The Altar Of Bones Part 29

"O'Malley talked about the big kill with his son the priest the day he died. He said you ordered it done because he drank from the altar of bones, and that made him dangerous to the world."

"Poor Mr. O'Malley. He must have been delirious, because I've never heard of this thing. This altar."

Miles hadn't expected to get the truth out of Nikolai. He could fly to St. Petersburg and try to choke it out of the man, and still he would get nothing.

"You're a lying sack of s.h.i.+t, Nikki."

"No, you are lying to yourself. You needed to believe it had everything to do with Cold War politics and money, but for you that was the least of it. You wanted wanted him dead, Miles, and not for the millions you stood to make out of it. You wanted him dead because you hated him. He was the golden boy. Sun-kissed, rich, handsome, and meant for great things. And you couldn't bear it." him dead, Miles, and not for the millions you stood to make out of it. You wanted him dead because you hated him. He was the golden boy. Sun-kissed, rich, handsome, and meant for great things. And you couldn't bear it."

"No," Miles said, but he knew that it was true.

He laid the phone back in its cradle, breaking the connection without a good-bye.

A bare second later the telephone rang beneath his hand, and Miles jumped, his heart pounding.

Yasmine, he prayed. Please, G.o.d, let it be Yasmine Please, G.o.d, let it be Yasmine.

38.

Budapest, Hungary RY PULLED the rental car to a stop across the entrance to a narrow, cobblestoned street. They were in the heart of the Jozsefvaros district, a part of Budapest where decaying Hapsburg mansions rubbed shoulders with grim Soviet-era apartment buildings. And wh.o.r.es and struggling musicians shared the sidewalks with plumbers and electricians. the rental car to a stop across the entrance to a narrow, cobblestoned street. They were in the heart of the Jozsefvaros district, a part of Budapest where decaying Hapsburg mansions rubbed shoulders with grim Soviet-era apartment buildings. And wh.o.r.es and struggling musicians shared the sidewalks with plumbers and electricians.

He cut the ignition and waited. The only sound he could hear was the ticking of the car's engine as it cooled. The empty street dead-ended into the wall of a cemetery. Ry did not like dead ends.

"Are you sure this is the place? I don't see anyone," Zoe said, just as the door to a nearby house crashed open and four enormous bruisers with shaved heads and hard, hooded eyes came out. It was the biggest house on the block, and its crumbling stucco had recently been painted a bright marzipan yellow.

As he watched the men come toward them, Ry raised his hands slowly and put them on the steering wheel. "Keep your hands out in the open, where they can see them."

"Oookay," Zoe said, and Ry heard the fear rising in her voice.

"They're not going to hurt us. They're just checking us out."

The men circled the car like dogs around a fire hydrant. They all carried guns in shoulder holsters under their coats, but they weren't acting as if they intended to take them out. Yet.

"The man we're meeting here," Ry said, "his name is Agim Latifi, and he's one of Eastern Europe's biggest arms smugglers. He's also one of the ugliest guys you'll ever see in your life. You ever seen a picture of a blobfish? Well, he's like that, only uglier."

Ry was joking around to put her at ease, but he was worried. It had been four years since he'd last seen Agim, and the French government was offering a reward of ten thousand euros for a tip leading to their arrest.

The goons finished circling the car. One motioned at them to get out.

They followed the men up the street. Ry heard a dog bark, then, from the open window of a house farther down the street, the incessant base beat of the Hungarian rap group Belga, singing "Az a Baj."

They went through the door of the yellow house, into a hall whose best days had been three centuries ago. Paint was peeling off the walls in strips, and the parquet floors were warped and stained. Ry could see no furniture anywhere.

With two men in front and two behind, they walked up worn marble stairs, through a pair of wood-paneled double doors, and into a dazzling, sun-filled room. Ry blew out a low whistle.

"Wow," Zoe said. "I feel like I should be wearing a ball gown and dancing the waltz."

Ry did a slow turn, taking in the deeply coffered ceilings and the garlanded friezes of carved and gilded fruit. "It was a ballroom once. He's restored it to all its former glory."

Before one of the floor-to-ceiling windows was a round table set with white linen, flower-patterned china, and a silver coffee service. A man sat at the table, reading the newspaper.

"Agim, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Ry yelled across the room. "Where are the violins? How do you expect Zoe and me to dance if you don't give us violins?"

Agim Latifi tossed the newspaper onto the floor and was out of his chair and onto Ry in three strides.

"My brother!" he shouted, wrapping Ry up in a bone-crus.h.i.+ng hug. "It is f.u.c.king good to see you."

Ry could feel his face cracking into a big smile. His friend hadn't changed; he was still Agim.

Behind him, Ry heard Zoe mutter, "Yeah, he's ugly as sin all right," and Ry grinned to himself, because Agim Latifi looked as if he'd just stepped off the page of a perfume ad, with his head of thick, black curls, the dark, liquid eyes fringed with thick lashes, and a full-lipped mouth parted open to show off dazzling white teeth. He had on a white, silky s.h.i.+rt with flowing sleeves that seemed to go with the ballroom and was open at the throat to show off a lot of smooth skin tanned a golden brown.

"And this is your new woman," he said, turning to Zoe and hitting her with a smile that rocked her back on her heels. "I thought, Ry, my brother, from the way you described her to me over the telephone that she just may be your One. And now that I see her, I know it is so."

Ry felt his ears burn. He made a mental note to never again talk about love with a Kosovo Albanian over a bottle of ouzo at three in the morning.

