Zoe wrapped her hand around his wrist. She didn’t try to pull him loose, just gently held his wrist. “Ry, let go.”
He let go, but only so that he could reach down inside the car. He searched through the pockets of Yasmine Poole’s bloodied maroon suede jacket and found her cell, an iPhone.
He straightened and backed up a couple of steps. He scanned through the phone’s history and saw that she’d called only one number during the last couple of days. He clicked on it, pressed send. The line, cell phone, whatever it was at the other end, rang just once before it was picked up.
“Yasmine?”
A deep male voice. Tough, but also anxious, and something else in there, too. Something sexual, maybe, but more than that. Tender?
“She’s dead,” Ry said. “So fuck you, Taylor. We’re bringing you down.”
Ry punched off and pulled back his arm to hurl the phone down into the river, then stopped himself.
He went around to the front of the car, pointed the phone at Yasmine Poole’s impaled and bloodied body and snapped a picture. He found the e-mail address that went with the number he’d just called and sent the son of a bitch a little present.
Ry felt something touch his back. He whirled, his fist balled up around the cell phone, his arm half-cocked, ready to slam it into some-body’s head, and he looked down into Zoe’s face.
She was pale, her eyes dark with worry. “Ry? What are you doing?”
He drew in a deep breath, then another. The redness was starting to fade a little from the edges of his vision. “Miles Taylor. I heard something just now in the way he said her name. He cared for her. He—” Ry cut himself off, drew in another deep breath. “I’m okay. I’m going to be okay.”
A smudge of dirt was on her cheek and he reached up to brush it off with his thumb, only he made it worse, because now there was blood on her cheek, blood all over …
“When I … Back in Galveston, in the church, you could still see Dom’s blood. It was all over, and there was a chalk outline on the floor, where his body had fallen.” Ry swallowed, closed his eyes, but he saw blood. Blood everywhere.
“I want that bastard to know how it feels, Zoe. I want him to hurt.”
Ry realized he was still touching her and started to let his hand fall, but she wrapped her fingers around his wrist and held his hand against her cheek. Then she turned her head just a little, until the ends of his fingers were on her lips, and she kissed them softly.
“He will, Ry. He will.”
BACK AT THE car, he said, “I can drive. You’re probably exhausted, and my eyes are fine now.”
She searched his face as she gave him the keys, but he was back off the ledge now, not so crazy anymore. Or at least no more crazy than usual. “I’m okay,” he said. “Really.”
She stared at him a moment longer, then she smiled and said, “I know.” He felt that smile, felt the force of it, like a hot, wet gust blowing through him.
HE PUSHED THE driver’s seat back, buckled up, adjusted the rearview mirror. He turned on some air. Going through the motions, doing normal things, like a couple of tourists on a little day trip. A quiet, scenic drive along the Danube Bend.
“It’s weird,” Zoe said, as if she’d been reading his thoughts. “I was fine during the middle of that wild chase, driving the car. I was in some kind of zone, not thinking or feeling, just doing. But now I can’t seem to get my left leg to stop shaking.”
She was rubbing her hand up and down her thigh, and Ry could see the tremor in her quad. “It’s the adrenaline,” he said. “Five minutes from now you’re going to want to topple over.”
She laughed, or rather tried to. It came out as more of a squeak. “Can’t, O’Malley. No time. We got places to go, people to see, things to do…. What exactly are we going to do?”
Ry tried to think, couldn’t, so he started up the car and pulled back out onto the road. “I haven’t a clue.”
They drove for a couple of miles in silence, then she shocked the hell out of him by saying, “I think we should go to St. Petersburg.”
The funny thing was, he’d been coming around to the same conclusion. Reluctantly, though, because it was a risk. A big one. “Popov’s son is in St. Petersburg.”
