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.
45
ZOE 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.
“They’re not up to Kareem’s standards,” he said, as she came up behind him. “But they’ll get us in.”
She let the towel she was wearing fall to the floor as she slipped her arms around his waist, pressing into him with her damp, naked belly. “You know, O’Malley, you’re kind of handy to have around.” She kissed him behind the ear, little nibbling kisses. Then one thing led to another, and—
“Come on,” Ry said now, wrapping a gloved hand around her upper arm to steer her around a girl with platinum hair and kohl-smudged eyes who seemed to be swaying to the beat of her own inner music. “We’re on the A-list, so we might as well cut to the head of the line.”
They got a few dirty looks as they pushed their way to the door, where a bouncer in a dirty white quilted coat stood, feet splayed, arms behind his back. He looked like the Michelin tire man, only mean. He eyed them up and down, started to shake his head, then stopped when Ry pushed up the sleeve of his coat far enough to show the dagger tattoo on his arm.
The bouncer let them into a tiny foyer filled with a double-helix staircase that stretched up into an eerie blue-haloed blackness. “Uh, Ry,” Zoe said. “I don’t see any way down, except for an elevator over there in the corner that’s no bigger than a Porta Potti.”
“I’ll be in it with you,” Ry said. “Just shut your eyes.”
Zoe snorted a scared laugh. “Like that’s going to work.”
Somehow—probably under the theory that if she was going to die, at least she wouldn’t die alone—she let Ry maneuver into the tiny cage. She regretted it an instant later, when the door clattered shut, the low-watt bare bulb that was plugged into the ceiling dimmed even more, and the car plunged with a violent shudder.
It was an eternity going down, and Zoe spent it with her face pressed against Ry’s chest to keep from screaming.
The elevator landed with another shudder and such a hard thud the lightbulb went out completely, and even Ry looked relieved to be out of it once the door finally rattled open. In front of them was a steel door outlined by pulsating green neon tubes and an old woman wearing a babushka and earplugs, who was there to take their coats.
The door opened into a large, square room with chrome-and-mirror columns, blue strobe lighting, and a broad band of twinkling pink lights that snaked across a midnight-blue ceiling like the Milky Way. The music, a painful mix of Russian techno and American hip hop, was so loud Zoe was surprised her eyes and ears didn’t start bleeding.
She saw a few tables scattered about, but most of the people in the impossibly crowded room were dancing, their bodies grinding together in rhythm with the thumping techno beat. Suddenly the music switched to something softer—a Russian folk song, but with a touch of Harlem soul thrown in to sex it up, sung in a husky, melancholy voice. And on the far back wall a giant video screen came alive.
In the video a young man with the piercing, fanatic blue eyes of a martyred priest and the sex appeal of a movie star sang into a microphone as if he were making love to it with his song. He was dressed like a pirate, in a white shirt with billowing sleeves and a red silk sash tied around his forehead to hold back his shoulder-length blond hair. The neck of the shirt slashed open deep enough to reveal glimpses of a well-cut chest, and as he moved, Zoe caught the distinctive blue ink of prison tattoos.
Just then she felt Ry tense a little beside her and she turned to see a couple of security guards in black tie coming toward them. They stopped in front of Ry, and one of them said something to him Zoe couldn’t hear, but Ry nodded, then he took her by the hand and they followed the men past the long, shiny black-lacquer bar and into a corner that was marked off with a red velvet rope.
Behind the rope, seated at a chrome-and-glass table and throwing back a tumbler full of vodka, was the beautiful young man still singing his heart out from the giant video screen. A couple of empty chrome stools flanked either side of him, but Zoe didn’t realize that he was actually waiting for them, until one of the security men snapped open the rope and waved them toward the table.
The young man raised his head. Unlike in the video, he wasn’t wearing the red sash, and she could see that the skin just below his hairline was marred by a raw, red scar. And those martyred-priest’s eyes of his had fastened hard onto Ry’s face.
He stared at Ry for a long moment, then leapt to his feet and came around the table to sweep Ry up in a big man-hug, thumping him hard on the back with bunched-up fists.
A BOTTLE OF Dom Pérignon and three fluted glasses appeared at the table, but the music was too loud for them to talk over. So they sat and sipped their champagne in silence, only from time to time the young man would lean over and drape his arm across Ry’s shoulder and smile, posing for a seemingly endless clicking of digital cameras and cell phones from the people in the club.
