The Games Read online

  “You could go in by helicopter,” Sci said.

  “We’d lose the element of surprise,” Tavia said. “And depending on how fanatical Amelia has turned her followers, we could be in for a firefight. But it’s the lesser of two evils. We really don’t have a third choice.”

  Looking at the sheer faces of the Two Brothers, I flashed back twenty-four months and said, “Maybe we do.”

  Chapter 73

  DR. LUCAS CASTRO waited until dark before he went to get his car from the parking garage. He took several detours to make sure he wasn’t being followed and finally pulled into the light-industrial complex around eight fifteen.

  Less than twenty-three hours now, Castro thought as he drove through the complex. It will be worth the sacrifice. It will change everything.

  The doctor pulled around the corner and hit the brakes. There was a small red Fiat Palio parked in front of his lab. He couldn’t see anyone inside.

  A voice in his head screamed: Back out. Turn around. Get lost.

  But Castro needed to get into his lab and retrieve the pack.

  He drove closer and was parking when a head popped up in the red Fiat. A young woman blinked and squinted in his headlights.

  He knew her!

  Leah? Yes, Leah, that was her name. Ricardo’s friend from school. Why was she here? How in God’s name had she come to be here?

  Castro had no choice now. He had to find out what she knew.

  The doctor climbed from the car, leaving the headlights on, came around, and stood in the beams. She recognized Castro then. Her mouth opened in confusion.

  “Leah?” he said, smiling. “Is that you?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, she rolled down the window. “Dr. Castro? What are you doing here?”

  “You’ve found where Ricardo’s been hiding,” he said cheerfully. “C’mon in, I know he’ll be happy to see you.”

  She brightened. “Ricardo’s here? Inside?”

  “Finishing up some work. He’ll be done in an hour.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this the other day?” she asked.

  “Ricardo asked me not to,” Castro said. “He was swept up in our research and didn’t want to be interrupted. Great minds are like that. Don’t take it personally. The important thing is you’re here now. Let’s go inside.”

  He turned and fumbled with the key at the door. He heard the window roll up, the car door open, and then the crunch of her weight on gravel.

  “Ricardo is supersmart, isn’t he?” she said.

  Castro felt the lock click open and looked over his shoulder, seeing her smiling, relieved, anticipating Ricardo. Young love. It can turn suspicion into eagerness, can’t it?

  He opened the door, reached in, and flipped on the lights, revealing the empty office.

  “Ricardo sleeps in the main lab most nights,” he said, stepping inside. “We’ve got experiments that require twenty-four-hour monitoring, but I’m here for the night. Why don’t the two of you go out, catch up?”

  “That would be nice,” Leah said, coming in behind him.

  He turned, held his car remote in his hand, turned the headlights off. She went past him into the room, and he shut the outer door.

  “Hold on,” he said as she moved to the inner door. “If he’s done his job, he’s locked it from the inside.”

  Leah tried the knob, said, “He’s done his job.”

  “Good man,” Castro said, smiling. “I sensed right away he was special. How did you figure out Ricardo was working here?”

  “Oh,” Leah said. “The police found his scooter not far from here, and then I had a friend who works for TIM Cellular ping his last known location before his phone died. And he was right there, outside your door.”

  So someone else knows about Ricardo and now Leah being at my door, Castro thought. Did it matter? Not after tomorrow. Before then? Yes, it mattered very much.

  He opened the inner door, stepped down into the warehouse space with the clean room in the middle.

  “Wow,” Leah said, coming in behind him. “That’s impressive.”

  “Isn’t it?” Castro said. “Ricardo came up with a few of the ideas.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Inside the clean room, I suspect. He can’t hear us because it’s soundproofed. Do you want me to call him out? Or do you want to go inside and surprise him?”

  “I’ll go in.”

  “You have to wear a hazmat suit and a visor.”

  “That’s okay. This will be fun.”

  The doctor smiled. “I can’t wait to see the look on his face when he sees you.”

