The Games Read online

  Chapter 4

  THIRTY-EIGHT MINUTES later, I was on my belly on the floor of the tramcar. The doors were open. I was looking over the side, straight down more than a thousand feet, and fighting vertigo.

  The second I spotted Tamara Patrick on the cliff, I said, “Stop.”

  Colonel da Silva repeated the order into a radio. The tram halted and swung on the cable about twenty-five feet out from the summit station.

  “How far down are they?” da Silva asked.

  “I’m calling it three hundred feet,” I said, getting up to look at two Brazilian soldiers who’d come from an army base located less than a mile from the bottom tram station. They were almost finished attaching a truck winch to the steel floor of the cable car.

  “One hundred meters,” I said to the soldiers. “Does it get me there?”

  Tavia translated my words into Brazilian Portuguese, and they answered her.

  She said, “With the extra rope, they think so.”

  Gomes was checking the knots and carabiners that connected a climbing rope to the winch’s quarter-inch steel cable. I checked the space that separated the winch drum from the floor. Three, maybe four inches of clearance. With that much rope going onto the drum, it would be a tight fit.

  We threaded the other, looped end of the climbing rope through a large carabiner we’d attached to a steel hook above the door frame. A closed D ring connected the rope to the harness I wore.

  “Radio?” da Silva said.

  I reached up and double-clicked the mike clipped to my chest.

  The other people in the car—da Silva, Tavia, Gomes, the two soldiers, and the off-duty sergeant—nodded. They got in a line and grabbed hold of the rope with gloved hands.

  I went to the edge of the open door, willed myself not to look down. Just before I stepped out, I said, “No slipping, now.”

  Then my weight came into the harness and my legs were in space, and I was pushing off the bottom of the tram. Free of the car and dropping, I went into a slow twirl that got me dizzy and forced me to close my eyes to the jungle treetops so far below.

  Sometimes I think I’m crazy. This was one of those times.

  It took them a full minute to lower me the entire length of the climbing rope.

  “You’re on winch now.” Da Silva’s voice crackled over the radio.

  “Got it,” I said, feeling the descent go smoother and faster.

  A minute later, I was almost to Tamara Patrick, eight, maybe nine feet above her and four feet out from the wall.

  “Stop,” I said into the mike, and the winch halted.

  “Help me!” Tamara called out weakly.

  “That’s what I’m here for,” I said. “My name is Jack, and we’re going to get you out of here.”

  “I can’t feel anything from the waist down,” she said, starting to cry.

  “But you can feel your arms?”

  “A little,” she said. “Yes.”

  “Both hands?”

  “The left more than the right,” Tamara said, getting herself under control.

  “That’s good, that’s a start,” I said, looking down twenty-five feet to the guide hanging there limply.

  “Has your guide said anything since the fall?” I asked as I started to kick and pump like a kid on a swing.

  “No,” Tamara said. “How are you going to get me off here?”

  “With a little imagination,” I said, swinging closer to the wall and then farther away.

  On the third swing I caught that secondary rope coming down from the top. I rigged my harness to it and called into the mike, “Give me eight feet of slack, then bring the litter down.”

  “Got it,” Tavia said.

  I waited until a loop of rope hung almost to the injured climber before I started down. When I reached Tamara’s side, she rolled her head over to look at me, another good sign.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “Me too,” I said. “I hate this kind of shit.”

  She smiled feebly. “And I love this kind of shit.”

  “Your sister told me that.”

  “Am I gonna be paralyzed, Jack?”

  There was so much pain and fear in her voice and face that I felt tears well up in my eyes. I looked away and said, “I’m no doctor.”

  She said nothing. I glanced at her. She was staring up.

  I craned my head back and saw the stiff backboard twisting lazily on a second rope dropping from the tramcar.

  “Jack?” Tamara said. “Could you hold my hand until it gets here?”

  “I’d be honored,” I said, reaching out and taking her left hand. It felt cold and clammy, and I realized she was probably almost in shock.

