The Betrayer Read online

  THE BETRAYER

  THE BETRAYER

  Daniel Judson

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2013 Daniel Judson Originally published as a Kindle Serial, December 2012.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  PO Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN: 9781611091786

  For Wendy

  Table of Contents

  Episode One

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Episode Two

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Episode Three

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Episode Four

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Episode Five

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Episode Six

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Episode Seven

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Sixty-Three

  Sixty-Four

  Sixty-Five

  Sixty-Six

  Sixty-Seven

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Johnny wakes, his heart a dead thing in his chest and his lungs empty. He reaches out fast, grasping for the redheaded woman beside him. Stirred from her deep slumber and immediately sensing his fear, she clutches at him with an urgency that matches his own.

  But there is calm, too, in the way she grabs him, something reassuring, and the instant she does so, the instant she has a solid hold on him, his heart shudders back to life and his aching lungs gulp in air.

  Out of the darkness, she whispers softly, “We’re safe. We’re safe.”

  He is still holding on to her — his powerful hands grasping her upper arm — and has to tell himself to loosen his grip. Still, it takes a moment for him to actually do so.

  “We’re safe,” she repeats.

  He nods, then says, “Good.”

  “Do you need the light?”

  “No, I’m okay.” It’s close enough to the truth.

  He begins to sense the room around them — a good sign. Their bedroom is tucked away in the back of their Brooklyn apartment. Quiet, dark, secure. A locked door stands between them and their apartment door, which is also locked. A dark hallway, three flights of unlit stairs, and yet another locked door stand between their apartment and the street.

  And, finally, a continent and ocean are between them and Bangkok, the place where they were almost killed, and the location of his recurring nightmare.

  Neither own very much. When they returned to the States a year ago, they had agreed to keep themselves as free of possessions as possible — and therefore as mobile as possible. All the things standing between them and Bangkok could easily be bridged by anyone who cared to, so the idea of having little to leave behind, and even less to carry, seemed the prudent thing to do.

  All that this room contains, then, are a mattress and dresser, which itself contains precious little. The walls and floor are bare, and the only “homey” touch they have allowed themselves is the heavy curtain hanging before the only window in their bedroom, to block out daylight as they sleep.

  The window is open now, the curtains swelling like ghosts in the early morning breeze.

  “Do you need to talk about it?” she asks.

  Johnny looks for the clock they keep on the floor beside the bed. It’s an old windup thing they picked up at a sidewalk sale. He trusts cogs and springs more than batteries, and the ritual of turning the winding peg at bedtime pleases him.

  The glowing hands tell him it is not yet six a.m. Neither has to leave for work till the afternoon, so there is no point in waking now.

  “No,” he says.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  The intensity of Johnny’s dreams has been lessening lately, to the point where he no longer sees the faces of the three men who had tried to kill Haley.

  He no longer hears the threats they’d spoken, the things they said they would do to her prior to killing her.

  Lately, he only dreams of killing those men — for him the easiest part of the whole ordeal. Or the easiest to accomplish, at least.

  Sometimes, though, he dreams of fleeing for the border with Haley, the days it took them to reach it, the fact that they had barely made it out of that forsaken country with their lives.

  He has come to consider the memories of Thailand nothing more than a virus he has carried back with him and has yet to shake. Maybe the infrequency of his dreams means his body is at last purging itself. Maybe one day he’ll wake up and realize he hasn’t dreamed that dream in a long time, and maybe never will again.

  Haley’s hand rests on his bare chest. He can tell by the lightness of her touch and the way her fingers are curled that sleep is close to reclaiming her. He hopes it will do the same for him soon enough.

  His eyes have grown accustomed to the dark, and he can see the tattoo that covers her right arm like a sleeve. One of the men had threatened to take her arm as his trophy. Johnny had gone after him first, breaking the man’s neck and feeling his body, pressed against his own, go instantly limp.

  Johnny pushes all that from his mind now. We are our thoughts. Isn’t that what the Buddha tells us? His heart is steadier now, he is calmer, and he wants to remain that way. He proceeds to count his breaths, just as Haley had taught him to.

