Altar of Bones (33 page)

“By the way, just who
do
you really work for? The CIA, or the people who killed Kennedy? Or are we talking about the same thing?”

At last, at last, the can popped open. Zoe quickly dumped the film back into her satchel and pressed closed the now empty can. She shifted her weight again and craned her head so she could look through the crack between the jamb and the half-open door. She could see Yasmine Poole now, and the two hooded guys who flanked her on either side, their semiautomatics still pointed at Ry. Yasmine herself was unarmed, but Zoe remembered the gun she carried in her purse.

“Agent Blackthorn,” said Yasmine Poole, “shoot Agent O’Malley in the kneecap.”

“No, wait!” Zoe cried out, and she didn’t have to fake the panic in her voice. She was running out of time—both with Yasmine and the French police. The sirens blared so loudly now, they had to be on the next street over and rounding the corner. “I’ll give you the film. Don’t hurt him.”

She caught Ry’s eye one last time, and she thought he might have winked at her, even though the blue-hooded guy was now standing over him, his weapon pointed down within inches of Ry’s knee.

“It’s just … I’m scared, Yasmine. Do you promise to let us go?”

“Of course, Zoe. After all, you could blab to the press all you want about some nameless guy on the grassy knoll, but without the film itself, they’d just think you were another tinfoil-hatted whack job. So slide the film out the door now, please, and we won’t hurt your boyfriend.”

Outside tires screeched, the whooping sirens cut off abruptly.

“The film, Zoe. Now.”

Zoe shot the film can like a hockey puck through the half-open door, toward the far corner of the room and under the purple cabbage-rose overstuffed chair.

Either she was too smart or she didn’t want to risk ripping her gorgeous red suit, but Yasmine Poole didn’t dive for the can as Zoe had hoped. The black-hooded guy did, though, and the distraction was enough.

Ry jackknifed his legs and kicked the gun out of blue-hooded guy’s hand. He sprang to his feet just as Zoe flung open the bathroom door, firing with one hand and tossing the bottle of cleanser to Ry with the other. He caught it in midair and sprayed blue-hooded guy in the face with it. The man screamed and clawed at his eyes.

Zoe shot up the rose-cabbage chair, where the black-hooded guy was still frantically trying to fish out the empty film can. Blood sprayed the wall behind him, as he went down with a scream, clutching his thigh.

Zoe swung the barrel of the gun onto Yasmine.

The woman stood still in the midst of the carnage, with her hands held out to her side, her eyes wild and full of a sick excitement, as if daring Zoe to shoot her in cold blood.

Zoe smiled. “You lose.”

Ry knocked her arm aside just as she squeezed the trigger. The bullet hit the iron bedstead with a
ping
and ricocheted up into the ceiling. Yasmine Poole didn’t even flinch.

Ry pushed Zoe toward the door. “Cops,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Z
OE COULD HEAR
men shouting and the slap of leather soles on the flagstone courtyard below. She started down, but Ry grabbed her arm and pulled her up a narrower set of stairs, toward the roof.

“Always,” he said, “have a plan B.”

The stairs ended in a trapdoor that opened up into an attic with huge, exposed beams, sectioned off into storage units for the building’s tenants. It smelled strongly of mothballs. Zoe didn’t see a window, which wouldn’t have done them much good anyway, as high up as they were. Ry led the way to the back, deep beneath the sloping roof, where a midget-size door with a small white knob was set low on the wall, almost at floor level.

He turned and grinned at her. “Laundry chute.”

“Great,” Zoe said. “Only the thing is …”

But Ry had already turned back to open the little door.

It was a laundry chute all right. A dark and narrow laundry chute.

Ry took both the Walther and her satchel out of her suddenly laxhands.
He stuffed the gun into an inside pocket of his jacket and zipped up. “You go first,” he said.

“The thing is, I’m kind of claustrophobic.”

She heard a door bang right below them, and someone shouting,
“Arrêtez! Arrêtez!”

“Don’t think about it,” Ry said. “Just do it.”

Zoe set her jaw. She swung feetfirst into the chute, shut her eyes, and held the doorframe with a white-knuckled grip.
How hard could this be? You just let go and slide
. But what if the chute got narrower as it went down? It was barely wider than a coffin as it was. A coffin … Oh, Lord. What if she got stuck? Unable to go up or down, trapped with the walls squeezing her chest, tighter and tighter, and the air black as death, growing thinner and thinner, running out, until she …

“Nope,” she said. “Sorry, cowboy, but ain’t no way—”

His hand smacked her hard in the back.

It was a long, long way down.

S
HE LANDED
flat on her back on a cement floor, her blood hammering in her ears.

She heard Ry coming down after her—it sounded as if someone were beating a tin can to death. She scrambled out of the way just before he exploded out of the chute. He landed and rolled up onto his feet in one smooth movement.

“You okay?” He helped her to her feet. He gave her back her satchel, then brushed her cheek with the backs of his knuckles. “You did great.”

Zoe was humming, her adrenaline shooting through the roof. “I did it, Ry. I was so scared coming down that thing, I thought was gonna pass out, but I made it. And we were like the A-Team, the way we took them down. I had that bitch Yasmine Poole nailed, too.”

