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  Bolting to my right, I shouted, “Abort the landing, General! Repeat, abort the landing! They’ve got a—”

  A man holding a machine gun appeared, started firing wildly in my direction. Tracers ripped past me like shooting stars as I sprinted around the corner of the shack.

  The helicopter was close now. I could see the bays open, crowded with men in SWAT gear, even as more gunfire erupted. They weren’t aborting.

  I heard several shots.

  “I’m engaged,” Tavia said.

  “Shoot Urso! He’s got a rocket grenade!”

  I came around the front of the shack. Caught in the spotlight, the Bear was on one knee and already aiming. Tavia shot and I shot, and we both hit Urso, but not before he triggered the surface-to-air missile.

  With a thud, the rocket fired and flame blew out the back of the launcher. The recoil tore it from Urso’s grasp and he began to crumple as a thin plume of fire trailed the missile into the crowded hold of the police chopper. The warhead exploded in a boom and a brilliant flash that engulfed the bay.

  The bird made a metallic groan that I knew all too well. The helicopter listed, shuddered, and tumbled from the sky. It struck ground and cartwheeled across the slope into a tree before rupturing in a churning ball of blinding fire.

  For a second I was so shocked I just stood there. Then I charged the second shack, hearing shooting to my right and bullets behind me.

  When I hit the front porch, I fired two shots to my right and then threw my shoulder into the door. The door frame splintered. I hit it again and it gave way. I stepped into a short passage that led to a black curtain rimmed in bright light.

  “Hear them coming?” I heard Wise say. “You can’t win.”

  “No, rich man,” Amelia said. “It’s you who can’t win. It’s you who won’t win. No matter what happens to me, I want you to know who helped me. I want you to know the tragedy of your fucking life.”

  I stepped through the drape, accidentally kicking over the tripod and camera as I aimed the Glock at Amelia Lopes from eight feet away. Amelia had dropped the mask. She had the pistol to Wise’s head and was whispering something in his ear.

  “Drop the gun!” I said as she started to turn. “Now!”

  “No,” she said, a split second before the gunshots that ended it all.

  Chapter 79

  I WALKED OUT of the shack minutes later feeling like a zombie. The air stank of burned fuel. Several helicopters circled overhead, beaming multiple spotlights on the clearing and the carnage left in the downed chopper’s wake.

  There was a deep gash in the mountainside where the police helicopter had hit first. Where it had struck the slope again and again during the cartwheels, the ground looked speared and slashed like so many dots and dashes. Crash debris littered the tree line.

  The chopper left a trail into the jungle that was also unmistakable. The trees and all the vegetation there had been lopped off above twenty feet, leaving bare, scorched trunks that looked like spent and broken matchsticks set upright in black sand.

  I stared at that gaping scar of the battle dumbly, wondering at the meaning of it all, and then fear seized my throat like a constricting snake.

  I triggered my microphone, said hoarsely, “Tavia?”

  I spotted a flashlight still burning on the ground, grabbed it, and began to run, praying for her voice to come back to me.

  “Tavia? Answer?”

  I sprinted across the slope, telling myself everything was fine, that her radio must have gone out.

  “General da Silva?” I said.

  “You’re done, Jack. You’ve cost the lives of ten men.”

  “I called for an abort. It was ignored! Tell the helicopters above me to train their spotlights where the chopper went into the jungle. Now.”

  After a long pause, da Silva said, “Done.”

  “Tavia!” I yelled. “Tavia, answer me!”

  The acrid stench of burned helicopter fuel was everywhere, a caustic fog that singed my nostrils and lungs. Throwing my arm across my mouth and nose, I scrambled lower and diagonally across the slope so the cut and burned trees were right there below me.

  The helicopters circling above had gotten their orders from da Silva. Six wide and powerful spotlight beams played on the debris field. A long chunk of helicopter blade stuck out of the side of one tree like a giant machete. A strut hung off another like a Christmas ornament.

  Some fifty yards from where the chopper had slashed into the jungle, what remained of the fuselage still burned and threw up a foul, black smoke. Here and there, I saw what might be body parts.

