The Games Read online

  The doctor broke into a run and left us there. Gaping at this news, I stared in at the lifeless form of Henri Dijon, who was sprawled on the bed at an unnatural angle, his skin now livid, almost purple, and blood trickling from his lips.

  I looked to Tavia and the nurse, who were also in shock.

  “Call da Silva,” I said. “And tell the nurse to shut that door.”

  Tavia put in the call while the nurse sealed off the room where Dijon lay.

  “Da Silva’s on his way,” Tavia said. “Says to talk to no one. Jesus, Jack, we could be infected. What do we do?”

  Feeling afraid and shaky for the first time, I said, “Strip, burn our clothes, and cover ourselves in Saran Wrap?”

  Chapter 9

  LUCAS CASTRO WAITED until he was blocks away from Maracanã Stadium before he removed the blond wig and fake mustache and dropped them in a trash can.

  They can’t ignore that, the doctor thought, looking back at the brilliantly lit stadium where Shakira was singing. Someone will pay attention now. The deaths of Jorge and his sister won’t be in vain. The death of—

  A firework rocket soared over the stadium and exploded in a series of thundering claps and flashes, then dwindled away to silver glints that rained down on the World Cup venue like a brilliant mist. The image was satisfying enough to turn Castro toward home.

  Dr. Castro had no doubt that he would hear how the crisis was handled. Once the body was examined, someone would come to him, and he’d be able to blame it on Igor Lima. No histrionics that might raise suspicions. Just a clear account of the truth.

  I warned Senhor Lima. But he was more interested in protecting the World Cup than the people of Rio.

  Dr. Desales would back him up. No doubt. And when it came to it, Pinto, the hospital administrator, would do the same, if only to save his own ass.

  When Dr. Castro reached home, he was pleasantly tired, and he poured himself a glass of wine, proud of himself. He hadn’t stood back. He’d fought for something, sacrificed for it, even spent four thousand dollars for a scalped ticket to the game.

  The doctor had watched Henri Dijon through binoculars for the entire match, or at least whenever he was visible. After seeing those same two from Private catch the FIFA spokesman and lead him away, he knew it was only a matter of time before a call went out for a doctor, a call that he would answer.

  Encountering Morgan and Reynaldo again, he’d had a moment of panic that they would recognize him from the night before. But his disguise and the urgency of the situation had been enough to keep all attention on the dying man.

  Dijon had conveniently expired before Castro had time to make even a mock examination. Then it was simply a matter of suggesting Ebola was the culprit and acting the scared, unethical plastic surgeon out to save his own hide.

  By now the entire stadium must be under lockdown, the doctor thought as he poured himself a second glass of wine and turned on the television, expecting the late local coverage that Sunday night to be all about the virus outbreak.

  But there was nothing. Just stories about the game and how smoothly it had all gone. Not even a protest had marred the event. FIFA and the government were declaring the tournament and the final a classic, one for the ages. Never once was Henri Dijon mentioned. And watching a live stand-up inside Maracanã, he could see that the stadium was empty.

  Castro couldn’t believe it.

  They’re burying Dijon’s death, he thought with growing bitterness. Even the death of someone like Dijon wasn’t enough to shatter the facade. They were burying the story for FIFA’s and Rio’s image, just like they’d buried the two poor kids.

  The doctor sat there for hours staring at the screen, telling himself that at some point, word of Dijon’s death and its manner would get out. But by dawn, watching the early newscasts, he wasn’t even trying to believe it anymore.

  Dijon’s death will be attributed to a heart attack or something. The virus will never be mentioned. I’ll never be contacted. And more will die until…

  No, that’s not happening, Castro decided, feeling angrier and more obsessed than ever. There has to be payback. That is all there is to it.

  He owed those dead kids payback. He owed all the poor of Rio payback as well. And Sophie? He owed her most of all.

  Castro went to his refrigerator and pulled out a vial. He held it up to the morning light and swore he could see the ghosts of Sophie, the children, and even Dijon swirling in the rest of the contaminated blood.