“Zoe, we need to—”

“And I’ve still got the film, Ry—the can was empty. I thought I could fool them and create a diversion at the same time.”

“I figured as much. Now—”

“Not that I wouldn’t have given it up if I had to, to save your life. But I don’t get it, why didn’t you let me shoot her? I wasn’t going to kill her, just make her bleed a lot, so you should’ve let me do it, Ry.”

“We’ll get her, don’t worry about it. But right now—”

“Because you know she’s gonna come after us, and if I never see the woman again in this life and in every reincarnation thereafter, it’ll still be too—”

He clapped his hand over her mouth. His palm was hard and dry. Her heart was still pumping madly, and she was bouncing up and down
on the balls of her feet. She realized suddenly that she could hear boots pounding on the stairs, shouts and whistles, the crackle of radios. Blue and red lights strobed though a narrow window set high in the basement’s wall.

She breathed hard through her nose, then her eyes slowly focused on Ry’s face. He lifted his hand.

She breathed, swallowed. “We’re still in big trouble, aren’t we?”

“Yeah. Take another breath. Good, you’re coming down a bit.”

Zoe took another breath and looked around. The basement was small, barely room enough for a deep sink and a row of three chipped and dented coin-operated washing machines.

She saw that Ry had found the door that led out onto the street. It was up a narrow half-flight of stairs, made of a thick gray metal, and dead-bolted from the inside. Ry slid back the bolt and eased the door open a crack. He looked out for a moment, then quietly shut it.

“It opens into another stairwell, six steps, leading up to a dead-end alley,” he said, heading back to her. “They’re working on the gas main, or something, out in the street right in front of the building, and that’s kept the squad cars from parking close. But we can’t just stroll on out because there are two cops within sight of the door, armed with MAT-49 submachine guns.”

“Wonderful. So how do we get out of here?”

“We need a diversion to distract the cops away from the alley. Something involving noise and smoke and flames would be nice.”

Zoe looked around the basement again, but besides the ancient washing machines and the sink, all she saw were enough cobwebs to weave a small tapestry. “Well, unless they’re arachnophobics, I don’t see anything down here that could create much of a distraction.”

Ry was bent over, rummaging through the detergents and cleansers under the sink. “Hey, we just got lucky, Zoe. They got Drano. We can make us a bomb.”

“You can make a bomb out of Drano?”

“Mixed with chlorine bleach and ammonia. It creates hydrogen gas. Nothing big or deadly—it’s all smoke—but it’ll get their attention.” He set the bleach, ammonia, and can of crystal Drano on top one of the
washers. “Look through that trash can over there for a liter-sized glass or plastic container. A Coke bottle would be perfect, but make sure it has a cap.”

Zoe could hear more sirens turn up the street outside as she pawed through empty detergent boxes, take-out containers, spray starch—

“How about an Evian bottle?”

“That’ll do.”

A door slammed above their heads, so hard the whole building vibrated. Heavy boots pounded down the inner stairwell, only two or three flights above them now. “Ry, they’re coming!”

“We’ll make it. They’ll want to search the main floor first.” He went back under the sink again and came out with a rusty wrench.

“Okay,” he said, handing her the wrench. “Here’s how it’s going to work. As soon as I add the Drano to the bottle and cap it, we’ll have about fifteen seconds before it explodes. I want you to throw this wrench through the window and yell for help—
‘Aidez-moi! Aidez-moi.’
Wait for me to throw the bomb before you go out the door, though, and let me go first in case there’s shooting, okay?”

Zoe nodded, even though her knees had gone wobbly.

She watched Ry pour the bleach and ammonia into the Evian bottle, spilling some because he didn’t have a funnel. Then he poured in the Drano crystals and capped the bottle fast.

“Hit the window now,” he said to Zoe, just as a man out in the street yelled,
“Arrêtez!”
and a woman screamed.

Zoe pulled her arm back and flung the wrench at the window, suddenly terrified that she would miss.

The wrench crashed through the glass. Zoe shrieked,
“Aidez-moi! Aidez-moi!”
at the top of her lungs, and ran for the door. Out the corner of her eye she saw Ry toss the Drano bomb out the shattered window, then he ran past her and up the steps. He slapped open the dead bolt and slammed through the door, Zoe on his heels.

They were up the outer stairwell and into the alley when a terrible explosion ripped the air.

Z
OE FELT THE
building’s stone walls shudder on their foundations. Windows rattled and shattered, shouts and screams rent the air.

The street was chaos. A water main had broken, blowing off a manhole cover, and water geysered into the air. Bricks and cobblestones littered the sidewalks, and where they’d been working on the gas main there was now a giant hole in the street.

They started to go right, saw a squad of riot police and their parked cruisers at the corner, so they veered left. They ran by a cop who was barking into his radio, but by now everybody was running so they didn’t stand out.

They dodged around a taxi that had jumped the sidewalk and plowed into a wine shop. Wine from dozens of broken bottles ran like rivulets of blood along the gutter. Zoe saw an old man with a loaf of bread tucked under one armpit try to scoop some up with his beret.