"Miss Zoe Dmitroff, I am pleased to meet you." Agim leaned over, brought her hand up to his mouth, and kissed it. "I am Agim Latifi, and I would steal you away if you were not Ry O'Malley's woman. But I will behave, because although he is not my brother by blood, he is my blood brother. Do you understand what I mean by this?"

Zoe, still looking a bit dazed, said, "You've shed blood for each other. Your own and your enemies'."

Agim slapped Ry hard on the shoulder with the flat of his hand, and Ry felt it clear to the bone. "What did I tell you, brother? She is the One."

Ry opened his mouth to set his friend straight, then shut it. Some things were better off just left alone.

"This is a beautiful room," Zoe said.

"Thank you. I am restoring the house little bit by little bit. I think, though, that it will take me a lifetime and cost me several fortunes." He waved a hand toward the view out the window, of a garden choked with ivy and fig trees. "Perhaps I will tackle the courtyard next. They say that during the Soviet siege at the end of World War Two, many hundreds of Hungarian soldiers were buried in the courtyards throughout the city."

Ry looked around the room again, wondering where the money had come from. He thought he'd been exaggerating when he'd told Zoe that Agim Latifi was the biggest arms smuggler in Eastern Europe, but now he wasn't so sure.

"Come," Agim said, linking his arm through Zoe's and leading her toward the table. "Let us have breakfast. There are small scones baked with cheese and potatoes, called pogacsa pogacsa. And these," he said, as he pulled out her chair, "are sweet sponge cakes filled with cottage cheese and raisins. I suggest you take one now, Miss Dmitroff, before Ry eats them all."

Agim poured coffee in a thick black stream from the silver pot into their dainty china cups. Ry bit into a sponge cake and nearly swooned, it tasted so good.

"Now, to business," Agim said, "for I know you are short of time."

He bent over and took a wooden box from beneath the table. "First guns. You said you want trustworthy, not fancy, so I have for you two Model 19 Glocks. With two dozen ammo clips for each."

Ry took one of the pistols out of the box, already liking the feel of it in his hand, the way it slid right in and became a part of him, hard and cold and deadly. "The one thing about jet-setting around in this day and age is how much of a pain in the a.s.s it is to get a new gun every time you hit a new place."

Agim grinned. "That is why it helps to know an arms smuggler."

Ry nodded with his chin at the box. "That's a lot of ammo. Were you expecting us to have to fight a war?"

Agim shrugged. "You are Americans. It is what you do."

Ry laughed. "Fair enough."

Zoe was checking out the other Glock, snapping back the slide, looking down the sights, getting a feel for the grip, testing the weight of the trigger pull. Agim watched her, smiling like a parent whose kid just aced her piano recital.

"As for this little trouble you are having with the French Surete Nationale, these accusations of terrorism ..." Agim waved his hand through the air as if they were mere bagatelles. "My man inside Hungarian security tells me they have indeed received an official communique from Paris last evening warning them of your possible entry into this country. At the moment it is wending its way through channels, stopping at every desk to be read and initialed. You could live out your years and die an old man here in Budapest before they get around to looking for you."

"I don't need years, just a day," Ry said. But the trouble was, if the antiques dealer Anthony Lovely had talked to the French cops, and if Yasmine Poole had an in with them-and Ry would bet that she did-then she would know where they were headed. And she wouldn't have to wade through any bureaucratic red tape to be hot on their trail.

"Our meeting with Denis Kuzmin is set for this afternoon," he said. "What were you able to find out about him?"

"He is the son of a Budapest woman and a Soviet soldier who was part of the occupying army after the war. The father deserted the family and went back to his homeland when the boy was eleven. His mother was a gymnastics trainer for the Hungarian women's Olympics team throughout the Cold War years, so they didn't want for much.

"Kuzmin is in his sixties now, and a man of some wealth. Up until last year he was a professor of Russian folklore and mythology at our Eotvos Lorand University. Now he is retired and living in a small villa about twenty kilometers from here, on a hill overlooking the Danube and a little town called Szentendre. He was married once, years ago, and they had a son, but the marriage fell apart when the baby died of crib death."

"And he collects icons," Ry said.

Agim flashed a brilliant smile. "Indeed he does, my brother. He is famous for it."

Agim slathered clotted cream on a sponge cake and handed it to Zoe with a smile that made her blink. "There is one other thing you should know about Denis Kuzmin. There are rumors that before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was an informant for the AVO. The Hungarian secret police."

Agim paused and looked off into the distance, thinking, then shrugged. "Perhaps his spying is the real source of his wealth, who knows? He would have been well paid surely for rooting out dissidents among the students and his fellow professors, listening for subversive remarks, since the seeds of revolution most often germinate within the universities. These people he informed on, they would have been sent to a 'psychological hospital' to be reeducated, but no matter what they chose to call it, it was only a sweeter word for prison. If the chance comes your way, my brother, you might want to kill him."

"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 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 wh.o.r.e, 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?"

LATER, 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. 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. "h.e.l.l, 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."

39.

MAN, 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." 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 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. 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 a.s.sa.s.sinate 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 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-" 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 pa.s.s both him and the VW bus, but not quite b.a.l.l.sy 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 gra.s.sy knoll. But whatever they know now or knew then, you got to figure the minute the a.s.sa.s.sination happened, people started covering their a.s.ses all up and down the chain of command, from the CIA to the cops in Dallas, because they let 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 h.e.l.l 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." 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 h.e.l.l 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 Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton 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." 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, a.s.shole a.s.shole.

"What an a.s.shole," 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."