The Games Page 12

  When I picked it up with a stick, I saw that it too was spattered with blood and was in two pieces, like it had been sliced off the billionaire with a utility knife or a razor blade.

  Chapter 42

  Tuesday, August 2, 2016

  4:30 a.m.

  BY THE TIME we got to the private hospital in Leblon, I was thinking that we’d been played by very sophisticated criminals who now held hostage one of the richest men in the world. His abduction could not have happened as a secondary crime of opportunity. This was planned. Get Wise to walk away, expecting to be picked up, and then, when he was far from the Sambadrome, with everyone thinking the play was over, attack.

  It had all happened on my watch. I had failed miserably. I felt like the world’s biggest fuckup.

  Wise’s wife certainly thought so. She’d said it to me at least twenty times since we’d brought Samuels and Branco to the same hospital where the twins were being treated. I was actually surprised she hadn’t fired us.

  “Will Andy be held for ransom as well?” she asked in the hallway outside the girls’ room.

  “I would think so,” I said.

  “I can’t imagine they’ll be happy about being shorted twenty million dollars for the girls,” Cherie said. “His own damn fault. The cheap idiot.”

  She was trying to act tough, but you could see the stress she was under.

  “Stay focused on the girls for right now,” Tavia said. “They’ve been through a lot. They’re going to need you to be strong for them.”

  Cherie sniffed, said, “Don’t worry about me. I can be Jackie O. when it’s called for.”

  Two doctors came out of the room. They said that Alicia had blunt-force trauma injuries to the right side of her head from being hit by the blackjack. She had considerable swelling, and it had taken them fourteen stitches to close the scalp wound. There were clear indications that she’d suffered a concussion, but the CT scan showed no skull fracture or head bleed. She was occasionally confused, but most of the time she was oriented to self, place, and events.

  Natalie’s right cheekbone was broken. So was her right orbital bone. So were two small bones in her left hand. She was on narcotics for pain, and the broken hand had already been set and splinted. The doctor recommended that one of Rio’s world-famous plastic surgeons be brought in later in the day to work on her face.

  “Can I go back in to see them?” Cherie asked.

  “Please. They’ve been asking for you.”

  Tavia and I went in with Cherie. In a beautifully decorated, homey room, the girls were dozing side by side in hospital beds, surrounded by various monitors. Bandages were wrapped around Alicia’s head. The right side of Natalie’s face was grotesquely bruised and swollen.

  Natalie’s good eye opened. “Mom?”

  “Right here, baby doll,” Cherie said and kissed her delicately on her forehead. “Right here.”

  “Mom, what happened to us?” Alicia said.

  Her mother turned and kissed her other daughter. “You don’t remember? You were kidnapped.”

  Alicia licked her lips, and her eyes widened. “That’s right.”

  “I’ve told her, like, a hundred times, Mom,” Natalie said.

  “Where’s Dad?” Alicia asked.

  Cherie seemed paralyzed by the question for a moment, then said, “He’ll be here soon.”

  Natalie seemed to pick up on something through her painkiller haze. “Mom? What’s wrong?”

  Cherie looked lost, tears dripping down her cheeks.

  Tavia said, “We think he’s been taken hostage by the same people who kidnapped you.”

  Alicia looked more confused than ever. “What?”

  “It’s true,” I said. “So we need your help. Whatever you can tell us about the people who took you—what they said, a name, a noise, anything—might help us in rescuing your father.”

  Natalie said, “They knocked us down and blindfolded us after the shooting. They dragged us in the darkness. We ended up in the back of a truck and then we were carried into a place that smelled like tobacco.”

  Alicia nodded. “I remember that. And there was this woman named Rayssa who gave us food.”

  “You see her face?” Tavia asked.

  Natalie said, “She always wore a mask when our blindfolds were off.”

  “No other names you heard?”

  The girls shook their heads.

  “No other voices?”

  “We heard other voices,” Alicia said. “Two different men.”

  “When they moved us,” Natalie said. “Both times.”

