Altar of Bones (64 page)

Vadim rubbed off the sting on his bunched knuckles. “I know you said only once,
Pakhan
. But I beg permission now to disobey you.”

Popov made a tsking noise, shaking his head. “You remind me of your father, Agent O’Malley. He, too, had that tough swagger and the smart mouth. Although now that I remember it better, Mike was not so full of the swagger that night we killed poor Miss Monroe.”

“Must’ve really felt good to be you that night,” Ry said. “Killing a woman half your size, and a drugged one at that.”

Popov merely smiled. “Did your father ever tell you that we saw her naked tits? They were all you could ever imagine.”

A laugh, half-hysterical, spurted out of Zoe’s mouth. “This is insane. You are insane. There, I’ve said it—so what are you going to do now, have your pet goon give me a smack in the jaw? You killed a president of the United States, you killed Marilyn Monroe. You even killed your own daughter, and, yeah, Katya Orlova was your daughter, and you know it. And why? So you could drink from the altar of bones? But you’ve already been there, done that. So why would you need more?”

“Because he’s still aging,” Ry said. “Much more slowly than the rest of us, maybe, but he’s still getting old. He looks in the mirror and sees the crow’s-feet coming on little by little, the sagging skin, the fading hair, and if he’s still getting old, then that means he’s dying. And he wants it to stop.”

“Ah, God,” Popov said on an explosion of breath. He tilted back his head and shut his eyes, then breathed out a hollow laugh. “You couldn’t be more wrong. I don’t want it for myself. I want it for my grandson. For my Igor, who is dying….”

P
OPOV MADE A
sudden jerking movement and looked away, as if he suddenly realized they could see his pain and might be reveling in it.

“My daughter married and had a child,” he said after a moment, then he paused and his mouth pulled into a wry smile. “My legitimate daughter, I should say…. And she had a child, a son. He is twenty-
one now. Twenty-one! And he has alveolar soft-part sarcoma.” Another twisted smile. “A mouthful of a disease, is it not? ‘A rare and always fatal form of cancer,’ the doctors told me that day. I didn’t want to believe them.”

Popov turned back around, and the desperation on his face now was as disfiguring as scars. “It began with a tumor in his thigh. ‘Cut it out,’ I told the doctors, ‘take the whole leg if you have to, but get it out of him.’ In the end, they did take his leg, but the cancer had already metastasized to his lungs and brain. They gave him a year at the most to live. That was eight months ago, and now he swallows OxyContin like breath mints for the pain. He barely weighs a hundred pounds.”

“I’m sorry,” Zoe said.

“Sorry?” Popov choked over the word. “Your sorry has no place in this. It is too puny. He is my Igor. My
Igor
, and I love him more than anything on this earth, more than my life. If God would let me die in his place, I would.”

“But you can’t die,” Ry said, “so you kill for him instead.”

“Nothing, no one else matters, but Igor. The altar of bones is the only hope he has left. It has given me a hundred and twelve years so far, and I feel and look like a man of what? Fifty-five? I’ve never been sick for a day since I drank from it, not even a sniffle. It worked a miracle on me, and it will work a miracle on Igor.”

Popov focused on Zoe’s face and she saw the hardness and cruelty come over him, like a steel curtain slamming down. “You are going to take me to the altar of bones, and I will use it to save my Igor. Whether you do so willingly or unwillingly—it does not matter.”

Zoe felt tears press against her eyes. This story of his Igor slowly dying, the pain she could see in Popov—it all seemed real, but,
Remember, trust no one
, her grandmother had written.
No one. Beware the hunters
.

“Why do you need her?” Ry said. “You already tricked your Lena into taking you to it when she was a nurse at Norilsk. You know where it is, so what’s been stopping you from going back?”

Popov slashed his hand through the air. “Do you think I
haven’t
been back to that cave dozens of times? An avalanche buried the entrance, and Lena along with it, and it took three days and fifty
zeks
to dig out
the snow, but the cavern was still there, behind the frozen waterfall, and the altar made out of human bones was inside, with the spring bubbling away underneath it.”

He stopped, and a faraway look came into his eyes. “I was out of my head with fever and near death when she brought me to the cave. The altar of bones was in the gruel she fed me, one drop, that’s all she needed to save me, but I never saw where she got it from. I thought it had to be the boiling spring—why else would they have built that altar made of human bones on top of it?”

He blew out a ragged laugh. “God in heaven, I must have carried away dozens of bottles of the noxious stuff. From the spring at first, and then later from a pool that was in the center of the cavern. From the spring and the pool, and every other bit of moisture dripping from the ceiling and oozing out of the walls, and none of it did a thing. I tried it out on the desperately sick and the dying, and afterward they were still sick and still dying. I had a dozen scientists study it and they all told me it was only water. Well, water polluted from the nickel mining, but water nonetheless. And Lena …?” He snapped his fingers. “
Poof
. Gone into thin air, from a cave whose only way in or out had been buried for days beneath a mountain of snow.”

He braced his fists on the table and brought his face close to Zoe’s. “So one thing I do know for a certainty. That altar in your little Keeper cave, the one built above a spring and made of human bones, the one that anyone can see with his own eyes … that altar is a lie. The real altar of bones is something else, somewhere else, and you are either going to tell me where it is or take me to it. Your choice. But those are the only two choices I am giving you.”

