Altar of Bones (54 page)

“No, wait,” Kuzmin cried, coming half out of his chair, and Ry tensed, his hand starting to go for the gun at his back.

But then the professor eased back down again. His hand shook as he smoothed his thinning, red-gray hair. He drew in a deep breath.

“Forgive me, I became sidetracked and forgot to tell you the most important thing. What you came for, the story behind your icon. In his description of the cave and what took place that night, Rasputin spoke about seeing a jeweled icon sitting on top of the altar made of human bones. He said his lover called it ‘the Lady,’ and it was of the Virgin, holding not the Christ child in her lap, but a drinking vessel carved out of a human skull. And the face of the Virgin was the face of his lover. The Keeper.”

Kuzmin leaned forward and Ry saw the desperation in his eyes, the hunger. “The Okhrana had the Mad Monk draw a sketch of the Lady’s face. My father saw it in the dossier. There can be no doubt that the icon you are holding is the very one Rasputin’s eyes gazed at inside the cave with the altar of bones.”

“Maybe,” Zoe said. She had, Ry noticed, never taken her hand out of the satchel after she’d put the icon away, and he knew she had it wrapped around the butt of her Glock.

“So what happened to your father, Professor?” Ry asked. “After that day at Fontanka 16.”

“What? Oh, there were more papers within the dossier, but my father never got the chance to read them, for Popov suddenly slammed the door to his cabinet shut, stuffed a thin file folder inside his uniform tunic, and said, ‘We’re done here.’ Then he saw my father was trying to hide something from him, and he said, ‘What have you got? Give it over.’ “

Kuzmin contemplated his empty glass, then said, “My father gave it over, of course. What other choice did he have? And so Senior Lieutenant Nikolai Popov left Fontanka 16 with two dossiers that day, and one of them had to do with an altar made of human bones.”

Fat lot of good it did him
, Ry thought.
All those years he spent searching for the thing, killing for it
.

“Did they never speak about it again?” Zoe asked. “Popov and your father?”

The professor snorted a bitter laugh. “Not hardly. Two days later, Senior Lieutenant Popov became Captain Popov, and Father was transferred out of the GUGB and into a regular army unit. One that was sure to be sent to the front lines during the war everyone feared was one day coming. He was lucky that was the worst that was done to him—”

Kuzmin snapped his fingers as if a thought had suddenly occurred to him. “My father drew from memory a copy of the two sketches he saw that day. Would you care to see them?”

He didn’t wait for a response, but got up and went to a cabinet at the base of one of the bookcases. He dug a key ring from his pocket, opened
the cabinet, and rummaged around with his back to them, then straightened and turned. He had a small, snub-nosed revolver in his hand.

He surprised Ry by laughing out loud when he saw the two Glocks pointed at his heart.

“Ours are bigger,” Ry said.

“And there are two of them,” Zoe said.

Kuzmin laughed again, then shrugged. “Well, I had to try, didn’t I? I don’t suppose you’d be willing to sell the icon? … No, I didn’t think so. Perhaps your grandmother—”

“She’s dead,” Zoe said.

“Ah, yes, of course. For how else would you have become the Keeper? Yet I think she died without telling you much at all. I think you came here knowing even less than I do. And I have told you some, but not all.”

He started to take a step toward them, but Ry stopped him with a look.

“We could become partners,” Kuzmin said, his eyes shining, wet and pale like spit. “We could go together to Siberia. We could find the magic people, and they will know just by looking at you that you are the Keeper. They will lead us to the lake, to the secret cave. My God, a fountain of youth! Think of what we could do with it. Not only will we be immortal ourselves, we’ll become rich beyond our wildest dreams by selling it to those who—”

A staccato of gunfire suddenly tore through the room from the garden. Flowerpots burst, the French doors erupted into splinters and shards of glass. Three red blossoms burst on Kuzmin’s ratty old sweater, and a thin red mist sprayed the air as the bullets tore through his chest.

A split second later Ry saw a grenade sail through the shattered doors to land with a heavy thud on the far edge of the thick Oriental carpet.

He heard a sharp
pfffft
and threw himself on top of Zoe. They rolled off the sofa and onto the floor, just as the grenade exploded.

T
HICK, CHOKING
white smoke billowed around them. Ry’s eyes and throat were burning up, he couldn’t breathe. He choked, then his brain kicked in.

Not fire. Tear gas
.

Zoe flailed underneath him, coughing, gagging. He rolled off her and up onto his knees. He still had his gun in one hand, and he grabbed her arm with the other, to pull her up with him. He saw her mouth open on a yell or a scream, then she choked and jerked away from him, scrambling on her hands and knees to the nearest armchair, clawing at the rug underneath it, as if she were a wounded animal trying to burrow into a hole.

He snagged her ankle; she kicked loose. He grabbed it again, tried to pull her out from under the chair. He yelled her name, but it came out in a croak. His eyes felt as if they were burning up inside his head, and every breath was like swallowing ground glass.

Gotta get us out of here, out of here now…
.

Ry figured their attackers would give it another ten, fifteen seconds, at the most, for the tear gas to take full effect, then rush the library.

