SHE LANDED flat on her back on a cement floor, her blood hammering in her ears.
She heard Ry coming down after her—it sounded as if someone were beating a tin can to death. She scrambled out of the way just before he exploded out of the chute. He landed and rolled up onto his feet in one smooth movement.
“You okay?” He helped her to her feet. He gave her back her satchel, then brushed her cheek with the backs of his knuckles. “You did great.”
Zoe was humming, her adrenaline shooting through the roof. “I did it, Ry. I was so scared coming down that thing, I thought was gonna pass out, but I made it. And we were like the A-Team, the way we took them down. I had that bitch Yasmine Poole nailed, too.”
“Zoe, we need to—”
“And I’ve still got the film, Ry—the can was empty. I thought I could fool them and create a diversion at the same time.”
“I figured as much. Now—”
“Not that I wouldn’t have given it up if I had to, to save your life. But I don’t get it, why didn’t you let me shoot her? I wasn’t going to kill her, just make her bleed a lot, so you should’ve let me do it, Ry.”
“We’ll get her, don’t worry about it. But right now—”
“Because you know she’s gonna come after us, and if I never see the woman again in this life and in every reincarnation thereafter, it’ll still be too—”
He clapped his hand over her mouth. His palm was hard and dry. Her heart was still pumping madly, and she was bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet. She realized suddenly that she could hear boots pounding on the stairs, shouts and whistles, the crackle of radios. Blue and red lights strobed though a narrow window set high in the basement’s wall.
She breathed hard through her nose, then her eyes slowly focused on Ry’s face. He lifted his hand.
She breathed, swallowed. “We’re still in big trouble, aren’t we?”
“Yeah. Take another breath. Good, you’re coming down a bit.”
Zoe took another breath and looked around. The basement was small, barely room enough for a deep sink and a row of three chipped and dented coin-operated washing machines.
She saw that Ry had found the door that led out onto the street. It was up a narrow half-flight of stairs, made of a thick gray metal, and dead-bolted from the inside. Ry slid back the bolt and eased the door open a crack. He looked out for a moment, then quietly shut it.
“It opens into another stairwell, six steps, leading up to a dead-end alley,” he said, heading back to her. “They’re working on the gas main, or something, out in the street right in front of the building, and that’s kept the squad cars from parking close. But we can’t just stroll on out because there are two cops within sight of the door, armed with MAT-49 submachine guns.”
“Wonderful. So how do we get out of here?”
“We need a diversion to distract the cops away from the alley. Something involving noise and smoke and flames would be nice.”
Zoe looked around the basement again, but besides the ancient washing machines and the sink, all she saw were enough cobwebs to weave a small tapestry. “Well, unless they’re arachnophobics, I don’t see anything down here that could create much of a distraction.”
Ry was bent over, rummaging through the detergents and cleansers under the sink. “Hey, we just got lucky, Zoe. They got Drano. We can make us a bomb.”
“You can make a bomb out of Drano?”
“Mixed with chlorine bleach and ammonia. It creates hydrogen gas. Nothing big or deadly—it’s all smoke—but it’ll get their attention.” He set the bleach, ammonia, and can of crystal Drano on top one of the washers. “Look through that trash can over there for a liter-sized glass or plastic container. A Coke bottle would be perfect, but make sure it has a cap.”
Zoe could hear more sirens turn up the street outside as she pawed through empty detergent boxes, take-out containers, spray starch—
“How about an Evian bottle?”
“That’ll do.”
A door slammed above their heads, so hard the whole building vibrated. Heavy boots pounded down the inner stairwell, only two or three flights above them now. “Ry, they’re coming!”
“We’ll make it. They’ll want to search the main floor first.” He went back under the sink again and came out with a rusty wrench.
“Okay,” he said, handing her the wrench. “Here’s how it’s going to work. As soon as I add the Drano to the bottle and cap it, we’ll have about fifteen seconds before it explodes. I want you to throw this wrench through the window and yell for help—‘Aidez-moi! Aidez-moi.’ Wait for me to throw the bomb before you go out the door, though, and let me go first in case there’s shooting, okay?”
