Altar of Bones (56 page)

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.”

B
ACK 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.

H
E 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.”

I
T 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.”

S
HE 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.”