Gotta get out…
.

He twisted his fingers in the denim of Zoe’s pants and yanked hard. She came up fast and whirled, her eyes swollen, streaming tears, her chest heaving. Then he saw the Glock in her hand, and he finally got it. He must’ve sent her gun flying under the chair when he’d jumped on top of her.

He grabbed her by the shoulders and hauled her to her feet. “Kitchen,” he rasped.

She nodded and ran half-blind toward the double doors that led to the foyer. Ry stumbled after her. He could barely see anymore. Ragged coughs ripped through his lungs. It felt as if he were breathing acid.

He glanced back at the shattered window through the white veil of gas. His swollen, blurred eyes saw a creature rise up as if from the black lagoon—tall and thick-chested, with bulbous, flylike eyes, a snakelike nose, and a long arm with a clawed finger pointing at Ry’s heart.

Ry fired off a half dozen shots, his aim wild because he couldn’t see. He heard the bullets hit wood and glass. The creature seemed to disappear in the smoke. Was he hit or just diving for cover?

A split second later a spray of automatic-weapons fire stitched the wall above their heads.

Not hit, or at least not so badly that he couldn’t shoot. More bullets whizzed by, lower this time, shattering the lintel of the door. Chunks of wood and plaster flew through the air. The clouds of gas seemed to shimmer with the noise.

Zoe was having trouble with the latch. She twisted around and rasped something that might’ve been “Locked” or “Blocked.” He pulled her out of the way and kicked the wooden panels into kindling with his steel-capped boot.

The pall of the tear gas followed them out into the foyer. Ry let Zoe get a couple of steps ahead of him, while he ran half-backward, covering their retreat.

The foyer dead-ended at a staircase, with two smaller hallways leading off on each side. Ry felt Zoe hesitate and he croaked, “Right,” just as the creature from the black lagoon burst through the library’s shattered doors, hitting the floor on a roll, firing his Uzi, but still aiming high.

Ry fired back as he rounded the corner into the hall and missed again because he couldn’t
see
anything.

A swinging door was at the end of the long hall, and Ry prayed that it led into the kitchen. They were about ten feet away when it banged opened as if from the punch of a fist, slamming hard and loud against the wall. A big man wearing a black Kevlar vest and a gas mask, and with an Uzi at his side, filled the threshold.

For a sharp, suspended second they all three stood stock-still as if caught in a freeze-frame. Then Ry saw the barrel of the Uzi start to come up, but before his tear-gas befuddled and disoriented mind could tell his body to react, Zoe shot the guy right between his big, bulbous eyes.

The body had barely hit the floor before Zoe leaped over it and was into the kitchen, peppering rounds into the room, shattering crockery and glass in a staccato burst of noise.

Ry saw a blurred version of the door he knew from his earlier recon led out into the back vegetable garden. He headed for it and almost tripped over the sprawled legs of the housekeeper.

Her throat had been slit.

T
HE COLD, CLEAR
February air tasted better than beer and felt almost as good as sex. Ry’s throat was swollen beyond talking, so he tapped Zoe on the shoulder and pointed the way through the apple orchard to the lane that led past the church, letting her lead the way again while he covered their backs.

They wove in and out of old tomato stakes, dead squash vines crunching under their boots. They were into the apple grove within seconds, and Ry could see through the trees the blurred steeple of the little Serbian church. Behind him, he heard a door bang and a spatter of Uzi fire.

They broke out of the trees and onto the lane. About thirty yards of open space were before the church and the cemetery’s stone wall, and they crossed it at a dead run.

Ry got to the wall first, so he could help Zoe over it, but she managed it easily, vaulting on one hand like a gymnast.

H
E SQUATTED ON
his haunches and leaned back against the rough stones of the wall, his chest heaving. Zoe knelt beside him.

She hacked phlegm out of her throat and started to bring a fist up to her eyes, but he grabbed her wrist, stopping her. “Don’t rub.” The
words rasped out of his throat, which felt like coarse sandpaper. His own eyes were now swollen into slits and so clogged with tears he couldn’t blink anymore. “Makes it worse.”

The cemetery wall was maybe three and a half feet high and built of stones harvested from the nearby countryside, and from the way it curved out around the church, it was as effective as a hunting blind. With the wall as cover, one guy could keep an army pinned down in the apple orchard. Not forever, but long enough.

Ry popped up and saw a blurred black figure flitting through the apple trees, then another smaller figure in a maroon jacket behind and off to the left.

“Two. Still in the orchard,” he said to Zoe, as he dropped back down. “Yasmine Poole, probably, and one of the guys from Paris.”

“I killed the other one,” she said.

He grinned at her. “Fucking A, you did.”

He dug the Beamer’s keys out of the pocket of his cargo pants and put them in her hand. He didn’t want to tell her how badly he couldn’t see because he was afraid she wouldn’t leave him then. “You go get the car while I—”

Ragged coughs ripped through his chest, stopping him, but Zoe nodded to show she got it. He watched her take off across the cemetery, running at a crouch, weaving among the tombstones, satchel banging against her hip.