Free Altar of Bones by Philip Carter Page B

faith he’d always had a hard time believing in was the existence of the devil, until now.
    “Do I believe you?” she began to chant. “Do I believe you not? Believe you, believe you not … Swear to me you have it, and I will believe you. But only if you swear on pain of your immortal soul.”
    Do it, Dom. Come on, man, you want to live, don’t you?
    He felt her move and he raised his head. He saw her hand come up and he sucked in a sharp breath, but in the next instant he realized that whatever she held was too small to be a gun.
    Dom heard a click and suddenly his father’s voice filled the confessional: “You better pray to that God of yours Katya Orlova isn’t long dead, because only she knows where the film really is. You and Ry, you’ve got to find her and get it back, and you got to do it fast.”
    She shut off the recorder and made a little tsking noise with hertongue. “You’re a mean man, Father, to go and spoil my fun like that. You see, I planted a bug in your daddy’s hospital room. A very good one, actually, state-of-the-art, and I got every word of his so-called confession, so obviously I’ve known all along that you never had the film.”
    She laughed again, and Dom couldn’t understand how such a sweet sound could come from such a depraved heart. “I wanted to see if I could get a priest to swear to a big fat lie and imperil his immortal soul just as he was about to die, but you wouldn’t do it, would you? What a disappointment.”
    She heaved a mock sigh and dropped her hand back in her lap. “
Such
a disappointment. Why, you’ve almost gone and ruined my day, Father, and the thing I’m wondering is—do you really believe God is such a stickler for the rules? I mean, don’t you think that once you got to the Pearly Gates, you could’ve just explained that there were extenuating circumstances involved? … No? Well, at least now, after I kill you, if you find yourself in heaven, you’ll know that you’ve earned it.”
    He saw her through the mesh screen, saw her bloodred mouth move as she spoke the familiar words of the Act of Contrition, “Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee …”
    He saw her hand come up again, and then he saw the gun.
    Washington, D.C .
    T HEY CAME DOWN the hall from the kitchen as a unit, covering for each other, laying down a field of fire. But one of them was still going to have to be the first through that door, and then Ry would kill him. He knew he was going to die, but he damn well wasn’t going to die alone.
    Time slowed as it always did in the thickest part of a firefight, when one second felt like a lifetime and every detail seemed etched in glass. He saw the curtains billow from the breeze coming through the busted window, heard the creak of a floorboard in the hall. Broken glass on the shelf above his head tinkled as it settled. His eyes flickered up and he saw—
    The grenade
.
    He’d stuck it on the top shelf of the bookcase, next to a potted fern—a souvenir from his first operation in Afghanistan, Soviet-made and at least twenty years old.
Was it still live?
    The first guy burst into the room. Ry shot him between the eyes. He reached up and grabbed the grenade off the bookshelf, while shooting the hell out of the doorway. He pulled out the ring pin with his teeth, but kept his thumb down on the safety spoon.
    A second guy came through the door, the barrel of his Uzi leading the way, spraying an arc of fire. Ry dove toward the window. Bullets whined all around him, and the whole world seemed to disintegrate into pieces of glass and wood and metal. He let go of the spoon, counted,
One thousand, two thousand …
    He slung the grenade sideways, saw it hit the floor and roll. He vaulted over the desk, snatching up the answering machine with one hand and pumping bullets back at the doorway with the other.
    He jumped feetfirst through what was left of the bay window, just as the room behind him exploded into fire and smoke and