The Betrayer

by Daniel Judson

  Cat said in a soft voice, “We need to talk to you.”

  Haley didn’t move, simply stated in a flat voice, “He’s alive, isn’t he? The Russian. Richter’s men didn’t find his body.”

  Cat nodded. “We know where he is. Kirkland managed to get him to stay put, but we can’t exactly storm the place and take him by force.”

  Haley remembered the trick Richter had played on her — coming to the door of the apartment she was hiding in, telling her that Johnny had sent him to take her to safety.

  She also remembered Fiermonte wanting her to use her as bait to bring Johnny out into the open.

  All she would have had to do was text Johnny.

  It was clear to her what the general plan was, and why they were coming to her. Still, she said nothing, just sat there and looked at Johnny, listening to his breathing.

  “Martin is ready to give you a crash course,” Johnny’s father said. “Tell you what to do and what to say so you can pass for an authentic medic.”

  “My father taught me field first aid,” Haley said.

  Johnny’s father hesitated, then nodded and said, “I’d like to tell you that you can say no and no one will think less of you, but you’re all we have right now. Bill and I will be nearby. We have a special cell phone for you, with a live mic, so we’ll hear everything that goes on. And Richter will drive you in, then take a position in the lobby once you’re inside.” He paused, then said, “I’m not going to lie to you, Haley. What we need you to do is dangerous. But we have to stop him while we can. If we don’t, none of us will ever be safe. If Gregorian can’t get to me right away, he’ll wait. And if he can’t get to me, he’ll get to my children.” Another pause. “Or those my children love.”

  Haley continued looking at Johnny.

  Cat gave her a moment, then said softly, “If we’re going to do this, we have to move, Haley. Right now.”

  Haley closed her eyes, then leaned down and kissed Johnny’s hand.

  “I’ll be back soon,” she whispered to him. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

  Then she let go of his hand, rose, and turned to face Cat and her father.

  “Just tell me what you need me to do,” she said.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Richter was driving, Haley was in the backseat.

  It was approaching seven in the morning, but with the low, dark clouds and heavy fog, it felt more like twilight.

  Gregorian’s son has seen Cat, in person as well as in surveillance photos Morris had provided the Russian.

  Johnny’s father and Cat had told Haley that.

  And though Gregorian’s son and Haley had both occupied Fiermonte’s living room for a few moments, the Russian had not once looked up from the floor during that time.

  Cat was certain of that.

  Haley glanced at her reflection in the review mirror. All but a few inches of her red hair had been cut off — by Cat, after which it was dyed black in the guest room sink.

  If the Russian had been provided surveillance photos of Johnny and Haley, a dramatic change in her appearance would be necessary.

  A long-sleeve shirt and denim jacket donated by Martin’s wife hid the bold dragon tattoo on Haley’s arm.

  Maybe the Russian knew of it, and maybe he didn’t. There was, though, no point in risking it.

  Looking at herself now, Haley marveled at how unrecognizable she was, even to herself.

  She was reminded of Johnny’s transformation shortly after they had met — his long hair buzzed down to military shortness, his traveler’s beard gone.

  Like a different man.

  She remembered the look of life returning to his eyes.

  When will I see that again? she wondered.

  She couldn’t imagine her life without him. There was no point in even bothering to do that.

  We are what we think, the Buddha taught.

  And what was it Emerson had said?

  What she and Johnny had read on the Zen Quote of the Day calendar on the day before all this began?

  What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

  Haley wanted to remain focused on memories of herself and Johnny — the tiny world they had made for themselves in Williamsburg, two survivors of violence clinging to each other and their careful routine.

  The bar just a few blocks away, a market just across the street from the nondescript building in which they lived, windows often covered with blankets.

  She wanted to hold on to the memory of their last time together in their bed — when he had come back from meeting his sister, needing Haley, having to have her.

  His need for her was as much a source of pleasure to her as his loving touch.

  But try as she might to hold those memories, doubts crept into her thoughts.

  Where would they go from here? How far would she and Johnny have to run to escape all that had been done, and what she was about to do?

  She attempted to follow her breathing, but that skill suddenly eluded her.

  Glancing at Richter’s eyes framed in the rectangular mirror, she watched him study the road as he drove.

  A road that was at times all but invisible.

  She thought of his loss and the responsibilities that were now his to bear.

  She also thought of how, at times, he had seemed to her to look a little too much like Johnny’s possible future.

  Hard face, burning eyes, permanent scowl.

  And then she thought of something Johnny had said to her not too long ago.

  Ask him about his name some time.

  He’d said that as he was getting ready to leave in search of his missing kid brother.

  Buckling his belt, pulling on his boots in the living room of the apartment they would never see again.

  It took a moment for Haley to speak to the man who for so long had frightened her.

  And who was now nothing less than her lifeline.

  “How far are we from the bridge?” she said.

  “Five minutes,” Richter answered.

