The Games Read online

  But not for the poor, Castro thought angrily. The poor, as usual, had gotten shafted. Thrown out of their homes to make way for the stadiums, doomed to substandard health care, poor sanitation, and inferior educations.

  Or destroyed, like that favela family today. Or like Castro two years ago.

  He shook his head. He wouldn’t go there. He wouldn’t allow those memories to cripple him. Not tonight.

  Instead, he watched the FIFA spokesman prattle on, ignoring the misery created by the sporting event and speaking only of the joy. Castro couldn’t ignore the pain or the misery. He couldn’t have if he’d tried because he had suffered as much as anyone and more than most.

  As a result, Dr. Castro hated all of them, everyone who had anything to do with the World Cup. In his mind, the suffering was entirely their fault. And now, probably starting in that favela where Maria and little Jorge had lived, there would be even more pain because of a stupid soccer game.

  There has to be some kind of response, Castro decided as the bartender put down the new shot glass full of rum. There has to be some kind of balance restored, some kind of penalty, something to…

  A thought came winging out of the blind rage he’d worked himself into. The doctor dismissed it out of hand at first and picked up the shot glass.

  Then he thought about it some more, and again.

  Dr. Castro put the glass down, understanding that restoring balance would mean crossing a line, after which there was no coming back. Ever.

  I don’t care, he thought. This isn’t vengeance. It’s the right thing to do.

  Castro sat there a moment, swelling with justness, purpose, and resolve. Then he pushed the shot glass aside, paid his tab, and went over to the trash can, feeling stone-cold sober.

  Chapter 7

  BY SIX THIRTY that evening, Avenida Atlântica was jammed with partying Argentines. The police had shut down the lane closest to the beach to take care of what had become a dangerous situation: the drunken revelers wandering off the famous black-and-white-mosaic sidewalks directly into traffic.

  With traffic moving in only one direction, taxis and cars were slow bringing guests to the Copacabana Palace. Though more celebrities stayed at the Hotel Fasano in Ipanema these days, the Palace remained the place to throw a high-society bash.

  As he walked along the sidewalk toward the main entrance, Dr. Castro was thinking that the Palace was also FIFA’s hotel. It only made sense that the final big party of the tournament would be held here.

  Castro was wearing his best suit, navy blue, tropical wool, with a lightly starched white dress shirt and a red tie with soccer balls on it. He saw security men eyeing him as he approached. He lifted his hand to scratch his beard then remembered he’d shaved it off and put his hand in his coat pocket instead.

  A couple climbed out of a cab just ahead of him. Both wore FIFA credentials on lanyards around their necks. The woman carried an invitation.

  For a moment, the doctor hesitated.

  Did he need FIFA credentials to get inside? Would he be turned away?

  Castro forced an easy smile and held up his invitation.

  Security waved him up the stairs.

  A doorman opened one of the double doors. Castro stepped into a crush of well-dressed partygoers, his left hand still holding the invitation. His right hand protected his front pants pocket and all that it contained.

  Slipping to the outside of the knot of people, Dr. Castro saw a table where guests were checking in. He also noticed a second security team: a big, beautiful Brazilian woman to the left of the grand staircase, and a tall, muscular blond-haired guy on the right. Both wore radio earpieces. Both were attentive and scanning the crowd.

  It took four or five minutes for the doctor to reach the table. He held up the invitation to a grinning woman wearing FIFA credentials, said, “Manuel Pinto.”

  She turned a few pages on her list, found Pinto’s name, and ran a pink line through it. Then she handed him a small ID badge that he clipped to his breast pocket. He smiled, thanked her, and walked around the table.

  Joining others moving toward the staircase, Dr. Castro kept that easy smile going, trying to look as if he were about to meet an old friend. He turned his head slowly toward his left shoulder and then toward his right as he got close to the second security team. The doctor was using body language; by exposing his neck to the Brazilian woman and then the blond man, he was saying, I am not a threat. Not a threat to anyone at all.