  “Did you see René up there?” she asked.

  “I’m wearing his harness.”

  Tamara nodded, her lower lip trembling. “He can’t deal with stuff like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “A paralyzed girlfriend,” she said, tears dripping down her cheeks.

  “What is he? An imbecile of titanic proportions?”

  Tamara laughed through her tears. “Sometimes.”

  I kept up the light chat with her until the backboard reached us. It took quite a bit of finagling on both our parts to get Tamara strapped to the board, and the winch cable rope attached to the four lines supporting it. But we did it.

  “Have a nice ride,” I said after I’d separated her from the rope that had saved her. “Very few people have ever done anything like this.”

  “Thank you, Jack,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” I said, giving her hand one last squeeze. “And whatever happens, you’re going to be fine in the long run. Okay?”

  “You think?”

  “Only an imbecile of titanic proportions wouldn’t.”

  She smiled and closed her eyes.

  “Take her up,” I said into the mike, and I watched her rise for a few moments before starting toward Victor Barros.

  By the time I’d climbed down to the guide’s side, Tamara had disappeared inside the tram, and the cable car was moving to the summit station.

  “We’ll be right back, Jack,” Tavia called into the radio.

  My fingers were on Barros’s neck by then. His skin was still warm to the touch, but there was no pulse that I could feel.

  “Take your time,” I called sadly into the mike. “He’s gone.”

  I hung there on the side of the cliff with the dead guide until the tram came back and lowered the winch rope. Then I clipped it directly to his harness and released him from the rope that had snapped his back and killed him.

  Twenty minutes later, they pulled me into the tram. I sat against the wall opposite the corpse, feeling wrung out, and the cable car began to drop toward the mid-station.

  “You okay, Jack?” Colonel da Silva asked.

  “Honestly? I feel like I could sleep for a week.”

  Tavia looked at her watch and grimaced. “I’m afraid you can’t, boss. We’re already running way late.”

  I glanced at my own watch, closed my eyes, and groaned.

  Chapter 5

  IN A BOTECO, a small, open-air bar not far from the hospital, Dr. Lucas Castro took another belt of cachaça, Brazil’s potent sugarcane rum. He stared numbly at the television screen, which showed some American guy hanging off a rope running out of one of the tramcars on Sugarloaf Mountain.

  Castro turned to Dr. Desales, said bitterly, “A climber dies. A climber’s rescued. It’s on every channel. But two kids from the favelas dying from a virus? The day before the World Cup final?”

  “Not a chance,” Desales said, nodding.

  Dr. Castro ordered another shot, unable to stop the events of the past five hours from spinning again in his head, getting him angrier and more resentful by the moment. He and Desales had stood there after little Jorge died, drenched in sweat as they watched the flat lines on the monitors, stunned by how fast the boy and his sister had deteriorated and succumbed. The children had be
en in their care less than three hours.

  “We’ve got to get out of here and decontaminate,” he’d said at last.

  Shaken, Desales had followed Castro through the plastic sheeting the nurses had put up while the doctors tried to save the children.

  They went to a special room off the ICU, stripped, and put their clothes in a hazardous-waste bin for incineration. Then they examined each other for any possible body-fluid exposure. Satisfied that there had been none, they lathered head to toe in a mild bleach solution that they rinsed off under high-pressure hoses.

  When they’d emerged from decontamination they found Manuel Pinto, the hospital administrator, waiting for them.

  A puffy-faced fifty-something man in a finely cut linen suit, Pinto asked, “What the hell’s going on?”

  “We lost two, a young boy and a girl from the favelas,” Dr. Castro replied. “It’ll take a PCR test to confirm it, but I believe it’s a virus that has broken out only once before. Upper Amazon Basin. Three years ago.”

  “You were there?”

  “With a World Health Organization unit,” Castro said.

  “Mortality rate?”

  “Sixteen percent,” Desales answered.

