Altar of Bones (65 page)

“I hope you rot in hell,” Zoe said.

Popov smiled. “No doubt I will. But not for a long, long time yet.”

N
IKOLAI POPOV
put the amulet around his own neck and stood before Zoe, looking down at her. He reached out to touch her, but she flinched away from him. So he let his hand fall back down at his side.

“Why the sad eyes, my dear?” he said. “You will come away from this with your life. And your lover’s life, too, because you have proven your devotion to him so sweetly.”

He paused, as if he expected a thank-you, but when she said nothing, his face hardened. “I know you also have the Kennedy film, and that I will let you keep. I don’t care what you do with it. I never wanted it, in spite of what Miles Taylor thought. You could release it in every multiplex across your large, obscene country if you like. Of the three of us involved in the assassination—four, if you count that fool Oswald—I am the only one still breathing—”

“Miles Taylor is dead?”

Popov laughed at the look of shock on Ry’s face. “As good as. You kids should really watch more CNN. Your Kingmaker had a massive stroke this past Saturday, and he is now in what they are calling ‘a permanent vegetative state.’ He can neither move nor speak, and a machine does his breathing for him. Whether there is any awareness in what is left of his brain”—Popov lifted his elegant shoulders in a shrug—“who knows?”

He turned abruptly away from them. “Vadim?”

Vadim, who was just reaching for the lighter he’d left on the table, straightened back up. He took the unlit cigarette out of his mouth and said, “Yes,
Pakhan
?”

“You may uncuff them now, then call up to the farm and have one of
the cars brought down here to take them back to the city…. What?” he said, at Zoe’s look of surprise. “Are you still thinking I am going to have you whacked, as they say in your silly American
mafiya
movies? My very own great-granddaughter?”

And Ry knew, from the spark of pure malice he saw flash in Nikolai Popov’s eyes, that the man had every intention of having them killed. That the orders had in fact, been given to his two enforcers well before this final charade had even begun.

P
OPOV DOFFED HIS
head in a mocking good-bye and headed toward the back of the ruins, and the deep shadows behind the trailer. The meth was really cooking like mad now, Ry saw. Visible fumes were rising out of the open mouths of the mason jars filled with cold-medicine tablets soaking in muriatic acid.

One spark, and this whole place really could blow to smithereens
.

All he needed was the spark, and Ry knew where he would find one. But he also needed to keep Popov here, in the slaughterhouse with them, until Vadim unlocked their handcuffs and he was free to make his move.

“I want to know why you waited,” Ry called out to the
pakhan
’s departing back.

Popov stopped and turned around. “Why I waited for what?”

“You told my dad the president had to die because he drank from the altar of bones and that made him dangerous to the world. Yet you waited fifteen months after Marilyn gave the amulet to Bobby before you came to that conclusion. Why? What happened that made you decide he had to die?”

Popov looked up at the ceiling, as if the real truth were to be found up there. “Why, why, why. Such a simple question, and so I will give you a simple answer. I did it for my country. Or rather for what my country was then. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

This surprised Ry, although he knew it shouldn’t have, and Popov laughed. “What, Agent O’Malley? Do you think only you Americans are capable of patriotism?”

Ry heard a stifled curse, and he glanced over at Vadim. The
vor
was
patting down the pockets of his jogging suit, the unlit cigarette dangling from his lips.
Please, God
, Ry thought,
don’t tell me he’s lost the keys to my cuffs
.

“So are you saying you killed Kennedy because of the Cuban missile crisis?” Ry said to Popov. “He forced Khrushchev to back down, he humiliated your country, so you decided to make him pay?”

“Make him pay? Mother of God, boy. This wasn’t some sandlot game we were playing. You weren’t alive then, so you don’t know what it was like. They called it the Cold War, but it wasn’t cold. It was a hot war and we were winning it. We were
winning
. Africa, South America, Southeast Asia—we had people’s revolutions going on everywhere, like little brush fires. Too many for the West to even hope to put out.”

A brightness had come over Popov’s face, as if a fire had suddenly ignited inside him. His eyes burned with it, and Ry thought he was getting a glimpse of the man he had been when he was procurator general of the KGB in Moscow.

“But there was always the risk one of our brush fires would start a conflagration that could erupt into a nuclear war,” Popov went on. “It was the fear lurking in all our hearts, that someday an American president or a Soviet premier would decide a line had been crossed, that he had to take a stand, to be a man. Or maybe he would simply lose his mind one day and push the red button, and our world would be gone in a radioactive flash.”

Vadim still hadn’t found the damn key, but at least, Ry saw, Grisha had unlocked Zoe’s cuffs. She stood up now, rubbing the red marks they’d left on her wrists.

“The night we killed Marilyn Monroe,” Popov was saying, “she told your father and me that she’d given the amulet to Robert Kennedy, to give to his brother. But there was no way of knowing whether the president ever got that silly bitch’s little gift, let alone whether he ever drank from it. So I waited and I watched him. He had Addison’s disease, so I waited to see if he got any better. And I watched him for signs of … of the dark side of the altar.”

“Because you’d already seen those signs in yourself?”

This time Popov’s laugh was a little too wild. “How could I have
seen it in myself? I had been one of Joseph Stalin’s pet spies. Whatever lines of sanity and morality there are in this world, I crossed them long before I drank from the altar of bones.”

“Here’s the fucker,” Ry heard Vadim mutter under his breath, and Ry’s thumping heart slowed a little.
Soon now. Soon
.