  Once at the Henry Hudson Bridge, Richter was to call Johnny’s father, who was somewhere behind them in this fog, with Kirkland, following in an untraceable car that belonged to one of Richter’s men.

  After that call Kirkland would use Fiermonte’s disposable cell phone to send the final text to the Russian.

  She’ll be there in thirty.

  Haley took a breath, let it out, then said, “Johnny told me once to ask you about your name. If you had been named after the Richter scale.”

  Richter met her eyes in the mirror. She held his stare.

  The look of him had terrified her once upon a time. But she wasn’t the person she was a year ago, when she’d first seen him.

  She wasn’t the person she was just hours ago, for that matter.

  She got the sense, though, that Richter already knew what her question would be. Wasn’t it an old joke between the two older Coyle kids and Dickey McVicker’s only son? One that had been first told decades ago, in better, or at least different, times.

  “So are you asking?” Richter said.

  He was clearly playing along.

  “Yes.”

  Richter McVicker nodded but didn’t answer at first.

  “You must be very scared right now,” he said finally. “Considering what you’re about to do. Are you?”

  Haley answered without hesitation. “I am.”

  Three days ago Fiermonte told me to rent two rooms at the Chelsea Hotel, Kirkland had told them. One for Gregorian and another for the woman from Detroit. The room number Gregorian texted back to me is the woman’s room on the seventh floor, directly below his.

  His point was that there would be one less floor between Haley and Richter waiting down in the lobby. It was a minor detail meant to be taken as good news, as if it might offer some degree of relief to those who knew the danger Haley would be facing.

  But it relieved no one, not even Kirkland. And Haley
knew that a lot could happen in the minutes it would take Richter to reach the seventh floor, should things go terribly wrong, which they so easily could.

  “It was something my father told me once,” Richter explained. His eyes were on the road — or rather the wall of white fog that at times obscured all but a few feet of the road. “I never had many friends growing up,” he continued. “Other kids were afraid of me because of how I looked. Or they made fun of me behind my back, made fun of my name. It was funny, I was bigger than anyone else on the playground, and yet I was scared to go to school. I hated it, used to cry every morning, drive my poor mother nuts. One day my father sat me down and asked why I was so afraid. I told him that kids were making fun of me. I told him I hated my name and I was mad at him for naming me that. Even Cat and Johnny teased me about it. He looked at me and said he couldn’t have a son that was afraid all the time. Or ashamed of anything about himself. He said he needed his son to be brave and confident. He needed his son to be the kind of man who could tear his way through anything — any door or wall, anything or anyone who got in his way.”

  Richter paused for a moment. Haley remained silent, waiting, watching his eyes in the rearview mirror.

  Taking a breath, Richter continued. “Then he asked me if I knew what the Richter scale was. I told him I didn’t, and he said, ‘It’s how scientists measure the force of earthquakes, which are the most powerful things in the whole world.’ He smiled, let that sink in, then told me that whenever anyone gave me shit about my name, or asked me if I’d been named after the Richter scale, I was supposed to look right at them and say one thing. And it was the same thing I was supposed to think to myself whenever I got scared. He said all I would need to do was remember that one thing and I’d be okay. I’d remember that I could do anything. So that’s what I do, whenever I get scared.”

  “So what’s the one thing?” Haley asked.

  His eyes met hers again. “That I wasn’t named after the Richter scale.” He paused, smiled his father’s smile, and said, “The Richter scale was named after me.”

  They rode in silence for the next few minutes. As they reached the Henry Hudson Bridge, which would carry them from the Bronx into Manhattan, Richter took out his cell phone and made the call.

  “Send the text.”

  Then he closed the phone and looked at Haley in the mirror again.

  “There’s only one man in the world I’d never want to go up against, and that’s Johnny Coyle. I’m sure he taught you some things, right? He was crazy good with a knife, even before he went into the army.”

  Haley nodded.

  “If anything goes wrong, you do what you have to do till I get there. Understand me? I will get there, no matter what. Just stay alive.”

  She tried to swallow but couldn’t. “Okay.”

  Richter looked at her a moment more with his hard eyes.

  “You’re going to do fine, I promise,” he said.

  As they approached the manned tollbooth, Richter lowered the sun visor. This was, Haley knew, to hide his face from the cameras mounted above each booth.

  Haley thought of hiding her face from the attendant by looking down at her lap, or turning her head and looking out the window to her right.

  But she didn’t, choosing instead to watch the man as Richter paid him.

  Richter did so, she noticed, with a handful of quarters.

  The man was too busy counting to look at either of them.

  When he was done, he muttered, “Go ahead,” pouring the quarters from his hand into the cash drawer.

  Richter pulled away and headed down the West Side Highway.

  Haley looked for the Hudson River but could barely see it through the fog.

  She thought of Johnny growing up on its eastern bank, dreaming as a boy of becoming a paratrooper like his father and his father’s father.

  A soldier, a warrior.

  A Coyle, he’d once told her, had served in every conflict, going all the way back to the Revolutionary War.

  She eventually pushed that from her mind, though, needed to focus now on what was to come.