  “They knew who you were, correct?” Tavia asked.

  “They knew all about us,” Natalie said.

  “Did they say how?”

  Before she could answer, the door to the hospital suite opened and in stormed a very tired, very angry federal military police lieutenant.

  Bruno Acosta pointed at Tavia and then at me, said, “You two are under arrest.”

  Chapter 43

  “ON WHAT CHARGES?” Tavia demanded.

  “Obstruction of a federal police investigation, obstruction of justice, failure to report a multitude of crimes,” Lieutenant Acosta barked. “Not to mention repeatedly lying to a federal investigator.”

  “We haven’t lied to you,” I said.

  “No?” Acosta thundered. “What about the real identity of these girls? What about withholding information about ransom demands? What about keeping us totally in the dark!”

  “That was our doing,” Cherie said. “My husband and I. We would not let Mr. Morgan, Ms. Reynaldo, or anyone at Private divulge to police what was happening. If anyone is at fault for keeping you in the dark, I am, and I’m sorry. We want you to be part of the investigation now.”

  I glanced at Cherie and had to admit she could indeed play Jackie O. when she wanted to. The way she’d spoken to Acosta, frank, open, yet deferential, coupled with her dazzling looks had charmed the lieutenant and instantly defused the situation.

  Still, he glared at me.

  “You are a foreign national, Mr. Morgan, and yet you ignore our laws like they are worthless, below you somehow,” the lieutenant said. “I’m asking that you be thrown out of Brazil.”

  Tavia said, “Lieutenant, may I remind you that Mr. Morgan works directly for General da Silva at the highest security levels for the sake of the Olympics. The only person who can have him fired and deported is the general.”

  Acosta looked ready to ignite again until I said, “So let’s figure out a way to work together. Put the past behind us and start over.”

  I held out my hand. The lieutenant hesitated. He really didn’t want to, but he finally took my hand and shook it firmly. “We are partners now, yes?” Acosta asked.

  “Equal sharing of information, backup when and if you need it.”

  Acosta thought it over briefly and then said, “I can live with that.”

  We brought him up to speed fast. The lieutenant was attentive and smart in his questioning and not happy when we described the ransom drop, the release of the girls, the kidnapping of Andy Wise, and the gunfire in Central. He said the hail of bullets had been heard all over the downtown area. Foreign journalists staying at one of the new hotels were asking questions.

  “This kind of Wild West thing is not what Rio needs right before the Olympic Games,” Acosta said.

  Tavia threw up her hands, said, “They shot at us, Bruno. We never pulled a trigger. The back of the van flew open and this guy was there with an assault gun.”

  “And no one saw a face?” the lieutenant asked. “A license plate?”

  “No license plates and they all wore masks,” Tavia said.

  “They even anticipated tracking devices and jammed them,” I said. “These guys are planners and bold executors.”

  “And now they have the big fish,” Acosta said. “There will be a ransom demand, a large one.”

  “We were thinking the same thing,”

  I looked to Cherie, said, “Do y
ou have Andy’s power of attorney?”

  She nodded. “On most things.”

  “Access to large amounts of cash?”

  Wise’s wife thought about that, said, “I would have to get it cosigned by a trustee, but yes. How much?”

  I said, “I think it’s going to be a whole lot more than before. I’d tell your trustees you may need access to as much as a hundred million dollars in the next twenty-four hours.”

  Cherie looked to Lieutenant Acosta, said, “I know this might be a sore subject, but can we try to keep this quiet? Out of the press?”

  The officer hesitated.

  I said, “The last thing Brazil or Rio needs is the story getting out that one of the Olympic Games’ biggest benefactors was kidnapped days before the opening ceremony.”

  Acosta looked frustrated, but he nodded. “We’ll do our best, Mrs. Wise.”

  My cell phone rang. General da Silva.

  “General?”

  “There will be an autopsy of Luna Santos’s body at eight a.m. sharp at the Hospital Geral,” he said. “I expect you, Tavia, and Lieutenant Acosta to meet me there.”