  “But we’ve just had a hundred percent incident,” Castro said. “We need to quarantine the hospital and the entire favela where those kids lived.”

  “An entire favela?” Pinto said doubtfully. “I don’t have that authority.”

  “Then find someone who does. I’m going to talk to the parents.”

  The mother, a sweet young woman named Fernanda Gonzalez, looked pleading and afraid when Dr. Castro walked out of the ICU into the waiting room.

  “There’s no easy way to say this,” Castro said. “We lost both of them.”

  Fernanda collapsed into the arms of Pietro, her husband, and sobbed.

  “How can that be?” Pietro demanded hotly. “I want to see them.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible, sir,” Castro said. “We believe they died from a highly infectious virus.”

  “What? Like Ebola?” Pietro asked in disbelief.

  “Different, but yes, dangerous like that.”

  “Where are they?” Fernanda sobbed.

  “Their bodies are under quarantine. And we need to do blood tests on both of you and anyone else who came into contact with your children in the past twenty-four hours.”

  “Oh God,” the kids’ mother moaned. “Oh God, this is not happening.”

  Her husband held on to her and sobbed too. Castro stayed with them until they could answer his questions. He learned that they lived in a sprawling slum in northeast Rio that was home to almost two hundred thousand people.

  The father had a decent job as a security guard at the monument of Christ the Redeemer on Corcovado Mountain. Fernanda stayed home and took care of the children. They’d both noticed that Maria had been lethargic the evening before. In the middle of the night, she’d started vomiting. An hour later, so had Jorge.

  “Where did they get the little cuts on their feet?” Castro asked.

  “I don’t know,” Fernanda said. “They’re kids. They’re outside all the time.”

  Barefoot? Castro thought, suppressing a shudder. In a slum?

  The doctor had grown up in one of Rio’s favelas and knew all too well that hygiene in many of them was minimal at best. So whatever the kids stepped on had been infected with Hydra. But who or what had carried the virus there in the first place?

  “Dr. Castro?”

  He had looked up from the parents to see the hospital administrator standing there, rubbing his hands nervously. Beside him was an imperious little—

  The bartender put a full shot glass of cachaça on the bar in front of the doctor, taking Castro from his thoughts.

  Castro picked up the shot glass and held it up to Desales. “To Igor Lima,” he said. “The dumbest cover-your-ass idiot I have ever met.”

  The doctors clinked glasses.

  They took the rum in one gulp, ordered another round, and almost immediately Castro’s thoughts began to swirl again to Igor Lima.

  Lima worked in the office of the mayor of Rio. He specialized in public-health issues, and when Castro and the hospital administrator had met with him just a few hours before, the man had been mightily annoyed to have been called to work on the Saturday before the World Cup final.

  “Viruses and diseases have a way of ignoring such things,” Castro had told him.

  “What viruses?” Lima had asked. “What diseases?”

  After looking at the hospital administrator, who turned his head away, Castro had brought Lima up to speed. The doctor finished with a plea to put the favela where the children had lived under quarantine.

  The mayoral aide’s chin retreated. His lips did a stiff dance, and then he shook his head. “That’s not happening.”

  “What?” Castro demanded. “Why?”

  “Because you’re not sure it’s a virus that killed those kids.”

  “I am sure. I—”

  “You haven’t run the PCR tests,” Lima said. “You said so yourself.”

  “Not yet, but—”

  “But nothing, Doctor. We’ll keep the bodies and the ICU in quarantine pending autopsies and figure out where we are on Monday.”

  “Monday?” Castro sneered. “You mean after the World Cup final, don’t you? That’s what’s behind this. You don’t want to have the mayor and FIFA embarrassed; you want the media broadcasting only good thoughts all over the world tomorrow afternoon. Right? That’s the reason you’re burying a potential epidemic, isn’t it?”

  Lima sputtered, “I’m not burying an epidemic.”

