Altar of Bones (59 page)

She looked up at him, laughing. “Never mind, O’Malley, it’s a girl thing. Just prepare yourself to be amazed at my brilliance, because I think I have an idea of how we can deal with Popov’s son.”

New York City

A
COLD SWEAT
bathed his face and he felt as if he were going to throw up, but Miles Taylor could not tear his gaze away from the horror that filled his computer screen.

Yasmine
.

Her eyes were wide-open and empty, like a doll’s, seeing nothing. Blood trickled out of the corner of her mouth, just a little blood really, nothing too terrible. Nothing like the blood farther down, where that …
thing
—what was it? A stake? A fence post?—pierced her chest. So much blood there, as if her heart had exploded.

His finger hovered over the delete key. He wanted to make it all go away, but he was also afraid to. As if by erasing this final image of her, as terrible as it was, he would end up erasing her existence from his mind.

From his heart.

Oh, God …

He curled his hand into a fist and pressed it against his chest. It hurt, it
really
hurt, as if he could actually feel it breaking. Feel it exploding,
bursting, the way hers had burst, and he looked down, half-expecting to see his own blood splashing and pooling into his lap.

He squeezed his eyes shut, pressed his fist harder against his chest. A high-pitched whine filled his ears, like a flatline on a hospital monitor. It went on and on and on, a long, bloodred line stretching into infinity.

H
E SHUDDERED AND
blinked, aware that time had passed, but he wasn’t sure how much. Seconds? An hour? A century?

He saw his computer had gone to sleep. The screen was blank now, the photograph that O’Malley’s whelp had sent him was gone. Gone, gone, gone. Yasmine was gone. As if, while he’d been off in a daydream, she had quietly and simply left the room.

He sat in a leather captain’s chair before the massive mahogany desk in his library. Around him all was silent, and he had the strangest feeling that if he went to the door and opened it, the rest of the brownstone would have vanished and he would be staring down into an abyss. Yet the silence also had a weight and texture to it, as if he could feel it pressing like warm, wet palms onto his skin.

She’s dead. My love is dead
.

“Okay, Yaz,” he said out loud into the empty room. “You’re right. I won’t let this beat me. I’ll deal with it. I’ll …”

You’ll do what, Miles, you fool? Do what?
What he wanted to do was bring her back. He wanted her
back
. If he wanted to, right this minute, he could pick up the phone and buy himself a villa on Lake Como, a Maserati Granturismo S, a van Gogh—except he already had all those things, and more. Okay, something bigger then, something both grand and catastrophic. How about start such a run on the world’s biggest banking institutions that would bring down the entire global economy? He had the power and the wealth to do that, if he really wanted to. Whatever his heart desired, whatever whim he wanted gratified, he could make it happen.

But he couldn’t bring her back. “Christ, Miles, what a maudlin, pathetic cliché. Get a grip.”

He wrapped his hands around the arms of his chair and pushed heavily to his feet. He stood for a moment, swaying, feeling light-headed and nauseated. That strange, high-pitched whine was back inside his ears again.

He jerked, shook his head. He’d been about to deal with some-thing—what was it? Something that had come up right before he’d clicked open the e-mail from Yaz and that monstrous photograph had filled his computer screen. Something—

We’re bringing you down
.

The film, of course. The fucking film. O’Malley’s kid and that old woman’s granddaughter, Zoe Dmitroff—they had the film. They had to have the film because that was the only thing in this world with the power to bring him down.

Okay, so they’ve got the film. Now what are they gonna do with it?
What a stupid fucking question. They would give it to the media whores, of course. The government had a lot of reasons to bury it, but if Mike O’Malley’s boy was smart enough to have gotten his hands on the film in the first place, then he was smart enough to have figured that much out. And the media … to them it would be the mother of all stories, the story of the millennium, and they would blast it around the world with the power of a megaton hydrogen bomb.

Panic ripped through Miles with such force he shook with it. He bent over and fumbled through the crap on his desk for the universal remote. He pointed it at the oil painting above the fireplace—a Jackson Pollock, not a van Gogh—and the painting and part of the paneled wall slid to one side to reveal a wide-screen digital TV.

The whining was now so loud in his ears he could barely think, and a terrible pain stabbed his head, right between his eyes, blurring his vision. His breathing was harsh and shallow as he clicked through the twenty-four-hour news channels. But they were all covering the story of the pretty blond coed who’d gone missing from the University of Wisconsin a couple of days ago. Nothing about the Kennedy assassination.

He left the TV on, but hit the mute button. Okay, this was good. This meant he still had time. Even if the O’Malley boy had already passed the film on to someone in the media, they would have to check
it out first, wouldn’t they? They would want to be sure it wasn’t a fake before they aired it, and that gave him time.

Unconsciously he rubbed at the piercing pain in his forehead, but the whining had blessedly stopped. His mind felt clear now, as if he’d just sucked in a breath of pure oxygen, clear and cold and sharp as ice.

