Haley placed her hand on Johnny’s back. Though the room was warm, he was shivering wildly.
“You’re cold.”
“I’m okay.”
She sensed that he needed to continue, to get this out while he could. She waited for him to resume, drawing small circles on his back with her hand. It was the only comfort she could offer.
“It was about a week after my father was killed that all the shit started coming out about how he was on the take, and had been for years. People started to say that he’d never actually risked his life when he was undercover because the men he had supposedly infiltrated were actually paying him large sums of cash to look the other way.”
“But it wasn’t true.”
“Of course not. We couldn’t do a thing about it, though. We were just…helpless. For a while it was headline news. The Daily News loved it. Everybody got dragged into it — my sister, Fiermonte, even Dickey, to a degree. He’s smart, though. He keeps himself insulated from the men who work for him. Finally, the whole thing died down, but by then my father’s reputation was shit. His life’s work was just…gone. I was done with my surgeries, my ankle was as good as it was going to get, but I still had no idea what I was going to do with myself. I knew I wanted to get out of New York, there were too many memories, but where would I go? And then one day it came to me: Vietnam, just to have a look around. The rest you know.”
When she had met him, he looked about as lost as a man could. Long hair, long beard, a faraway look in bloodshot eyes. He’d come to Thailand to flame out, and many who traveled there managed to do just that.
And yet within days of their meeting, Johnny had shaved off his beard and cut his hair.
And a look of life had returned to his eyes.
She looked at him now and saw once again a hint of that faraway look.
“What is it you have to do tonight?” she asked.
“Cat wants me to help her find my brother.”
“Is he in trouble?”
“Yeah.” Johnny looked at her. “Listen, I promised I would never leave you alone, not even for one night. I won’t break that promise. I won’t do this if you don’t want me to.”
They had, since Thailand, never been apart, not even for one hour. They worked, ate, and rested together.
Survivors’ bond.
“You made that promise a year ago,” Haley said. “Things have changed since then. I’ll be okay. Anyway, you need to do this.”
“Dickey’s closing the bar for a few days, just as a precaution. You’ll be safe here, Hay. A man will be posted outside. He’ll be watching, every minute of the day and night.”
“Is there someone there now?”
“Yeah.”
She hesitated. “Richter?”
“He’s taking the first shift.”
“How long is he going to be there?”
“A new man will be posted every five hours. Fresh eyes. I know you don’t like it, Hay, but I feel better knowing he’s there.”
Haley said nothing.
“If you don’t want to stay here, we’ll sneak out and I’ll take you to a hotel so no one knows where you are. Some place where you can actually turn on the lights.”
“No, I’d rather be here. I’d rather be home. Don’t worry about me.”
“My cell will be on. Keep yours close.”
“I always do.”
“This should only take a few hours.”
“Stay focused on what you have to do.”
“I’m just going to be knocking on a couple of doors, asking questions. Certain people in Jeremy’s life probably wouldn’t want to talk to an FBI agent, even if she is his sister. So nothing dangerous. I’m not risking my life over him. I’ll be back, I promise.”
She touched his face. “I’m not worried, Johnny. To be honest, I feel sorry for the man who tries to keep you from coming home.”
He kissed her, and she felt his heart pounding.
Of course she was worried. Of course she was feeling a rush of fear, thinking thoughts she didn’t want to think.
But she was determined not to show it.
Later, as it was getting dark, Johnny left. Haley tacked up blankets over the two front windows, thought about looking down on the street, seeing if she could spot the man who was playing lookout.
But she decided not to do that to herself. She lit candles, drew a bath, soaked in it till the water turned tepid.
Then she dried off and dressed, complete with the black hiking boots she had bought in case the day came that they would need to once again run.
Like two animals heading for deeper woods.
Draw the enemy in by the promise of gain, then take him by confusion.
— Sun Tzu
EPISODE TWO
Chapter Twelve
Jeremy was in a hotel room, waiting for dark. A pointless thing, putting everything on hold till the sun goes down, he thought. I’d be just as visible under streetlights as I would be in daylight, just as vulnerable.
But he needed to be smart, to make only good decisions, wanted that more than anything, and waiting around for the cover of night seemed the thing to do.
There was also the fear to take into account — the fear of having been shot at, yes, but also the fear of being in over his head, of having started something he shouldn’t have, something he maybe hadn’t completely understood. The man who had showed up at the park last night was like a ghost from the past. The fact that he had emerged now, after all this time — just appeared out of nowhere — could not have been a coincidence.
I’ve stirred something up and pure evil has arisen again, he thought.
It was this fear — this realization — that at times today all but paralyzed him.
