The Games Read online

  About halfway through the evening, I realized that I wasn’t just smitten with her. She’d turned into a good friend, the kind of person I could and did confide in.

  Someone very wise once told me that if you want love in your life, you have to go looking for it. So I broke my vow, and over a bottle of Malbec I’d let it slip that I loved working with her and, well, just being with her.

  Tavia had cocked her head. “What are you saying, Jack?”

  “I’m saying it’s wrong for all sorts of reasons, but I can’t tell you how much I’ve grown to hate being apart from you.”

  Tavia hesitated for several beats, but her moistening eyes never looked away from mine before she said, “Then don’t be apart from me ever again.”

  Now, standing in her shower, I looked at Tavia washing herself and felt happy and whole, ready to face any challenge. I could do anything my heart desired with this woman by my side.

  Tavia rinsed off, looked at me, and smiled. “That’s quite the grin.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes. What were you thinking about?”

  “True love,” I said, and kissed her.

  Chapter 16

  WE WALKED UP to the Alemão favela, rather than taking the gondola, shortly after dawn. The slum was wide awake and throbbing with life. Dads and moms heading off to work. Moms and dads cleaning clothes in buckets or lounging in their doorways to smoke and watch their children dart with the chickens along the haphazard paths.

  After the surreal experience of seeing the slum from the sky at night, I was engulfed by it in the daylight. Yes, there was squalor, but the people seemed to make the most of their lives, and so many were smiling and genuinely happy that I kept having to remind myself that it was a dangerous place, the kind of place that could swallow two missing girls.

  Everyone we stopped to speak with asked suspiciously if we were cops. Tavia explained again and again that we had been hired by the parents to look for their girls. We got people to look at photographs of the twins. No one recognized them in that part of the slum, more than a mile west of the school yard where my men had been murdered and the twins taken.

  “Police are not liked here,” I said after the eighth or ninth person questioned our roles.

  Tavia said, “People of the favelas know that police corruption is rampant because the cops are paid so little. It’s very dangerous to be a cop in Rio. They die. Often. So the relationship between the police and the favela fluctuates between mutual admiration, suspicion, and outright war. One of the reasons I left to join Private.”

  “Glad you did,” I said.

  “Me too,” she said, and she smiled in a pleased and playful way.

  We kept moving through the slum toward the kidnap site, talking to people, showing pictures. And getting nothing.

  There had to be a better way to do this, I thought.

  “So they don’t trust the cops,” I said. “Who do they trust? Who hears things? The priests?”

  “Maybe priests, but I don’t know how we’d find…wait.”

  “What?”

  “I know someone who might know something. Not a priest. An old acquaintance of mine here in Alemão. Why didn’t I think of her before?”

  Twenty minutes later we entered a small crowded public medical clinic on the eastern edge of the slum. Tavia went to the window, identified herself, and asked to see Mariana.

  The receptionist disappeared but quickly came back to open the door and lead us in. The hallway was crowded with supplies, and we had to squeeze past seriously ill people lying on gurneys.

  “Wish I had a surgical mask,” I said as we rounded a corner and almost ran into a woman standing there.

  “Good thinking,” the woman said, handing me one. A kind, grandmotherly type in her sixties, she wore her gray hair in a braid and had an earth-mother style to her clothes.

  “Mariana Lopes,” Tavia said, throwing her arms around the woman, who hugged her back. “Long time.”

  Tavia introduced me and said Lopes was something of a saint around the favelas, which caused the woman to blush and wave her off. Later I would learn that in addition to the medical clinic, Lopes ran an orphanage and an after-school program for favela kids, all on a shoestring budget.

  “She’s around a lot of people,” Tavia explained. “She listens to street kids, who often see things adults don’t see, or don’t want to see.”

  “If you say so, dear,” Lopes said. “How can I help you?”

  Tavia explained what had happened the night before, the shooting and the kidnapping of two American church volunteers.

  “I’d heard a rumor of gunshots up there,” she said. “But nothing concrete. It takes a few days before things like that trickle down to me.”