Zoe’s eyes were steady on his face. “You can give me a hundred choices and it wouldn’t matter. I don’t know where it is. Maybe my grandmother Katya knew, but you hunted her down for most of her life and then you killed her before she had a chance to tell me.”

“Yes, you are right. I hunted her for years, but she was like her mother, Lena—good at escaping from seemingly impossible traps. When my agents found her little girl, Anna Larina, in an orphanage in Ohio, I was sure I had her then, that she would not stay away from the child forever,
but I was wrong. All those years I watched and waited for her to seek out the daughter she’d abandoned, and to meet you, her granddaughter, but she never did. So wary, she was, and so clever, until the end when the cancer got her and she grew careless. Or perhaps merely desperate to pass her knowledge on to the next Keeper before she died.”

He stared at Zoe hard for a moment longer, then straightened, shaking his head. “That is why I think you are lying to me. Playing me, as you Americans say. You are the Keeper now, and you know where the altar is, because the Keeper always knows where it is.”

He turned away, as if dismissing her, and Vadim, who’d understood nothing of the English words, must have taken this as his cue because he straightened and said, “Now,
Pakhan
?”

“Yes.”

“What?” Zoe cried. She tried to get up again, but the handcuff still held her fast to the eyebolt in the table. “What are you going to do? Don’t hit him again. Please.”

“She’s begging you not to hit him, Vadim,” Popov said in Russian to his enforcer, and the two men shared a laugh.

R
Y WATCHED AS
Vadim lit up a fresh cigarette, drawing on it deeply, seeming to relish the burn of the smoke as it went down his throat, and Ry felt that first lick of fear because he knew what was coming.

He also knew he could take it because he’d lived through much worse. But Zoe—he could tell by her face that she had no real idea of what was happening, and he ached for her because he knew she would blame herself afterward.

Vadim laid his Bic down on the table, took a couple more deep drags off the cigarette, then stared at its glowing red tip and smiled.

“Hold him down.”

Ry heard a step behind him, and Zoe shouting,
“No, don’t,”
but it all happened so fast. A thick, heavy hand gripped the back of his head, pulling it back, exposing his neck, and an instant later he felt the burning cigarette sear like the fire of a thousand suns into the right side of his throat.

He trapped the yell of agony that rose up inside of him through a sheer force of will.
Jesus God, it hurt
. He could smell his own skin sizzling.

Through the pain shrieking in his head, he heard Zoe screaming, and the rattle of her handcuff as she tried to pull it out of the table with brute force. Then he thought it must be over, because Zoe stopped screaming and Popov’s face appeared before his watery vision.

“My great-granddaughter seems to be in some considerable distress, Agent O’Malley. She must truly be quite fond of you.”

Ry fought to get his breathing back under control. He was bathed in a cold sweat and he wanted to puke. The ravaged nerves in his neck had been shocked into silence for the moment, but he knew the pain would come back any second now, and with a vengeance.

“You want her to make something up just to get you to stop?” Ry said. “Listen to me, she doesn’t know where it is.”

“I think she does. And after we have hurt you enough, she will tell me.”

“Oh, for God’s
sake
,” Zoe shouted. Such pure female exasperation was in her voice, both men stopped glaring at each other to look at her.

Her face was wet with tears, but fury was in her eyes, and Ry loved her for it. “For someone who’s supposed to be a hundred and twelve, you sure haven’t evolved much,” she said to Popov with the best sneer that Ry had ever seen on any mouth, and he loved her even more. “Do you get your jollies off of torture?”

Popov looked taken aback, then his lips twitched, as if he were genuinely amused. “A small jolly perhaps. But then Vadim can do much worse damage than a cigarette burn or two. Much, much worse. He does this thing with a pair of bolt clippers…. But if you tell me now how to find the altar, it won’t have to come to that.”

“I don’t
know
how to find it—”

Popov turned and snapped his fingers at Vadim. “Again,” he said in Russian. “Do it on an eyeball this time.”

“No, wait. Stop,” Zoe cried. “Oh, God,
stop
.”

She was tearing frantically at the collar of her parka, and for a moment Ry thought she was choking. Then he realized she was trying to
dig out the green-skull amulet. “I’ll give it to you, okay? I’ll give it to you, only don’t hurt him any more.”

She finally got the chain off from around her neck. She held the amulet tightly in her fist, hesitating, as if even now she was having a hard time letting it go. Then with an abrupt movement she slid it down the table toward Popov.

He trapped it with his hand before it could fall to the floor. “What is this?”

“You know what it is,” Zoe said, still breathing hard from her fear and her fury.

Popov held the amulet up to the light, turning it over and over in his long fingers, studying it carefully.

“I don’t know where the altar of bones is,” Zoe said. “I couldn’t even tell you how to get to the lake or the cave if my life depended on it. But that gooey stuff inside the amulet came from the altar. At one time there were two of them hidden inside the Lady icon. Katya gave one to Marilyn Monroe. That’s the other one. And if that story about your dying grandson wasn’t all just one big, fat lie, then I hope you get your miracle. But only for his sake.”

“My miracle …”

Popov’s fingers closed around the amulet, locking it up in his fist, and Ry saw the knuckles whiten. Then the Russian looked at Zoe, but if he felt anything for his great-granddaughter, it didn’t show on his face.

“Well now, my dear,” he said. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? But then few of you Keepers have ever been any good at keeping to your sacred duty, if history is anything to judge by. You give your secrets up so easily, as easily as you spread your legs, and for why?” He laughed. “Love.”