She nodded slowly. “And that’s why we got to go there and settle this. He had my grandmother killed for the altar of bones, and when that didn’t work, he sent the ponytailed man after me. He would’ve got me, too, if you hadn’t come back just in time, but that was luck, pure and simple, and we can’t count on always being lucky. He’s going to keep sending his thugs after me until he gets what he wants. I know guys like him—hell, my whole family’s made up of guys like him.”
“So what are you saying? We give him the icon and the riddle, say this is all we got, so good luck with it, bozo, and wash our hands of it?”
“Not on your life.”
He glanced over at her. She had her chin up in the air and a hard look in her eyes, and he couldn’t help grinning at her. But he said, “Okay, so say we find a way to get to Popov, or we deliberately let him get to us, and then we see what shakes out. But it’s going to be really dangerous, Zoe. The best we can hope for is that we come up with a plan where we control most of the variables, but no way are we going to be able to anticipate everything. And as someone once said, it’s the unknown unknowns that end up getting you killed.”
She flashed a cocky grin back at him. “Hey, how about a little confidence here, O’Malley. So far we’ve got America’s Kingmaker and a Russian mafia boss after our asses, and we’ve managed to get ourselves branded as international terrorists. I say we’re on a roll.”
IT FELT GOOD now that they had a plan, even if it was a half-baked, crazy plan, but Ry wasn’t ready to stop and turn the car around just yet.
It was less than three days since he’d fished her out of the Seine—okay, she’d gotten herself out, but that was only a minor quibble. Three days, and for nearly every minute of it they’d been on the run for their lives. But now, for these few moments at least, the road ahead was empty of enemies.
He looked over at her. She still had that cocky tilt to her chin, but this time he didn’t smile. He felt tight all over, in his chest and throat, so that for a moment he couldn’t breathe. She was so damn tough and strong and smart, and he didn’t know why, but those very things about her made him want to go out and slay dragons for her. Maybe just to show her that he could do it, that he was worthy of her, and wasn’t that a thought?
A strand of hair had come loose from her clip. He reached over and tucked it back behind her ear, just to be touching her. “What are you thinking about?”
“The bone juice,” she said. “I like that name you gave it. It fits…. How much of it do you think was real? That story the professor told us.”
“I think the part about Nikolai Popov and the Fontanka 16 dossier was true. It’s how he learned about the altar of bones in the first place. And we know the icon’s real, so it’s possible there’s an altar made out of human bones in a cave somewhere up in Siberia. The rest, though, is just a myth, something an ancient people who lived a harsh life in a harsh land made up around the campfire one night, because it’s hard to face the thought that from the moment we are born, we’re already dying.”
“I guess,” she said, not sounding convinced.
“I’m beginning to wonder, though, if the KGB actually sanctioned the assassination, or if it was something Nikolai Popov pulled off all on his own. Think of who was involved: Popov and his two agents, who were both Americans. And Lee Harvey Oswald, their patsy, also an American.”
“Uh-huh,” Zoe said, but Ry didn’t think she’d taken in much of what he’d just said. Her head was still in that cave in Siberia.
She said, “Does anyone know today exactly how Ivan the Terrible died?”
“Back in the sixties, when they were restoring the place where he was buried, they exhumed his body and did an autopsy. He died of mercury poisoning.”
�
�So he didn’t die of natural causes. He was murdered, like Rasputin was murdered, and look how hard it was to do even that. I remember reading about it in a history class, how they tried everything to get rid him—cyanide, bullets, bashing him over the head, and finally dumping him in an icy river. It’s one of history’s great mysteries: Why he was so hard to kill? So what if the altar can make you immortal, Ry, in the sense that the only way you can die is if someone kills you, or you’re in an airplane crash, or you get hit by a truck?”
Ry thrust his fingers through his hair. “You can prove anything if you never have to validate your starting assumptions. Okay, so a long time ago some witch doctor gets murdered and his body’s buried in a cave. And by some wild coincidence when they stick him in the ground, a spring wells up, and then someone builds an altar out of human bones on top of it because, oh, hell, I don’t know … maybe because bones were the only thing she had handy. But just because the altar and the spring exist, that suddenly doesn’t make it into some kind of fountain of youth.”