  A nurse came up to talk to Lopes, who listened and frowned. She held up a finger, said, “I’m sorry. Crisis of the hour. Listen, Tavia, you know who might know something more recent?”

  “Who?” Tavia said.

  “The Bear,” she said. “Remember him?”

  Chapter 17

  TAVIA DID REMEMBER the Bear, and she was surprised to hear he was still alive.

  “He doesn’t live in Alemão anymore, does he?” Tavia asked.

  “No, L’Esprit, Spirit,” Mariana Lopes said. “But they’re not far apart, you know?”

  Tavia got directions and we started off again, skirting the German slum to where train tracks separated it from another smaller but no less decrepit favela.

  We climbed through the maze up the steep side of the Spirit slum, where teens hung from doorways and men stood at bars the size of closets and televisions blared with the latest soccer highlights. There was music playing everywhere, and it seemed to throb louder as we climbed higher, almost to the top, where the favela met the jungle, bamboo and vine thickets not yet hacked away by someone eager for a newer home.

  Drenched with sweat, I looked over my shoulder and was stunned by the view. There was Christ the Redeemer against a crystalline-blue sky, and I could see across the lower basins of Rio all the way to the beaches and the ocean, which looked impossibly aquamarine in the distance.

  “Rio’s the only city in the world where the poor get the best views,” I said.

  “True,” Tavia said. “But even that is changing.”

  “People buying up the bottoms of the slums and putting up high-rises?”

  “Happens almost every day. So the poor who can’t afford the high-rise will just go higher and higher up the mountain, and then down the other—”

  Tavia stopped, said, “There’s Urso, the Bear.”

  Urso reminded me of gangster chieftains I’d encountered in L.A. over the years. Big dude. Late twenties. Buff. Heavily tattooed. Cannon-barrel arms. A keg for a chest. Two jackhammers for legs. And bristly jet-black hair that matched the color of his wraparound shades.

  At the moment I saw him, however, the Bear’s street cred seemed compromised by the fact that he was holding a baby in one arm while handing a woman a wad of cash. She got emotional and bowed her head in thanks.

  Urso kissed the baby on the cheek and gave him back to his grateful mother, who bowed again and trotted off past four other gangstas leaning up against a concrete retaining wall just below the edge of the jungle.

  As the woman walked away, the Bear smiled, revealing gold caps, two on his upper incisors and two on his lower canines. The grin and the gold caps disappeared when Urso spotted Tavia walking toward him.

  “Oi, Urso,” Tavia said.

  He tugged down his glasses to look at her, said in English, “Octavia Reynaldo. Where you been, girl?”

  The other gangsters began to leer openly at Tavia, who flipped them the bird, said, “Got a new job. Hadn’t you heard?”

  “Can’t say I did,” Urso said. “Who’s the surfer boy?”

  “My boss,” she said. “Jack Morgan, the head of Private. From L.A.”

  Surfer boy aside, the fact that I was from Los Angeles seemed to impress the Bear because he broke into t
hat gold and stained-enamel smile and reached out a giant tattooed fist to bump mine.

  “Where’s your crib for real, man?” he asked.

  “Pacific Palisades, you know it?”

  “Up toward Malibu.”

  “You’ve been to L.A.?”

  “Lived there four years,” Urso said. “South Central–Compton line.”

  “Rough place.”

  “No, man, this is rough. South Central’s paradise compared to Spirit.”

  “Why didn’t you stay in L.A.?”

  The Bear shrugged. “Shit happens. Even in paradise.”

  “You hear about the shooting and the riot at that food giveaway in Alemão?” Tavia asked.

  “I’m not supposed to set foot in Alemão,” Urso said. “Ever.”

  “But you’ve still got friends inside, right?”

  The Bear gestured at the other four watching us. “My friends are all right here. Backs against the jungle, just holding our own. Know what I’m saying?”

  “Did you or your friends hear anything about the shooting?”

