Altar of Bones (51 page)

“We’d kind of like to stay under the radar while we’re here, if we can help it,” Ry said, reevaluating his first impression of Denis Kuzmin. In his mind he’d pictured a retired professor who pored over dusty old books and collected icons. But if he’d been an informant for the AVO, then he could be dangerous.

“You must have another cake,” Agim said to Zoe. “Two is not enough. And while you eat, I will tell you the story of how Ry and I became brothers, since he probably did not think to tell you himself.”

Zoe washed down the last bite of sponge cake number two with coffee and reached for sponge cake number three. “You’ve heard of the Silent Buddha?” she said. “Well, Ry could give that guy a run for his money.”

Agim let loose a hearty laugh and slapped Ry on the back.

“The story begins four years ago in Kosovo,” Agim said to Zoe. “When the bombs stopped falling. With the monster Milosevic gone, it was not long before you Americans and your allies discovered that the former freedom fighters you supported had turned the place into a drug smugglers’ paradise. My people, the Kosovo Albanians, we make up what is called the Fifteen Families, and these families are now importing eighty percent of Europe’s heroin. We call it
Albanka
. The Albanian Lady.”

“I’ve heard of it,” Zoe said, and Ry thought that given what her mother was, she probably knew more about Albanian Lady than she wanted to.

“One of the Fifteen Families was headed by a man named Armend Brozi,” Agim went on. “The American drug enforcement agency set up an operation with their counterparts in Germany to bring this man down, and Ry, he was the one put in charge of it. He needed someone to go undercover, as you say, but the Fifteen Families … It is impossible for anyone not Kosovo Albanian to worm their way inside, you understand? For that, Ry chose me, and I did it willingly. No, hungrily.”

Agim fell silent, staring down at his hands, which were balled into fists on the table. After a moment, Zoe asked, “Because it was personal?”

Agim swallowed, nodded. “I had a sister. Her name was Bora, which means ‘snow,’ and it was a good name for her. Not because she was pure—no, far from that. But because she was beautiful in the way that snow is beautiful when it is lying fresh and white and heavy on the rooftops of our village. Armend Brozi made my sister his whore, and when he tired of her, he turned her into a mule. He made her swallow condoms full of heroin and carry them in her belly through customs. On her last trip one of the condoms broke inside her, and she died on the filthy floor of a bathroom in JFK airport.”

Zoe reached out to touch the back of Agim’s hand where it lay on the white tablecloth. “Did you make him pay?”

Agim’s smile was both sad and cruel. “Oh, yes, I made him pay. On the day when we took Armend Brozi down, Ry arranged it so that only I was there to kill him. He died like my sister died, slowly and in much pain. This is what Ry did for me, and this is why I call him my brother.”

The room fell into silence, then Agim shrugged. “Afterward, it was too dangerous for me to be in Kosovo, but I had family here in Budapest and so this is where I came. Now I am getting rich selling guns to insurgents throughout the world, who buy them with the money they have made running drugs. Which makes me a hypocrite, but what can you do?”

L
ATER, AS THEY
were walking back to where Ry had left the car, Agim snagged his arm, holding him back and letting Zoe go on ahead of them.

“Now that I have met her, Ry,” Agim said in a half-whisper, his eyes glinting with poorly suppressed humor, “I can say this with absolute certainty. She is the One.”

Ry kicked at a loose cobblestone. He wanted to kick himself. “Hell, Agim. I barely know her.”

Agim shook his head, his face serious now. “You have learned more about her in these last two days than many lovers come to know of each other in a lifetime. She is your One. So do not be an idiot about it.”

M
AN, IF
these guys were going any slower,” Ry said, fighting down the urge to lean on the horn as the ancient Volkswagen bus lumbered around the curve ahead of them, “they’d be traveling backwards.”

“Uh-huh,” Zoe said. She had the
Vanity Fair
open on her lap and was bent over it, staring at Miles Taylor’s face, trying to crawl inside the man’s head. Get inside his soul.

“At least they are taking in the view,” Ry went on, as the road opened up to a stunning vista of wooded hills and the winding Danube River.

“I’m looking, O’Malley,” Zoe said. “But I’m also thinking.”

“Oh-oh.”

“If America’s Kingmaker once helped a Soviet agent assassinate President Kennedy, then what’s he doing to the country now with all his power and influence and money? For all we know he might still be working for the KGB, or whatever they call themselves these days—”

“The FSB. Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti.”

She waved a hand. “Whatever. He can tell it to the judge after we expose him. But what I’ve been thinking is, how
do
we expose him? We could turn the film over to somebody in the government, like the CIA. But, oh, wait, the triggerman was one of their agents, who just also happened to be a KGB mole—”

A horn blew behind them. Ry glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a red Mini Cooper darting back and forth across the center line, wanting to pass both him and the VW bus, but not quite ballsy enough to try to do it blind.