“But the riddles, the icon, all those generations of Keepers … Why would they do all that to protect a secret that isn’t real?”
“It never had to be real, Zoe. They just needed to believe that it was.”
SHE GREW QUIET after that, and Ry thought she’d fallen asleep.
But then she said, “Rasputin told the Okhrana spy that he saw the Lady icon sitting on top of an altar made of human bones inside a cave in Siberia. He also said he brought some of the bone juice out of the cave with him in a vial, that he was giving it to the sick boy, keeping him alive with it.”
“Or,” Ry said, “he could have just had a talent for using the power of positive suggestion. He was never able to actually cure Alexei’s hemophilia for good, just bring him relief from the symptoms.”
She waved a hand. “Whatever he did, it helped, so work with me a little here, okay, O’Malley? My grandmother gave Marilyn Monroe a green glass amulet in the shape of human skull and she called it the altar of bones. My great-grandmother Lena probably brought both the amulet and the icon with her when she escaped from the Norilsk gulag and made her way to Shanghai.”
Ry tried to imagine doing such a thing, and couldn’t. “She must’ve been one hell of woman. Tough and gutsy and smart. Just like her great-granddaughter.”
He saw Zoe’s cheeks flush, and she wouldn’t meet his eyes. He wanted to tell her that he meant it, that he’d never before known a woman like her, and he wanted to know her better, deeper, and keep on knowing her and never stop.
“Anyway, the point I was trying to make wasn’t all that earth-shattering,” she said. “Just that even if we find the amulet, what’s inside of it will have come from the altar, but it won’t be the altar. The altar of bones is in a cave hidden behind a waterfall, on a forgotten lake somewhere near Norilsk.”
“Do you want to go to Siberia now, instead?”
“No, St. Petersburg first. Then Siberia.”
ZOE GREW QUIET again after that, and this time she did sleep. For about fifteen minutes, maybe, then she awoke with a start, her eyes a little wild. Ry saw that her thigh muscle was trembling again.
“You’re okay,” Ry said. “You’re with me in the Beamer, heading God alone knows where.”
“Oh.” She scrubbed her hands over her face, then looked out the passenger-side window at the view far below them, of the Danube snaking around wooded hills and the red-tile roofs of another little village. “Not back to Budapest?” she said, apparently just now noticing which direction they were headed in.
“I suppose we are going to have to stop and turn around eventually.” He let another half a mile click by, then said, “Not to change the subject, but that was a fine bootlegger’s turn you did back there. Nobody can pull off that kind of fancy driving on instinct. You gotta be taught it, and you need practice.”
She didn’t say anything. In some ways she was the most open person he’d ever met. But he also sensed hidden places in her, like folds in the heart, where she hoarded her thoughts and feelings, and Ry got that. He wasn’t all that good either at opening up the secret parts of himself.
She turned her face toward the window and he was about to just let it go when she said, “My father committed suicide the week before the start of my junior year in high school.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
Her throat worked as she swallowed. “Thank you…. Anyway, my mother had already pretty much taken over the actual running of the family business by then, and I don’t need to elaborate what the family business was since you were working for her.”
“Anna Larina isn’t you.”
“Yeah? Nature or nurture. I guess with some families it hardly matters.” Zoe laughed. Ry heard the bitterness and understood it, because for the last year and a half he’d been wondering the same thing. What parts of his father, the traitor, the assassin, did he carry around inside himself?
Probably more than he was ready to admit to right now. He’d joined the Special Forces right out of college, and they’d trained him to kill, just as his father had been taught to kill. Hell, at the time, his brother, Dom, had even accused him of signing up because he was trying “to out-tough the old man.” Later he’d gone to work for the DEA, where he often volunteered for the hairiest undercover work because he got off on the excitement of it, the lying and the spying, the cat-and-mouse games, and he was good at them, too.
Just like his old man.
