The Games Read online

  “I imagine it wouldn’t,” I said.

  “If I am relieved of command, you’ll continue on?”

  “In any role the government wants,” I promised.

  “I appreciate it, and I can’t say how sorry I am about Tavia. She was one of a kind, a special person, and the only woman I have ever truly feared.”

  I laughed at that, said, “She could be fierce at times. That’s one of the things I loved about her.” Then my laugh turned wistful and died.

  “I’ll be in touch once I know,” da Silva said.

  “I’ll eat and then get to work.”

  He hung up. Mo-bot called a minute later.

  “You sleep?” she asked.

  “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  “On the couch here at Private Rio,” she said.

  “Seven and a half solid hours here.”

  “That’s a blessing. How are you? I mean…”

  “It’s tolerable as long as I don’t think about it, meaning about every minute or so I get stabbed in the gut. But Justine’s here.”

  “That’s a help. Jack, you poor thing. Listen, I finally tracked down the articles of incorporation for Dr. Castro’s business. You’ll never guess what the company was organized to do.”

  “Infectious-disease research?”

  “How’d you guess that?”

  “The way things are going, I just imagined the worst-case scenario and threw it out there.”

  Chapter 84

  DR. CASTRO DROVE southwest through Rio, using every little trick he knew to avoid the strangling traffic, but then it started to rain and that mucked up everything and he was stuck again in the midst of bumper-to-bumper vehicles. To pass the time, he tuned to an all-news radio station and listened intently to the description of the government raid on the Favela Justice terrorists.

  Billionaire Andrew Wise had been rescued, and Amelia Lopes, aka Rayssa, was dead, along with a dozen of her followers, including a notorious gangster named Urso who’d used a rocket launcher to take down a BOPE helicopter. Several people had died in the crash, among them Octavia Reynaldo, head of Private Rio.

  Wise had gone out in front of cameras and microphones and announced his intention to spend the rest of his life figuring out how to better the lives of the poorest of the poor. A reporter asked if his daughters were in custody, and he’d said they were under arrest.

  Amelia Lopes and the Wise twins, Castro thought. Kindred spirits. I would have liked to have known them. Daughter of a saint, product of poverty, Lopes saw the inequities and acted. Guilty rich girls confronted with the inequities of life joined her. It made sense to him, and in many ways he agreed with their goals.

  But Amelia Lopes had thought about the gap between rich and poor in entirely economic terms, the benefits and losses, the income, the greed, the want. To Castro, the biggest gap was in health care. The richest had access to the best medical care and a sanitary environment conducive to long human life. The poorest had feces flowing past their doors, pestilence, and recurrent plagues. The richest couldn’t see that a simple rise in the living standards of the poor would lead to fewer crippling diseases and fewer early deaths.

  Why? Because the rich were ignorant of what it was like to live at the mercy of a parasite, a disease, or a virus. So they have to be taught, the doctor thought as traffic began to ease and he picked up speed. They have to be shown.

  Forty minutes behind schedule, at eleven a.m., Dr. Castro finally drove into Laranjeiras, a largely residential neighborhood in south Rio with a funky street vibe. Little cafés, nice parks, lots of vendors. And the base station for the cog railway that climbed to the top of Corcovado Mountain.

  The rain lightened to a drizzle. Castro went past the rail station, slowed along a high wall, and then turned through a pair of iron gates into a cobblestoned courtyard in front of the shambles of a palace built in the early 1800s by the dethroned king of Portugal’s doctor. The palace must have been grand and glamorous once.

  Squatters lived there now; the limestone walls were slick with moss, and the wooden shutters hung off their hinges and moldered. Castro had seen the palace many times. The building had been one of his wife’s favorites. Sophie always thought it should have been in a movie, that it was the perfect place for a vampire to await sundown. Castro sat there a moment after he parked, swearing he could see Sophie right there, entranced by the decrepit building.