“It’s possible they found out my dad was a mole a long time ago,” he
said. “They might even know he was the man on the grassy knoll. But whatever they know now or knew then, you got to figure the minute the assassination happened, people started covering their asses all up and down the chain of command, from the CIA to the cops in Dallas, because they
let
it happen. Take the Secret Service, for instance. Never mind that they let the president ride around in an open convertible that day; as soon as the first shot was fired, the guy behind the wheel should’ve floored it and gotten the hell out of there. Instead, he practically came to a complete stop to look around, I suppose. Who knows? But that left Kennedy and everybody else in the car just sitting there like wooden ducks in a shooting gallery.”

Zoe rolled the magazine up into a tight cylinder and turned to look out the window. “See, that’s what I’m most afraid of, Ry. We give them the film, they tell us we need to consider what’s best for the country, yada, yada, and then they turn around and bury it.”

“Babe, they’re gonna bury it so deep, the only way it’ll ever see the light of day again is if some kid in China accidentally uncovers it while digging around in his backyard.”

“While we’ll spend the rest of our lives locked up in a cage somewhere.”

The Mini Cooper honked again, and the VW bus retaliated by belching a cloud of black smoke and slowing down even more as they started around yet another bend in the road. Ry braked and forced his hands to relax their death grip on the wheel.

He said, “We could take it to the media. I know a guy who works for the
Washington Post
who’s pretty good. He’s smart, thorough, and not easily intimidated. And whatever his personal biases are, he seems able to keep them from bleeding into his stories.”

They came out of the curve, and at last Ry saw straight road and no oncoming traffic ahead. He pressed down on the gas pedal and was within a split second of pulling out around the van when the Mini Cooper blew by them. The guy behind the wheel gave them the finger, and Ry thought,
Asshole
.

“What an asshole,” Zoe said, and Ry laughed.

He said, “We could take the film to my guy, but the trouble is the
film is only half of it. It shows who did it, but not why, and he is going to want to know the why before he breaks the story.”

“And the minute he starts asking questions,” Zoe said, “Miles Taylor is going to have him killed.”

“Exactly.”

They were quiet for a moment, then Ry said, “There is one guy I know who’s powerful and connected enough in his own right that Taylor might have a hard time getting to him. Although, he might not have the juice to get the film exposed—in fact he wouldn’t do it if he honestly believed it would hurt the country more than it helped.”

“Who is this paragon?”

“Senator Jackson Boone.”

Zoe whirled around in her seat to gape at him. “Oh, my God. You know Senator
Boone
?”

“Hey, don’t swoon on me here.”

“It’s just …
Senator Boone
. People are saying he could be our next president, Ry. How do you know him?”

“From when I was in the Special Forces. He was my commanding officer.”

Zoe laughed. “You know what I like about you, Ry? You not only speak fifteen languages, but everywhere we go you know ‘a guy.’ A guy who can get us guns. A guy who can make us fake passports. A guy who is a U.S. senator.”

She unrolled the
Vanity Fair
and it fell right open to the Taylor article. Opposite the first page of the text was a photo display, and as she tilted it toward the sunlight that streamed through the window to get a better look, Ry repressed a groan.

The photograph that had her so obsessed was one of Miles Taylor standing alongside the president of the United States, awarding some inner-city educator the Freedom Medal. Behind them a small knot of people were grouped around an American flag, and a little apart from them, as if she’d deliberately stepped back to get out of the picture, was a woman in a bright red suit.

And, okay, maybe she had red hair, but you couldn’t really tell because she had it up, and she was so far on the edge of the picture that half
her face was cut off and the half you could see was out of focus. But Zoe was sure the woman was Yasmine Poole because she had on a red suit. As if there weren’t a million red suits in the world. It had to be a woman thing, he thought.

And, of course, because she could read his mind, Zoe said, “I’m telling you, O’Malley, it’s her. It’s that same killer designer outfit she had on in Paris.”

Ry bit the inside of his cheek to keep from opening his mouth, then said, “Hey, I’m with you, at least as far as Yasmine Poole working for Miles Taylor as his hit man, hit woman, whatever. I’m just saying the woman in that particular photo could be anybody.”

Zoe studied the photograph a little longer, then closed up the magazine, put it in the side-door pocket, and uncapped one of the water bottles they’d stocked the car with. As they came around another bend in the road, she pressed her face against the window glass.

“This really is spectacular,” she said. “But Strauss got it wrong. The Danube isn’t blue, more like a dull, muddy brown.”

“It still is blue most of the time. It’s probably just got some runoff today from the melting snow.”

He let a couple of beats go by, then said, “So Agim is one good-looking dude, wouldn’t you say?”

Zoe took a swig of the water. “Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

R
Y FELL IN
love with Szentendre at first sight.

“It’s almost too charming to be real,” he said to Zoe. “Cobbled lanes, red-tiled roofs, brightly painted houses, quaint Orthodox churches. Look, they’ve even got horse-drawn carriages. I could hire a couple of guys to play violins, buy you one perfect red rose, and we could go for a ride in the moonlight—”