“By the time I was old enough to understand what was going on,” Zoe was saying, “Daddy was just a figurehead, somebody to give the orders because the vors and captains and other sundry thugs would’ve balked at the thought of taking them directly from a woman.”
Ry said, “They had to know who was the real brains behind the operation, though. I’ve joined a few gangs of one sort or another while undercover, and one of the first things you figure out fast is who’s really calling the shots.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe as long as Anna Larina allowed him to act the part of the pakhan, Daddy could fool himself into thinking he was the pakhan. He’d been molded for that life from practically before he could walk. To be the pakhan—it was what was expected of him, what he expected of himself.”
Zoe went quiet again, thinking, remembering, and Ry let the silence fill the car until she chose to break it.
“He killed himself less than a week after Anna Larina pulled her infamous stunt with the head in the ice-cream tub. I’ve always thought that was why he did it. He knew only a true pakhan would have the toughness to do what she’d done, and he didn’t have that sort of toughness. He knew that and he couldn’t bear it, and so he killed himself.”
She was sitting ramrod stiff in the passenger seat now, eyes straight ahead, chin in the air. She was trying to be so tough herself, Ry thought, and his heart ached for her.
“Anyway,” she said, “Anna Larina crossed a big, bad line killing a top vors of the L.A. family, and Daddy was scared they would come after me in revenge. But I’d gotten this little red Miata for my birthday and I wanted to be out with my friends, go to Stinson Beach, to the Stones-town Mall, but Daddy was fixated on the idea they could get to me when I was in the car. He wanted me to take this course called Driving Techniques for Escape and Evasion, but I just rolled my eyes at him. Because I was sure I was God’s gift and knew everything.”
“You were sixteen.”
She shook her head. “That’s no excuse.”
Maybe, Ry thought. And maybe not. When he was that age, he was sure he knew everything and was invincible in the bargain.
“On the day of his funeral,” she said, “I signed up for that defensive driving course, along with shooting and tae kwan do lessons. I thought it was the one thing I could still do for him even though he was now gone. I could keep myself safe for him.”
A moment went by, then it hit them both at the same time, what she’d just said, and they started laughing and then couldn’t stop.
“Oh,
God. Keep myself safe,” Zoe said, finally winding down. “I’m kind of sucking at that lately, aren’t I?”
Ry turned his head to look at her. Her cheekbones were flushed from laughing, her eyes bright. Her mouth was open and wet. Half her hair had come out of its clip and curled around the side of her neck. Cupping her neck just the way a man’s hand might do, if he had it in his mind to tilt back her head so he could kiss that wet, red mouth—
A bang, loud as a cannon, rocked the car, and the steering wheel jerked in Ry’s hands. He wrestled with it while he looked around wildly, thinking, What the hell now? Then he felt the chassis shimmy and heard the whop-whop of flapping rubber.
He pulled over to the side of the road and got out to take a look. Their left rear tire was in shreds.
“It must’ve taken a round from the Uzi,” he said to Zoe as she got out to join him. “The bullet penetrated just enough to let the air out in a slow leak until it finally blew.”
He laughed, feeling a little high after the big adrenaline rush. “I thought someone had lobbed a bomb at us.”
She was feeling it, too; she was practically thrumming beside him. “You’re telling me.” She blew all the air out of her lungs in a big whoosh and lifted the hair off the back of her neck. “My leg’s doing that twitching thing again, and I—”
He caught the back of her neck with his hand, pulling her face around to his, a little too rough, a little out of control. He kissed her and felt her gasp of surprise in his mouth, a warm, moist breath, and then she melted into him, opened her mouth to him.
They kissed, locked together, turning slowly, swaying. He ground himself against her belly. He was hot and hard for her and he wanted her to know it.
He was going too fast. He tried to gentle his kiss, but then she tangled her fingers in his hair and sucked on his tongue, pulling it deeper into her mouth, making love with their mouths, sucking, tonguing, and he was lost.
Altar of Bones Page 35
