The Betrayer (50 page)

The back of the Russian‘s head exploded, scattering blood up the wall.

Richter let go of the gun, and it fell, still in hand, into the Russian‘s lap.

Standing straight, Richter looked down at the dead man, studying him, but only briefly.

Then he moved, quickly and decisively.

He grabbed Haley‘s jacket from the floor and brought it to her. Helping her sit up, he asked if she could stand. She was too stunned to answer. He repeated himself, and finally she nodded once.

He pulled her to her feet, holding her steady and helping her put the jacket on.

It was like dressing a preoccupied child.

There was no time to button the jacket, so Haley held it closed with one hand. She was looking at the dead Russian slumped in the corner.

Like just another hotel suicide.

“Don‘t look,” Richter told her.

It was only then that Haley became aware that she could hear something other than the ringing.

She wanted to look away but couldn‘t. She needed to see that the Russian was dead.

Needed it to sink in, needed to know that he would never come after Johnny or his family.

Or anyone else in the world, for that matter.

Taking Haley by the shoulders, Richter turned her away from the dead man and guided her out of the room.

They crossed the dark, empty hall to the stairwell doorway.

Moving fast, they descended the six flights of stairs, Richter holding her and watching her closely the entire way.

Emerging in the lobby, Haley saw that Kirkland was behind the desk. He came around it immediately, and Richter handed Haley to him.

And then Kirkland handed Richter something.

Two things, actually.

One looked like a driver‘s license, and the other was a data disk.

“Get going,” Richter said.

Kirkland nodded as Richter stepped around the desk and looked down at something on the floor.

Or someone.

The clerk, Haley assumed.

“Aren‘t you coming with us?” Haley said.

Richter didn‘t answer. Kirkland was ushering Haley away. As they moved through the lobby, she looked back over her shoulder at Richter.

He was speaking to the clerk.

“I know where you live. I can find you and your family. The girl wasn‘t here. None of us were. Do you understand me?”

The man didn‘t answer, and Richter nudged him with his foot.

“Do you understand me?”

The man, his voice muffled but urgent, answered, “Yes, yes. I understand.”

Numb, Haley looked forward then and saw Johnny‘s father waiting at the door.

When Kirkland and Haley were just feet away he held up his hand, indicating that he wanted them to wait. Stepping outside, he looked to the right, then left.

Turning back and looking through the glass door, he waved for them to come.

Kirkland helped Haley out the door.

“It would be better if she walked by herself,” Johnny‘s father said. “Can you do that?” he asked Haley.

She nodded, and Kirkland released her. She walked down the steps and crossed the sidewalk to the van waiting at the curb. Kirkland studied the area carefully, then followed her.

Johnny‘s father got in behind the wheel, and Kirkland and Haley entered through the sliding side door.

The only place to sit was on two upside-down milk crates by the rear door. Kirkland guided Haley to them and sat her down. Sitting on the other, he faced her and looked at her swelling cheek.

“You okay?”

She glanced at him, nodded, then looked away.

As the van headed east on Twenty-Third, Haley noticed that Johnny‘s father was looking at her in the rearview mirror.

She met his eyes. He nodded once, and she returned the gesture.

Then she looked out the rear window, watching the entrance to the Chelsea Hotel as it receded, waiting for Richter to exit.

She was beginning to think that something was wrong and they would need to go back, but finally she saw him emerge.

He walked down the steps to the sidewalk and turned left, heading west.

A solitary man walking calmly, his hands deep in his pockets.

He disappeared into the fog shortly before the van crossed Seventh Avenue.

John Coyle was alone in one of Martin’s guest rooms.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, staring toward the only window but not really seeing it or the gray morning beyond, he allowed his mind to drift.

He recalled the day he first met Dickey McVicker, nearly fifty years ago.

Just boys then, John eleven and Dickey ten, living one street away from each other in the Manhattan neighborhood known as Hell’s Kitchen.

Two teenage boys had stopped John Coyle outside the small corner market owned by Dickey’s father. They had pushed John down and were demanding the money in his pocket — money his father had given him to buy milk — when Dickey came out of nowhere and beat them both with the ax handle his father kept behind the counter.

Days later, those same boys and three of their friends jumped Dickey after school and beat him badly.

