The Betrayer

by Daniel Judson

  “You took an oath, too, Cat.”

  “Fuck my oath. My career died when Daddy was killed. I’m the daughter of a traitor, remember? Anyway, we’re family, Johnny.” She smiled. “Whether you like it or not. That’s what matters.”

  Johnny looked once more toward the closed doors.

  “Keep an open mind,” Cat said. “Just this once. And go easy on him, okay? He’s trying to do his best. That’s all any of us can do, right? That’s all anyone can ask.”

  These were, she knew, the last words their father had spoken to Johnny.

  A cheap shot, maybe, but she would say or do anything at this point to bring her two brothers — as opposite as two men can be — together.

  If only for a few precious minutes.

  Johnny looked at Haley. She smiled and nodded.

  After a moment Johnny stepped toward the French doors.

  Jeremy heard the voices but not the words spoken. Regardless, he recognized his brother’s voice among those coming from beyond the doors.

  He was on the tail end of his high, under the blankets to keep warm, the heavy drapes closed to keep out the harsh daylight. His mind and body were still drifting — a sensation he knew well, one he had once loved more than anything but now utterly despised.

  The disconnect, the apathy, the sense of time just passing him by — he had no interest in any of that now. He craved, in fact, the opposite of those things, even if it meant feeling every cut on his face and bruise on his body.

  Even if it meant being aware of every mistake he had ever made, past or present.

  When he heard indications that the conversation was winding down — voices growing softer, pauses lasting just a little longer — he pulled off the blankets and moved to the edge of the bed. He was dressed, but Cat had taken off his socks and shoes and placed them on the floor. Moving slowly, he pulled on the socks, then the shoes.

  He was rising to his feet when he heard the longest pause yet.

  It was followed by the sound of footsteps approaching the doors.

  Footsteps that could only belong to his brother Johnny.

  Jeremy stood still and waited.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Johnny closed the door and, through the cave-like darkness, saw his kid brother’s beaten face.

  Jeremy had been the good-looking one, resembling their mother the most, even more so than Cat. But whatever hints of their mother Jeremy’s face had once possessed — the nose and mouth and cheeks — had been replaced by dozens of fresh lacerations and grotesque bruises.

  Even Jeremy’s eyes, which had held the same something as their mother’s, the same warmth, seemed void now, dark to the point of lifelessness.

  The kid had been through hell, yes. He had been through hell and was still standing.

  But that in itself didn’t convince Johnny that his brother had changed.

  Johnny stayed by the door, breathing shallow breaths. Jeremy remained by the bed, his left eye all but closed by swelling, his right clotted with blotches of shimmering red.

  “I heard three voices out there,” Jeremy said. “You and Cat and someone else.”

  “My girlfriend.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Johnny didn’t answer at first.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Jeremy said.

  Johnny supposed there wasn’t any reason not to. “Haley.”

  “Cat said you guys maybe got into some trouble last night.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Jeremy shrugged off the rebuff. He stared at his brother for a moment, then said, “I thought I could do this. I wanted to do this. But I didn’t want to involve either of you until I was sure.”

  “Do what exactly, Jeremy?”

  “Expose him.”

  “Dickey.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You believe he killed our father.”

  “I know he was the one behind it. I was trying to prove it. Maybe I still can. With Cat’s help, and yours, I think we have a chance—”

  “You think Dickey was behind it because you remembered things,” Johnny said. “Under hypnosis.”

  “I heard stuff, yeah,” Jeremy said. “While I was in that apartment. I mean, my subconscious did. I was pretty high.”

  Johnny nodded. “I remember. This was while Dickey’s man was watching you, while you were waiting for Dad to come and get you.”

  “That’s right. Dickey’s man was a Russian named Gregorian.”

  “You never mentioned his name before.”

  “I didn’t remember it till last month.”

  “It came out in the sessions.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What else came out?”

  “A lot of gaps were filled in. Gaps in what I had been able to remember. You’d be surprised how much the subconscious retains. I even remembered some other names.”

  Johnny thought about that for a moment. “Is that why Morris put you and Smith together?”

  Jeremy nodded. “Smith knows Dickey’s operation better than anyone. If those names mean anything to anyone, it would be him.”

  “But instead of helping you, he and another guy beat you. A Russian, according to Cat.”

  “The Russian did the beating. Smith held me down later while I was being injected.”

  Undercover operatives have probably done worse to maintain their covers, Johnny thought.

  Their own father, no doubt, had.

  “So why did you go to Morris in the first place?” Johnny asked. “Why not Cat or Donnie Fiermonte?”