  Urso hesitated and then spoke to the men in Portuguese. The four gangsters shook their heads.

  “They don’t know nothing. I don’t know nothing.”

  “I can’t believe the Bear wouldn’t hear about a shooting on his old turf,” Tavia said.

  Urso acted insulted, said, “If you’re not a cop anymore, Reynaldo, why you so interested?”

  “The guys who died worked for us,” Tavia said. “They had families.”

  “That right? Now, why would Private bodyguards be in a favela?” he asked her.

  “There’d been threats to a church group. My men were volunteers.”

  “See there?” the Bear said, looking to me. “Do-gooders getting killed. Always happens. It’s why I try never to do that much good.”

  He translated, and his buddies broke up laughing and fist-bumped.

  I said, “Two American girls went missing after the shooting. Twins.”

  “That right?” He seemed surprised. “Hadn’t heard that.”

  Tavia showed Urso a picture of Natalie and Alicia. The Bear whistled and held the photo out for his friends to see. They reacted with similar admiration.

  Urso said, “We’d remember those two lindíssimas. You don’t see too many gorgeous americanas in Alemão or Spirit.”

  “Will you ask around for us? There’d be real money in it if you came up with something strong,” Tavia said.

  “Yeah? How much?”

  “You put us onto them, I’ll give you fifty thousand reais.”

  Urso snorted. “Make it worth my time. Make it dollars and I’m yours.”

  Tavia glanced at me, and I nodded.

  “All right, L.A.,” Urso said with that gold-capped grin, and he bumped my knuckles again. “Bear’s on it, and I’ll find you those girls, ’cept I need an advance for me and the boys to go to work.”

  “Give him five,” I said to Tavia.

  “Ten,” Urso said.

  “Seven.”

  The Bear winked and grinned lazily as if he’d just scratched his back against the bark of an old tree.

  Chapter 18

  AT THREE FIFTEEN that same day, Tavia and I stood on the tarmac of a private jetport at the domestic airport on the Rio harbor front. We had a Mercedes-Benz armored limousine at our backs and four operators armed with H&K submachine guns nearby.

  I still felt nervous as the Gulfstream appeared out of the sun.

  “What are they like?” Tavia asked. “I mean, in person?”

  “The mom, Cherie, can be intense, passionate, idealistic, and, at times, irrational,” I said. “Andy’s your typical engineering über-mind: brilliant, but socially awkward, probably two or three clicks along the autism spectrum.”

  The Gulfstream landed, revealing the logo: WE. The jet taxied and rolled to a stop in front of us. Tavia signaled her guards. They moved in pairs, two men on each side of the exit ramp as it lowered.

  Cherie Wise, a pale redhead in her early forties, came out wearing red capri pants, sandals, a blue Hamilton College sweatshirt, a straw hat, and oversize sunglasses. Andy Wise, a lanky, balding man with round wire-rimmed glasses, followed her. He wore Wranglers, a green polo shirt with the WE logo on the breast pocket, and running shoes, and he carried an iPad under one arm.

  A structural engineer with a Stanford MBA, Andy and his company, Wise Enterprises, had slain giants, making billions in public works and telecommunications projects around the world: Hotels in Dubai. Tunnels in China. Hydroelectric dams in southern Africa. Cellular networks all over the Third World. In Brazil, WE had been involved in the construction of the World Cup stadiums and many of the Olympic venues.

  Wise’s wife was no slouch either. An English major and former Peace Corps volunteer, she was a tough administrator with an advanced degree from Wharton. She ran WE Help, the Wise family’s philanthropic foundation, which gave away tens of millions of dollars every year to various worthy causes.

  “Tell me again why I shouldn’t fire you, Jack?” Cherie said coldly by way of greeting.

  “As ineffective as we were in this case, we’re still the best,” I replied, having anticipated the challenge. “Without Private’s help, you’ll be significantly weakened in your effort to find and free your daughters.”

  Andy Wise stared at me like I was a disappointment, said, “Status of your investigation?”