  Chapter 74

  RICARDO’S BLOODLESS FROZEN face looked up at Leah as she struggled, jerked, choked, and kicked to break the death grip Dr. Castro had around her neck. But Castro’s hands and gauntlets held tight.

  From inside her hazmat visor, Leah made noises that sounded like she was screaming underwater. Each time she opened her mouth, the force behind the protest was weaker. Each time, the plea was fainter.

  Her third effort was barely a whimper. Then she sagged. Castro had to struggle to keep her from pitching over into the lift-top freezer. She’d been gazing into it in disbelief and horror when Castro began to strangle her. He held on long after she’d lost consciousness, made sure she was good and dead.

  When he finally released Leah and removed her visor, her eyes were wide open, dull, and bloodshot. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth and had turned bluish. He felt for a pulse at her neck and found none.

  He stripped her out of the suit, hoisted her up by her torso, and got her to the lip of the freezer.

  He stared in at Ricardo, said sadly, “The two of you together at last.”

  Castro dumped her in so she landed facedown on Ricardo. He arranged Leah’s arms and head so their lips almost met. He recalled an image of his late wife, Sophia, in the prow of a long canoe on some remote backwater of the Amazon, smiling at him out of the deepest love.

  Soon, he thought. Soon I will set off to find you.

  Castro’s breath had gone shallow. He saw auras at the perimeter of his vision, purple and ice blue. His heart raced, and he felt hollow and dizzy; the pain in his skull was like hammer strikes coming from the inside.

  The doctor knew what was happening, and he slammed the freezer shut. He turned around and lay down on the floor of the lab, knowing a migraine was about to incapacitate him. Not now, he thought fearfully. Not now.

  “Breathe,” Castro whispered. “Lots of time. No urgency. No loss. Breathe. Lots of time. No urgency. No loss.”

  He repeated Sophia’s four-line chant, the only method that had ever given him relief or comfort from the migraines he’d suffered since medical school.

  Breathe. Lots of time. No urgency. No loss.

  Castro repeated his wife’s prescription again and again, a monotone chant to calm himself. Minutes became an hour that way; he simply breathed with no concept of time or urgency or loss. Gradually, slowly, the hammer strikes and the flashes of lightning in his skull became weaker and fainter until the doctor slipped away into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  Chapter 75

  THE HELICOPTER ROARED a hundred feet over the water and two hundred yards off Ipanema Beach. Although this was the dead of winter in the Southern Hemisphere, the beaches were jammed and people were partying. Then again, it was the night before the Olympics opened, and despite the recent violence in the favelas and the traffic snarls, hundreds of thousands of fans and athletes had come to Rio for the games.

  Tavia sat in the jump seat beside me, wearing black and body armor and carrying night-vision goggles. I was similarly attired and having a radio-headset conversation with General da Silva, who’d agreed to put Lieutenant Acosta and a BOPE contingent at our disposal.

  At the moment, they were landing on a rooftop helipad in Leblon and would begin a straight ascent up the mountain toward the jungle clearing where we believed Andy Wise was being held.

  The rest of us had other plan
s.

  Two minutes later, the chopper landed on the highway at the south end of São Conrado beach. Two men were waiting. They threw long black duffel bags into the hold and climbed in.

  Few words were spoken before the helicopter lifted off again and spiraled north. We left São Conrado, rose up over the mountainous jungle between Rocinha and Vidigal favelas. The pilot cut the running lights and soon we were hovering over the south end of the Two Brothers.

  We landed on the western mountain and got out, pulling the two duffel bags and other gear out after us. Crouching there, we ducked our heads to the wind blast as the helicopter lifted off and flew away south.

  Tavia and I turned on headlamps and watched as the two men opened the duffels and removed titanium poles, struts, wires, and the dark fabric of a pair of large tandem gliders. They had them ready for flight in under ten minutes.

  We lifted and moved the gliders to the cliff. This was where the idea that had sounded great on paper started to look incredibly bad in reality.