Zoe nodded, even though her knees had gone wobbly.
She watched Ry pour the bleach and ammonia into the Evian bottle, spilling some because he didn’t have a funnel. Then he poured in the Drano crystals and capped the bottle fast.
“Hit the window now,” he said to Zoe, just as a man out in the street yelled, “Arrêtez!” and a woman screamed.
Zoe pulled her arm back and flung the wrench at the window, suddenly terrified that she would miss.
The wrench crashed through the glass. Zoe shrieked, “Aidez-moi! Aidez-moi!” at the top of her lungs, and ran for the door. Out the corner of her eye she saw Ry toss the Drano bomb out the shattered window, then he ran past her and up the steps. He slapped open the dead bolt and slammed through the door, Zoe on his heels.
They were up the outer stairwell and into the alley when a terrible explosion ripped the air.
ZOE FELT THE building’s stone walls shudder on their foundations. Windows rattled and shattered, shouts and screams rent the air.
The street was chaos. A water main had broken, blowing off a manhole cover, and water geysered into the air. Bricks and cobblestones littered the sidewalks, and where they’d been working on the gas main there was now a giant hole in the street.
They started to go right, saw a squad of riot police and their parked cruisers at the corner, so they veered left. They ran by a cop who was barking into his radio, but by now everybody was running so they didn’t stand out.
They dodged around a taxi that had jumped the sidewalk and plowed into a wine shop. Wine from dozens of broken bottles ran like rivulets of blood along the gutter. Zoe saw an old man with a loaf of bread tucked under one armpit try to scoop some up with his beret.
Ry grabbed Zoe’s arm and pulled her toward a lamppost, where a red motorcycle was parked with LUIGI’S PIZZERIA emblazoned across its fuel-tank cover. The delivery boy was nowhere in sight, but he’d left the bike’s engine running.
Ry jumped on, kicked up the stand, and peeled away, so fast Zoe barely managed to swing up behind him, straddling saddlebags that were stuffed full with boxes of hot pizzas. As she looked back as they careened around the corner and through the downpour of Parisian tap water, she caught sight of the fiery red of Yasmine Poole’s designer suit.
ZOE WRAPPED HER arms around Ry’s waist and yelled into his ear, “You said nothing big or deadly!”
He was actually crazy enough to laugh. “The Drano bomb must’ve rolled down into the gas main, and there must’ve been an open flame down there. It lit the hydrogen gas, and boom.”
They tore across the river and up the Left Bank, weaving in and out through traffic that seemed to have no concept of lanes or turn signals or even, occasionally, the laws of gravity.
She wanted to ask him where they were going, but it was impossible with the noise. So she looked at the Paris scenery whizzing by and tried not to think about her not wearing a helmet.
Dusk was falling, the streetlamps coming on, the booksellers along the quays packing up their stands. The damp February cold cut through her leather jacket, chilling her to the bone. Across the river she could see a landmark she recognized—the Louvre, and the point of I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid thrusting through the skeletal trees. A tourist boat floated by, shining a spotlight on the
cream, cut stone walls and gray mansard roofs. As they idled at a red light, sandwiched between a diesel-belching bus and a beer truck, Zoe twisted around for another look at the famous museum and saw a flash of red sitting behind the wheel of a silver BWM, a half a long block behind them.
No, it can’t be.
The Beamer suddenly swerved up onto the sidewalk, shooting around the bumper-to-bumper traffic, squeezing between cars and a mammoth granite building, scattering pedestrians like bowling pins. Its side-view mirror scraped sparks from stone as it bore down on them.
Zoe jabbed Ry in his side with her elbow and bellowed, “Gun it!” in his ear, but his head was already snapping around to see what the commotion was about. The Beamer squealed to a stop, blocked for the moment by a moving van parked in a driveway, but it was close enough now for Zoe to see easily through its window. It was Yasmine Poole, all right, and she looked pissed. She also looked as wet as a sewer rat, and Zoe would’ve smiled if she hadn’t been so scared.
The backseat window rolled down and a hand emerged, holding a semiautomatic. The long, gray muzzle slowly swung around until she was looking right down the bore, big and black as the mouth of hell.
