Altar of Bones (16 page)

Yasmine Poole’s résumé was also impressive at first glance. A degree from the London School of Economics, followed by a year as an arbitrage trader with F. M. Mayer, then another year as an analyst with Wertheim and Company, and all of this by the age of twenty-eight. Which was young, but that didn’t especially bother Miles. It meant she would still be both hungry and malleable—two qualities that seemed to fall by the wayside as you got into your thirties.

His company, Taylor Financials, had never hired so much as a janitor, though, without doing an extradeep background check on the
applicant, and it was what came out of the investigator’s report on Yasmine Poole that most intrigued Miles.

For one thing, her name wasn’t Yasmine Poole, at least not originally. She’d been born Yasmin Yakir, the child of a couple of New York right-wing activist Jews. When she was ten, her parents emigrated to Israel and settled in an illegal West Bank wildcat outpost. Two years later, when she was twelve, a Palestinian rocket destroyed their home while she was at school, making her an orphan. After that she was in a group home in Jerusalem until she turned eighteen, when like the rest of her countrymen she was required to join the army.

But whereas most Israeli women were assigned to support or staff billets, she was selected by Aman, their special ops branch, to be trained as an assassin. She’d served three years, but doing what exactly only God and the Israeli army knew for sure, because as good as Miles’s investigator was, he wasn’t good enough to penetrate their intelligence files.

“Actually,” the investigator told Miles, after he’d been summoned to fill out his report with a verbal and more personal evaluation, “I got the sense she was eased out of the army quietly, you know? After her three years were up. Like maybe she got to liking it just a little too much. The killing, if you know what I mean.”

Miles said nothing, and after a long silence the investigator went on, “Her commanding officer couldn’t decide whether she was crazy, or she just liked to play at being crazy. But whichever it was, I think she scared the holy bejesus out of him.”

The investigator paused again, and Miles still said nothing. Finally, figuring he was dismissed, the guy got up to leave. But at the door he stopped and said, “If you want my recommendation, boss, I say stay away from her.”

Instead, Miles had her in for an interview the very next day.

Her beauty literally stole his breath away. He’d long ago lost count of the number of actresses and models he’d fucked, and still he’d never had that happen to him before. Where the very sight of a woman closed up his throat so that he couldn’t inhale or exhale, just gape at her like a beached fish.

“So tell me,” he finally said, when he got his breath back, “what are you running from, Ms. Yasmin Yakir?”

He expected a gasp or at least a blush, but all he got was a little shrug that drew his eyes down to her breasts. “So, you did your due diligence on me and found a skeleton. Big whoop. We all got them.” She crossed her long legs, made sure he was looking, then added, “What are you running from, Mr. Marcario Tavoularis?”

It was so funny, he almost laughed out loud. He’d set out to shock her, and he ended up shocked. Not so much that she knew he’d changed his name from the Greek Marcario Tavoularis to the Waspish Miles Taylor, but that she’d gone to the trouble to find this out about him. He hadn’t tried all that hard to bury his working-class origins, but it would still have taken some digging.

But then she’d been in the Israeli intelligence, after all, or a form of it anyway. He was confident, though, that his real secrets, his bodies, were too deeply buried for her to have gotten even a whiff of their stink.

So he leaned forward and put a lot of mean into the smile he gave her. “What’s your point, Ms. Yakir or Poole, or whatever? That you’re smart and you got a set of balls? You think that makes us even?”

The smile she gave back to him made him hard. “No, Mr. Tavoularis, or Taylor, or whatever. When you kill your first man,” she said, “then we’ll be even.”

He wanted to wipe that smart-ass smile off her face by telling her about the big kill, but he didn’t. He told her about it eventually, though. Eventually he’d told her pretty much everything.

“D
ON’T FROWN AT
me like that,” she said to him now.

She smoothed the deep crow’s-feet around his left eye with the tips of her fingers. “You think too much about things sometimes. Analyze and poke at them. Analyze and poke at
me
. Some people are simply born in love with the taste of blood.”

A door slammed down below and someone laughed, too loudly. Miles turned away from her and limped to the window to see what the noise was about.

The sun was long gone now, but enough light was still left in the summer sky to see that it was nothing, just three of the catering crew who’d come out onto the deck from the billiard room for a smoke. Tomorrow night he was throwing a party here at his beach cottage, an intimate gathering of fifty or so of the world’s superrich and famous.

My beach cottage. Hunh
. Twenty rooms, stone fireplaces, wraparound verandas, ocean views, and a $12 million price tag—and here at the Vineyard they called it a “cottage.”