He’d gone to the Gershwin Hotel, just north of Madison Square Park, because it was a place he knew well. A small, inexpensive boutique hotel — part hotel, part youth hostel, a favorite of young, budget-minded Europeans, so there’d be a lot of people coming and going, people who looked enough like him. He had stayed there a number of times before, during one of his affairs with a married woman — older, of course, and perfumed, polished, plucked. She’d had a hunger he’d never experienced before. Memories of her — her touch, the smell of her, the sound of her voice — had hit him like a flood the moment he turned onto Twenty-Seventh Street and seen the entrance to the hotel. In the lobby, and then riding the elevator up to his room, he remembered their first time — she was already in the room, and when he opened the door, he saw her there in the dim light, waiting for him with her back to the only window, and naked save for a long string of pearls and black four-inch stilettos.
They went at each other for hours till each was spent, then fell asleep, lying together till morning.
Despite these memories and the loneliness they stirred, he knew that he’d made the right choice by coming here. The hallways were narrow and divided every fifty feet or so by heavy swinging doors. This gave every floor a mazelike feel, and it was one that just might disorient anyone unfamiliar with the hotel’s strange layout. Such disorientation, Jeremy hoped, would last long enough to give him the advantage, allow him to move unseen as he made his way to the back stairs that led to the crowded lobby, should it come to that.
Should the man from last night — the man from that terrible night three years ago, the man he had only recently remembered — somehow track him here.
Though he wasn’t a trained soldier like Johnny, or FBI like Cat, Jeremy was nonetheless a Coyle. He’d been raised by Coyles, in a house full of Coyles. He reminded himself of this, repeated it like a mantra. Free now of his addiction, he was thinking in ways that could only be innate.
Steps ahead, all contingencies considered, each fallback plan possessing a fallback plan of its own.
Even last night, as he watched that Russian approach him and eventually recognized the man, he’d managed not to panic — not completely, anyway.
He had quickly aborted his original plan and put into act
ion his fallback.
In him, somewhere, were remnants of his father.
These fragments, he thought, are what will keep me alive.
I will — I must — trust them.
It was eight o’clock — an hour since full night had fallen — but he still hadn’t left his hotel room.
On the small, round table under the wall-mounted TV lay what was left of his cell phone. In his right hip pocket when his motorcycle had spun out from beneath him, it had been crushed when he hit the pavement and now it no longer worked. As he slid along Delancey Street, he’d instinctively rolled onto his back, which smashed his laptop as well. He had been, then, unable to send the text he had promised to send to Elizabeth after his meeting. He knew she was probably under the impression that he had been killed, and he had felt the pressing need all day to contact her and let her know that he was okay, to relieve her of the fear she was certainly feeling. But he didn’t dare call from his hotel room — that would have been too easy to trace. There was a pay phone on the second floor, where the hostel was located, but he didn’t dare use that for the same reason. And though there were desktop computers available to guests and he could have easily e-mailed her, the computers were set up in an area that was accessible to just too many people, and he would have been too exposed.
If that Russian had known about last night, what else did he know?
So Jeremy had no way of letting Elizabeth know that he was okay, and he had no way of knowing whether or not she had kept her promise to contact his sister. For that matter, he didn’t know if Cat had found the hidden note he’d left for her at their father’s old apartment. And if she had, had she figured out what it meant?
Too many questions, and only one way to answer all of them.
Get a new phone, get it activated, and go from there.
It took another half hour, but finally Jeremy summoned the courage necessary to leave his small room. He knew there was a Sprint store just a few blocks east. He’d be able to purchase a replacement phone and would be back within an hour.
As the elevator door opened, he braced himself for the worst, but the elevator was empty. It was the same when the elevator reached the lobby — certainly that Russian would be standing there when the door opened. Someone was, but not him. Jeremy walked through the crowded lobby, his heart pounding. He wanted to pause before stepping outside but didn’t dare. He just kept on going, pushed himself through a fear that was growing more and more wild.
He exited to an empty sidewalk and looked around as discreetly as he could as he turned right and followed Twenty-Seventh Street across Fifth Avenue.
He walked for three blocks, studying every approaching face, making quick checks of those behind him.
He thought of his father, the work he had done, the life he had lived.
He was reminded of why he was doing this by the time he reached his destination. And though his heart was still pounding, all hint of wildness had been replaced by a clarity he’d never quite known before.
Chapter Thirteen
Whenever she went for a run, Cat pushed herself hard.
On her days off, when it was warm, she went to Central Park and ran the loop. During bad weather and when it got cold, she ran on the elevated indoor track of a health club not too far from her place. Running was crucial to her, and she did it as much for her emotional well-being as her physical conditioning and overall health. Every one of the Coyle children ran track. Running tests a person like nothing else, her father used to say. Even Jeremy ran track, though for only his freshman year. He was actually better than she or Johnny — broke several long-standing records, was a natural. But his mental illness got the better of him after their mother died, and he quit the team, preferring to party, first with fellow students at his high school, and then with a crowd from the city.