  As a onetime soldier, he’d endured some of the toughest training a man could, and yet meditating is easily the hardest thing he has ever attempted.

  It feels a little beyond him right now, so he listens instead to the ticking clock and focuses on the smell of Haley’s hair.

  These are the things that matter, he tells himself.

  He repeats that again and again till he once more believes it deep down, till he trusts it in that way we trust in things that are bigger than ourselves.

  All war is deception.

  — Sun Tzu

  EPISODE ONE

  Chapter One

  “I’m going to need you to go somewhere and lay low until your next job,” the man on t
he phone said. “When I do call, I’ll need you here within a matter of hours, not days. Understand?”

  Vitali, sitting on the edge of a worn mattress in a motel outside Boston, answered that he did. He knew very little about the man who employed him — a disadvantage, considering that the man knew more or less everything about him. The only thing Vitali did know for certain was that this man — his benefactor for the past three years — was located somewhere in New York City. So the comment about being there within a matter of hours and not days meant that wherever Vitali did go to lay low and wait, it couldn’t be too far from this part of the country.

  There was a pause during which Vitali looked toward the only window and allowed his thoughts to drift to the still-vivid memory of this morning’s kill.

  A middle-aged male who worked as a therapist. But Vitali didn’t care what the man did for a living. He didn’t care whether or not the man had deserved to die; he was no avenging angel. Nor did he care that the man had a wife and children. Vitali made a point of learning everything he could about his targets, so he had known all this going in. Still, while pleading for his life, the man had mentioned his loved ones, had even tried to show Vitali photographs of them that he kept in his wallet.

  Vitali had simply told him that it didn’t matter. Once he was in possession of the item he had been sent to retrieve, he shot the man in the temple with a stolen handgun, then proceeded with his trademark professional calm to stage it so the death would look like a motel suicide.

  The man on the phone spoke again, pulling Vitali from his memory.

  “There’s a good chance this is the job you’ve been waiting for.”

  Again, Vitali simply stared into the glare of the east-facing window and said nothing. The steady sounds of speeding trucks and cars coming from the highway just beyond were a white noise he found pleasing. It also helped sustain his dreamlike trance.

  Though this morning’s kill had taken place just a little over two hours ago, he was still high from it. He felt a lightness in his head and a surging in his chest. Now that he was back in the relative safety of his own rundown motel room, he could allow himself to experience the euphoria fully.

  Allow it to slow his responses and reflexes, allow himself to savor the sense of being just a little outside of time and space.

  Remember the feeling of having held complete dominance over another being.

  All too soon this would be gone, and only the memory of it, as vague as the memory of a dream from long ago, would remain.

  Till the next time, that is.

  “Do you understand what I’m telling you?” his benefactor said.

  Vitali sensed that the man was irritated. Maybe he thought his comment about this possibly being the job Vitali had been waiting for deserved some kind of display of gratitude, but Vitali didn’t care about that, either. All that mattered to him at this moment were the chemicals awash in his brain. He needed to feel their effects for as long as he could.

  No drug — nothing in this world — was quite like it.

  “I understand, yes,” Vitali said finally. “So the item was what you were hoping for.”

  “Better than I’d hoped.”

  “Good.”

  “You’ll know more as soon as I do,” the man said. “In the meantime, stay out of trouble.”

  The line went dead.

  Vitali closed his cell phone, lit a cigarette, smoked it down, then lit another. He always smoked heavily in the days that followed a job, less so in those leading up to it. He preferred French cigarettes — Gauloises or Gitanes, though Spanish Ducados were also good. His father’s brother had introduced them to him. As proud as Vitali was to be Russian, he deplored his homeland’s cigarettes, but he had learned long ago that devotions such as these were luxuries he simply could not afford.

  How many like him were in prison or dead because of the brand of cigarette they smoked? Or the expensive clothing their egos demanded they wear? Or the designer shoes?