  Then he shook the memory off and got out, confident that this was the perfect place to leave his car. After dark, the squatters would strip it, take it apart, and sell the pieces. Nothing would go to waste.

  Castro got the backpack out of the trunk, threw his keys inside, and shut it. He felt eyes watching him, looked up three stories, and saw a boy looking down at him through the lightly falling rain. The kid was shirtless and eating something, but he was also clearly watching the doctor.

  That pleased Castro as he walked back through the gates. If the kid saw him toss the keys in the trunk, the car would be gone within the hour. He walked away, heading west and uphill past the Museum of Native Art and onto Rua Cosme Velho, a twisting, climbing road.

  The rain stopped and behind it came a breeze from the northeast, from the equator, bringing equatorial heat to Rio. Castro reached the entrance to the sports complex at the College of St. Vincent de Paul, where he had been doing a weekly clinic for athletes the past six months. The security guard recognized him, asked him what was in the pack.

  “Sand, mostly,” Castro replied. “I’m going climbing in the Andes in December and getting into shape. Walking everywhere I can with this on.”

  The guard looked at him like he was kind of nuts but nodded and let him pass through. Castro headed to the athletic department building.

  But when he got there, he cut back to his right, out of sight of the guard, and made his way across a practice field and around grandstands to the rear corner of the college grounds.

  Castro went to a heavy iron gate, pulled the cotter pin that held the latch tight, and opened the gate, praying that the squealing it made would not attract attention. He exited, shut the gate, and breathed a sigh of relief.

  The doctor was in the dripping, steaming jungle now, safe from all prying eyes. He just had to be careful and stick to a route he’d plotted for months. He had a brutal series of climbs and traverses ahead of him. There were other ways, some of them probably easier, but Castro had chosen this approach because from above he would be invisible, and because he wanted to suffer.

  Chapter 85

  Friday, August 5, 2016

  12:30 p.m.

  Six and a Half Hours Before the Olympic Games Open

  JUSTINE AND I climbed from a taxi outside a long steel building in a light-industrial complex in Rio’s Estação District.

  Lieutenant Acosta pulled in behind us and got out. For an early Friday afternoon, the entire complex seemed empty. Then again, the president had declared the opening day of the Olympics a national holiday in Brazil.

  We went to the door of AV3 Research and knocked. No one answered.

  “Think you have enough cause to enter?” I asked.

  “We’re in Brazil,” Lieutenant Acosta said. “I’ll invent a cause, say I was doing a well-being check on Castro. If we find nothing, we’re good and we back out.”

  We tried to force the door, with no luck. It was reinforced steel and triple dead-bolted. Acosta called a locksmith. After we’d waited for forty minutes in the lieutenant’s car to get out of the suddenly oppressive heat, the locksmith had the door swinging open.

  The outer office wasn’t much—file cabinets, an old desk. But we found the second door and had the locksmith pick it. It was 1:25 p.m. when we finally gained access to Castro’s inner sanctum, turned on the lights, and saw the clean room.

  We walked around it, finding the entrance, but looking first through glass windows into a spotless, elaborate, and meticulously arranged laboratory.

  “I’m not going in there,” Justine said.<
br />
  “I’ll go,” I said.

  “I will too,” Acosta said.

  “We don’t know what we’re dealing with, Jack,” Justine said.

  “We’ll have a look around outside first,” I said. “Get a clue.”

  We walked through the workshop, finding a metal band saw, a bender, and lengths of titanium rods and flats. Jars of titanium screws and bolts. A small welding setup. Cargo netting. Various gas canisters of different sizes.

  “Someone’s building and looking to save weight,” I said.

  “For what?” Acosta asked.

  “I can’t figure it out. Maybe he left a design or something.”

  I began opening drawers, finding the usual tools but also calipers, a guide to stress testing, stout metal fittings, and lengths of high-pressure hose. In a bottom drawer I found something odd: a short length of black hose clamped to what looked like an airbrush.

  “What’s that for?” Acosta asked.