“So I watched and I waited,” Popov said, “for any signs that your President Kennedy ever drank from the altar. And what is one of the first things to happen? He cuts a deal with Sam Giancana of your Italian
mafiya
to assassinate Fidel Castro. They put poison on Fidel’s cigars—can you imagine such a crazy thing as that? ‘This truly is the act of a madman,’ I thought to myself at the time, but I did nothing. Because the only certain and permanent solution I could think of was to kill the man, and although you might not believe me now, it was a path I was truly loath to take. But then there came the crisis he made over our missiles in Cuba, where he went right to the brink, and yet still I did nothing.”

The cuffs were off at last. As Ry stood up, he brushed his hand across the table and palmed Vadim’s lighter, slipping it into his pocket.

Popov was on a roll now, as if it were a relief to him to finally be able to explain to someone why he had committed one of the great crimes of the twentieth century.

“He pushed us to the brink of nuclear war, and still I did nothing. Then one day Miles Taylor, my mole inside the administration, passed along a top-secret document to me, and I saw that it was a detailed plan for an American invasion of North Vietnam, already set for the following spring. Sixty thousand combat troops, with full air and sea support, were to hit the beaches south of Haiphong harbor and sweep towards Hanoi. While your air force would nuke the rail and road passes between North Vietnam and China.

“I am holding this document in my hands, reading how your president intends to escalate from a few inconvenient advisers in South Vietnam to a full-blown war with the North and with China, and with us Soviets, as well. It was sheer insanity. And that was when I knew the dark side of the altar had truly taken hold of him. That for the sake of my country, for the world, he had to go.”

An invasion of North Vietnam? Nuking the passes?
It seemed unreal to Ry. Truly insane—and wasn’t that a laugh? Yet, when you thought about it, after Kennedy’s death those “advisers”
did
escalate into an invasion of a sort, although into the southern half of the country, not into the North.

While Popov was talking, all of Zoe’s attention had been on Ry, letting him take the lead. He held out his hand to her now, and she came to him. He put his arm around her waist and drew her to him. Popov and his two goons didn’t seem to care.

“So you decided all on your own,” Ry said, “that President Kennedy had to go. And you had my father and Miles Taylor to help you pull it off. The brilliance of the plan, the reason why it worked, was in its very simplicity.”

Popov looked pleased at the compliment. “If you involve too many people in your conspiracy, someone always ends up talking, either to save his own ass or because he just can’t help himself. Even so, I never anticipated your father would have his woman make that damn film. He outsmarted me there. Miles Taylor was going to be useful to me for many years to come, but your father? From the moment he pulled the trigger, he was dispensable, and he knew it.”

“Like Lee Harvey Oswald.”

“Ah, yes. Poor Lee Harvey. Why am I always forgetting about him? But then he was never a real part of it, except as a patsy. You know the type. In Russia we call him the elephant-in-the-parade man—the one who follows the elephant with a shovel and a pail full of shit. I fed him a beautiful story about how Castro wanted revenge for the poisoned cigars, then I sent him off to make history.”

Popov laughed again, and Ry thought he looked positively entranced with himself now—the star of his own movie. “And what a history it turned out to be,” he said. “Imagine that a single bullet from a clunky Italian-surplus bolt-action rifle could change direction several times in order to kill the president and wound the governor of Texas. A pity our poor Oswald didn’t live long enough to marvel and gloat at what a crack shot he was that day.”

“And Jack Ruby, the man who in turn gunned Oswald down in the
basement of the Dallas police headquarters—I take it we have you to thank for that? Snipping off loose ends, were you?”

“Of course. Like your father, Lee Harvey Oswald was a dispensable commodity.”

While Popov talked, Ry had edged himself and Zoe farther from the table and closer to the slaughterhouse door. He could see that it had grown light outside, and it was no longer snowing. Feeble rays of sunshine filtered through gaps in the crumbling walls.

Ry casually put his hand into his coat pocket, found the lighter, and flipped open its lid. He pushed down on the gas lever and pressed the pad of his thumb on the striker wheel. He said, “I remember reading about the Warren Commission’s ‘magic bullet theory.’ You must’ve gotten a good laugh out of that.”

Popov was getting a good laugh out of it now. “Magical bullet, indeed. But what turned out to be even more magical was the top-secret document Miles Taylor had given me. It was only later, long after our big kill, that I found out the document was a forgery. An exceedingly well-drawn forgery, but all lies nonetheless. Miles, and some other members of the Kennedy administration, had been pushing for an escalation of the fighting in Vietnam because of the millions to be made in Defense Department contacts, but Kennedy was balking. Vice President Johnson, though, seemed quite amenable to the idea. Miles must have decided that the easiest way to get those defense contracts was to arrange to have the vice president become the president.”

Popov laughed again and shook his head. “Miles, the devious bastard—he used me to do his dirty work for him. I had
made
Miles Taylor, I shaped and molded him, and so I thought he was my creature, that I owned him. It was arrogant of me, I know, and in my arrogance I swallowed that phony document of his hook, line, and sinker.”

“You thought you were so smart,” Zoe said, startling everybody because she’d been quiet for so long. “And yet you were wrong about everything. The document was a fake, but so was the amulet, because the real one, the one with the altar of bones—Katya got that one back. You’re wearing it now, around your neck. The amulet Marilyn Monroe gave to Bobby that day was filled with toilet water, so even if his brother
did drink from it, he was never going to lose his mind and push the red button.”