From there it was a short road — a downhill run — to addiction.
She thought of all this as she ran. Outdoors tonight, following a circuit through her Long Island City neighborhood — her least favorite route, but convenient — out her door and back home in less than an hour. It did the trick, though, because she wasn’t even at the halfway point and her lungs and legs were already burning.
Her mind was running, too. She found it difficult to focus on anything in particular, to hold on to a single thought for any length of time. One second she was thinking about Jeremy, the next she was remembering something from her childhood, from the time — a rare time, thanks to her father’s work — when they were all together, father and mother and three children.
After a while she gave up fighting her lack of focus. Obviously, her mind needed to run as well. Roam free, wander about. So she let it. The harder she pushed herself, the faster her mind moved from random thought to random thought. She began to hope that maybe a pattern would emerge out of this chaos, that her subconscious would ultimately reveal something to her, something her conscious mind couldn’t or wouldn’t understand. She thought of her father, recalled a quiet moment between the two of them one winter evening when she was maybe ten. She hadn’t thought of this in years. He had come to her bedroom, knocked on her door and entered, then spent a half hour with her, just talking to her, asking her about school, her friends, giving her the attention that she craved. She could barely remember now what they had said, but the memory of his presence — the softness of his voice, the way he listened to her, the trust he engendered — was still vivid.
And then that memory was gone, replaced by another, and then another. It went like this, consuming her, pulling her attention from the street in front of her. At one point she managed to focus on her surroundings and realized that she had run three blocks without noticing. She had crossed three streets but hadn’t looked prior to crossing them, or, if she had, she hadn’t retained what she’d seen when looking.
Not good.
She stopped for a breather, and to get control of herself. She wasn’t far from McKinney’s, the Irish bar she had gone to after having drinks with Fiermonte a week before, after hearing about the feelings he had for her. She wondered if the man she had met there and gone home with was inside right now. Not that she really wanted to see him again. If anything, his presence would be reason enough for her not to enter. And if she did, what then? A quick drink or two, a look around? She was on leave, so she didn’t have to worry about work in the morning. She had, in fact, nothing to do till she heard from Johnny, and that wouldn’t be for a few hours at best. Waiting was such a helpless feeling. She needed to do something. Something stupid would even do, no?
No, she thought. I need to be patient. I need to trust Johnny.
Their father had served in an elite unit in Vietnam — the LRRP, Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol, born out of the 101st Airborne. Teams of six men, sometimes fewer, would penetrate deep behind enemy lines, often remaining there for days. Their goal was either to gather intelligence on the enemy or to capture an enemy combatant and return with him to base, then hand him over for interrogation.
Johnny had been fascinated by that unit as a boy, had studied everything he could about its history, its tactics, its tools. He would have volunteered for it if it hadn’t been disbanded after Vietnam. But its role had been taken over by the Army Rangers, so he had set his sights on becoming one of them, by way of the 101st Airborne, like their father and their father’s father.
If anyone could find Jeremy and bring him back, if anyone had what it took to do that, it was Johnny.
She had to trust him, had to wait, but doing that would leave her with hours to kill.
Hours, once her run was done and she had showered and dressed, with nothing at all to do.
A bored Cat was a dangerous Cat.
Like her father, she worked long hours, sometimes seven days a week. She had no family, didn’t really want one. Well, maybe someday. She had learned that it was easiest to hide from loneliness when you were busy, and when you weren’t, when you had to step away from the job or there was nothing for you to d
o, simply go out and have a few drinks. And when that wasn’t enough, just bring a stranger home and hope he was halfway decent. Hope he knew what he was doing — and knew enough not to overstay his welcome.
Tonight, though, for a few hours anyway, she would have to face her loneliness, sit with it, and she wasn’t looking forward to that at all.
She stared at McKinney’s for a moment more, then turned around and started the run back home. Running toward something was always better than running away from something. Her thoughts were calmer now, easier to hold on to. She thought of Jeremy out there somewhere, scared. She had studied the surveillance video over and over, and each viewing had only served to convince her even more that he was straight, not high or strung out.
But the problem with being straight was that there was nothing between you and your feelings. No veil, no buffer. You couldn’t hide from fear.
Back at her building, her legs spent and her lungs raw, she stopped to grab her mail, then headed upstairs. Once inside her apartment, she stripped, showered, dressed again, just in case the phone rang, just in case Johnny found something and called her, needed her to do something, go somewhere.
Please, Johnny, find something, she thought.
She was about to make something to eat when she decided to look at her mail first. Bills and junk, that was all she ever got. She’d been late on a few credit cards lately and needed to do better, needed to put her life in order, even if only on that level.
As she flipped through her mail, the return address on one envelope in particular caught her eye.
Verizon Wireless.
She was looking at her cell phone bill.
The Betrayer Page 10