  “No idea,” I said. I set it aside and moved on toward a second bench that smelled like airplane glue and featured tiny wood clamps, fine-toothed saws, and scalpels. There were thumbtacks and little bits of paper stuck to the wall above the bench. Something had been torn down.

  On top of the bench were two airbrushes and a can of hose glue. I opened drawers and found sheets of balsa wood, cardboard tubes, and what looked like little plastic fins. What the hell was he building?

  “We haven’t seen anything that says he’s a threat,” Justine said.

  “If it’s anywhere, it’s in there,” I said, gesturing to the laboratory.

  “I’ll wait here,” she said.

  Acosta and I went through the zipped door into a kind of anteroom. Hanging on one wall was a protocol list with a diagram that we followed to suit up safely. The hoods and gauntlets went on last.

  “Part of me thinks this is nuts, Jack,” Lieutenant Acosta said.

  “I think that part of you is right,” I said, getting used to the way he sounded over the little motorized HEPA filter that cleaned the air we were breathing.

  I bent down, unzipped another door, and climbed into an air lock with an exhaust fan and ductwork leading to a large air-scrubbing device overhead. Near the exhaust fan there was a showerhead with a sign next to it: 2% bleach.

  Lieutenant Acosta climbed in after me and peered through the porthole window on the opposite door. “So there are infectious diseases in there?”

  “Strong enough to require a Clorox bath afterward,” I said, and I shivered before unzipping the third door and stepping out into the lab.

  I was struck again by how regimented the room seemed. Everything had a place and everything was in its place.

  I spotted Justine looking in through the small window in the far wall and gave her the thumbs-up before walking past a row of glass cages and seeing wood chips and rodent feces in the bottom. Above the glass enclosures there were unplugged electronic monitors. What did they measure?

  I walked over to the refrigerator. Acosta circled the other way, looking at the scientific apparatus near a lift-top freezer.

  I opened the fridge and felt my breath catch.

  Hundreds of vials of blood hung in racks inside. They were labeled in code on the side of the trays: I-1:7V, I-1:7M, I-1:8V, I-1:8M…

  What did any of that mean? I had no idea. I picked up an IV bag of blood lying on the lower shelf.

  I turned it over in my hand and read what was written there.

  LSANTOS-1—H:9V CONTRAIDO: 7.30.16.

  “Lieutenant?” I called. “You better come see this.”

  “Not before you see this, Jack,” Acosta said.

  Still holding the IV bag, I shut the fridge door and saw Acosta holding up the freezer top and pointing inside.

  Chapter 86

  I STARED IN at the frozen couple. Their lips—his gray and hers blue—barely touched. On the young woman’s back, there was a rectangular piece of freezer paper. Someone had scrawled across it in big block letters: Enfin os ricos estão atormentados.

  “What’s it mean?” I asked.

  “You can translate it two ways,” Acosta said. “‘For once the rich are tormented,’ or ‘For once the rich are plagued.’”

  Oh Jesus, I thought, and closed my eyes. It was real, then. The weird gut sense I’d had being around Castro the first time had been true.

  “What’d you find?” Lieutenant Acosta said.

  I showed him the bag of blood and the label. “Luna Santos-1—Hydra-9 virus. I don’t know what contraído means.”

  “‘Contracted,’” Acosta said. “As in disease.”

  Contracted July 30, 2016, then. “That was the day Luna died,” I said. “Castro was using this secret lab to develop a deadly virus, using humans as his guinea pigs, and…”

  I turned back to the freezer, leaned way in, and studied the color of the dead couple’s skin.

  “This wasn’t just a lab,” I said. “It was a propagation operation too.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “We know he drained Luna of blood. Judging by the extreme pallor, the male victim has been drained of blood too. But there’s only one blood bag in the fridge, and not enough in the vials to make up for the difference. We’re talking liters of infected blood. We need experts in here, and we need to find Castro.”

  “You really think he plans on…” Acosta looked sick.

  “Based on this place? I think he’s been planning for a long, long time.”