  It seemed to work, as neither of them paid him much attention. He stole glances at the badges they wore: REYNALDO, PRIVATE. MORGAN, PRIVATE.

  Dr. Castro stiffened as he went by them.

  Private.

  He vaguely knew of the company and its reputation.

  What were they doing here?

  Where the staircase split, the doctor went right, climbing to the mezzanine and wondering whether having Private around made going through with his plan too risky. Maybe he should just have a drink and slip out. But then he flashed on images of bulldozers and rubble and a torn, bloody lab coat and those kids dying today, and the anger came back, along with his purpose and resolve.

  Dr. Castro turned left on the mezzanine and moved with the crowd past walls covered with photographs of notable guests of the Palace, almost all of them Hollywood actors, European royalty, music greats, or the superrich and powerful. He found it all of only mild interest, although he did note that novelist Anne Rice’s picture was above and in a much more prominent position than Brigitte Bardot’s.

  The doctor entered a ballroom set up for a banquet and continued along with the throng out onto a terrace that overlooked Avenida Atlântica, the beach, and the ocean. Night had fallen.

  Across the street, under spotlights, men were playing beach volleyball. There were drums beating and whistles blowing somewhere, and Argentine and German fans were crushed in around the open-air bars and kiosks along the waterfront.

  The crowd on the terrace was much more well-heeled. Dr. Castro guessed dignitaries, FIFA officials, local politicians, and a smattering of tycoons.

  Everyone who had benefited, he thought bitterly.

  The majority of people he’d come in with were already pressing on toward the bars on either side of the terrace. The doctor figured he’d had enough for one night but thought he’d look out of place without a drink in his hand. He waited patiently and ordered club soda with lime on the rocks.

  When Dr. Castro turned away from the bar, he glanced through the crowd and was startled to see Igor Lima six people away and to his left. The mayor’s aide was drinking champagne, talking to a blonde six inches taller than him, and looking very self-satisfied. For a long moment the doctor got so enraged he considered making Lima the direct object of his wrath.

  But he restrained himself. Too obvious. And Lima might recognize him, and that would do Castro no good in the long run.

  It had to be a more fitting choice, the doctor thought. A statement. A…

  The party dynamics shifted, some guests leaving the terrace to check on their seating for dinner. The exodus opened up space in the celebration and revealed new faces, including another one that Dr. Castro recognized.

  He felt the rightness of that choice begin to vibrate everywhere in and around him. His skin tingled. It made him shiver.

  Breathe, he told himself. Breathe, and then calmly, coldly, finish this.

  Castro shifted his drink to his left hand, reached into his pants pocket, found the long thin cylinder, and grasped the length of the slender barrel. With his thumbnail, he flicked off the cap.

  “Please, if you will all come inside, dinner is about to be served,” a woman called, prompting the crowd, including his target, to surge toward the banquet hall.

  Castro forced that easy smile onto his face and lifted his drink before him, which got people to move out of his way. He angled and slipped and sped up until he was right behind Henri Dijon.

  Quick as a whip, he drew his weapon, held it tight to his body
, and then…

  “Ahh!” Dijon yelled.

  The FIFA spokesman spun around, slapping at his butt cheek and looking everywhere. His shoulder collided with a young waitress carrying a tray loaded with cocktails. He knocked her off her feet. The drinks and the tray crashed to the stone terrace, sending booze and shards of glass flying.

  During the same three or four seconds, Castro kept moving and pocketed his weapon. Far enough away now, he blended in with the other guests as they all turned to check out the carnage. Dijon looked mortified as he helped the waitress back to her feet, saying, “I’m so, so sorry. I got stung by something, and I…”

  The doctor drifted off. He didn’t want to seem too interested. Besides, the job was done.

  As he moved through the banquet hall, he monitored his reaction. He had crossed the line, and yet he felt no remorse and no guilt. None whatsoever.

  That’s easier, he thought. Better.

