The Games Read online

  Her eyes welled with tears and she looked away, embarrassed. My heart almost broke because I realized she still carried a torch for me, as I did for her.

  “Thank you,” I said, swallowing at the emotion in my throat. “But I don’t want to upset you and Cruz.”

  “I thought Emilio and I were good,” she said, sniffing and wiping at her eyes. “But if our relationship can’t stand this stress, then it wasn’t meant to be.”

  Justine touched me with her loyalty and with her acknowledgment of the thing that still lived between us, whatever it was. I couldn’t think about that for long. It seemed like I was insulting Tavia somehow.

  So for the first time in a long time I started talking. About everything.

  Over the course of days, I told Justine all about Tavia and broke down several times in the process. I felt as if I’d really opened up, held nothing back, and as a result we’d never been closer.

  “You’ve come a long way,” Justine said early Sunday afternoon, nine days after the crash, as she helped me into a sport-fishing charter boat I’d hired out of the Botafogo Bay marina. “It’s good you’re not keeping it all bottled up the way you usually do.”

  “Think I’ve earned a spot on Dr. Phil?”

  “Uh, no, but you’re making progress,” she said, smiling with concern. “Sure you don’t want me to come along?”

  “This is something I need to do alone.”

  “I’ll be waiting right here for you when you come back.”

  “What am I? Forrest Gump?”

  Justine laughed, said, “Forrest is a lot faster.”

  “I think my grandmother’s faster at the moment,” I said and settled into my seat and put Tavia’s ashes on the deck between my legs. “At least go have lunch or an açaí berry smoothie or something.”

  “Açaí berry smoothie it is. Those things are addictive, aren’t they?”

  “Massively,” I said as the captain started his engines.

  “There’s really no one else?” Justine asked.

  I shook my head, said, “She was an orphan.”

  The mate threw off the lines.

  As the captain chugged us out of the marina, I watched Justine at the end of the dock watching me until we lost sight of each other.

  We picked up speed and headed toward the harbor mouth. Sugarloaf Mountain loomed to our right, looking as impossible and breathtaking as ever.

  For a moment I thought about the climbers Tavia and I and General da Silva had rescued off the cliffs the day before the World Cup final. It seemed like several lifetimes ago.

  When we were more than a mile offshore, the captain slowed his engines and looked to me. I gazed around at the relative position of Sugarloaf, Copacabana, and the lighthouse toward Devil Beach.

  I nodded. It looked right.

  The captain cut his engines. I picked up the urn and fought my way to my feet and to the side of the boat.

  For a moment I looked around again, wanting to be sure, swallowing at the ball of emotion that swelled in my throat.

  I unscrewed the lid of the urn and, whispering hoarsely, said, “So here you are, Tavia, right where you wanted to be, a part of Rio forever.”

  I had to stop for several moments and breathe not to cry.

  “I loved you, Tavia. I miss you, and I always will.”

  Then, with shaking hands, I spread her ashes on the water.

  There was little wind and they floated on the surface for a few minutes before drifting off into the glinting light toward Copacabana.

  I sat down, feeling hollow and alone, before nodding to the captain.

  When we reached Botafogo Bay, I got up and stood in the bow, shading my eyes and peering toward the marina.

  Justine, my friend, my very best friend in the world, was right there on the dock, smiling and waiting for me.

  Acknowledgments

  Our gratitude goes out to the Cariocas, the welcoming people of Rio de Janeiro, who went out of their way to teach us both sides of their “Marvelous City,” the glamorous and the rich as well as the destitute and the poor.

  Our exceptional guide, João Carlos Desales, showed us the tapestry of life inside some of the world’s most desperate slums, and then did the same for us in some of the world’s wealthiest neighborhoods. This book could not have been written without him.

  We were also helped by Lais Tammela Souza and Rosangela Farias, who led us to Rio’s stunning physical landmarks and pointed out little-known facts that later became part of the book.

  Lieutenant Marco Veiga of the Rio de Janeiro State Military Police helped us understand the BOPE and the favelas from a law-enforcement perspective. Oca dos Curumins, also known as “Tia Bete,” runs an after-school program inside the Alemãn favela, and gave us social insights into the dynamics of Rio’s teeming slums.