  “Tavia?” I called. “Are you there?”

  No answer.

  Tears began to well in my eyes, and I brushed them away hard and went closer. One of the choppers above me adjusted its beam, revealing a scorched tree at the far lower edge of the crash path. The tree had been split almost lengthwise, with the front piece gone and the rest of the trunk sticking up like a church spire half sheared off.

  At the base of that tree, Tavia lay facedown.

  I ran to her, begging God to let her be alive.

  But when I reached her side and started to turn her over, I knew by the slack in her neck that it was broken and she was gone.

  Chapter 80

  Friday, August 5, 2016

  2:00 a.m.

  Seventeen Hours Before the Olympic Games Open

  LIEUTENANT BRUNO ACOSTA led me into Private Rio’s offices. The entire staff was there waiting, anxious and somber. I’d texted them all and asked them to assemble for some difficult news. Cherie Wise and her daughters were there as well, all of them clearly frantic with worry.

  The second they saw Lieutenant Acosta, they all sprang to their feet.

  “What’s happened?” Cherie cried. “No one will tell us what happened after the camera died.”

  Acosta bowed his head. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Wise, to be the bearer of tragic news, but…I’m so sorry…”

  The billionaire’s wife stared at the police lieutenant in disbelief and growing horror. “No,” she said. “No, that’s…”

  Cherie began to waver on her feet. Natalie grabbed her arm, held her up, whimpering, “Mom? Please say it’s not…”

  “It’s not right.” Alicia sobbed and held tight to her mother.

  Cherie sagged down into a chair, jaw slack, eyes fixed on a future that looked black and void. I moved, and she focused on me.

  “You said you’d save him,” she said in a devastated voice. “You and Tavia assured me he would not die.”

  Before I could reply, Lieutenant Acosta held his palm up to her and said, “Mr. Morgan put his life on the line to save your husband, Mrs. Wise. Octavia Reynaldo gave her life trying to save your husband.”

  Gasps went up all around the room. Cherie looked even more distraught. Seeing that and the shock on the faces of the good people of Private Rio threw me back into utter misery and it took every bit of strength I had not to break down.

  “No,” Natalie said, holding her stomach and bursting into tears. “No. No.”

  Her sister put her face in her hands and continued weeping.

  “It wasn’t…” Alicia choked. “He wasn’t…Rayssa said…”

  Lieutenant Acosta stepped toward her, said, “Ms. Wise?”

  Alicia raised her head, peered at him with tortured eyes.

  Natalie looked at her sister in terror. “No.”

  Alicia’s jaw quivered and her skin flushed before she glared at Natalie and shrieked, “It’s all about money! That’s what you told me! She was just going to scare him and take his money.”

  “That’s what she told me!” Natalie screamed back.

  In the stunned silence that followed, I watched their poor mother. I saw every tic and tragic bit of Cherie’s terrible path to understanding.

  She gaped at them in bewilderment. “You knew? You were a part of…”

  “Mom,” Alicia said in a terrified voice. “Amelia showed us how Dad’s company
screwed the poor people of Brazil. She told us we could begin to right that, that Dad deserved some punishment, and it would help the poor.”

  Natalie said, “Mom, she made it sound like a good thing, a rebalancing.”

  Cherie looked at her daughters like they were alien creatures.

  “You betrayed your father because he made too much money?” she said. “You played judge and jury with your own dad? Sent him to his death?”

  “No!” Natalie cried. “It wasn’t like that.”

  Cherie lunged up and out of her chair. She slapped Natalie and backhanded Alicia. Lieutenant Acosta stepped in and restrained her. She went hysterical in his arms.

  “It’s over,” she wept. “Everything is over.”

  “Cherie, it’s not over.”

  Cherie Wise didn’t hear and sobbed in grief and loss.

  “Cherie, baby doll, I’m right here.”

  A Private nurse pushed in a wheelchair bearing Andrew Wise. The billionaire sported a whopper of a bandage around his head and looked as weak as a newborn colt.