  What she would need to do to keep those she loved safe.

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  She turned from Eighth Avenue onto Twenty-Third Street and spotted the long facade of brick, wrought-iron railings, and tall windows that was the Chelsea Hotel.

  Glowing in the fog was a neon sign hanging from the seventh floor down to the fourth, still lit.

  hotel in large, vertical white letters, and below it, in smaller, horizontal red letters, chelsea.

  A grainy haze around both words.

  She could not see where Twenty-Third met Seventh at the eastern end of the long block, nor could she see the tops of the buildings surrounding her, but that didn‘t matter. If anything, the confining fog would help conceal those who would soon be there to back her up.

  Johnny‘s father and Kirkland parked around the corner. Richter was on foot, waiting for his signal to approach.

  All of them listening via the cell phone equipped with a hot mic.

  Haley made a point of not looking up, because it was likely the Russian would be watching from his window to make sure that she was in fact alone. For some reason it took all she had to keep her eyes straight ahead. She also made a point, despite the dread and fear inside her, of walking quickly; she was, after all, a medic rushing to give an injured man aid.

  Halfway down the block she crossed to the south side of the street and entered the hotel.

  The lobby was narrow and small. A waiting area was just inside the door — a single couch flanked by two chairs, a marble-top coffee table with magazines. Beyond that stood the front desk, to the left of which was the only elevator.

  It didn‘t face the out into the lobby, but rather the front desk.

  To the right of the desk was the door to the stairs, and that also faced the desk, behind which was a man in his thirties, casually dressed and reading a newspaper.

  The Chelsea was an old hotel, a city landmark, and behind the clerk was something Haley hadn‘t ever actually seen in a hotel: a grid of small, numbered cubicles for room keys. Most of the tiny cubicles still had keys in them.

  Apparently, the Chelsea hadn‘t upgraded to electronic locks and key cards.

  As Haley walked through the lobby, she saw a sign posted exactly where the waiting area ended and the front desk area began.

  guests only beyond this point.

  There was no way she could get to the elevator without first approaching the front desk. She would, in fact, have to pass within feet of it.

  Maybe if she did so with authority, as if she belonged there, the man would not notice or stop her.

  But the moment she thought that — the moment she had passed the sign and crossed into the front desk area — the clerk looked up from his reading.

  Haley smiled at him. Demurely, coyly — I‘m here for an affair, please don‘t take a good look at me.

  But the clerk stared at her. When she turned to her left, stepping to the elevator, she faced it squarely, putting her back to the man.

  She pressed the button, not with the tip of her finger but with her knuckle so she wouldn‘t leave a print.

  The button lit up.

  “What room?” the man asked.

  Haley gambled, said in French that she didn‘t speak English.

  She hadn‘t turned to face the man, simply turned her head slightly and spoke over her shoulder.

  The clerk replied immediately in fluent French, asking her again what room she was going to.

  Haley gave the number, and the man put his paper down and stepped to a computer monitor, then asked for the name of the guest.

  Kirkland had provided Haley with the fake name Fiermonte had used to register the room. He had paid for the room with stolen credit cards provided by his Russian associate.

  She repeated the name.

  The elevator door opened as the clerk scanned the monitor, and Haley stepped inside.


  The man instructed her to hold the elevator, please.

  She did so and waited for several long seconds, during which she took note of a single security camera mounted above the key cubicles.

  Finally, the man confirmed the name, nodded, and said, “Merci.”

  Haley let the elevator doors close and pressed the button for the seventh floor.

  Only then did she realize that she had been holding her breath.

  She released it.

  As the elevator rose, she wondered how Richter, when the time came, would get past that man.

  But she didn‘t need to cloud her mind with such concerns. She opened the shoulder bag that Martin had provided her. It contained everything she would need to treat a gunshot wound.

  Among those supplies were several pairs of nonlatex gloves.

  She took out one pair and pulled it on.

  The elevator slowed, then stopped, and the doors slowly opened.

  Haley stepped into a dark hallway.

  Thick paint on the walls, a stairwell with wrought-iron railings and, once the elevator doors closed and the car descended, a cavernous silence.

  She didn‘t have to go far to find the room. Knocking on the door, she realized that she was holding her breath again.

  She let it out, breathed in, and heard from beyond the door, “Come in.”

  With her gloved hand she turned the knob, swinging the door inward.

  Stepping over the threshold, she saw the Russian standing with his back to the windows, facing her.

  Wearing only a bath towel around his waist, a handgun fitted with a suppressor in his right hand.

  Haley closed the door.

  “Move to the middle of the room,” the Russian said.

  Haley did. She quickly scanned the room to make sure they were alone, then looked at the Russian.

  “Take off the bag and empty it.”

  Haley didn‘t understand.

  “Pour its contents on the floor.”

  Haley removed the shoulder bag, then crouched down and turned it upside down, holding it by its bottom and shaking it.

  The medical supplies landed in a pile on the wood floor.