  Dr. Raquel Souza at Hospital Federal dos Servidores do Estado worked with us on tropical diseases and how they spread in Brazil. Lucia Montanarella of the Rio Olympic Authority was gracious with her time in explaining the various venues of the 2016 Olympic Games. Raquel Aguiar with the Oswaldo Cruz Institute was a big help.

  We are also grateful to the nameless people of the Alemãn, Marabel, and Vidigal favelas who made us feel welcome, the folks we met at the FIFA World Cup Final, and so many other Cariocas who shared with us their unique city and lifestyle.

  Caught in the crosshairs of a deadly standoff, Detective Michael Bennett must kill…or be killed.

  For an excerpt, turn the page.

  THE COOKING LAB was in the east wing of the building, on the third floor. It was in a type of apartment known as a junior four, a one-bedroom with a formal dining room off the living room. The dining room was usually separated with French doors, but since the cooking lab was set up there, they’d taken off the doors and Sheetrocked the doorway.

  In the lab, just to the right of the kitchen door, was a barrel of sodium hydroxide, a big white fifty-gallon industrial drum of the stuff, plastered with bloodred DANGER: HAZARDOUS MATERIALS diamonds. In front of the drums were two lab tables where two HCL generators were going full tilt.

  The generators were chemistry industry standard, a bubbling, dripping, steaming mousetrap setup of hot plates and beakers and rubber tubing and inverted funnels. The HCL rig was for turning solids into liquids and liquids into evaporated gases that were separated and condensed back down into newer, much more lucrative solids.

  Hustling busily between the barrel and the lab tables and the kitchen was a tall and wiry, handsome, black-haired Hispanic man. He was the drug crew’s head, Rafael Arruda. No dummy, Rafael, he wore a super-duty gray-hooded hazmat suit with full respirator, two pairs of sea-green rubber medical gloves over his hands, and plastic nurse booties over his vintage Nikes. All the seams taped nice and tight to avoid the highly caustic fumes and chemicals.

  He was whipping up some MDMA, the main ingredient in the drug ecstasy. He’d already cultivated about three ounces of the drug’s blazingly white crystals in the plastic-lined collecting tin beside one of the generators. About thirty grand worth once it was cut and packed down into pills.

  He’d shoot for a half pound tonight, before he pulled the plug around one or two and went home to his wife, Josefina, and his daughter, Abril, who had come home for the weekend from Georgetown, the school that he himself had attended, majoring in chemistry on some rich oil guy’s Inner City Golden Promise scholarship fund.

  His promise in the field of chemistry had paid out all right. At least for him. When he wasn’t cooking drugs, he was a tenured professor and cohead of Columbia University’s undergrad chemistry department and lived in a four-million-dollar town house in Bronxville, beside white-bread bankers and plastic surgeons.

  It was about seven thirty when he noticed the clogged dropping funnel in generator one. That happened from time to time with the new, iffy stuff he’d gotten from a chemical supply house in Canada. The stuff was cheaper, especially the hydro, but it was becoming more and more obvious that it wa
s subpar with impurities, probably Chinese-made.

  If it wasn’t one thing, it was another, Rafael thought as he immediately lowered the heat and replaced the inverted funnel with a fresh one. You had to pay attention.

  As he arrived at the kitchen sink with the dirty funnel, Dvorák’s Symphony no. 9 in E Minor, known as the New World Symphony, began playing in his headphones. He loved this one, the slow oboes and clarinets and bassoons, sad and yet somehow strangely uplifting. Salsa was his favorite, but way back since high school, it was nothing but calming classical while he worked.

  He was lifting the bottle brush from the depths of the original prewar porcelain kitchen sink when the bassoons cut out, replaced by an incoming text beep.

  His family and guys knew never to bother him when he worked, so he immediately looked down at his phone on his belt.

  He prided himself on his stoic calm, but he suddenly felt a chill as he read the three words down there on the screen.

  BOSS COME QUICK!!!! it said.