  Every single ghost was howling at him to go on.

  Twenty-Four Months and Two Weeks Later

  PART TWO

  A Tale of Two Cities

  Chapter 10

  Thursday, July 28, 2016

  ONE WEEK AND one day before the opening ceremony of the 2016 Summer Olympic Games, Rio was almost ready to show the world how to party.

  Construction went on around the clock as workers finished up the Olympic venues spread across the city. Corporate hospitality tents had gone up on the beaches and in the parks. The new subway line to the Olympic Park in Barra da Tijuca had opened the week before, to much fanfare.

  In Ipanema and Copacabana, hotels were fully booked for the upcoming sixteen-day event, and the few apartments available were going for twenty-five thousand dollars U.S. a week. The first of several massive cruise liners had already sailed into Rio’s harbor to provide overflow sleeping space for the five million people expected to come to the Marvelous City for the games.

  Newspapers wrote about nothing but the Olympics. It was the only topic on the radio, the only thing you saw on television. Even in squalid places like Alemão, the so-called German favela of northwest Rio, there was an energy in the air; anticipation, yes, but something more that Rayssa couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  Standing behind a four-foot masonry wall high up one of the six steep hills of the Alemão slum, Rayssa was pissed that she couldn’t name that energy.

  What was it? And what was everybody in Rio anticipating anyway? Didn’t they know the whole thing was rigged from the get-go? Completely and totally rigged? No, they don’t. Fools. So we have to show them, educate them.

  It’s the only way anything will change here.

  As these thoughts weaved through her head, Rayssa rested her elbows on top of the wall and looked through a pair of high-dollar Zeiss binoculars. It was late on a Brazilian winter day, the sun already behind the towering mountains to the west, and the shadows lengthened with every moment. But from her position, Rayssa still had a sweeping, panoramic view of the favela, all six hills, all six aerial gondola stations, many of the alleys, many of the broader pathways, a few of the little markets and stores, the ditches that funneled raw sewage downhill, the roof of the police station on the far, far hill, and the new school the government liked to tout.

  To anyone who’d not grown up in a favela, this was a hellish existence, devoid of culture or enriching experience. But Rayssa loved the favelas, their vibrancy, their music, their art, the close-knit fabric of life. Favelas didn’t just exist. They pulsed, and Rayssa loved each throb and each cry.

  She moved the binoculars, paused, and held them on a group of church volunteers standing on what passed for a playground at the school, distributing clothes and food. She studied the line of slum dwellers awaiting their handouts as well as the knot of young, foreign do-gooders doling out the contributions. Two girls, roughly nineteen, pretty, fair-skinned Caucasians, stood out. She watched them for a long time, seeing how tense and uncomfortable they were. Then Rayssa panned beyond the girls to two beefy guys watching over the whole scene.

  Rayssa studied them for fifteen or twenty seconds before lifting her eyes from the binoculars and looking up at the sky. It was already dusk. Within minutes it would deepen into the time when jaguars hunted.

  A fourteen-year-old boy came padding up to her. “They’re ready.”

  “Get ready to disappear, Alou,” she said.

  “Like smoke in the wind. The binoculars good?”


  “The best,” she said. “Good steal.”

  Alou grinned. “Lightest fingers in the city.”

  Rayssa picked up a cell phone, sent a group text: Set.

  She brought up the binoculars again. Lights were starting to blink on in shacks all around the slum. She peered toward the police station just over a mile away, scanned the paths and alleys below it. No men in SWAT gear. Just the good people of the favela going home after a day of backbreaking work.

  Rayssa lowered the binoculars. She looked at the school with her naked eye now, gauging the deepening gloom. You didn’t want to go too early because the element of chaos and surprise would be reduced. You didn’t want to go too late because the chaos and surprise might be too much and it would all be for—

  She snatched up the phone, texted Now.