  Dr. Castro left the banquet room, walking with a slight hitch in his stride so he wouldn’t accidentally jab himself with his weapon. He found a men’s restroom. He took a stall, put his drink down, felt wobbly, and leaned against the wall with his eyes closed for several long beats.

  Then Castro gingerly went into his pocket and drew out the syringe. He studied it, feeling more than satisfied. When the doctor had gone out onto the terrace, there had been five ccs of little Jorge’s blood in the cylinder. And now?

  Now there were only three.

  Chapter 8

  Sunday, July 13, 2014

  6:45 p.m.

  I PLAYED DIVISION 1 football. I know what it’s like to be an athlete surrounded by a raucous crowd on a big game day, how you feed off it, how the fans feed off your play.

  I have also been lucky enough to be in the stands for four World Series games, three NBA Finals, two Super Bowls, a Stanley Cup contest, and the men’s hundred-meter track final at the London Olympics.

  But I will tell you flat-out that I have never felt anything close to the extraordinary energy inside Maracanã Stadium after ninety minutes of nail-biting regulation play and fifteen minutes of dramatic overtime left Germany and Argentina locked zero to zero in the winner-take-all game for the soccer championship of the world.

  Going to their respective benches for water and coaching before the second overtime period began, the players looked like they’d been through a war. The fans in the stadium looked like they’d witnessed a war and were holding on to one another for strength.

  I got it. Like them, I’d seen twenty-two men playing beyond their hearts for one hundred and five minutes, striving for supremacy under incomprehensible pressure, while all around the globe, literally billions of fans were living and dying on their every fevered move.

  This is different, I thought as I climbed up the stands and scanned the crowd. This is a whole other dimension of sport.

  Don’t get me wrong. I love baseball, football, basketball, and hockey, but you can’t tell me those games yield true world champions the way soccer does. More people play soccer than the four of those sports put together, and the World Cup pits all nations against all nations, with almost every country on earth competing during the four years of qualifying that lead to the final tournament.

  As the players returned to the field, the emotion in the crowd of seventy-five thousand rabid fans was off-the-charts electric. I had trouble staying on task when the referee blew his whistle and Maracanã Stadium morphed again into a madhouse crackling with hope and pulsing with fear.

  When the ball went out-of-bounds and the din died down a little, I triggered my lapel mike, said, “Tavia?”

  “Right here,” she said from the opposite side of the stadium.

  “Tell everyone that this is not over yet, and we stay sharp until the very last person leaves this place.”

  I heard her speaking Portuguese and then the crowd roared, drowning her out and sucking me right back into the game at the hundred and twelfth minute.

  In a full sprint, Germany’s André Schürrle drove the ball down the left side of the pitch with Argentine defenders in hot pursuit. Schürrle dribbled toward the corner and just as he was about to be double-teamed, he struck the ball with his left foot.

  The rising ball flew beautifully between both Argentine defenders and past a third before dropping to the chest of Germany’s Mario Götze, a substitute player sprinting toward goal. The ball bounced off Götze’s chest. Before it could hit the ground, he let loose with a nifty feat of kung fu, booting the ball out of the air and into the net.

  The place went insane with a roar that hurt my ears. The Germans were deliriously singing “Deutschland über Alles” while the Argentines screamed in disbelief, ripped at their hair, and cried as if a wedding had just turned into a funeral.

  I’d never seen anything like it.

  More than seven minutes remained in the overtime, but I began to move laterally through the stadium toward a blue stage erected in the stands high above midfield. This was where the trophies would be awarded. I figured that if there was going to be a security issue, it would happen when the politicians and lords of FIFA emerged from their bulletproof hospitality suites and exposed themselves to the players, the fans, and the world.

  Only four minutes remained on the clock by the time I got to the area. Already a large company of burly Brazilian policemen in matching blue suits, ties, and white gloves were moving to positions on either side of the aisle of steps the players would climb to reach the stage. Colonel da Silva was coming down the stairs on the opposite side, inspecting the security line.