“Gun!” she screamed.
“Gun it where?” Ry shouted back at her. “I got a goddamn red light—”
“A gun. Pointing right at—”
A bullet buzzed past Zoe’s ear and pinged into the body of the bus alongside of them. The next one plowed into the bulging saddlebags, killing Luigi’s pizzas.
Then the light changed and Ry finally gunned it. The motorcycle, small-framed and light, shot forward with such force it leaped off the pavement, and for a few terrifying seconds Zoe was stretched out parallel to the street and only her one-handed grip on Ry’s belt saved her from falling. Even so, her head almost smacked into one of the bus’s giant front tires, coming so close some of her hair got caught up in the fender guard and was pulled out by the roots.
Then another bullet plowed a groove in the asphalt right before her terrified eyes.
She barely managed to haul herself back upright before Ry cut sharply across the front of the bus and a taxi, then jerked the handlebars so hard to the right that their back tire fishtailed, and Zoe nearly went flying again. They jumped the curb up onto the sidewalk, barely dodged a quayside stand loaded with stamps and postcards, then dropped down onto an arched bridge and headed for the other side of the river.
Zoe glanced back over her shoulder in time to the see the silver Beamer U-turn across four lanes. Tires screeched, horns blared, and there was the clanging crunch of metal slamming against metal, but miraculously the BMW emerged unscathed and hot on their tail.
Where were the damn traffic cops? Zoe wondered, then an instant later heard the whoop of a siren.
They hit a green light at the end of the bridge, and for a moment Zoe thought Ry was going to turn up into the three lanes of one-way traffic, but he jumped another sidewalk instead, threading through a row of bollards and cutting into a park.
The pebbled pathway was crowded with people out taking their evening constitutional, but Ry barely slowed down as he plowed through them, leaving a wake of screams and curses and shaking fists, but, thankfully, no dead bodies.
Zoe heard lots of sirens now and saw whirling blue lights, but given the number of traffic laws they’d broken, she wasn’t so sure she wanted the cops anymore.
They flew past rows of plane trees, rosewood hedges, and geometric flowerbeds. They careened around a colonnaded fountain, where a boy was trying to sail his toy boat through a pool choked with miniature icebergs, then shot out of the park and into the biggest square Zoe had ever seen in her life. Or rather it was an octagon, with an enormous Egyptian obelisk in the center of it.
Eight streets spoked in and out of the square, and they were all jam-packed with rush-hour traffic. Cars, buses, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, all whirled in seemingly haphazard abandon and dizzying speeds. Ry cut in and out, like a skier slaloming down a mountain, ignoring stoplights and traffic cops—doing things that would have gotten him shot on a L.A. freeway.
Zoe searched through the kaleidoscope of swirling headlights for a silver Beamer and a flash of red hair. We’ve lost them, she told herself, and wished she could believe it.
A quarter way around the enormous square, Ry peeled off, taking one of the wider spokes. They were still moving along at a pretty good clip, but he’d stopped breaking all the laws in the good-driver’s manual. It was a miracle they hadn’t been jumped on by every traffic cop in Paris by now.
The street they were on pulsed with neon-lit nightclubs, shops, and cafés. Ry rolled the motorcycle to a stop at a red light. Ahead of them was a square with a church built to look like a Greek temple. It was half-covered with scaffolding, but its doors were open and a man in a business suit sat on its marble steps in spite of the cold, eating a McDonald’s burger and reading a newspaper.
Suddenly a cacophony of car horns blared into life behind them. Zoe twisted around and saw the silver BWM whip out from behind a Japanese tourist bus. The blue-hooded guy with his semiautomatic was leaning far out of the backseat window, making sure that this time he wouldn’t miss.
“They’re back!” Zoe screamed.
27
RY JUMPED the light, scooting between a truck loaded with terracotta bricks and a yellow Mini Cooper. Brakes squealed behind them, horns shrieked, but Zoe’s horrified eyes were riveted on the bakery van, double-parked and blocking the street ahead of them.
