The Games (Private #11)(34)

He kept looking back over his shoulder at intersections, hoping he’d shaken me, but I stayed on him, soaked with sweat. He darted to his right and up onto a brightly tiled red stair that led to another and another, a staircase that climbed steeply up the side of the hill to Santa Teresa.

I sprinted after him, knowing where I was. The Selarón Steps was an iconic place in Rio, an urban staircase with walls and doors flanking it and virtually every square inch of it tiled, up one side and down the other. Some tiles were simple, others ornate, but all of them were unique and yet part of the whole; the thousands of shiny snapshots and miniature paintings covered the entire staircase in a collage. Lanterns lit the steps, and tourists walked and lovers embraced along them as the kid holding Cherie Wise’s purse bounced up the stairs and through the crowds like the battery bunny gone mad.

I pounded after him and found his weakness. On the flats he was swift, but climbing slowed him, and I started to gain ground. When I was two flights behind him, nearing the top, the kid glanced back, saw me coming, looked startled, and threw the purse at me.

It was a great throw. I mean, he hit me square in the chest with the purse, and it pulled me up short and briefly stunned me.

He cursed me in Portuguese and sprang away, bounding up the remaining steps and onto the Santa Teresa road, where I lost sight of him. I didn’t care. I bent over, desperate for air but happy he hadn’t gotten away with the purse.

I found Tavia coming up the lower part of the Selarón Steps, showed her the purse, and told her what had happened. Fifteen minutes later, I handed it to a grateful Cherie Wise.

“Oh, thank you, Jack,” she said, taking the purse and hugging it. “It’s a favorite of mine. The girls had it made for me a couple of years…”

She looked worn out suddenly, said, “I really need to sleep. I’m getting dizzy.”

“Make sure he didn’t take anything out while he had it, and we’ll go back to the hotel,” Wise said, and then he looked at me. “No one tried to contact us.”

“I know,” I said, glancing back at Lapa and wondering if we should have them troll through again.

Cherie opened the purse, took one look, and let out a soft gasp.

“What?” Tavia asked.

She held the purse out and showed us. Inside, on top of her things, there was an unlabeled CD-ROM in a dirty plastic case.

“That’s not mine,” she said.

“I would hope not,” her husband said. “That technology’s a dinosaur.”





Chapter 38

Sunday, July 31, 2016

8:30 a.m.



WE ALL GOT a good six or seven hours of sleep after finding the CD, so the Wises, Tavia, and I were looking rested and ready to go when we filed into the lab at Private Rio the next morning.

Seymour Kloppenberg and Maureen Roth, however, had been up all night and looked it.

“You get into the CD?” I asked.

“It was encrypted, but yes,” Sci said, and he pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. He turned to his computer keyboard and typed.

The large screen above the workbench opened and revealed instructions in a primitive, blurry font, all capital letters.

LOAD MONEY IN WHITE UNMARKED FORD PANEL VAN NO REAR WINDOWS.

ANDREW WISE DRIVER, WEARS BLUE WORKMAN’S COVERALL, NO HAT, NO GLASSES.

NO FATHER? THE GIRLS DIE.

NO OTHER PASSENGERS IN VAN OR THE GIRLS DIE.

NO POLICE OR THE GIRLS DIE.

NO PRIVATE OR THE GIRLS DIE.

NO TRACKING DEVICES OR THE GIRLS DIE.

EXCHANGE TO TAKE PLACE IN OPEN, PUBLIC, LIT AREA OF OUR CHOOSING.

YOU HAVE UNTIL MIDNIGHT MONDAY, AUGUST 1, TO PREPARE.



“We can get a van like that in Rio, right?” Cherie asked.

“I’m sure,” Tavia said. “How soon can you get the thirty million?”

“It’s waiting at the national bank,” Wise said.

“They want fifty million,” Cherie said.

“I’m not giving them fifty.”

Cherie’s face went cherry red. “They’ll kill the girls.”

“No, they won’t,” her husband said. “I told you. They’ll see a whopping stack of cash in the back of that van and it won’t matter whether it’s thirty million or fifty.”

“But—”

“Jack?” Wise said impatiently. “What’s the likelihood of kidnappers stopping to count when we deliver that amount of money?”

“In a public, lit place?” I said. “Small. They’re going to want to see money and lots of it, but they won’t be counting exact figures until they’re long gone.”

“See?” Wise said to his wife. “And the girls will be just as free and safe as if we’d spent fifty million for their return. In business, we call that a bargain.”

“In life, we call that endangering the lives of your own flesh and blood to cut costs,” Cherie shot back.

Wise ignored her, said to me, “Get one of those vans and put in the most sophisticated and least detectable tracking devices you can find. I want them buried in the money. Can you make that happen?”

I looked to Mo-bot, our expert on these kinds of things. She nodded.

“Wait! What?” Cherie exploded. “Are you kidding me? The note explicitly says tracking them will mean Alicia and Natalie die.”