Altar of Bones (8 page)

Even as the gunfire still echoed in the frigid air, Nikolai was already moving. One at a time, he went to the three men and emptied the pistol into their heads, making sure they were dead. Then he reloaded.

He tucked the gun into the waistband of his trousers. He started toward the sleigh, then turned back. He squatted beside the dead commandant
and felt inside the man’s coat pocket. He pulled out a flask, silver with engraved initials.

So he hadn’t been going for a gun after all
.

Nikolai dropped the flask of vodka into his own pocket and stood up. He climbed into the sleigh, smiling. The commandant and his men had served Nikolai’s purpose well, bringing the sleigh out here. Nobody in their right mind would try
walking
out of Siberia.

He picked up the reins, but before he drove off, he looked back toward the frozen waterfall, shimmering and sparkling in the sun like a cascade of diamonds.

Diamonds
. Nikolai smiled at thought. For what the waterfall hid was more valuable than diamonds, more valuable than any make-believe chest of Romanov gold.

The altar of bones … dear God, it
was
real. He’d seen it with his own eyes. He’d drunk from it. Already he could feel its incredible power coursing through his blood, changing him. He felt like a god.

No, not
like
a god.

He threw back his head, and his shout echoed over the raw, frozen land.

“I am God!”

Galveston, Texas
Eighteen months before the present

F
ATHER
D
OM
hated that horrible hiss as oxygen was forced into the failing lungs, but he leaned closer to his father’s mouth. The old man was dying and he wanted to confess.

Confess
. That was the word he’d used, even though Dom didn’t really believe it. Not from his devoutly atheist father, who’d once called religion the greatest con game ever perpetrated on the human race. But “I’m dying and I want to confess,” his father had said, then he gave this wild laugh that nearly killed him right there.

“Aw, quit acting like you’ve been hit with the proverbial thunderbolt,” the old man said now. “I’m not gonna start shouting hallelujahs and I haven’t gone stupid on you either, if those two afflictions aren’t already redundant. I just have something that needs saying and I obviously don’t got all livelong day.”

“I’m here for you, Dad. But so, too, is the loving and forgiving presence of our Lord.”

Dom winced inside at how trite that sounded, but then his father had always been able to make him feel and behave like some ridiculous caricature of a priest. Most days Dom loved being what he was, and he was good at it, but sometimes he thought he’d put on the white bands of the Holy Roman Catholic Church just to spite Michael O’Malley, because he’d known it would piss off the old man for all eternity.

Only now his father was dying, so Father Dominic O’Malley laid his hand on the graying head as he began the last rites. “Through this holy
anointing may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit—”

The old man shook his head so hard he nearly tore the oxygen tube out of his nostrils. “Shut up with that ridiculous nonsense. I said confess, not die with the dirge of medieval hocus-pocus assaulting my ears.”

“But I thought you …” Dom swallowed something that felt halfway between a laugh and a sob, then looked quickly away before his father could rag on him for his weakness. He wished just once the old man could have … what? Respected him? Accepted him? Loved him?

“Okay, you win. No more medieval hocus-pocus. Only you know what? You can deny Him all the way up to your last breath, but Christ has never denied you. He’s always loved you, and so have I.”

The old man blew out a ragged sigh. “You’ve always been so full of pompous and sentimental certainties. Not only is it tedious, but when paired with your naïveté, it can be downright dangerous. You don’t know what I’ve done.”

“Then tell me. Confess. And we’ll even leave the Lord out of the conversation, because a godless confession can still be the first step to forgiveness and salvation.”

“What baloney. No God worth his salt is going to let puling sinners worm their way back into his good graces just by kissing his ass. Dom”—he felt his father’s hand clutch his arm—“quit mouthing religious platitudes for once and focus here.”

Such strength still in those fingers, Dom thought. But the old man had always been tough. Texas tough, he liked to brag, like a boot full of barbed wire. Dom stared down now at his father’s mouth, bloodless from lack of oxygen, at his watery blue eyes that looked clouded with what?

Fear?

No, Dom thought, that simply wasn’t possible. The father he knew had never shown a lick of fear in his life. It was part of the code Michael O’Malley lived by. When things turned bad on you, you sucked it up. You didn’t bawl, or whine, or make excuses.

His father released the grip he had on Dom’s arm and gave it a surprisingly gentle pat. “Hey, it’s okay, son. It’ll be okay. It’s snuck up on
me, this death business. I need you to call your brother, call Ry, and tell him to get down here now. He’ll know what to do—” A vicious cough racked the old man, and he let his head fall back on the pillow, closed his eyes. “Call Ry …”

“I already did, Dad. He’s on his way.”

Forgive me, dear Lord for that big honking lie
.

They’d often called their father “the old man” even when they were kids, but he really wasn’t all that old. Only seventy-five, and when you looked at him, you saw a big, strapping man, still full of vigor and a lust for life, or at least until yesterday.

Yesterday morning Michael O’Malley got up with the dawn, went for his daily power walk on the beach, and ate a breakfast of granola and yogurt. Then he stood up to put the dirty dishes in the sink and was struck by a massive coronary. On his way to the hospital, Dom had called and left a message on his brother’s cell, then he’d called again after the doctors had given their prognosis—their dad’s heart had been damaged beyond any hope. It would go on pumping for a little while yet, but soon it would stop. Just stop.