Two men walked toward the van’s open rear doors, carrying a seven-tiered wedding cake between them, their eyes wide at the sight of the pizza cycle hurtling toward them. They stopped short, and the cake swayed dangerously. They sidled two steps backward; the cake swayed even more.
Ry started to pull around them, into the oncoming lane of traffic, but that way was blocked by yet another smoke-belching tourist bus. So he throttled back and aimed right, for the impossibly skinny space between the bakery van and the row of cars parked along the curb. A space that was now filled by the bakers and their cake.
A gun popped behind them, sounding close and loud, like a string of firecrackers going off, and the window of a parked Fiat exploded in a shower of glass.
The bakery men dropped the wedding cake and ran, and Ry plowed right through it. Silver and white frosting sprayed up in sticky globs, splattering their faces. They shot past the van, knocking its side-view mirror askew, and out into the square.
An outdoor flower market, lit up by strings of white twinkling lights, lined the church’s east colonnade. They ducked under a low-hanging orange canopy, and Zoe looked back. Lots of flashing blue police lights, but no big silver BMW, no hooded men with guns.
They rounded the back end of the church and nearly slammed headfirst into the Beamer.
Ry swerved, and they went into a violent, fishtailing U-turn, clipping a cart full of cellophane-wrapped bouquets and snagging a watering can when its spout got caught up in the bike’s spokes. They dragged it behind them, trailing sparks, and it acted as a brake, slowing them down. But then it fell off, and the bike surged with a roar of released speed—aiming right for a shop with a plate-glass window full of fancy chocolates and bonbons.
At the last second Ry jerked the handgrip hard, and the bike popped up over the sidewalk, through an arched art deco doorway, and into a shopping arcade. Hanging globe lanterns, café tables, and startled faces whipped past them in a blur, then they burst back out through another arched doorway and into a narrow, one-way street zipping with traffic.
NO SIGN OF the silver BMW, and Zoe started to breathe again. But then, incredibly, she saw it—the Beamer, barreling out of the side street ahead of them.
It sent a taxi swerving into a light pole, and within seconds the narrow street was a chaos of locked bumpers, blaring horns, and screaming bystanders. Ry gunned the cycle’s engine and aimed for the narrow gap between the Beamer’s front bumper and a green kiosk plastered with posters.
&nb
sp; But the gap was closing fast, too fast. Only five feet wide, and they weren’t going to make it. The Beamer’s headlights flooded the kiosk. The gap narrowed some more, only four feet wide now. Zoe gripped Ry hard around the waist, felt the sweat and tension of him through his clothes.
Three feet.
Two and a half.
They shot through what was left of the gap, shaving it too close. The Beamer slammed into the kiosk. Metal crunched, glass shattered, someone screamed, and a car alarm started shrieking.
They turned the corner at a skid, taking out a newspaper stand, and barreled right into the oncoming flow of traffic, going so fast the little motorcycle whipped back and forth like a snake.
The street ended in another open square, this one full of buses and taxicabs and a massive stone railway station straight out of the gaslight era. Ry cut through the snarl, ignoring traffic signs and crosswalks, hurtling down the length of the station until they could see the peeked-roofed platforms. And then at least a dozen set of tracks, crisscrossing a wide and open expanse that was latticed with electrical wires and littered with switch boxes and signal poles.
Ry twisted his head around, and she saw his mouth open. She couldn’t hear him over the noise, but she thought he yelled, “Hold on!”
Zoe held on. Although if she’d known what he was going to do, she might have jumped off instead and taken her chances with the bad guys and the French cops, whose sirens she could now hear again, closing in behind them.
They bounded up onto the sidewalk and went flying up and out, through the air, out, out, out, and Zoe screamed, sailing over a skein of wires that looked hot enough to fry an elephant.
They hit the ground so hard she felt as if her teeth had been driven through the top of her head, and something fell off the back of the bike with a loud clang. But by some miracle the tires didn’t blow.
Ry poured power into the sputtering engine, and they bounced and lurched over the web of rails and crossties, tires grinding, spewing gravel. Zoe looked toward the platforms and saw a bright, white headlight burst out of one of the dark tunnels.
Altar of Bones Page 21
