The Betrayer Read Online Free PDF

FBI
agent. A celebrated agent, once. His grandfather had faced death on
D-day, and so had his great-grandfather, in the trenches of France during the
First World War. And Johnny had been eager to face it, couldn’t wait to join
the army and follow in the Coyle tradition of bravery and service.
    But that was
Johnny. Of the two of them, he was the strong one; he was the athlete, the
champion, the one destined for greatness. He wouldn’t be afraid, Jeremy
thought. He knew no fear. He wouldn’t hesitate for a second.
    But he wasn’t Johnny.
    The concept of
death scared him, but out of that fear came a degree of clarity. He knew that he
needed a backup plan of some kind. Too much was at stake. He couldn’t leave a
note and risk that the wrong person might find it. Someone had betrayed his
father, someone close to the man, and if this went bad, if all his careful
planning fell to shit, then events might actually lead Cat to the very person
Jeremy most suspected.
    The last man to
have spoken with their father on that terrible night three years ago.
    The one man
there would be little hope of any of them ever getting to.
    It took Jeremy
a moment, but then he thought of something that he could do. How he could leave
crucial information behind in such a way that only Cat would find it.
    It was an old
game he and his sister had played in their childhood. Something their father
had taught them to do.
    He opened a
nearby drawer and removed a notepad and pencil, then sat down at the table and
wrote a quick note. Just three things. Only three things — it was all he
dared to risk. Anyway, Cat would know what they meant. He had faith in her. And
she was the one who’d had faith in him the longest. She was the last in their
now-fractured family to give up on him, having held on to hope for him long
past the others.
    He pressed down
hard on the page with each stroke, and when he was done writing, he removed the
page and left the blank notepad on the empty table.
    Right there, in
plain sight.
    Folding and
pocketing the page on which he had written his note, he returned the pencil to
the drawer, then put on his vintage leather jacket and headed for the door, shouldering
the backpack as he exited.
    He was halfway
down the outside hallway when he found himself slowing to a stop and pausing
yet again.
    He thought once
again about waiting, being here when Elizabeth showed up. He thought of her perfume
and the smell of her hair. Even just the memory of that was enough to cause a
tugging in his gut. He loved her deeply, though he’d never told her that, never
said it aloud, not in those exact words. He loved her for her kindness and the ease
with which she had come to care for him. A motherly kind of care — yes, he knew
that, saw all that, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t try to fix him the way
others had. She didn’t tell him — well, not till a moment ago — that he shouldn’t
feel what he was feeling. She had simply listened, always listened.
    But if he
stayed now, and if she stayed the night, the root of his torment would still be
there when she walked out his door in the morning. He knew this. It would
always be there, driving him during his waking hours, haunting him in his
dreams as he slept.
    His father was
dead because of him. There was no doubt about that. He was the reason a team of
thugs had been able to draw the man out. He was the reason they had been able
to abduct his father and bring him to an enemy who wanted him dead, who killed
him and disposed of his body in a brutal way.
    But it wasn’t
just that he was the cause of his father’s death that he was unable to endure. It
was the man’s posthumous disgrace, the accusations — false accusations, Jeremy
knew — that his father had been corrupt, that instead of risking his life in a
series of undercover operations against organized crime, he had actually been
working for the men he claimed to have infiltrated, providing them with
information in exchange for