“Did I ever tell you, Yaz, that I was born and raised right here on the island?” Of course he’d told her, and probably more than once, but he went on anyway. “In a little town called Oak Bluffs. Five of us squeezed into a real honest-to-God New England cottage. Four tiny rooms built by some whaler a couple of centuries ago. It had a lot of gingerbread on the outside so the tourists all thought it was ‘cute,’ but inside, the linoleum floors were peeling and the old pipes froze and broke every winter. And there was never enough money for anything. My daddy—before he took off on us when I was thirteen—he ran the local gas station. He took care of the fancy cars of the rich summer families who thought of us as townies, when they bothered to think of us at all.”

She had followed him to the window and now she slipped her arm through his, leaned into him.

“And yet now those very same people,” she said, “are coming to your parties in this big ol’ house, their lips in a permanent pucker the better to kiss your ass, and you like it, Miles, and your ass likes it because it feels just so damn
good
.”

Miles laughed at the image she’d put into his head, but it was a bitter laugh. Even after all these years, after that dump of a house and his brute of a father, and the rich snobs who came to rub his face in it with their very existence—it all still festered.

They were quiet together a minute, then he said, “I’ve had this dream the last couple of nights. I’m a kid again, out in the backyard of the Oak Bluffs house, only instead of playing I’m trying to bury a dead body, and it’s raining so hard that, no matter how much dirt I shovel in the grave, the water keeps washing it away, exposing the bones.”

He turned to look at her. “And, yeah, I know what you’re going to say. Sometimes a dream is just a dream.”

“No,” she said, and something was in her eyes, something hard and cold. “What I’m going to say is that you lied to me.”

“About what? And, anyway, are you going to tell me you’ve never lied to me? Everybody lies. It’s in our natures. Hell, the whole world spins merrily along in a circle fuck of lies.”

“Your big kill. You lied to me about the reason for it.”

“Funny, but that is one thing I haven’t lied to you about.”

“Call it a sin of omission then.”

He shook his head, feeling a little pissed now. “Still not following you.”

“The altar of bones.”

“The
what
? Yaz, I swear to you I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Instead of answering, she lifted her left hand and he saw that she was holding one of those miniature tape players. At some point she’d put down her drink and picked up the player and he hadn’t noticed her doing it, and that bothered him. Was it those damn pain pills he’d taken for his knee, fuzzing up his head, or was he really losing it?

He knew about the recording she’d made in the hospital, of course. She’d given him the gist of it when she used a burner phone to call him from Galveston on his secure line. How she’d taped the old man right before he croaked, spilling his guts to his priestly son, telling the boy all about the big kill and the home movie he’d had made of it. Only O’Malley didn’t have the movie anymore, had never really had the movie, because some woman called Katya Orlova had run off with it and disappeared.

Miles thought Yasmine had told him everything about O’Malley’s confession and what had gone down in Galveston, but now she pushed a button on the tape player. He hadn’t heard that voice in forty-eight years. Mike O’Malley’s voice.

And Yasmine hadn’t told him quite everything, after all, because he heard Mike O’Malley say, “It all started with Katya Orlova and the altar of bones, but it ended with the kill.”

M
ILES LISTENED THROUGH
it to the end, until that familiar voice, an old man’s voice now, faded so it was barely intelligible, saying something that sounded like “I thought she’d died in the cave.” Then after a long pause, another voice said, half plea, half prayer,
“Dad? Oh, God—
”

Yasmine turned off the tape player.

“Is that it?” Miles asked.

She nodded. “He didn’t say another word after that. He slipped into a coma, and then it was bye-bye, Mikey.”

Miles didn’t say anything, just looked out the window at a sea that shone silver under the rising moon.

“You really don’t know what it is, do you?” Yasmine said. “This altar-of-bones thing.” She laughed, and he heard in her laugh the madness that always lived in her, just beneath the surface. “Oh, Lord, this is almost too funny, Miles. You went and killed—”

“No.”
He thrust away from both her and the window, took a couple of steps, then turned back. “O’Malley did the killing.”

“And the Russian, Nikolai Popov, he did the planning. But you conned them into doing it. You were the big mastermind. Isn’t that what you told me? Only now it looks like you were the one who got played.”

He almost hit her. He got as far as lifting his arm for a backhanded slap, but the way she just stood there, ready to take it, even though she could see it coming … He could see she
wanted
him to do it. And that stopped him.

Anyway, the face he really wanted to smash wasn’t hers.

It all started with Katya Orlova and the altar of bones…
. What in hell was that? It almost sounded like a joke. If you didn’t know Nikolai Popov.

“You’ve got to find this Katya Orlova woman, Yaz. Find her, get the film, make her tell you all about this altar of bones.

“And then kill her for me, please.”