  Cherie raised her head, saw her husband alive, and fainted dead away.

  Chapter 81

  AFTER MO-BOT GAVE her smelling salts, Cherie gazed at her husband in wonder and confusion. “You’re alive.”

  “Thanks to Jack’s skills,” Wise said, holding her hand. “He shot her through the right side of her chest, spun her away from me before she pulled the trigger. Her bullet cut a bloody groove across my forehead.”

  Cherie started to cry. “Why did you do this? Why did you torture me?”

  For the first time, the billionaire turned his attention to his daughters, who wilted helplessly under his unblinking appraisal.

  “Before she died, Amelia told me I’d been betrayed by my own girls. She said she wanted that to be my last thought.”

  Natalie looked ready to disintegrate and Alicia began to weep. “What have we done? Oh my God, what have we done? She said it was all about money.”

  The billionaire watched them without emotion, as if he were studying some interesting object in nature.

  “Maybe you didn’t know Rayssa planned to shoot me,” Wise said at last. “So I forgive you for that.”

  Natalie trembled, said, “Dad?”

  “I’ve had some time to think,” he said, more to his wife than his daughters. “Amelia Lopes was right. I made too big a profit. It is time to give back. So I forgive the girls for that as well.”

  Alicia tried to go to him, but Lieutenant Acosta stopped her, spun her around, and started putting handcuffs on her. “Alicia Wise, you are under arrest for conspiracy to kidnap and murder.”

  “No,” she whined. “We didn’t kill anyone.”

  “You participated in the murder of two of my people,” I said angrily. “Or have you forgotten the two bodyguards who died in the fake kidnapping?”

  “We didn’t know that’s what was going to happen!” Natalie said as Acosta put her in cuffs as well. “Amelia kept us in the dark, said it would be better.”

  Cherie had gotten enough strength to hold on to her husband as Acosta prepared to take their daughters away.

  “Dad?” Natalie said. “You said you forgave us. Won’t you help us?”

  “I’ll pay for your attorneys,” he said. “But I will testify against you.”

  “So will I,” Cherie said, and she cried harder.

  “Get them good lawyers,” Lieutenant Acosta said. “With all the media attention, they’re both going to wind up in prison. There’s no way around that now.”

  Chapter 82

  Friday, August 5, 2016

  7:00 a.m.

  Twelve Hours Before the Olympic Games Open

  DR. CASTRO CAME awake slowly, groggily. He was still in the hazmat suit, lying on his back on the floor of his lab. How long had he been…

  Castro bolted upright, feeling claustrophobic, and gazed around wildly until he saw the clock on the wall: 7:01 a.m. He’d been asleep—what, almost ten hours? At least that.

  He had to move, now, leave this lab forever. Castro got to his feet, opened the lid of the freezer, and saw that Leah’s clothes had ice on them and that her strangled expression had frozen in place.

  He shut the freezer, went to the refrigerator. He opened it and looked at all the vials and bags of blood, virus and mutation, virus and mutation, the whole history of Hydra-9’s development from the very beginning laid out on shelves, oldest on the bottom, state-of-the-art up top.

  Castro took bags of Luna’s contaminated blood and used a funnel to make the transfer into a lightweight titanium cylinder, then he screwed on a pressurized fitting with a short, stout piece of hose dangling off it. He did the same thing with bags of Ricardo’s blood and then wiped down both cylinders with a bleach solution.

  At 7:40 a.m., the doctor looked around, feeling like he’d forgotten something. But he couldn’t put his finger on it, decided it was nothing of real consequence, and left the lab.

  After he stripped off the hazmat suit, Castro took the cylinders to his workbench and a green-gray North Face Cinder 55 internal-frame backpack that he’d bought online at Moosejaw.com. The Cinder 55 had 3,356 cubic inches of space inside and thick, rugged outer walls of abrasion-resistant nylon. Serious mountain climbers used these packs to lug gear to and from base camps.

