Altar of Bones (66 page)

Popov raised his eyebrows at Ry. “This is true?”

“Yeah, Popov, it’s true,” Ry said. “It turns out you were played all over the place, every which way there is.”

The Russian thought about it for a moment, then threw back his head in genuine amusement. “What a joke on me. A joke every which way, no? … And now I really must be going. As you American’s say, have a good life.”

Ry waited until Popov had turned and was walking away, out of ear-shot, then he pulled Zoe tighter against him, leaned his head close to hers, and spoke softly as if he were giving her comfort, “Do you remember Paris and the Drano bomb?”

Zoe nodded.

He gave her a little squeeze. “Straight out the door, babe, and don’t look back.”

Zoe nodded again.

Vadim, Ry saw, must suddenly have figured out that the cigarette dangling off his lower lip wasn’t lit, because he was patting the pockets of his jogging suit looking for his lighter. Popov was almost at the trailer house now, nearly abreast of the picnic tables with their lethal brew.

But suddenly he stopped short and turned back.

“You think it is so terrible,” he said, “what I have done to possess the altar of bones so that I might save my grandson’s life. But Katya herself would have understood. Did you know, Zoe, my dear, that when your mother, Anna Larina, was four years old, she was stricken with leukemia? She was given only weeks to live, but a year later not only was she still alive, she was as healthy as any child of her age. And in every test they ran on her, they could fine no trace of the cancer. The doctors were at a lost to explain it. They called it a miraculous recovery.”

Zoe shook her head. “I don’t … What are you saying now?”

The smile Nikolai Popov gave her was full of spite. “Just that I thought the sacred duty of the Keeper was always passed down from mother to daughter. Yet Katya skipped Anna Larina and gave it to you.
Ask yourself why she would do that, Zoe. Ask yourself why your mother didn’t die when she was four like she was supposed to.”

T
HIS TIME WHEN
Popov left them, he kept on going.

Ry watched him take one step, then another, purposeful steps, mission accomplished, and Ry waited, waited until the man was walking past the trailer house again, alongside the picnic tables and the mason jars full of cooking meth.

He waited one more second, two, then yelled,
“Now.”

Zoe ran all out for the door, just as Ry jerked the lighter out of his pocket and hit the striker wheel.

Nothing happened. He hit it again, then again. Got nothing but puny sparks. He saw Vadim and Grisha scrambling to get out their weapons, saw Popov spin around and pull a gun out of the pocket of his sable coat. Ry prayed as he’d never prayed before in his life and struck the wheel again. And again.

Suddenly the wick caught, bursting into a bright blue-yellow flame. Ry threw the burning lighter onto the picnic tables, then ran for the door. He heard two shots, rapid-fire, one after another, but nothing hit him. Then he heard a loud whoosh, and a blast of hot air hit the back of his neck. He looked over his shoulder as he ran—the picnic tables had become a giant fireball.

He saw a curling tongue of fire leap out, like a giant fist, and grab Popov. The man screamed and screamed as the flames enveloped him, shooting up the length of his sable coat, wreathing and billowing around his face.

Ry’s last view, as he went through the door, was of the flames spreading from Popov to the trailer house, and to the stacks of propane tanks and bags of ammonia nitrate, and he ran harder, desperate now, because any second that stuff was going to blow and send everyone to hell.

He was out in the yard, looking frantically for Zoe, not seeing her. Then, oh God, oh God, there she was running about ten yards ahead of him, moving fast, long, hard strides, and he pushed harder to catch up with her. She didn’t know, she couldn’t know—

He tackled her, slamming her down into the snow-covered ground, covering her with his body as best as he could, his arms over their heads as the world exploded behind them. The air disappeared, sucked out of their lungs, and time seemed to stop. Then bricks and shards of sheet metal and glass rained down, and hot, roaring flames shot up into the sky.

R
Y ROLLED
off Zoe and got up onto his knees. She lay facedown in the snow, unmoving, and he felt a split-second’s panic before he saw the back of her parka moving up and down with the force of her breathing.

He started to reach for her, but she pushed herself up, spitting snow out of her mouth and rubbing it out of her eyes.

“Are you okay?” he said, although he knew she couldn’t hear him, because his own ears were still deafened from the force of the explosion.

He looked back at what was left of the slaughterhouse. Flames still shot up from the rubble, and roiling brown smoke billowed into the air. Anyone still inside when it blew, he thought, could never have survived, and he didn’t see anyone else about. He remembered Vadim ordering their driver to take the SUV up to “the farm,” and he wondered how far away that was and how many of Popov’s men were there.