Despite his injuries and deep humiliation, Dickey had refused to cry. John took Dickey home to his father, who tended to Dickey’s wounds. It was obvious to him that Dickey was all too used to beatings.

Beating Dickey once hadn’t satisfied the bigger boys, and Dickey himself was bent on revenge. An ongoing battle had begun, one that had lasted for years. To survive, Dickey had joined a gang, eventually talking John into joining as well. This would be the first of many secrets John would keep from his father.

Petty crimes followed, street fights were a regular occurrence. It wasn’t long before Dickey and John were inseparable.

And it wasn’t long before petty crimes gave way to more serious ones.

John lingered on those memories for a while — on the violence and fear that had defined their young lives. Then he found himself recalling the day that Dickey had come to live with him.

A cold afternoon in late November. John was thirteen, Dickey twelve, his face bearing yet more of the many cuts and bruises, put there not by bullies, but by the hand of his own father.

But the look of anger in Dickey’s eyes — a look that had been there from the day he and John had met — seemed to soften just a little at the realization that his old man would never lay a hand on him again.

That John Coyle and his father — a quiet man, fair, built like a middleweight but exuding the power and confidence of a much larger man — were his family now.

And always would be, John’s father had assured Dickey, for as long as he wanted.

Years later, when John had decided that he wanted to be a paratrooper like his father, he tried to talk Dickey into signing up with him.

But Dickey had no interest in that. It wasn’t that he was shy of the prospect of going to war.

He had simply found his battleground of choice.

A place he knew like the back of his hand.

And why, he had asked his friend, would he even think of giving up an advantage like that?

Or choosing a soldier’s meager pay over the fortune that could be made in New York?

That other men — men who were nowhere near as smart as Dickey — were already making.

While John was away — boot camp followed by jump school, then two tours in Vietnam as a member of the LRRPs, and after that, college and eventually Quantico — Dickey had risen fast through the New York underworld, becoming in no time at all the man everyone would come to know as Big Dickey McVicker.

A man to fear, a man with a knack for making his enemies concede to his wishes or disappear.

To John, though, Dickey would always be the little boy with whom he had shared a room in that cramped apartment on Fifty-Seventh and Ninth.

The boy who, by rushing to John’s aid that long-ago afternoon, had set John on the long journey that would eventually lead him to his wife and family.

Just one deviation in that chain of events and John Coyle would not have met the woman who would forever change his life.

Would not have been where he needed to be at the moment he needed to be there.

It was this understanding that made John realize he now had a choice to make.

There would be repercussions for Fiermonte’s disappearance. And Morris’s, too.

Investigations, yes, but that did not concern him.

What did concern him was the inevitable retribution, by the men his two colleagues had chosen to betray their oaths for.

Sooner or later, Dickey’s absence would be noticed.

It would be days at most before the assumption would be made that the man was at last dead.

These Russians were brutal, they were animals, but they weren’t stupid — at least not so stupid that they couldn’t put two and two together and come up with something that was close enough to four.

At which point Richter would be in the fight of his life.

The fight
for
his life.

It was, John knew, a fight for which Richter was in no way ready.

And it was a fight that he could not let the boy face alone.

Leaving the guest room, John walked to the next room in the dark hallway and knocked on the door.

A voice said, “Yeah,” and John Coyle entered.

He had expected to find Bill Kirkland sacked out, but instead the young FBI agent was standing by the window.

Himself lost in thought.

He turned to face John Coyle. His eyes were red, his face pale.

John remembered all too well his years undercover, the toll it took on him.

And his family.

“What’s up?” Kirkland said.

“I need you to do something for me.”

“Whatever you need, boss.”

“I need you to get a message to Richter.”

“Okay. When?”

“Now.”

Haley showered immediately upon her return from the Chelsea Hotel.

Quickly, and merely to wash away any trace evidence that may have transferred to her during her encounter with the Russian.

Well, that, and to scrub away the lingering feel of his violating touch.

The hot water pounded her battered body — deep bruises on her back from when she landed on the floor, the welt on her cheek from knuckles as heavy as lead.

After, she hurried to dry herself with a clean towel. Exiting the bathroom, she found that the clothes she had just removed were already gone and a fresh change was waiting for her.

Dressed, her short hair still damp, she made her way down to the recovery room.