  “A few weeks after Dad was killed, when all that shit was coming out, I got in a fight and ended up getting busted for possession. I was brought to Morris’s precinct, and when he realized who I was, he pulled some strings and got me let go.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “He had worked with Dad at some point, and he told me he didn’t believe any of the shit that was being said. Our father was the most standup guy he’d ever met. And bravest. He walked me out and got me a cab and told me that if I ever needed anything, I was supposed to call him.”

  “It seems to me that an awful lot of trouble could have been avoided if you’d just gone to Cat.”

  “She wouldn’t have believed me. And anyway, I wanted to do this on my own.”

  “Why?”

  Jeremy looked at him. “Can’t you guess?”

  “To prove something to us.”

  “No. To prove something to myself.” He paused, then: “I read about the training you went through, Johnny. Airborne school, Ranger school, the whole thing. I read about what Dad went through as an LRRP, and his father as a paratrooper, and his father in the First World War. I had no idea that the courses soldiers ran through when they’re training were called confidence courses. I’d always thought they were obstacle courses. But when I read that, it made sense to me. I realized that everything you’ve put yourself through was to build up your confidence. Your whole life has been one test after another. I was reading the memoir of one the men Granddad jumped into Normandy with, and the guy said that the one thing he carried with him that always made the difference was confidence — in himself, and in the man beside him. And each battle he survived, as scared as he was, added to his confidence, gave him reason to think that he just might survive the next one, too, and the one after that.”

  “So this was your way of getting that. Confidence in yourself.”

  “This was me doing what had to be done.”

  “But you called Fiermonte. And Charlie Atkins.”

  Johnny could tell that his brother was bothered by this, bothered that Johnny knew about that. “How did you know about Charlie?” Jeremy asked.

  Johnny shrugged off the question. “My point is, if you wanted to do this on your own, why’d you call them?”

  “Charlie was the only person I knew of who might be able to get me face-to-face with Dickey, but I didn’t know how to find him. So I called Fiermonte and asked him.”


  “Fiermonte told you how to find Atkins.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He put you, a drug addict, in touch with a known drug dealer.”

  “I told him I was clean and that I needed to make amends to the people I’ve wronged over the years.”

  “And he bought that?”

  “He seemed encouraged that I was in a twelve-step program.”

  “You weren’t, though.”

  Jeremy shook his head. “No. But the part about me being clean was true.”

  “You kicked your addiction, just like that. After all these years.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How?”

  “I found someone who cared about me,” Jeremy said. “I know it sounds like bullshit, and I don’t expect you to understand, but suddenly I had something I’d never had before, and it made all the difference.”

  “What was it you had?”

  Jeremy shrugged. “Self-esteem. A reason not to fuck up anymore. All it took was Beth. All it took was the way she looked at me. The way no one really had. Not since Mom, anyway.”

  Johnny thought about Jeremy’s closeness to their mother.

  He thought, too, about his own transformation upon meeting Haley.

  He didn’t want to get sidetracked, though, needed to keep his exhausted mind focused on what mattered, so he didn’t dwell on either memory and instead said, “So all Fiermonte knew was that you needed to contact Atkins to complete a step in your program.”

  “Yeah. He wouldn’t have believed me if I’d told him the truth. And he would have tried to stop me. Or worse, get me put back in the hospital.”

  “The thing is, Jeremy, I spoke to Fiermonte yesterday. He said you sounded kind of out there when you called him. Manic, even paranoid. Atkins told me pretty much the same thing.”

  “It’s not true.”

  “Then why would they both say that?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I was excited when I talked to Atkins, but not crazy.”

  “I’ve seen you lost in your own little world before, with that faraway look in your eyes. You could have been that way when you talked to them and not been aware of it. You could have said things that you didn’t remember the next day.”

  “Not a chance. No way.” Jeremy wasn’t getting angry at the implication, or agitated. He simply stood his ground. “Anyway, do I look that way to you now?” he said calmly. “Do I look manic?”

  “No,” Johnny said flatly. “You look like someone coming down from a high. I’ve seen you that way before, too.”

  “You can believe me or not believe me, Johnny. It’s up to you. Just like it’s up to you if you want to see me the way I am now. See me for what I’ve done in the past month, not for what I did when I was a fucked-up kid.”

  Johnny considered that, then said, “So you told Charlie about your memories.”

  “Yeah. I mean, I told him about them, not what they were.”

  “And he was the only one you told.”

  “Yeah. Except for Beth, of course.”

  “And you told her everything.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why confide in Atkins, though? Even as little as you did.”

  Jeremy shrugged. “He was like a brother to me once.” He thought for a moment, then said, “I guess maybe I was desperate for someone to believe me. Desperate to talk to someone other than Beth about it. But he seemed a little, I don’t know, too interested, so I shut up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I realized as I was talking to him that he was someone who might want to profit from any information I gave him. Which I’m guessing he did.”