  “Jack?” Tavia said. “You okay?”

  “I’m beginning to think we’re insane,” I said, checking the sound-suppressed Glock .40 on loan from BOPE in a chest holster and the three full magazines beside it.

  “I think it’s a brilliant idea,” she replied. “We land silent, reconnoiter the place, and wait for the BOPE to ride in and save the day.”

  She quickly got into a harness behind the pilot, looking over his right shoulder. She’d taken off her headlamp and was fussing to get her night-vision goggles positioned correctly, and I finally decided I couldn’t back out. It had been my idea, after all.

  Harnessed behind my pilot, I asked him, “Sure you can do this?”

  He reached up, switched on his goggles, and chuckled. “Look at that, will ya? Piece of cake.”

  I’d kept my night-vision turned off. I couldn’t stomach seeing that first big step into the void. Tavia and her pilot ran off the side of the cliff and disappeared into the blackness without a peep.

  “Let’s do this before I chicken out or puke,” I said.

  We took four big steps before the bottom dropped out, and we fell away into an inky darkness.

  Chapter 76

  WE FELL TEN feet.

  Twenty feet.

  At thirty I thought we were headed for a quick ending, but an updraft caught us and, with a ripping and straining noise from the wing, we banked away on the wind like surfers arcing on a wave.

  “First step’s a bitch, isn’t it?” the pilot said.

  “I thought I was going to swallow my windpipe,” I said, shaking from an adrenaline rush so strong that it was several moments before I could find the switch on the side of the goggles and flip the night-vision on.

  That familiar ghostly green world appeared, but it was a world I’d seen before only from the noisy cockpit of a helicopter, with a shield blocking me from the wind and constant radio chatter in my ears. We picked up speed. The wind bit at our faces and goggles and whistled in our ears as we flew through a narrow canyon between the mountains, two miles long and barely five hundred yards wide.

  For almost fifteen hundred feet below us, there was nothing but khaki-colored air and then the deep jade forest canopy. The vegetation seemed to undulate like a tranquil sea. Ahead, framed in the far mouth of the canyon, the lights of Ipanema, Copacabana, and Leblon burned an emerald fire.

  My pilot had us eighty yards out from and almost parallel to the rim of the canyon. Tavia soared with her pilot a hundred yards ahead and one hundred feet lower than us. The pilots had said it was the safest way to go as we hugged the contour of the mountain.

  “ETA?” General da Silva’s voice crackled in my earpiece.

  “Four minutes? Five?” I said.

  “Mark that,” the general said. “Diversionary fire will commence downslope at twenty-one hundred hours fourteen minutes. Full BOPE support at twenty-one hundred hours twenty-six minutes.”

  That gave us only twelve minutes to figure out where Wise was.

  “Can you delay support until twenty-one thirty-two?” I asked.

  After a pause, da Silva said, “Agreed, Jack. You’ll have eighteen minutes to find him.”

  We banked away from the cliff wall and zigzagged into a long, gradual descent toward the mouth of the canyon. Two minutes later we flew out of the gap. The lights of Leblon were so bright, I turned the goggles off. We’d lost nine hundred feet in altitude by the time we banked after Tavia’s glider.

  Far below us, raucous, celebrating crowds were partying on the mosaic walkways along the beaches, and vendors were doing a booming business. No one looked up that I could see. We were like big black bats, invisible against the night sky.

  “Two minutes out, General,” I said.

  We turned and flew west now, straight toward the lower end of that jungle clearing. I drew my Glock from my chest holster.

  Tavia’s pilot stalled slightly to let us pass and land first. I flipped the night-vision goggles on. We dropped under five hundred feet.

  Shooting began in the trees far downslope of the clearing, a short burst followed by four or five random shots and then nothing.

  Three hundred and fifty feet. Two fifty. There were men with weapons and flashlights running downhill toward the shooting. We flew right over them, no more than seventy feet above their heads. They never looked up, just dashed on into the trees.

