would three years ago?”

“It would expose him for who he is to the three of you. And then he’d have to kill all of you — particularly you and Cat, the two real threats to him. It would be better to stay behind the scenes and turn all of you against Dickey, the man who was hiding me. Eventually, one way or another, I’d have to come out, at which point the thug who’d been tailing Jeremy would have his chance at revenge.”

“You killed Gregorian’s father.”

“That’s right. It’s likely there’s nothing to connect Fiermonte and Dragoi Gregorian. Fiermonte would have set up buffers between them, used disposable cell phones, never met face-to-face. So if something went wrong and Gregorian got arrested, he couldn’t identify Fiermonte.”

Johnny thought about that for a moment. “I don’t understand,” he said finally. “If you were on to Fiermonte before he tried to kill you, why not just come forward with whatever you knew?”

“Like I said, I wanted it not to be true. Only Dickey knew my doubts about the man. It was Dickey, in fact, who came to me and suggested that Fiermonte was helping the Russians. What I found confirmed my suspicions, but it didn’t prove anything. It certainly didn’t prove that Fiermonte was running the whole operation.”

“So how can we prove it?”

“We may already have.”

“How?”

“Two months after Tambov got arrested, when everything started to settle down, Dickey and I approached a man named Kirkland. You know him as Smith. I had trained him, so I knew we could trust him. We told him everything, at which point he and Dickey were the only people who knew I was alive. And who knew that I had been framed by Fiermonte. It remained that way till just now, when we told you.”