  Johnny nodded. “He claims he told Dickey everything you told him. And he told me I shouldn’t believe a word you said to me. He also suggested that I should just let you get yourself killed.”

  “Like I said, he was a brother to me, once.”

  “You two had a falling out.”

  “He got tired of me and bailed. Like everybody does, sooner or later.”

  Johnny said nothing to that.

  “That’s another thing I’ve learned from my reading. Rangers have a code, don’t they? ‘Never leave a man behind.’ You train in pairs, don’t you, just to instill that? Dead or alive, everyone comes home.” Jeremy paused. “You left me behind, Johnny. Almost from the start. I didn’t measure up, I wasn’t enough like you, and you left me behind.”

  Again, Johnny didn’t respond.

  Jeremy let the silence linger, then said, “Look, I didn’t know who to trust, okay? Now that I know what I know. But I had to start somewhere. I had to do something. I would have made a deal with the devil if I had to. And the way it looked to me at the time, Morris was the only one I could turn to. The only one who didn’t look at me and see a complete fuck-up. But I was smart, Johnny. I read your Sun Tzu, I followed it to the letter as best I could. I took my time, talked to Morris for weeks over the phone before I finally agreed to meet with him. The only mistake I made was letting him pick the location of our first meeting.”

  “The bar on the Lower East Side.”

  Jeremy nodded. “A mistake I’ll never make again.”

  “And you still trusted him, after the Russian showed up and took shots at you?”

  “I had no choice but to let it play out. Otherwise, I would have lost a month of negotiation. I needed to meet with Smith. He was my only hope. And Morris might be as much of a patsy as I am.”

  “Does he know what you remembered?”

  “Some of it, but not all.”

  “And Smith?”

  “I told him even less. Mainly because I didn’t have time to tell him more. We met twice, and briefly both times.”

  “You told your friend Beth everything, though, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And now Cat knows.”

  Jeremy nodded.

  “I don’t understand something, though,” Johnny said after a moment. “The therapist you went to, wouldn’t he have the original recordings?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Johnny cocked his head at that. “How?”

  “A motel suicide.”

  “When?”

  “Last week. I didn’t find out till last night. Apparently, he’d been getting calls from someone for the past few days. Calls that made him nervous. His wife overheard one of his conversations, and it sounded to her like someone was trying to buy something from him.”

  Johnny remembered one of the questions that ran through his mind as he was racing from his meeting with Atkins.

  If Dickey knew of the woman in Chappaqua, if he knew about the recordings, why hadn’t he used his resources to find her, and through her, the hypnotherapist?

  According to Atkins, he had told McVicker about Jeremy’s call a month ago, right after it had happened. And Jeremy’s therapist had been killed last week.

  That left a span of three weeks.

  And three weeks was plenty of time to negotiate the purchase of the originals, then orchestrate a hit.

  Lure Jeremy’s therapist and kill him.

  Just like our father.

  Still, something prevented Johnny from taking that leap.

  He couldn’t put his finger on it, but something was…off.

  He’d learned a long time ago to always trust his gut.

  “Who told you about your therapist?” Johnny asked.

  “Morris and Smith.”

  “And so your CD is the only copy left.”

  “I burned a backup onto my laptop, but it was smashed when my bike went down.”

  “The information could still be on the hard drive.”

  “It looked pretty bad to me.”

  “I’m sure Cat knows a tech who can take a look for us. Where’s your laptop now?”

  “In my backpack, behind the front desk. It’s under a fake name and room number. It should be safe.”

  Something in Jeremy’s demeanor changed suddenly.

  “Of course, that’s what I thought about the mailbox key,
” he said.

  His remorse was almost palpable. The death of their mother, when Jeremy was in his early teen years, had triggered a pattern of mania and depression that eventually led to a vicious spiral of self-destruction. He had been a sensitive, untested boy back in those days, and he had changed seemingly overnight.

  What might the death of Elizabeth Hall trigger, Johnny wondered, now that Jeremy was a man out to prove himself?

  A Coyle in a long line of Coyles.

  After a moment of silence, Jeremy said, “Cat told me that Beth had been beaten.” His voice was soft, the words clearly difficult for him to speak. “By some woman, who then attacked Cat.”

  Johnny nodded. He couldn’t help but recall the moment when he realized Haley was not in the apartment below theirs. Waiting for him, safe.

  He recalled, too, the man in Thailand saying he was going to take Haley’s tattooed arm as a prize.

  It was always there, this memory, ready to rise to the surface at any given moment.

  But Johnny pushed it from his mind and focused on his kid brother. He could only imagine what the guy must be feeling.

  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.”