  I glanced at my watch and was surprised to see it was nearly seven. I really needed some sleep, but I said, “We’ll see you soon.”

  Chapter 44

  THE COLONIAL FRONT of the Hospital Geral featured a series of archways facing Santa Luzia Road. The arches gave way to an airy colonnade where patients were already lined up waiting for their names to be called.

  Ending an overnight shift, Dr. Lucas Castro yawned as he walked through the courtyard beyond the colonnade. He decided he would stop and get an açaí smoothie, double-dosed with guarana and other herbs to keep up his stamina. He was going to need it in the coming—

  The doctor stopped short. There in the colonnade he spotted three and then four people he absolutely did not want to see. Ever. Especially here, where he worked. My God, how did they… What did they…

  Castro pivoted and slowly and deliberately walked away, back toward the building and the clinic. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Jack Morgan, Octavia Reynaldo, General da Silva, Lieutenant Acosta, Antonio Santos, and a tall, wild-haired guy wearing a tie-dyed shirt. They were walking into the courtyard, talking, not looking his way at all.

  The doctor felt ill nonetheless.

  They had to be looking for him. What else would they be here for? Castro hurried into the building where he worked, took a left, and ducked into a men’s room. He stood inside the door, watching through a crack.

  If they turn this way, it’s over, Castro thought, breathing hard. I go out through the window, get to the house, get what I need, and then head for the…

  All six of them went right. He watched them go down the hall away from him and his office. Relieved, he told himself to wait until they disappeared before hurrying on his way.

  But now he was intrigued. If they weren’t in search of him, what were they doing in the Hospital Geral? Where were they going?

  Against his better judgment, Dr. Castro exited the restroom and strolled down the hall after them, keeping a few nurses and patients between them and him. They took a left and then a right, then boarded an elevator. They were going down, he saw. He ran to the stairs.

  He opened the stairwell door in the basement, saw them already out of the elevator and moving away from him. There were fewer people down on the lower level of the hospital. For a second, Castro hesitated. Then he saw where they were going.

  Pathology.

  The doctor put it all together in an instant. Luna Santos’s body had to be in pathology, awaiting autopsy. He felt a pang of dread but took a breath and calmed himself. He’d made sure the burn was intense. They weren’t going to get much off her except carbonized flesh and singed bone.

  Castro stood there several more moments, wishing there was a way he could go to the autopsy and listen to the idiots trying to figure out how and why Luna Santos had died. He supposed he could wander through and…

  He shook off this foolishness. These people weren’t at the Hospital Geral for him, and they weren’t going to get anything from Luna’s husk. It was time to go, time to attend to far more important business.

  As he began to climb back up the stairs, Dr. Castro figured he had less than three days left to live, and he didn’t want to waste a single, precious moment.

  Chapter 45

  Tuesday, August 2, 2016

  8:00 a.m.

  Eighty-Three Hours Before the Olympic Games Open

  DR. EMILIO CARDOSO adjusted his belly beneath his scrubs, checked the drawstring that held the bottoms up, and then pressed a scalpel to the charred remains of Luna Santos just above her right ear. He cut through scorched flesh to the brittle bone and sliced over the top of her head to her opposite ear. Pieces of skin and muscle fell away like dead coals and ash.

  The general, Acosta, and I watched from the other side of a window in an observation room; an intercom allowed us to communicate with Cardoso. The victim’s husband had asked to be at the autopsy, but the second they’d pulled back the sheets on her body he’d almost fainted. Tavia had taken him to get something to drink.

  “She was subjected to tremendous heat,” said Sci, who was assisting the medical examiner at the request of General da Silva.

  Cardoso wasn’t happy about Kloppenberg being in his autopsy room, but he nodded. “The skull will be brittle.”

  “We’ll tease what’s left off the bone,” Sci said.

  Using forceps and scalpels, he and the medical examiner were able to peel back what was left of her scalp to reveal a small hole in the left posterior portion of her skull and a larger exit hole above the right eye socket.