Then after ten minutes or so of this, he abruptly pushed back from the table and got to his feet. Ry stood as well, holding out his hand. The young man started to take it, but then he pulled Ry into him for another fierce hug instead, and Zoe saw his eyes clench tightly shut as if he were in pain.
He said something in Ry’s ear, and Ry nodded. Then they broke apart and the man disappeared into the crowd, one of the security guards close on his heels. The other jerked his head at Zoe and Ry for them to follow him through a small, narrow door behind the bar.
“I will return in a moment with your coats,” the guard said, then the door swung closed, leaving them alone in a small room mostly taken up by a plush, white leather sofa. A huge plasma TV took up one wall; another was filled with rows of platinum records and framed CD jackets.
“Well, if Popov’s son didn’t know we were here before, he will soon,” Zoe said, “Only about a hundred kids just took our picture with that singer. Who was he, by the way?”
“Sasha Nikitin. He’s a big deal here in Russia, maybe not on the level of a Bono or the Boss, but getting there. He’s a big enough celebrity, anyway, to cause a stir wherever he goes, and whoever gets seen with him gets noticed.”
“Nikitin … Is he related to the Dr. Nikitin we’re going to meet with?”
“Sasha’s his son,” Ry said, as the door behind them opened again, letting in a shuddering blast of music and the security guard carrying their coats under one arm and a pair of large-size men’s boots in his hand.
“Should you choose to put your hand in your right pocket,” the man said to Ry while watching them bundle up, “you will find a Beretta Px4 Storm, along with an extra ammunition clip. In your left pocket is the key to an apartment near the Pevchesky Bridge that I believe you know of. We’ll let it be known where you will be staying, accidentally on purpose, you understand? So the pakhan’s men can find you.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“You might want to put these on now.” The guard handed Ry the boots. “I’ve hidden the GPS tracking device in the left heel. We’ll be monitoring it, so that once the pakahn’s men have you, we’ll be able to follow it to where they bring you, but at a discreet distance, of course.”
“How soon do you think he’ll make his move?”
“Not before morning, I shouldn’t think. We have inserted into the down lining of your coat a short-range voice transmitter….” The security man paused, his forehead knotted in a frown. “As per your wishes, we won’t move in for the rescue until we get the signal from you, and that worries me. You will be well searched for weapons, and anything else of that nature, before you are allowed in the pakhan’s presence.
Which means you will have to improvise should trouble suddenly hit the fan, and there may not be a lot of time or opportunity to preserve your lives before we can arrive.”
“I know,” Ry said. “But there’s no way around it. We need to talk to the man before you guys come in with guns blazing.” He held out his hand. “Thank you for everything. And tell Sasha—”
“He knows,” the security man said, shaking Ry’s hand and cutting off whatever Ry had been about to say. “He said to tell you it is the least he can do for the man who gave him back his life.” The guard paused again, cleared his throat. “You will find the entrance to the back tunnel inside the closet over there. It is a small hatch in the floor, beneath the filing cabinet.”
“Tunnel?” Zoe said. “Oh, shit. And pardon my Russian.”
THE TUNNEL WAS a little bigger than the laundry cute. Just. They were going to have to crawl through it on their hands and knees.
Zoe groaned. “I really hate this.”
“I know. But look at it this way—it beats having to go back up in that death trap of an elevator.”
Zoe gave a squeaky laugh. “You do have a point. So how far do we have to crawl down this thing?”
“Not far.”
“You’re lying through your pearly whites, O’Malley. I can tell…. I can do this, though. I can do it.”
“Yeah, you can.”
“Only do I have to do it now? Right this very minute, I mean?”
“Yeah, you do.”
Zoe crawled down into the opening in the raw dirt, and it was worse than she imagined it would be. Thick wooden planks were fitted into the walls to hold back dirt that smelled wet and musty. The way a grave would smell, she thought, then wished she hadn’t. Every ten feet or so, a bare, dim lightbulb hung from a wire that looped across the ceiling.
Her breath rasped in and out of her throat like rough sandpaper, her heart hammered in her ears, but somehow she kept putting one knee in front of the other.
Altar of Bones Page 37