  Rafael pulled the plug on everything and tore off the hood and respirator and earbuds as he came out into the hall of the apartment and went into the count room next door. In it were two bullnecked towering Dominicans. One had a slicked ponytail and one was bald, with a thin beard, and both wore camo fatigue pants and black Under Armour under puffy silver North Face vests.

  They were his crew captains, fraternal twin brothers, Emilio and Pete Lopez, with whom he had grown up. They stood staring dumbfounded at the laptop that monitored their closed-circuit security video downstairs.

  “What the hell is going on?” Rafael said.

  “We don’t know. Nate just radioed up from the lobby,” Emilio said, thumbing nervously at his beard. “A bike—a motorcycle or something—just wiped out into Louis on the sidewalk, and he said two dudes in helmets jumped off it and were fighting with Jaime and Jesus.”

  “And now no one’s responding,” said Pete, shaking his head. “Nate won’t answer his radio or his phone.”

  Nate again! Rafael thought. He was Josefina’s cousin and a pothead total screwup, the weakest point in his armor by far. That’s it. He was going to fire him. Right after he personally kicked the living shit out of him.

  “Where are they?” Rafael said, scanning the screen’s security grid. “Jaime and the rest of them. I don’t see them. They’re not in the street.”

  “We don’t know,” said Pete.

  “Did you scope out the front door?” Rafael said.

  “Of course, bro. That’s just it. No one came in, or we would have seen them,” said Emilio.

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “We know,” said Emilio, wide-eyed.

  “Jackass—come in,” Rafael called down on the Motorola. “Nate, you there? Hey, jackass!”

  He unkeyed the radio and listened. The rasp of static. No Nate. No nothing.

  What the hell is this? he thought.

  “What are you guys doing just standing there?” Rafael cried up at the towering Lopez brothers. “I sent you to that training course why? For exercise? Shit is going down now! Get out the vests and choppers now.”

  “You think it’s the Romolos, maybe?” said Emilio. “Over that thing with that girl who got killed? Or is it the cops?”

  That’s when it happened.

  In a silent instant around them came darkness.

  The lights, the monitor, all the juice—all of it was suddenly gone.

  RAFAEL FELT PANIC arrive, a cold petrifying pulse of it that began in his stomach and radiated out. To his balls and knees, to his chest and brain.

  “Holy shit! What is this?” cried Pete in the dark.

  Rafael bashed down the welling panic and finally, with a shaking thumb, got the flashlight going on his phone. He went out of the count room to the apartment door and cracked it.

  No. F me. Not good.

  The hall was dark. The entire building was out. Someone had shut their whole shit down!

  He almost wet himself as the gunfire suddenly started up. Thundering up the dirty worn marble staircase came the sudden deafening blasts of a Glock 18 going off in a long magazine-emptying, full-auto burst. A faint flicker of muzzle flash accompanied the sudden jackhammering, the pulsing glow of it against the cracked stairwell plaster like firelight on the upper reaches of a cave wall.

  Think, Rafael thought as he quickly closed and bolted the door.

  Do not panic. You are intelligent. You have a plan. Do the plan.

  “Who is it? Cops?” said Emilio as Rafael came back into the count room.

  “You hear any bullhorns? It ain’t the cops!” said Rafael, opening the gun closet and reaching for the second shelf. His hands passed over the tube of a flashlight until he found what he was looking for.

  The night-vision goggles.

  He had all kinds of shit in there. Dried food, a portable propane generator, enough ammo to outlast Judgment Day.

  Now, apparently, it was here, he thought as he pulled the strap of the goggles over his head.

  “You want to play blindman’s bluff in my house?” he said as he clicked on the goggles and everything was suddenly illuminated with a pale-green light. He unclipped the Kalashnikov from the wall rack.

  “Then you got it, bro. Let’s do it. Come out, come out, wherever you are, you son of a bitch.”

  RAFAEL SENT PETE and Emilio up and over the roof to come down the west wing while he went down the east wing stairs.