  No. American cigarettes — Parliaments now, as dreadful as they come — were fine with him. He could endure any hardship or pain, was most proud of this fact, was in this way as disciplined as a monk.

  By the time he was halfway through his second smoke, Vitali had decided that he would head up to Portsmouth. It wasn’t all that far away, according to a map he’d found in his hotel room, and it was a place he’d never been to before but had wanted to visit for a while now. He moved around a lot — for his job, and because of it, too. A moving target was harder to hit. He wandered from city to city, staying sometimes just a night, sometimes days, and on rare occasions for a week or even longer.

  He loved America for that reason (and maybe that reason alone), loved the freedom to roam from state to state unchecked. It made a great deal of what he did, for work and for pleasure, that much easier.

  As much as he loved America, though, he was eager to get back home.

  He remembered now that someone had told him not too long ago that there was a pub in Portsmouth where, on certain nights during the week, jazz musicians wandered in off the street one at a time, unpacked their instruments, and started to play, sometimes joining in midsong. He couldn’t remember who’d told him that, or when; he crossed paths with a lot of people — some faces he could see clearly, and always would, but most he couldn’t. He wasn’t particularly a fan of jazz, or any kind of music for that matter, but his father had been a devotee of the art form, and so Vitali wanted to see this place, if only as yet another in a series of acts meant as loving memorials to his old man.

  The man who had taught him everything he knew about killing and not getting caught.

  So Vitali left Boston that night by bus, occupying himself for most of the journey north by watching the pretty college-aged woman seated across the narrow aisle. Listening to her iPod, often with her eyes closed, she never once looked his way, so he didn’t get the chance to strike up a conversation with her. He was good at conversation, at putting people at ease, and could hide his Russian accent easily and adopt one that was as reassuring — and as distinctly nonregional — as an American TV newscaster.

  When the bus arrived in Portsmouth four hours later, the woman who had caught his eye was met by a tall, skinny, awkward-looking guy. Vitali watched as the reunited couple kissed, and continued watching as they headed arm in arm toward the terminal’s exit.

  Of course, he was thinking of killing them both. He craved that now, knew exactly how he could do it: Ask for a ride, offer them money when they hesitated, the kind of money two kids couldn’t refuse, then flash the cash (he carried large sums with him always). He would push this couple, always with a hapless smile, till they said yes, and once in their vehicle all he would need to do was wait for the opportunity to present itself. It invariably did. And what would follow was simply a matter of him being true to his nature.

  But I need to lay low, he thought. Especially now. It looks like this job might be the job you’ve been waiting for.

  So he paused and let these two go on without him. Once they were out of sight and the need he had felt while watching them was gone, he resumed walking. Exiting the terminal, a single duffel bag over his shoulder, he headed on foot through the small city in search of a hotel.

  Something better than that dive outside of Boston.

  After all, this was pleasure now, not business.

  Vitali found the pub — it was called the Press Room; the hotel desk clerk, a pretty woman with long brown hair and fashionably geeky black glasses, claimed with a fond smile to know it well.

  And it was there, early into his first night, that Vitali met a woman.

  He was handsome enough, despite a few minor scars on his broadly boned face — a Russian face, but there was nothing he could do about that. He had lifted weights regularly since he was a teenager, had wrestled in school, and excelled in hand-to-hand combat in the army (he’d gone AWOL after killing a neo-Nazi bunkmate who’d annoyed him one too many times). His build was one that promis
ed raw power, and he exuded a quiet confidence, displaying it with even the slightest move he made, even as he was sitting still on a bar stool in a strange bar in a strange city.

  More than that, he had a friendly and easygoing smile. Every rattlesnake has its charm, his father had told him. And that is yours.

  Vitali spent what would turn out to be a week with this woman: Dinners after she got out of work, drinks after that, though never in the same bar — a precaution that he disguised as a desire to experience every flavor her beautiful city had to offer. Each night ended with the two of them returning to his downtown hotel room, where he secretly videotaped their raucous lovemaking with a high-definition surveillance camera he’d hidden in the room shortly after checking in.