  Rayssa had just enough time to grab the binoculars before two rifle shots barked and echoed over the slum. Two bullets hit the beefy guys watching over the church group, one in each man’s head, dropping them in their tracks a split second before a thudding explosion lit up a street two miles away.

  Every light in the favela died.

  “Go, Alou!” Rayssa whispered, and she heard the boy leap up and run.

  Under cover of night, Rayssa stood there a moment, hearing shouting and yelling far below her near the school, none of the words clear or distinguishable from that distance, just panicked voices all melding together and sounding to her like the throaty, hissing-whip roars of one very pissed-off jaguar.

  Chapter 11

  DARKNESS WAS STARTING to fall over Botafogo Harbor, ending the splendor we’d been watching from the spectacular table that recently promoted General Mateus da Silva had gotten us at Porcão, a restaurant that boasted dramatic views of the harbor and Sugarloaf Mountain.

  Porcão offered Brazilian churrasco, with guys walking around carrying big skewers of freshly braised meat that they sliced off for you at your table. Tavia and I had eaten and drunk enough that we waved off a chance for more excellent rib eye, and I held my hand over my glass when da Silva attempted to fill it again.

  “You don’t think there’s even a chance of a terrorist act at this Olympics?” I asked incredulously.

  The general looked annoyed, poured more wine for Tavia, and said, “It’s not something I stay awake thinking about, my friend, and I’ll tell you why.”

  I sat back, tried not to cross my arms, said, “I’m listening.”

  “Do you think a foreign terrorist could mount some kind of action in Rio without help from the locals?” da Silva asked.

  “I’m not following you,” Tavia said.

  “Black September attacked at the Munich Olympics,” da Silva replied. “They were all Palestinians, but they had help, people in Germany who believed in their cause. But in Brazil, you will not find people to help foreign terrorists, just as you will not find homegrown terrorists here.”

  “And why’s that?” I asked.

  Acting as if it should have been obvious, the general said, “Brazilians and, especially, Cariocas do not have the right mind-set for terrorism. They’re too happy with their lives. Let’s say you are some crazy Middle Eastern terrorist and you come to Brazil and you say to your neighbor, ‘Hey, Senhor Carioca, let’s build a bomb to change the world.’ You know what Senhor Carioca is going to say?”

  I raised my eyebrows. Tavia smiled as if she knew the answer.

  The general continued, “He says, ‘No, you go on, Mr. Crazy Terrorist. I am heading to the beach. Cold beers, soccer balls, the ocean, many fine women in bikinis with big round bundas for me to look at and many muscular men with six-pack abs for the women to look at. This is all we want in life. This is all any Brazilian wants in life. Not terror, Mr. Crazy Man. Not bombs.’”

  I glanced at Tavia, who was highly amused.

  “You agree with this argument?” I asked.

  “For the most part,” she said, chuckling.

  “But what about Henri Dijon?” I asked.

  General da Silva groaned. “Not again, Jack. That was no attack. No evidence of intentional harm was found.”

  “Because the autopsy was not exactly thorough.”

  “You blame the doctors for not wanting to risk their lives if there were no other incidents of infection?”

  “Can I speak freely?”

  “I’ve never known you not to.”

  “You guys wanted the way Dijon died to be hushed up.”

  Da Silva went stone-faced, said, “We wanted to avoid a panic if it was unnecessary, and history has proven us right. Dijon and those two children were the only ones who contracted that virus. You and Tavia didn’t get it, did you? The nurse didn’t get it, did she? If the mysterious plastic surgeon had gotten it, we would have heard, but we didn’t, did we? In fact, there were absolutely no new cases after Dijon, isn’t that so?”

  “Correct,” I said.

  “There you go. End of story.”

  Tavia said, “But General, you have to admit it’s strange that two kids from a favela and one visiting dignitary were the only victims.”

  “Why strange? Who knows where Dijon had been in the prior few days? And again, it doesn’t matter. No new cases in more than two years now.”

  Tavia’s cell rang. She looked at it, said, “The office.”