As the hours passed, and the old man grew steadily weaker, Dom kept trying to get hold of his brother, kept getting that damn voice mail. Ry not only wasn’t on his way to Galveston, God alone knew when they would even hear back from him. He’d been known to drop off the face of the earth for weeks, even months, at a time.

Dom touched his father’s hand where it lay, looking waxy and already dead, on the white hospital sheet. “In the meantime, why don’t you try to get some sleep. We can all talk later, after Ry gets here.”
Or doesn’t
.

He saw his father’s lips twist with a sudden spasm of pain. “Dad? Are you all right?”

He reached for the morphine drip, but the old man stopped him. “No, don’t. That stuff makes it hard for me to think, and we’re running out of time. I know I said I had a confession to make, but that was a poor choice of words. I don’t have any use for a priest, and if that hurts your tender feelings—tough.”

That
did
hurt, actually, but Dom managed to keep it off his face.

“Talk to me as your son, then. Or better yet, as an equal, a fellow human being. Now that would make a nice change.”

The old man gave him a ghastly smile. “You live with this thing you call a God, Dom. You preach goodness, turning the other cheek, doing unto others, all that bull, so you think you know all about bad. Only you got no idea. Not the kind of bad I’m talking about. The pure, down and dirty kind of bad that knows no rules and has no stopping point—”

The old man broke off, looked away. His eyes darkened, turned inward, and Dom wondered what they saw. Michael O’Malley had married late, at the age of forty-one, and much of his earlier life had always been a blank slate to his wife and sons. But what he’d just implied—Dom didn’t want to believe it.
You’re talking about evil, Dad, and you could never do evil
.

Could you?

He saw an odd look come over his father’s face. Not dreamy or nostalgic. No, it was too intense for that.

“Katya was her name. Katya Orlova, and from the beginning there was something special about her. In those days Hollywood had more pretty blondes than palm trees, but Katya … She had this luminescence about her, this glow, as if the sun was inside her, shining through the pores of her skin. And did I tell you she had the damnedest eyes? Dark gray, like storm clouds.”

The old man’s mind seemed to be wandering, but Dom got the gist of it: another woman. He might have known. Since he couldn’t shut his ears, he shut his eyes and saw his mother’s face. The sprinkling of freckles like cinnamon flakes across her cheekbones and nose, those dimples every time she smiled and she’d smiled a lot, even at the very end when the breast cancer finally beat her.

“Aw, Christ, Dom. Quit looking like I’m breaking your heart. Katya Orlova was just a means to an end. I never loved her, not like I did your mother.”

Dom blinked away tears, angrier with himself than his father.
Why do I always let him get to me like this?
“So who was she then?”

But his father said nothing more. The watery blue eyes seemed lost
now, staring across the foot of his bed at the mint green wall that was empty except for a black-enamel, plain-faced clock.

“Dad?”

“I’ve been watching that clock,” the old man finally said. “Every time another minute goes by, the long hand does this little jump from one hash mark to the next. Sometimes it trembles before it moves, like it’s not really sure it wants to go there, but it does it anyway. And it makes this little
click
noise, like it’s checking off another minute of eternity, and I’ve been thinking how one of these times soon that clock is going to do its little tremble-jump-and-click routine, but me … I’m going to be too damn dead to see it.”

He took his gaze off the clock and looked at his son. “All those rituals and sacraments of yours—what do you really think they’re for? In the end we’re all the same. We’re all afraid of that long dark night, and so we hold sacred the one thing we think can save us.”

Dom shook his head. “What are you telling me? That you thought this Katya Orlova woman could somehow have saved your soul?”

The thin mouth opened on a sigh. “Could have given me more time …”

Dom leaned closer. “Time to do what?”

The old man shook with another bout of violent coughing that sapped his strength, and the room fell back into silence again except for the hiss and beeps of the machines.

Dom thought his father was done talking, but then he said, “No, not my soul, and it doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe it never mattered, because a heart attack from out of the blue or a shot behind the ear from a .22 and either way, bang! You’re deader than a doornail.”

A shot behind the ear from a .22?
That kind of talk was so unlike the man he knew, Dom thought it had to be the painkillers messing with his head.

He was sure of it an instant later when his father tried to grab at the handrails to pull himself out of bed, his eyes wild. “Time … we’re running out of time, Dom. They’ll be coming for you boys once I’m dead, because they’ll figure they’re safe then. You’ll be loose threads to them, just for being my sons. And loose threads get snipped.”

He lay back gasping. “They probably already got a man inside the hospital here, waiting for me to croak. Or a woman. Some female doctor I’ve never seen before showed up to poke and prod at me while you were down in the cafeteria getting coffee. Red hair and that angels-weep kind of beautiful, but I don’t like her smile. She’s got a killer’s smile.”

What was he trying to say? That a female assassin was lurking here in the hospital, waiting for Michael O’Malley to die so she could then bump off the man’s sons? Dom tried to stop himself from jerking around to check out the open doorway, did it anyway, and felt like a fool. No one was there.

“Who’s coming for us? The Mafia? The Columbia drug cartel? Who really does stuff like that?”

A hideous laugh tore out of the old man’s throat. “My partners in crime.”