Altar of Bones (48 page)

A rusty washing machine lay on the sidewalk, its guts spilling out, and they had to walk out into the street to get around it. A block later they had to go around a refrigerator.

“Why do they just throw their stuff out in the street like that?” Zoe whispered.

“They drop them out of the windows onto the heads of the firemen and paramedics.”

Zoe now wished she hadn’t asked. She lowered her head even more and tried to keep from breaking into a run.

They passed a burnt-out school, then ducked down the basement steps of a government housing project. The door at the bottom of the steps opened in front of them, as if by magic, just long enough for them to slip quickly through. Then it swung shut with a loud snap of a lock, and Zoe jumped.

They found themselves in one large room, half the size of a basketball court. On one side was an array of computers, printers, and hologram and embossing machines. On the other side were tables strewn with wigs, fake beards and mustaches, tubes of skin dye, palettes of paints, and pots of glue. And underneath the tables, on the floor, bin after bin of prosthetic noses, chins, ears.

A tall, bearded man, who was sitting at a computer table, spoke to them without turning around. “This morning I am eating my muesli and watching your face all over CNN, and I think to myself, ‘Kareem, you are a fool. You should be charging him double.’ “

“You do and I’ll tell your mother,” Ry shot back. “She always did say you’d come to a bad end.”

A tiny, ageless woman in a beautiful, flowing blue hijab came up to
Zoe and took her hand. “Come. My name is Fatama. While the men drink tea and see which one has the smarter mouth, I will make you a new face.”

F
IVE HOURS LATER
, Zoe was in the Charles de Gaulle Airport, staring at the metal pole barrier that isolated the passport control booths from the departure area. You had pass through them first, before you could take yourself and your bags through security, and the lines were long, snaking into the seating area.

Okay, you can do this, Zoe
, she told herself.
You’ve got your ticket and your boarding pass in your hot little hand, so all you got to do is make it through security. You’re going to walk up there and get in line, and smile at the man when he asks to see your passport, like you haven’t got a care in the world
.

She joined the tail end of the nearest line just as her face popped up on the TV set that hung suspended from the ceiling above the lounge chairs. She couldn’t read the French that was scrolling across the screen, except for that one horrible word.
Terroristes
.

Zoe ducked her head and turned away, as if the TV set itself might suddenly spot her and start blaring an alarm.

You can do this, Zoe. You can do this
. …

But her feet seemed to have other ideas. Her feet left the passport control line and headed for a door sporting the ubiquitous blue silhouette of a woman in an A-line dress.

She stopped as the restroom door swung shut behind her and drew in a deep breath, feeling such an onrush of fear and despair it nearly drove her to her knees. How was she ever going to get out of this mess? The whole world thought she was a terrorist, but she didn’t know what exactly they thought she had done. What the charges would be, or what chance she would have to prove her innocence.

But then, innocence or guilt, what did it matter? They would kill her long before she got to trial.

You can do this
. She
would
do it. Her feet would go back out there and get in that line because she had to. Getting on the plane was her only option now.

She went to one of the sinks, turned on the tap, and splashed cold water on her face. She looked up and froze, startled by the stranger’s face she saw in the mirror. A girl with short, spiked black hair dyed purple at the ends. Sallow skin and dark eyes the color of bruises. A ring piercing one eyebrow, a stud in her nose.

S
HE WASN’T SURE
how long she stood there, staring into the mirror. Her mind seemed to just drift away for a while. But then a loudspeaker high in the wall crackled something in French, snapping her back into the moment.

She tore her gaze off the punk-rocker girl in the mirror and shut off the tap. She dried her hands on her jeans because those blower machines were useless and headed for the door.

She was going to do this. She’d get through security and then she’d be home free. For a while, at least.

The lines were much shorter at the passport control stations now, only three people deep. Zoe hadn’t seen Ry since they’d caught separate cabs to the airport, and had that ride ever been the loneliest hour of her life. But there he was, putting his carry-on onto the X-ray machine’s conveyor belt. Fatama had put him in a salt-and-pepper wig and beard, and an old man’s potbelly. He shuffled along, stoop-shouldered and looking crotchety, and it made her smile.

Then the smile froze on her face.