  Castro poked the bureaucrat in the chest with his finger, said, “When a variation of this virus hit a village up in the Amazon a few years back, we had a sixteen percent mortality rate. But this is a mutation of Hydra. The cells have six heads instead of five. It killed both those children. One hundred percent mortality.”

  “Again, without tests and without autopsies, you can’t know that,” Lima said. “So for the time being, the quarantine begins and ends with those bodies and that ICU.”

  Castro started to argue again, but the mayoral aide stepped back, said, “Doctor, I hate to do this, but given your history, I don’t think you can be considered rational enough to handle this situation. I think you should be quarantined too.”

  “What?”

  “You’re off the case, Dr. Castro,” Lima said, and then he turned to the hospital administrator. “Senhor Pinto, you are in charge of making sure that everything in that ICU is sanitized and those bodies autopsied tonight so they can be cremated as soon as possible. And test the doctors.”

  The administrator shook his head. “Tonight? I…I can’t.”

  “And why not?” Lima demanded.

  “I have a ticket to the FIFA party at the Copacabana Palace,” Pinto said.

  “That’s your problem, not mine,” Lima said.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Deadly serious,” the mayor’s aide replied, and he turned to depart.

  Castro’s hands balled into fists. He wanted to belt the little man but restrained himself, said, “Anyone else dies, it’s on your head, not ours!”

  “Go into quarantine, Dr. Castro, and you as well, Dr. Desales,” Lima said over his shoulder.

  Chapter 6

  THE BARTENDER PUT two more shot glasses in front of the doctors.

  They’d been drinking since their tests, and the children’s parents’, had come back negative. Dr. Castro drank his down and ordered another. Dr. Desales finished his and said he was done. He and his wife had dinner plans and he didn’t want to be wasted when he got home.

  Dr. Castro wasn’t done and he had no one to go home to anyway. He suddenly wanted to get good and drunk and do something brazen, or vengeful, or both. He didn’t know what yet, but Lima’s actions could well have doomed many people. Even though he and Desales were clean, there were bound to be others.
There needed to be a response. Right?

  He couldn’t just turn the other cheek again. Right?

  That was right. There had to be a response, a just response, a goddamned wake-up call.

  Desales set an envelope on the bar in front of Castro.

  “Ticket to the big FIFA bash at the Copacabana Palace,” Desales said. “Pinto gave it to me because he couldn’t use it, but we have plans with the in-laws and my wife won’t break them. You should go.”

  “Screw that,” Castro said, and he picked the envelope up, pivoted, and flicked it into a trash can behind him.

  Desales sighed, clapped Castro on the shoulder, and left.

  The bartender set another shot down in front of the doctor just as the television screen changed from news back to World Cup coverage. More analysts. More dissection. More ruminating on Brazil’s brutal loss.

  Seven to one? After everything, seven to one? For Brazil to go out before the finals was bad enough, but to get demolished? Annihilated?

  Castro’s thoughts turned circular again, brought up old bitterness and grief he’d told himself a thousand times to leave behind. But the doctor couldn’t leave bitterness and grief behind. They were such constant companions, they might as well have been friends.

  The doctor drank the shot down and ordered one more.

  The screen cut to Henri Dijon, a FIFA spokesman, a French guy with a superior attitude and a five-thousand-dollar suit. Dijon was standing at a bank of microphones in front of the Copacabana Palace.

  A reporter asked whether FIFA considered Brazil’s World Cup a success despite the protests in the months leading up to the tournament. Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians had gone into the streets in cities across the country to decry government corruption and the spending of billions on sports stadiums that might never be used again while the poor of Brazil got nothing.

  “FIFA considers the tournament a smashing success for Brazil, for Rio, and for everyone involved,” Dijon said, and he kept blathering on in that vein.

  For everyone involved? Castro thought, tasting acid at the back of his throat. For everyone involved?

  Maybe the greedy bastard politicians who’d skimmed millions could consider it a success. And the construction companies. And FIFA, the most corrupt sports organization in the world. For those three groups and some others, the World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympic Games would be smashing successes.