  The backpack was almost full already, but there was still room for the blood cylinders, a bota bag of wine, water, and dried meat and fruit. His last lunch. His last supper.

  He put a rain jacket on top of his supplies and equipment, toggled shut the main compartment, and then turned the top flap over. He unzipped the top flap pocket, slid in a nine-millimeter pistol with two full clips, and cinched the pack tight.

  Hoisting it onto his back, he guessed the weight at forty-five pounds, and he made adjustments to the shoulder straps and waist belt so it rode snugly above his hips, centered along his spine. He was satisfied with the Cinder 55 and the way he’d packed it.

  And he was more than satisfied with the items inside it and all the details that had gone into their design and construction. Things were coming together now. Preparation was about to meet opportunity.

  Dr. Castro took a shower. He shaved and dressed in dull gray pants with a belt that featured a figure-eight buckle that was really the handle of a three-inch dagger that slid and locked into a hidden sheath. He’d taken it in trade for stitching up the son of a gangster but had never had any use for it until now.

  After putting on a gray work shirt with collar and cuffs, Castro set a gray ball cap on his head and eased on a pair of wraparound sunglasses. He picked up the pack, threw it over one shoulder, took one last look at his laboratory, and left, locking the place up tight.

  After engaging the dead bolts on the outer door, he put the pack in the trunk of his car. With the keys he’d taken from Leah, he opened her car, started it, and drove it several blocks away. He left her cell phone on and placed it under the seat.

  Castro ran back, got in his car, and pulled away. It was 8:15 a.m. He was behind his original timetable by fifteen minutes.

  Chapter 83

  Friday, August 5, 2016

  10:30 a.m.

  Eight and a Half Hours Before the Olympic Games Open

  SOMEONE KNOCKED SHARPLY at the door to my suite. I opened my eyes a crack, feeling more rested than I had in days. Then the night before and the heartache returned, and I realized that for a long time to come, sleep would be my only refuge from the nightmare of being awake.

  Tavia, my lover, my friend, was gone. The woman who might have become my wife was gone. It felt like someone had torn something out of me by the roots.

  The knock again.

  “Coming,” I said. I threw on a robe, went to the door, and peered through the peephole.

  Justine Smith stood there, and my heart instantly felt better.

  I opened the door, smiled wanly as she said, “Oh, Jack, I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and held out my arms. She came into
them and the door swung shut.

  “I know how much Tavia meant to you,” Justine said. “I got on a plane as soon as I heard, came straight here from the airport.”

  All the emotions I’d kept bottled inside broke through, and I held on to one of the few women I’ve loved in life while I went to pieces over the loss of another. Justine held on and on, exuding deep and sincere empathy, rubbing my back while I mourned.

  When it was out of me, I felt wrung out and embarrassed.

  Justine put her hand on my cheek, gazed into my tortured eyes, and said, “I am here for you.”

  I reached and held her hand there, said, “You’re a good friend, the best.”

  “Keep remembering that.”

  “I could never forget,” I said, and I hugged her just for being there.

  Then my cell phone rang. Justine pulled back, smiling sympathetically.

  “Let it ring,” I said. “Hungry?”

  “Famished,” she said. “Let’s order room service and talk about Tavia?”

  The old me would have dismissed that out of hand. My inability to open up was what had ultimately done in my romantic relationship with Justine. But I had to talk about Tavia. I had to tell someone about the love I’d lost.

  “I’d like that,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “I’ll order. You get showered and dressed.”

  I gave her a mock salute and headed to the bathroom, thinking once again how great Justine was. Goddamn it, even though I’d blown it with her and even though she was with someone else now, Justine still had the purest heart of anyone I’d ever met. Just having her to rely on made the burden of Tavia’s death seem almost bearable.

  I climbed out of the shower and was dressing when my cell phone began to ring again. I looked at the caller ID and answered.

  “General da Silva?”

  “There’s a good chance I will be fired today,” he said stiffly. “Getting a police helicopter and several men shot out of the sky in full view of many of the Olympic venues evidently does not sit well with the president.”