  I glanced at the clock. It was a quarter to five, two hours and…

  I knew it all then, fought a queasy, liquid feeling, said, “We need to get out of here. Now. I think I know where he’s going to attack.”

  We shut the freezer, put the IV bag holding Luna Santos’s infected blood back in the fridge, and returned to the air lock, where we took bleach showers and shed the white suits.

  “What is it?” Justine asked.

  “Bad,” I said, punching in General da Silva’s number.

  “You still have your job?” I asked when he answered.

  “Holding on by the skin of my teeth.”

  “Then this is going to be tough to hear, General, but Acosta and I think Lucas Castro is going to release a plague at the opening ceremony.”

  Chapter 87

  Friday, August 5, 2016

  1:45 p.m.

  Five Hours and Fifteen Minutes Before the Olympic Games Open

  THE SUN HAD broken through the clouds, and the heat from Bahia just kept rising. The heat and the north wind had come as a surprise to Dr. Castro. It did not help him, but it could be dealt with. And he believed that the winds would change again before sunset, turn back out of the southeast.

  But now, it was just plain stupid hot. Dr. Castro stopped, wiped his brow, and shrugged off the heavy backpack. He drank and ate a piece of jerky before setting off again, climbing higher through the jungle toward the base of a long charcoal-colored cliff.

  The faint path to the cliff was steep, but the doctor kept at it, pulling himself up over roots and through brush, slippery fern beds, and stands of wild bamboo, trying to distance himself from the apartment buildings below.

  Two o’clock had come and gone before he reached an even fainter trail inside the tree line below the cliff. He had found the path in his scouting trips and used a machete to trim out the rough spots.

  The doctor studied the damp earth there and saw no tracks. He’d learned that most people wanting to follow the contour of the mountain took a heavily used trail some two hundred vertical feet below. In his experience only the odd rock climber or two came this far up, and even they rarely used this trail.

  He’d met a few over the past two months. One of them had used a Cinder 55 backpack as a cargo bag for ropes and such. An American. Billy White from Fort Collins, Colorado. He’d recommended the pack.

  Good guy, Dr. Castro thought. Nice guy.

  The faint path ahead continued through the jungle, and he had to be sure of his footing, keeping his weight and
balance shifted toward the steep slope to his left. One false step and he’d go down hard. Very hard. And tumble and then hit hard again.

  The north breeze ebbed. The rain forest turned even more oppressively hot. Insects were buzzing, birds were calling, and somewhere a monkey chattered. But no human voices. Not even a distant car horn.

  It suited Castro. He did not want to run into anyone today. He wished to be like a virus: Alone. Mutating. Incubating. Not existing in people’s minds until their friends started dying all around them.

  Dr. Castro pushed on into one of the mountain’s deep and densely forested side canyons. For all intents and purposes, he was invisible.

  Alone. Moving. Mutating. Incubating.

  Castro imagined he was becoming like Hydra-9. In the shimmering heat he was hyperaware of everything. He felt part of nature now, the buzzing and sawing, the building and destruction, all of it unfolding in an imperfect but inevitable process.

  One species becomes dominant, and then, with something as insignificant as a twist in the strand of a virus, the same species is laid low, making way for some better, stronger, and smarter creature.

  Great good will come of this, he thought. The population is out of control. The rich are out of control. This will be a check. This will create some balance.

  “Hey there, Doc.”

  Dr. Castro startled at the soft voice, almost tripped off the wrong side of the trail, but he managed to grab onto a vine. He looked up and saw Billy White sitting on a rock about fifteen feet above him, tanned, bare-chested, ripped, Petzl helmet and a pack next to him, chewing on an energy bar.

  Chapter 88

  “BILLY,” CASTRO SAID. He coughed. “I didn’t see you there.”

  White wiped off sweat below his short blond dreadlocks and flashed the doctor an aw-shucks smile. “Just taking a rest. I’m playing mule, hauling out a bunch of gear from the last time we were in here climbing.”