Altar of Bones (49 page)

The whole damn world’s gone gray on me. Gray clouds, gray trees, gray snow.

Yasmine. She should have called from Paris by now, called to tell him the Dmitroff girl had been found and dealt with and the film destroyed. Yet both the cell in his pocket and the telephone that sat on his massive antique partner’s desk stayed ominously silent.

He hated this, hated not having control, hated having to wait for the ring of a telephone.

It’s Nikolai
, he thought.
The bastard’s beat Yasmine to the girl. He’s got the film, and now he’s gonna try to use it. Either he’ll bleed me dry, or he’ll figure out a way to use me. Well, fuck that, because it’s not gonna happen. Not this time
.

He thought back, so many years ago now, to the angry young man
he had once been. And to the Russian who had come into his life and known just what it would take to buy his soul.

T
HE FIRST TIME
he met Nikolai Popov, it was a crisp, sunny December day in 1951.

Miles had gotten a track-and-field scholarship to Boston College out of high school, but he blew out his knee going over the hurdles during his very first meet. So after that, the only way he could manage the tuition was to take just a couple of classes a semester, in between working construction jobs down at the harbor.

It was good times, though. He crashed with five other guys in a run-down Victorian apartment building on the edge of Chestnut Hill and lived off peanut butter and cans of pork ‘n’ beans. Got laid when he could, which wasn’t often because the kind of girl that caught his eye—girls with class and money and pedigrees that went back four generations—they didn’t often put out for schmucks like him.

Miles had this one Jesuit professor, Father Patrick Meaney, who was young and hip and a political activist, and who seemed to take a particular liking to him, claiming Miles was some kind of economic genius and pretending that he cared. One night, after his econ theory class, Father Pat invited Miles back to his place for a brandy, and to continue “our discussion on reflexivity in the marketplace.”

To Miles’s surprise, Father Pat had invited another guest over for a drink that night, too, a Russian he introduced as Nikolai Popov, who was supposed to be some sort of economic adviser attached to the Russian embassy in Washington. Miles figured the guy for a spy right off, though, because weren’t they all spies?

The funny thing was, they did talk about reflexivity in the marketplace that night. At one point, Miles leaned back in his chair, pleased with the argument he’d just made—that the biases of individuals enter into market transactions, potentially changing the fundamentals of the economy—when he realized his professor had left the room and he was alone with the Russian.

“Poor Father Pat,” Nikolai Popov said, as he leaned over to pour
more brandy into Miles’s glass. “He is in bad trouble with his bishop these days. It seems he may be consorting with some members of the Communist Party. Real card-carrying members.”

“Like yourself?” Miles said.

Popov smiled and shrugged. “I foresee a reassignment in his future. To some mission in deepest, darkest Africa, I fear. What is it you Americans say? Better dead than Red?”

Miles waved away the idea with his glass, slopping brandy onto his hand. “Aw, most of that radical stuff he spouts in class—it’s just for show. I doubt he really believes in half of it.”

The Russian raised an amused eyebrow. “You think not? And what do you believe in, young Miles? Or for you, too, is it all just for show?”

“Nothing,” Miles said, as he tried surreptitiously to wipe the brandy off his hand and onto his pant leg. “I don’t believe in anything.”

“Not anything?” Popov pursed his lips and tilted his head, as if he found the younger man quite amusing. It was starting to piss Miles off. “No, I think you believe rather wholeheartedly in money. The power of money.”

“Money can’t buy happiness,” Miles said, not believing a word of it, of course, but then he rarely told people what he really thought.

“Enough of it can buy you anything.”

Miles shrugged, conceding the point.

Popov took a sip of brandy, let the silence build, then said, “We have spoken of Father Pat’s future, but what of yours? Boston College is a fine school, but it is neither Harvard nor Yale. And you will not get a position with a firm such as Wertheim and Company on wishing and hoping alone. You need connections. An in.”

“I know people.”

“Really? And how do you know these people, Miles? From parking their cars for them during summer parties at the Vineyard? From seeing them drop by your father’s Oak Bluffs service station for a tune-up? These same people, who after your father deserted your family, didn’t even think enough of your mother to give her a job cleaning their toilets.”

Miles felt his face burn with shame and he hated the man for being
able to do that to him. “Fuck ‘em, then,” he said, his lips stiff. “I don’t need them.”

“No, what you need is to
be
one of them, and that can never happen. You don’t even exist for them. They drive up to your papa’s service station in the summer, and you fill up the tanks of their big, fancy cars, and they don’t see you. They look at you and give you money for the gas, but they never see you. You could drop dead at their feet, and they wouldn’t give a shit.”

Miles wanted to punch his fist through the guy’s face, but he said and did nothing.