The only real proof that he was involved with Jack Kennedy’s death was at the end of the film, when the camera had focused in on him taking the rifle from Mike O’Malley’s hands. But that was the face of a man from almost fifty years ago, and who knew what kind of condition the film was in after all this time? Surely, if it ever came to trial, he would be able to buy a brigade of experts to testify in court that the man taking the rifle from the assassin wasn’t him.

“Who you gonna believe, you or your lying eyes?” he said to the vacant-eyed talking head that now filled his television screen, but his words came out all slurry.

Well, fuck ‘em—he didn’t need them or their shit. He had so much money he could shred most of it into confetti and throw himself a ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue and still have enough left over to live like a king for the rest of his life. He could buy himself a tropical island and spend the rest of his days in a Margaritaville of warm sunshine and beautiful girls in string bikinis, and then, just because he could, because it would satisfy the black anger in his heart, he would get himself the most badass hit man he could find and send him after the O’Malley boy and that miserable old woman’s granddaughter. Zoe Dmitroff.

God, did he want them dead. He wanted them
dead
the way Yasmine was dead, and he would tell the guy he hired to make their deaths long and slow and painful, and he would have it videotaped, too, yeah, and every night before he went to bed, he would watch the tape over and over, watch them dying over and over, and he would think of Yasmine, and he would smile—

Suddenly it felt as if a giant vise had grabbed his head and was squeezing it, tighter and tighter. He tried to reach out to keep from falling, but he couldn’t lift his arm. He tried to take a step, but lurched instead, banging into his desk, knocking something off it. He heard it hit the thick carpet with a dull thud, but he couldn’t see. It was as if a white,
gauzy bandage now covered his eyes, and he tried to reach up to pull it away, but he still couldn’t lift his arm.

His legs gave out from under him, and he pitched forward, banging his head on the corner of his desk as he fell to the floor. He tried to get back up again, but a boulder was on him, pressing him down. And the pain was so sharp and fierce, it felt as if a knife were slicing open his skull. Had Jack Kennedy felt pain like this when the bullet ripped through his head?

Miles blinked, and the white gauze fell away from his eyes. For a moment he thought he saw his son, standing by the fireplace, but no hate was in Jonathan’s eyes this time. The boy’s eyes were wet with tears, and Miles wanted to tell him to quit bawling, to be a man, but he couldn’t get his tongue to work right. Nothing was working right anymore. Even his heart felt broken, and wasn’t that a laugh.

Then suddenly his son was gone, and where his heart had been, Miles felt a gaping hole, a giant, sucking abyss of need.
I want
, he thought.
I want, I want. I want her back, I want it all back, every day, every moment of love and joy and sadness and misery—I want all of it back
.

Z
OE STARED
at the ugly gray concrete building, its door nondescript except for the number 17 painted black on the milk glass of the transom above it. “This looks closer to a prison than a nightclub, Ry.”

“The club itself is deep underground, in what was once a nuclear fallout shelter.”

“How far underground?” Zoe asked, as a shiver of claustrophobia coursed through her, but Ry pretended not to hear.

She could feel the beat of the music blasting up from below through snow and the thick soles of her new fur-lined boots. The crowd waiting to get in was mostly teenagers. They drank from paper cups of vodka bought from a kiosk on the corner and sucked on harsh Russian cigarettes while they jiggled and stamped their feet, trying in vain to drive away the bitter cold.

“I thought you didn’t want anyone to see us with your biologist,” Zoe said. “In case we end up landing a pile of trouble in his lap.” Actually Ry had said a
shitload
of trouble, but she didn’t want to be indelicate in public. “Won’t he stick out here like orange Day-Glo paint?”

Ry shook his head. His cheekbones were chapped pink from the cold, and his eyes glimmered in the harsh white light cast by the 1950s-era streetlamps. “We won’t be meeting up with Dr. Nikitin in the club. That’s where we’re gonna let Popov’s son, the
mafiya pakhan
, know we’re in town.”

“Oh, right. Him.” Zoe shivered inside her new down parka. It was supposed to keep her warm up to minus fifty degrees and it was almost succeeding. “I almost managed to forget about the rotten schmuck for all of two seconds.”

She couldn’t believe they were doing this, even more that it had all been her idea. After that insane chase through the mountains above the Danube Bend, wild sex with Ry on the hood of a car, and then finding the altar of bones where it had been, with her, all along, hidden in the icon—she’d felt so wrung out and exhausted, she was asleep on her feet by the time they got back to their hotel in Budapest. She couldn’t remember crawling into bed, although when she woke up late the next morning, she was in her underwear, beneath the covers, and the smell of freshly brewed coffee filled the room.

She didn’t know how he’d managed to do it, or if he slept at all, but by the time she emerged from the shower, Ry had shopping bags full of the heavy-duty clothes they would need for a St. Petersburg winter laid out on the sofa, and on the coffee table a new set of fake documents, including visas to get into Russia.