  My pilot pulled a release, and our legs dropped. He stalled the glider hard. We floated toward the ground. We reached our feet out like night birds in search of a roost and landed with barely a sound.

  Tavia and her pilot landed just as quietly about twenty yards away.

  “We’re down,” I said, getting myself free of the harness.

  “Eighteen minutes,” the general said.

  “Understood.”

  The glider pilots knew to go to the tree line and wait there in cover until the BOPE forces landed. Tavia and I split up. She took the right flank of the clearing and I had the left.

  The Glocks out and ready, we snaked fast through the trees to within fifty yards of the shacks. I switched the goggles to infrared mode. The wavering heat glow of three people showed inside the near shack’s walls. Two people were in the shack closer to Tavia. Armed men, five of them, were arrayed across the front of both buildings.

  “Tavia, stay put, cover me, I’m going to go in there, see if I figure out which one’s holding Wise.”

  “Sitting tight,” she replied.

  I slipped around and got higher up the mountain than the shacks. Then I dropped in behind them, sneaking the last twenty yards to a lit open window at the back of the larger shack.

  I turned off the goggles, eased up, peeked inside, and saw a kid in front of several computer screens. I recognized him—the pickpocket who’d taken Cherie Wise’s purse. Beyond him, an armed man stood in the doorway. Where was the third person I’d seen in the infrared?

  The middle computer screen in front of the boy came on and showed Andrew Wise sitting in that familiar chair, blinking at the lights.

  The billionaire looked haggard and drawn, but his eyes still had a spark.

  Wearing that primitive mask, Amelia Lopes appeared beside him.

  Chapter 77

  “WELCOME TO THE Favela Justice show,” Amelia said, facing the camera. “We had sixty-three million votes in that short time. Isn’t that incredible? Sixty-three million. And the hash tags? Top three on Twitter for the last six hours. The size of the vote speaks volumes about the interest people have in the plight of the poor. So what was the outcome?”

  Amelia turned the mask this way and that, as if considering the results.

  “Before we give you the final tally,” she said, “let’s review the highlights of the case against Andrew Wise.”

  For the next few minutes, she did just that. The billionaire said nothing.

  When she finished, she said, “What do you think the numbers are going to be, Senhor Wise?”

  “I have no idea,”
Wise said. “They don’t matter.”

  “They don’t matter? Poor people don’t matter?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Wise said.

  “The world just heard you say that,” Amelia said, turning back to the camera. “Sixty-three million votes. Final tally in the case against Andrew Wise. For hash tag WiseGuilty: twenty-nine million. For hash tag PayTheBillion: eleven million.

  “But hash tag WiseDecision? Only twenty-three million votes in favor of the accused and now convicted Mr. Wise.”

  She paused, then turned her thumb up, then turned it down. “Forty million people thought Mr. Wise should pay the billion-dollar penalty. But is a billion enough when a man has so many billions? Shouldn’t we exact some greater punishment for his deeds?”

  Amelia reached around behind her and came up with a pistol. “Shouldn’t Andrew Wise pay for his greed in a much more permanent way?”

  She aimed the pistol at Wise’s head, said, “Any last words?”

  Wise looked frightened for the first time. He glanced at her and said, “Forty million people said I should pay a billion dollars to the poor. I get that, but they never said a thing about killing—”

  He stopped his defense at the sound of a helicopter coming hard.

  Chapter 78

  I HEARD THE BOPE’s helicopter coming too. So did one of Urso’s men, who roared out an alarm. Things started going downhill fast from there.

  The armed guy went to the pickpocket, said, “We’re going, Alou!”

  Then he looked through the window and saw me, tried to swing his gun my way. I shot him twice in the chest and then aimed at the boy.

  “Where are they?”

  Terrified, he pointed toward the second shack.

  “Stay there,” I said and I was turning to run that way when I saw movement beyond the boy and caught a fleeting glimpse of someone running out the front door carrying something that turned my blood cold.