“That is why you stole the Kennedy boy’s car that summer you were twelve,” Popov went on. “You went for a joyride and wrecked it just a little, yes? But he sent a gofer down to the police station to deal with it, he didn’t even press charges, and that rankled, didn’t it, Miles? It rankles to this day. Because you took that car to make all of them see you, to prove you mattered, and yet …” Popov snapped his fingers. “
That
is how little you mattered.”

Miles’s mouth stretched into a travesty of a smile. “Who gives a fuck what happened when I was twelve? Someday I’m going to be richer than the Kennedys, richer than any of those arrogant assholes can hope to dream of.”

Popov smiled that damn smile again. “And how will you accomplish that? You have a little over twenty-four thousand in the bank, which has come from playing the market—quite ingeniously I might add—with the few dollars you’ve managed to scrape together. But in the world you wish to enter, twenty-four thousand is pissing money.”

“How do you know all this stuff? Just who in the hell are you?”

“Don’t ask stupid questions. You know I do more for my embassy than advise them on which way the capitalist winds will blow when the markets open tomorrow…. As I was saying, you are about to embark on your career with a degree and twenty-four thousand dollars to your name. Not bad for a boy like you, who comes from nothing. But it is peanuts and you know it is peanuts. You know the only way to make real money is to have real money to begin with, like the Du Ponts have, and the Rockefellers and the Gettys.”

“Okay,” Miles said after a moment. “Why don’t we cut through all the bullcrap, Mr. Popov? What are you willing to give me, and what do I have to do to get it?”

W
HAT ARE YOU
willing to give me …

What Nikolai Popov had given him was the seed money, and the kind of insider trading, that he needed to play the markets in ways that really counted for something. Popov also gave Miles a mission: to search out and develop ties within the policy-making circles at the highest levels of the U.S. government. And once inside those circles, he was to feed whatever intel he came across back to Moscow. The deal served both men well. At least in the beginning.

Miles got filthy rich, and with each billion came a power and influence on Wall Street and within the corridors of Congress and the Oval Office beyond even his wildest dreams. In return, Popov had collected on his investment in the currency of all spies everywhere: information.

How many national secrets had Miles spilled into the Russian’s ears over the years? Enough to get him hanged a thousand times over, and that didn’t even count the murder of a president.

The grandfather clock in the corner began to strike, and Miles started so violently he spilled coffee down the front of his suit coat. He brushed at it with his hand, smearing it into the gray silk cashmere. He swore. Custom-made in Savile Row, it had cost him five thousand bucks, and even that ruinously expensive French cleaner his secretary took his clothes to on the Upper West Side might not be able to get the stain out.

Fuck this. If Yasmine didn’t call in the next five minutes, he was calling Nikolai. Better to know right off if Nikolai had the film, and then he could exert some control over the situation.

It was almost funny when you thought about it. He’d watched it all go down, live and in living color, but the only images he could ever call to his mind were the still prints Mike O’Malley had made from that damn film. Of himself in that stupid railroad uniform, taking the rifle from Mike’s hands.

Yasmine was right. He had believed the con was all his, that he’d
played and manipulated Nikolai Popov and the KGB into carrying out the assassination. But when it came to Popov, he should have suspected that there were wheels within wheels.

Especially when Popov forced him to take part in the dirty work, by threatening to expose him as a commie spy if he refused. Putting him in the frame, figuratively. And literally, too, as it turned out. Thanks to O’Malley and that damn film.

Miles turned and limped back to the desk, stared down at the telephone. Black and simple, and checked by his security twice a day for bugs, its number known by only a handful of people in the world.

Ring, damn you. Ring
.

I
T DIDN’T RING
.

He went around the desk and sat down, the leather of his captain’s chair sighing softly beneath his weight. He pulled the telephone toward him, lifted the receiver, waited a few seconds more, then dialed the number of a telephone on the other side of the world that would also probably be plain and black and checked for bugs twice a day.

It rang four times, there was a click, but he heard no one at the other end of the line. No
“Da?”
or the more formal
“Zdraste.”
Just silence.

“Nikolai?” Miles listened for the smallest intake of breath, for any show of surprise, but what he heard was soft laughter.

“Miles, is that really you? Of course it is you. But why are you telephoning after all this time? What do you want?”

“Can’t an old friend call up to see how you’re doing?”

“How many years has it been since last we spoke? Twenty-five, thirty? A loyal comrade falls out of favor and he is dropped like a—what is it you Americans say? A hot tamale? And now suddenly you are ringing me up to see how I am doing?”

“Potato,”
Miles said. “Dropped like a hot potato.”

Nikolai blew out a long, sad sigh. “Since you are kind enough to ask after my health, I am alive. And at my age that is quite the accomplishment. Mostly, though, I am content to sit and look out at the lovely pond in my garden, at water so blue you cannot tell where it leaves off and the
sky begins. Or rather I would be if it were not February and the pond was not strangled with ice.”