Through the glass she could see that Cat was seated at Jeremy’s bedside.

The boy was conscious, and Cat was talking to him.

Haley saw Jeremy glance over at his brother in the other bed.

Cat was still talking, and by the look on Jeremy’s face, Haley knew that he had just been told that his father was not dead.

Haley didn’t enter, merely watched through the glass as Johnny’s kid brother, overcome, wept.

There could be no memorial service for Big Dickey McVicker, no burial, at least not a public one, and certainly not in the well-kept Great Neck cemetery in which his beloved wife had been buried years before.

Like the remains of so many of the victims of his ambition, Dickey’s would rest in an unmarked grave somewhere in the nearly twenty acres of land in northern New Jersey he had purchased through a “dummy” company decades ago.

He had acquired that land for the sole purpose of hiding the bodies of those he’d had murdered, and those he would murder in the years to come.

And if not whole bodies, then body parts.

All in the name of his family.

His enemies were confined to a narrow valley of weeds accessible only by an all-terrain vehicle. Richter knew of four — had taken part in the burying of four — but no doubt more were there.

Big Dickey, however, would be buried on the side of a small hill a mile away, alongside a dirt road that itself was several miles from the main road.

A dirt road that had no less than three gates made of cow fence, each one padlocked.

He had expressed his desire to be placed in this spot many times, to both his son and John Coyle, should a legitimate burial be impossible.

More of an inevitability, he conceded, than a possibility.

So it was just past midnight when Richter set out for New Jersey with the body of his father, wrapped in an old rug, in the backseat of an old Jeep Wrangler.

It took Richter two hours to reach the location, and another two to dig the grave, into which he carefully lowered his father and proceeded to cover him up with damp-smelling dirt.

Before getting back into the Jeep, he removed his coveralls and boots and gloves, placing them into a plastic garbage bag, which he tossed into the back with his pickax and shovel.

It was nearly dawn when he reached the gated estate in Great Neck. Leaving the vehicle parked outside the multicar garage, he used a garden hose to rinse all the dirt from the tires, then wash off and put away the tools.

Carrying the plastic bag down to the basement, he tossed it into the furnace and waited till its contents had burned to ashes before going upstairs.

After a quick washup and some toast and orange juice, Richter got into his father’s Mercedes sedan and traveled to a secluded parking lot off the New Jersey Turnpike to meet with the man he knew still only as Smith.

To discuss certain matters that could only be addressed in person.

And in the middle of nowhere.

It was there, with the top of New York City skyline in view beyond the tall marsh grass that lined the highway, that Smith informed Richter of John Coyle’s decision.

Richter, to Smith’s surprise, was moved to the verge of tears by the news.

“Is he sure?” he said finally.

Smith nodded. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“He says he can do more for you dead than alive.” The FBI agent paused, then said, “There’s going to be a war. We all know it. The Russians will be coming for you, and probably very soon. You’re going to need all the help you can get.”

Richter thought about that. “What does he want in exchange?”

“Nothing. But on the way here it came to me that there was something you could maybe do for him. Not in return, but for the same reason he’s putting off his official resurrection. Out of loyalty.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Johnny’s still wanted in Thailand, and Fiermonte had a false witness waiting to come forward. I think John would prefer that his son didn’t have that hanging over his head for the rest of his life.”

“Has Johnny woken up?”

“No. His condition is unchanged.”

“He’s tough,” Richter said. “He’ll come back.”

“That’s what we’re counting on.”

Richter paused, then asked about Johnny’s girl.

“She’s healing,” Smith said.

“Good,” Richter said. He paused for a moment more, scanned their surroundings, then said, “So again, what do you have in mind?”

“I was thinking that Johnny should join his father in the afterlife.”

“But how would it be done?” John Coyle asked.

He and Cat were standing in the center of the circular gravel driveway in front of Martin’s stone manor.

It was eight in the morning — just a little over twenty-four hours since Dragoi Gregorian had “killed himself” in the Chelsea Hotel.

Kirkland said, “New York State law currently requires two signatures on a death certificate application — one by an attending physician, or coroner, and the other by the licensed funeral director who receives the deceased’s remains. Martin has agreed to fill out and sign the application as the attending physician, citing accidental death. And Richter has a licensed funeral director standing by who will sign whatever he puts in front of him.”