  The wrapped-tight canvas AK strap cut hard into his forearm as he came silently down the quarter turns of the stairwell. He tried to remember the shooting techniques. Was he supposed to blur the target beyond the front sights? Or was that just for a pistol? Fricking impossible to remember all the training they’d had from the course two years ago. He checked the safety. It was on. He shook his head, clicking at the button.

  As he came across the final stair head of the first-floor landing, he caught the scent of gun smoke. A lot of it. The tangy, almost sweet smell, rank as a gun range. He tightened his grip on the gun as he came across the landing to the final turn, his back against the abandoned apartment doors, barrel trained down through the balustrades. There was no one through the posts. No one on the final stair flight, and then he was coming down, his AK sight center-massed on the open lobby doorway.

  The first thing he noticed when he peeked through it was that the heavy wrought-iron-and-glass front door of the building was ajar. A triangle of the outside sodium security light spread over the floor’s dirty mosaic tiles. Bits of snow swirling in the yellow beam, a faint layer of snow already gathering in the grout.

  “Rafael!” Pete suddenly called out across the lobby from the other stairwell.

  Rafael almost tripped over the bodies as he came through the west wing doorway.

  There were two of them. One of them lying flat in a pool of blood on the dirty tile, the other to the right, sitting up against the wall. The chests of their motorcycle shells were wet with blood, and the tinted face masks of their motorcycle helmets were smashed to shit, just riddled with bullet holes.

  “Ha-ha! That’s what you get, you fucking amateurs. That’s exactly what you get,” said Rafael as he hawked and spat on both of them. Whoever the hell they were.

  He glanced at Nate, also covered in blood, by the bottom of the stairs, the Glock 18 on the tile beside him.

  At least the jackass had done something right for once in his miserable life, Rafael thought.

  “Rafael! Do CPR! Nate’s dying! Come on, do something!” said Pete, who was kneeling at the bottom of the stairs beside Nate.

  “He’s still breathing, I think,” said Emilio, pressing his ear to Nate’s mouth as Rafael arrived.

  “And so are we!” said the prone motorcycle guy behind them as he sat straight up like a monster in a horror flick.

  Rafael, standing in profile to the suddenly risen figure, had just registered that the man had a suppressed automatic pistol in his hand when Pete’s bald head blew apart as if it had be
en dynamited. Pete’s instant death was followed quickly by ponytailed Emilio’s as the other reanimated dead body by the wall shot him with a suppressed pistol.

  Rafael screamed as he swung the rifle up and then abruptly stopped screaming as a third and final .45 ACP lead slug instantly carved a brand-new orifice through his temples.

  “Is it him? Is it him?” said the rider excitedly as the driver leaped up from the pool of fake blood behind his trusty suppressed Heckler & Koch mark 23.

  Instead of answering, the driver knelt and removed Rafael’s wallet, trying not to look at the hot mess that an ounce of lead makes when it’s sent traveling through a human head at the cruising speed of a 747.

  “It’s him,” said the driver, calmly pocketing the target’s driver’s license and checking his watch. “Our work is done here. Time to go.”

  THEY SCOOPED UP THEIR brass, left the BMW bike out on 141st, and went out at a quick, steady pace through the back of the building, taking a garbage alley that led out onto Riverside Drive.

  Three blocks south, parked alongside Riverside Park, was the preplaced getaway vehicle: a beat-up dingy white work van with the baffling and meaningless words THE BOWLES GROUP LLC poorly hand-painted on the door.

  Once inside the rear of the van, the driver finally pulled off his helmet. He was a fit-looking white guy in his late thirties with close-cropped blond hair and light-blue eyes that were striking in his otherwise easy-to-forget plain and pale face.

  He scrubbed the sweat from his hair with a towel and then put his pale-denim-colored eyes to his stainless steel Rolex. It seemed like it was last week that they were up on Amsterdam, but the assassination had taken eleven minutes from start to finish. Eleven!

  He looked over at the rider getting changed beside him. Then he reached around and cupped her perfect left breast. Her right one wasn’t so bad either, he felt. She turned and smiled at him, an improbably gorgeous woman in her early thirties, petite yet athletic, with white-blond hair and large greenish-brown doe eyes. His pet name for her ever since they met was Coppertone Girl.