Four men of the French Sûreté Nationale were coming down the corridor. They carried submachine guns and scanned the crowd with narrowed, intense eyes. One of them had a piece of paper imprinted with the photographs of a man and a woman in his hand, and he was comparing it to the faces of those he passed. Zoe wondered if it was possible to faint from fear.

How can they recognize me? I’ve got purple hair and a gold stud in my nose
.

Only one person was ahead of her in line now, a man wearing a maroon sweat outfit and with long, slicked-back hair that looked as if it hadn’t been washed since Christmas. The man in the booth had already
given him his ticket and passport back, but maroon guy lingered, babbling in French about God knew what.

Come on. Come on …

Zoe looked over her shoulder. The cops had turned off the corridor and were coming right at her now, walking fast, one of them talking excitedly into his shoulder radio.

Maroon guy laughed, said something more, and slapped his passport against his palm. Then at last, at last, he picked up his carry-on and started to walk away. Zoe stepped up and handed her airline ticket and passport to the man in the booth. She was Marjorie Ridgeway, from Brighton, England. What if he asked her a question, though? Could she fake a British accent? Her hair in the passport photo was short and black, but it wasn’t purple on the ends. Fatama had said that would be too much; it would raise a red flag. Nobody ever looked exactly like his or her passport photo.

The man in the booth opened her passport, looked at her photograph, looked at her, looked at her photograph. Behind her, Zoe heard the crackle of excited chatter on the cop’s radio.

The man in the booth was looking at her ticket now. Round-trip to Budapest and back on Malév airlines, leaving at 1850 from Gate 15. She’d bought a round-trip because one-ways also raised red flags.

What was taking him so long? Oh, God, now he was looking at her passport again.

She heard a shout and the thud of running booted feet behind her. She whirled, stricken nearly deaf and blind with fear. The cops were coming right at her, and she started to raise her hands in surrender because she didn’t want them to shoot.

Then they were running past her, through the throng around the security machines, and out a door that led down to the tarmac.

She heard someone say,
“Mademoiselle?”

She looked around to see the man in the booth, holding out her passport and ticket. “Have a pleasant flight,” he said, and smiled.

Z
OE SANK DOWN
into her seat, still shaking inside, sure she’d sweated off five pounds in the last five minutes. But she’d made it onto the plane, and Ry, too—she’d spotted him seven rows down, while she was stowing her satchel under the seatback in front of her.

She drew in a deep breath and looked out the window. The lights from the ground-control vehicles shone in red, white, and blue streamers on the wet tarmac. America. Home. She wanted to be back in San Francisco, curled up on the sofa in her loft with Barney and Bitsy purring away beside her, taking turns rolling onto their backs so she could give their bellies a rub.

She felt a presence beside her, heard a woman’s voice, and she twisted around fast, nearly coming up out of her seat.

But it was only the flight attendant, who smiled and said, “I asked if you would like a magazine. I’ve only the one left in English.
Vanity Fair
.”

Zoe took the magazine, more to be polite than anything else. What she really wanted was a drink. Straight vodka, easy on the ice, thank you very much.

She started to slip the magazine into the seat pocket in front of her, then her eyes fell on the face of the man on the cover, and she nearly gasped out loud.

She couldn’t believe it, it simply couldn’t be, but it was.

It was the third man in the film, the one in the railroad uniform, the one who’d taken the rifle from Ry’s dad, broken it down, put it in a toolbox, and then walked away with it, into the sunset. The flaring eyebrows, the pronounced widow’s peak that pointed like an arrow to the hooked beak of a nose, the full lips that looked too Angelina Jolie for a man. He was much older now, nearly fifty years older, but it was still him.

The man who had helped to kill President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Zoe spread the magazine out on her lap with shaking hands. She read the subhead, and this time she did gasp out loud.

MILES TAYLOR, AMERICA’S KINGMAKER.

New York City

M
ILES TAYLOR
picked up the steaming coffee his secretary had deposited by his elbow and took a sip, his mouth puckering. It was just the way he liked it, black and thick as tar pitch. He winced as he levered himself out of his favorite tufted brown leather wing chair and limped to the library window, bringing the coffee with him.

He looked down on Central Park and a grove of gray, withered birches. He spotted only one hardy jogger out on the path that wove through the trees. The street directly below him, though, was bustling with yellow cabs and scurrying pedestrians. The morning’s snowfall had already turned to a sooty slush, and gray, saggy clouds hung low over the rooftops.