  “We’ve got every agent in the Rio office assigned to your case,” Tavia said, and she introduced herself.

  “And I’ve mobilized a secondary team of my top operators. They’ll be leaving Los Angeles within the hour,” I said.

  “So you are in the organizational stage,” Wise said, staring over my shoulder as if there were something behind me only he could see.

  “And data-gathering,” I said, trying to speak his language. “Tavia’s joined forces with a favela insider who has a team tracking your daughters’ whereabouts. But, please, I’d feel better if we were in the limo.”

  Cherie glanced around, said, “We aren’t safe here?”

  “I think we’re perfectly safe here,” I said. “But I don’t want to take any chances until we know why your daughters were abducted. We’ll bring you to your hotel, talk on the way.”

  The four of us climbed into the limo. Tavia and I sat in the seats facing backward, across from the couple.

  When the doors were shut and locked, Wise rolled his head and rocked slightly, said matter-of-factly, “I don’t think there’s a question about why they were taken, Jack. The hostage and ransom business is booming in South America. Talk to the people at Global Rescue and they’ll tell you that.”

  “Andy, stop,” Cherie said. “I’m sure they—”

  Wise ignored her. “I’ve seen the statistics. I know the odds of us ever seeing our daughters safe and—”

  “Stop it!” Cherie snapped. “They’re not statistics, Andy. They’re our daughters, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Get emotional if you wish,” Wise said. “But the numbers don’t lie. It’s why I didn’t want them down here in the first place. I knew the threat. I informed you of the threat. But, no, I was ignored. The statistics were ignored just so you could make the girls look better on some future résumé.”

  “That had nothing to do with it,” Cherie shot back. “I wanted them to see the world for real, not in the abstract. I wanted them to understand people and their plights on a gut, emotional level, not as some goddamned number or statistic.”

  “And look where it’s gotten us,” Wise said.

  Tavia’s cell phone rang. She answered, listened, said, “We’ll be right there.”

  She hung up, turned around in her seat, and knocked on the divider, which lowered. “Change of plans,” she said. “We’re going to Private Rio.”

  “Why?” Cherie asked. “I need a shower, a change of—”

  “We’ve been contacted by the kidnappers, Mrs. Wise,” Tavia said. “They’ve sent a video of the girl
s.”

  Chapter 19

  “MOM? DAD?” NATALIE Wise sobbed. “You’ve got to help us.”

  “Please?” Alicia whimpered. “We want to come home.”

  “Oh God,” Cherie Wise said, and she buried her face in her husband’s chest.

  We were in the lab at Private Rio, watching the video on a big screen. The billionaire rubbed his wife’s back mechanically and looked at his daughters with little affect, as if he considered the images nothing more than a gathering of blips and algorithms.

  But I was studying everything the camera revealed. The girls were bound with leather straps to ladder-back chairs. The chairs were set about a foot from each other in front of a black curtain parted to show a painting of children on their knees praying.

  Natalie and Alicia were frightened, filthy, and showing signs of abuse. Natalie, a redhead like her mother, had a severely swollen left cheek. Alicia, sandy blond and the smaller of the two, had a split lip and eyes that looked like she hadn’t slept in days.

  Two masked figures in black appeared, a male and a female. The man’s mask had feathers and green sequins; the woman’s was more primitive, a rudely carved face with a diamond-shaped mouth and painted cat’s eyes.

  In stilted, accented English, the man said, “We know who is these girls. Tell the Wises we want fifty million dollars or daughters to be executed. You have forty-eight hours to comply. Instructions to follow.”

  The screen went blank.

  “Pay them,” Cherie Wise said, unable to control the tears. “Tell them right now, we’ll pay.”

  “Wait,” her husband said. “I want to hear—”

  “Your options?” Cherie demanded, mouth open, incredulous, tears dripping down her cheeks. “There is no option, Andy. We pay. We get our daughters back, and we go on.”

  He blinked, said, “Should the police know we’ve been contacted? That a ransom has been demanded?”