  She got up from the table, answered, and walked away.

  I said, “I still think you’d be smart to beef up the number of hazmat teams at the venues.”

  The general thought about that, shrugged, and said, “My budget is stretched thin as it is, thanks in part to Private’s exorbitant fees, but I’ll see.”

  I had no time to respond to the not-so-subtle charge of price gouging because Tavia came back, highly agitated. “Sorry to dine and dash, General, but we have a problem with another client.”

  Da Silva looked mightily displeased. “I didn’t know Private had another client in Brazil during the Olympics.”

  “During the games, we don’t,” Tavia said. “These clients are supposed to leave next Wednesday night, before they start.”

  I blinked, felt hollow in my stomach. “The twins?”

  She nodded grimly. “They’ve gone missing, Jack. And Alvarez and Questa are dead.”

  Chapter 12

  FIVE MINUTES LATER, Tavia and I were in a cab speeding through tunnels and over bridges and down highways toward northwest Rio and the Alemão favela, one of the biggest slums in the city.

  “This wasn’t how I’d hoped the evening would go,” Tavia said wistfully.

  “I had other plans too,” I said, and squeezed her hand.

  “You want me to make the call to Alvarez’s and Questa’s wives?”

  “I’ll do it,” I said. “But let’s get the facts straight first.”

  She nodded. “I think you did the right thing.”

  “Not telling da Silva all of it? I don’t know. I may live to regret it.”

  When the general had asked about our clients, I’d told him that the nineteen-year-old Warren twins, Alicia and Natalie, were from Ohio and that their father was an old college friend of mine who’d asked me to look after them while they were in Rio on a church mission. Most of that story was fabricated, and it had to be. Our contract stated that we could not reveal their true identities unless the family gave us permission to do so.

  Still, I didn’t like misleading General da Silva. He’d been a big supporter of Private’s involvement in security for the Olympic Games and for the World Cup before them, and I did not want to alienate him in any way. If I got permission from the parents to tell him, I would. Until then, I wouldn’t.

  To keep my mind off that dilemma, I said, “Tell me about the favela where they were taken.”

  “Alemão’s one of the biggest and oldest favelas in Rio,” she said. “Close to four hundred thousand people live there on six steep hills spread out over, I don’t know, eight square miles?”

  “Pacified?”

  “About as well as Rocinha. There’s st
ill a constant battle to keep it clean.”

  “How bad was it back in the day?”

  Tavia raised her eyebrows, pursed her lips, said, “In the 1980s and 1990s, Alemão may have been worse than Rocinha, an outlaw city inside the city. No police would go there. The drug traffickers developed their own justice system and social codes. Rape, burglary, murder, and disloyalty to the gang were forbidden. The punishment was almost always death.”

  “But the BOPE changed that?”

  She nodded. “The German favela was one of the first they tried to pacify. The BOPE made an announcement that they were coming to drive out the narcos. The traffickers were waiting, armed to the teeth. When a police helicopter flew over the slum to call out movement to the BOPE ground forces, someone fired a bazooka and blew the helicopter out of the sky.”

  “Is that right?” I said, shocked. Despite what Hollywood might lead you to believe, back in L.A., you just didn’t hear about bazookas firing on police choppers.

  “The bazooka was the last straw,” Tavia said. “They brought in da Silva as commander the next day, and he was ruthless. Fifteen or twenty gangsters were killed in less than eight hours. The others escaped into the jungle, and even now they keep trying to come—”

  I saw what had stopped her. Up ahead, in what had been blackness, lights were coming back on, flickering and then strengthening and spreading across hill after hill.

  “That’s Alemão,” Octavia said as the taxi slowed down and stopped a short distance from several police cars blocking the road, their blue lights flashing.

  We climbed out, paid the driver, and moved toward the officers in the squad cars. Octavia did the talking, showing her Private badge and gesturing to me. They didn’t seem too impressed until she told them that the two dead men had worked for us, and we worked for General da Silva.