  “She was shot from five, maybe six feet away,” Cardoso said.

  Sci nodded. “Shooter had to be aiming diagonally at her, and almost level.”

  Cardoso said, “Thirty-eight caliber. There’s our cause of death.”

  “So why burn her?” I asked.

  The pathologist and my forensics chief looked over at me, puzzled. So were General da Silva and Lieutenant Acosta.

  “I don’t understand, Jack,” Sci said.

  “She’s shot through the back of the head, so why burn her in Santos’s front yard? I mean, the killer wanted the body to be there for a reason. And he burned the body for a reason as well.”

  “I don’t know,” Dr. Cardoso said. “My job is to examine, not speculate.”

  “But I’m free to speculate,” I said. “Luna’s body was not hidden. It was brought to her home, put there to shock and traumatize Antonio, which says to me her murder was probably personal and designed to exact some kind of revenge.”

  “And burning her body?” the lieutenant said. “Same thing?”

  “Could be,” I said. “But setting a fire after a murder? That’s what killers do when they’re trying to destroy evidence.”

  “Evidence in the car she was in?” General da Silva asked.

  “Or on her body,” I said. “And it wasn’t to prevent us from knowing she was shot to death before she was burned, unless the killer actually thought Luna was going to be cremated by the blaze.”

  Dr. Cardoso did not seem interested, but Sci got what I was driving at and said, “We’re looking for something on or in her body.”

  I nodded. “Unless the fire took it.”

  Kloppenberg and Cardoso went back to their work. They cut open Luna’s chest and found her organs cooked by the flames. The medical examiner focused on the weight and size of her heart, liver, and lungs.

  Sci started dissecting them on another table. For the next fifteen minutes, fatigue-induced negativity crept in and had me starting to believe we wouldn’t find anything of value.

  Then Kloppenberg, who was working on the heart, stiffened. He stepped over to the liver and made a cut and looked at it under a magnifying glass. Then he turned to me and nodded.

  “Dr. Cardoso,” Sci said. “Could you take a look at this?”

  The medical examiner set h
is instruments down and crossed the room.

  Sci gestured into the heart. “Notice anything missing?”

  Cardoso frowned, looked down through the magnifying glass for a few beats before he got it. “There’s no congealed or coagulated blood.”

  “There’s no blood in any of the organs,” Sci said, looking back at me. “I think she was drained before she was shot and burned, Jack.”

  Chapter 46

  DRESSED IN HIS hazmat suit, Dr. Castro reached into the refrigerator in his lab and retrieved one of the pints of Hydra-9-contaminated blood he’d taken from Luna Santos’s body. Castro set the plastic pouch of blood in a pot of water warmed to ninety-eight degrees.

  Leaving the blood pack there, he returned to the refrigerator and retrieved five more pints of blood stolen from the blood bank at Hospital Geral. He warmed these too and then used a hypodermic needle to extract a sixth of the volume of contaminated blood and inject it into the clean samples.

  He left the newly infected blood at body temperature for twenty minutes, giving the virus time to start to reproduce, and then returned them to the refrigerator to chill and slow the cycle. Before he closed the refrigerator, the doctor stood there, counting. Four pints of Luna’s blood, and five new pints. Nine pints. A little more than a gallon.

  Was it enough? Could there ever be enough? What was the ideal?

  Three gallons, Castro decided. But what would that weigh? A gallon was roughly eight pounds, so twenty-four pounds. That was too much. Max load according to the specs was fifteen pounds.

  So work backward. The delivery system weighs 1.8 pounds, leaving me 13.9 pounds, or just under two gallons. He shut the refrigerator door, knowing he needed another seven pints of blood to do the job.

  The doctor left the lab, entered the decontamination shower, and hosed himself off completely with bleach and saline. He rinsed and repeated the process. It was unthinkable for him to get sick, not now, when he was so close to his goal.

  Dr. Castro stripped and stepped into a second shower. He shivered as he dried off with paper towels and put them in a biohazard-waste bin. Dressed, he exited and sealed the air lock.