He touched Zoe’s arm, and she looked up at him, still blinking the snow from her eyes. “Can you run some more?” he shouted at her.

She nodded, and he wrapped his hand around her arm, helping her to her feet. The lane that led to the main road was too exposed, so he looked around and spotted a small gate in the cemetery wall. The gate was padlocked shut, but it was old and rusted, and one kick with his boot broke it open.

They wove in and out of snow-draped tombstones and monuments, heading away from the gutted, burning meth lab. They stopped at the top of a small rise and looked back. The fires had gone out, but thick brown smoke still lay over the ruins like a shroud. Ry searched for any movement, for any sign of pursuit, but he saw none.

Then, as they started down the other side of the rise, Ry noticed the small group of people gathered around a freshly dug grave. And parked next to them, a hearse, the smoke from its exhaust blowing out into the cold morning air.

“Babe,” he said, “I think I see our ride back to St. Petersburg.”

R
IDING IN THE
back of the hearse was weird, but warm.

They lay side by side, Zoe cradled in the crook of his arm. She turned her head and lightly kissed the cigarette burn on his neck. “I know you said not to give up the amulet too quickly or he might get suspicious, but if I’d known—”

“Sssh. It’s over now, and he’s dead. Roasted and blown to smithereens. I’m just sorry he took the altar of bones down into hell with him.”

“He took the amulet with him,” Zoe said. “Not the altar of bones.”

He pushed himself up on one elbow so that he could look into her face. “But last night … Wasn’t the juice still in the amulet, then? When did you—”

“Right before Popov’s goons showed up. That’s what I was doing in the bathroom.” She grinned up at Ry. “It was a good plan, if I do say so myself.”

“Better than good. It was brilliant.” He kissed her on the mouth, then lay back down beside her. “And the best thing about it was that it worked.”

Back on that mountain road above the Danube, when she’d showed him the little sample perfumes, she’d told him of her idea then—to pawn a fake altar of bones onto Popov by transferring the bone juice into one of the perfume vials and putting mineral oil in the amulet. The consistency of the mineral oil was close enough to the real thing, as long as you didn’t know it was supposed to glow in the dark.

Zoe stirred in his arms. “Do you think Igor’s real, that Popov really had a grandson who’s dying of cancer?”

“I don’t know. His pain seemed real enough. But then I know from my years as an undercover narc that sometimes you can play a part so well, you can even talk yourself into believing it.”

“He wasn’t really going to let us go, was he?”

“No. We were loose ends that needed snipping.”

Her breathing slowed and quieted, and he thought she’d fallen asleep, then she said, “Then maybe what he said about my mother was a lie, too. What he implied. That Katya gave her the bone juice when she was a little girl because otherwise she would have died of leukemia.”

Ry hesitated a moment. “Remember I told you how I researched your whole family last summer, when I was trying to find your grandmother? … Anna Larina’s ‘miraculous’ recovery was such a big deal back in 1957, it made the front page of the L.A.
Times
.”

Zoe shuddered. “It kind of creeps me out, thinking about it, but it explains a lot. Why she looks young enough to be my sister. And why she is … what she is.”

“Don’t think about it, because it doesn’t matter. You broke free of her a long time ago.”

Zoe was quiet again for a while, then said, “The altar of bones is real, Ry. He was a hundred and twelve, yet you saw how he looked. The altar did that to him.”

“It also made him crazy, and in the end it couldn’t keep him from dying. Whatever the altar did to him, it didn’t make him immortal.”

“Popov was convinced it was never in the cave,” she said. “But it’s there. He just didn’t know how to find it.”

“And you think you can?”

“I’m the Keeper, so I have to try.”

“It
would
have to be all the way up in Siberia, though,” Ry said. “And it’s the goddamn middle of February.”

She laughed and snuggled deeper into him. “That’s why I’m bringing you with me, to keep me warm. At least we’ve run out of bad guys to come after us. Popov was blown to smithereens, Yasmin Poole was skewered, and apparently Miles Taylor is now a turnip. We won’t have to worry about being chased all over the place and shot at every time we turn around.”

Ry wasn’t so sure about that, but he said nothing.

The hearse rocked over the ruts in the road. In the distance he heard the wail of a train whistle. “We must be getting close to civilization,” he
said. “The first thing I’m going to do when we get back to the apartment is take a long, hot shower. A loooong, hot shower …”

Ry hoped she would ask him if she could join him, but she said nothing, and then he realized her breathing had slowed and quieted. She had fallen asleep.

He turned his head and rubbed his mouth over her hair.