  On the stage itself, on a long table draped in white, the trophies were being assembled and positioned. Behind the table, overseeing the arrangements, was a man I knew slightly, an acquaintance, really. Henri Dijon was French and the primary spokesman for FIFA.

  In every encounter I’d had with Dijon, he’d been unflappable, well spoken, and impeccably dressed. He was also a health nut and ordinarily appeared tanned and fit. But in those last minutes of the World Cup final, Dijon looked pale and weak as he patted his sweaty brow. And his clothes seemed, for him, anyway, disheveled.

  The crowd roared. I spun around, saw Argentina’s superstar Lionel Messi lining up for a free kick about thirty-five yards from the goal with less than two minutes on the clock. If Argentina had a chance, this was it.

  Instead of raising the decibel level, all the Argentines had gone silent and apprehensive. Then Messi booted the ball over the top of the goal, and a great wave of groaning broke over the stadium.

  When the referee blew the whistle a short while later, ending the game, the Argentines were wretched and the Germans dancing. Down on the field, it was the same, the world champions celebrating and the almost champions grieving and despondent at what might have been.

  “Jack, da Silva says the VIPs are ready to move,” I heard Tavia say in my earpiece. “Chancellor Merkel will come last with her own security contingent.”

  “Roger that,” I said, turning away from the field.

  My intent was to climb high above the stage before any of the VIPs started down. But I’d taken no more than two steps when I saw Henri Dijon come toward me as if he were drunk and forced to walk a high wire.

  The man was drenched with sweat and trembling. He lurched and stumbled, and I caught him before he could face-plant on the concrete.

  “Henri?” I said.

  “Doctor,” he said thickly. His eyes were unfocused and bloodshot.

  “We’ll get you a medic,” I said.

  “No,” Dijon gasped. “Not here. I don’t want to ruin the ceremony.”

  Tavia had seen Dijon falter and came across the stage in time to hear him. She said, “Let’s get him to the clinic.”

  We held him under his arms and supported and lifted him up the twenty or so stairs. Having the wall of guards on either side made it easier for us and less humiliating for the FIFA spokesman.

  “Oh God,” Dijon moaned. “Something’s wrong. Terribly wrong.”
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br />   Tavia put her hand on his brow after we’d gotten him out of the stands and into the deserted halls of the stadium.

  “He’s burning up,” she said, and we dragged him to the clinic.

  The nurse on duty got him on a bed and tried to check his vital signs. But Dijon went into some kind of seizure; his whole system seemed to go haywire, his body arching grotesquely with violent spasms.

  “Call for a doctor,” the nurse cried as she tried to hold Dijon down. “There has to be one in the stands. I can’t handle something like this, and I don’t think he’d survive an ambulance ride.”

  Tavia radioed Colonel da Silva, who relayed the message. A moment later, over the loudspeaker, a man’s calm voice asked for any physicians in the stadium to go to the clinic, where there was a medical emergency.

  In two minutes, a shaggy-haired blond man with a mustache came running up to the clinic. “I’m a doctor. What have you got?”

  The nurse started firing off the patient’s vital signs as the doctor grabbed sterile gloves and a mask and went to Dijon’s side. The man’s spasms had slowed to tremors. The doctor set to work and the nurse drew the curtain.

  In the hall outside the tiny clinic, Tavia, shaken, said, “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  “I saw some rough stuff in Afghanistan, but that was right up—”

  The doctor tore back the curtain and hustled toward the door with the nurse crying after him, “Are you sure?”

  “Sure enough to be getting out of that room,” he yelled. “You should too.”

  “What’s happening?” Tavia demanded as he rushed out.

  “He’s dead,” the doctor said, hurrying by us.

  “Where are you going?” the nurse cried.

  “I’m a plastic surgeon, no expert on infectious diseases, but that looks like Ebola to me,” he shouted over his shoulder. “And because I am no expert, I am getting the hell out of here before this entire stadium is put under quarantine!”