The Games (Private #11)(36)

Agreed, Wise responded a moment later.

Go to the northeast corner of Rua Frei Caneca and de Mar?o. Park where you can see to the north. Wait.

“Northeast corner of Frei Caneca and de Mar?o,” Tavia muttered as she got us turned around. “That’s gotta be—”

She floored the accelerator of the X5, said into her microphone, “Andy, you’re going to be parking next to the Sambadrome. It’s where they have the big samba contests during Carnival.”

“Never been there, but I know what it is,” Wise said. “Describe what I’ll be seeing, please.”

Tavia thought, said, “Think the grandstands at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and then think twenty times the size of those grandstands and lining both sides of Fifth Avenue for roughly half a mile. You’ll be looking up a wide, empty concrete street. Park where you can see the entire length of the parade route, but expose yourself and the van as little as possible. Does that make sense?”

“I guess I’ll know it when I see it,” Wise replied.

Cherie unclipped her seat belt, shifted so she was behind and between me and Tavia. She stared through the windshield and slowly, gently, moved her hands against each other as if she were washing them.

“This is going to work,” Cherie said in a wavering voice. “I’ll have them back in my arms soon.”

“That’s the plan,” I said.

“I want us taken to the jet immediately afterward,” she said. “The hell with the Olympics. We’re just not staying. The girls will understand, I’m sure. And Andy, well…there are some things in life not worth fighting about.”

Tavia and I exchanged glances but didn’t join the conversation our client was having with herself. After a while in our business, you learned that people did and said strange things when there were lives on the line.

On the screen of the iPad, the van’s icon reappeared.

“You’re close, Andy,” I said into the microphone.

“Just ahead,” Wise replied.

“We’re shutting down the trackers in three hundred feet,” Mo-bot said over the radio. “Camera will come on at the parking spot. You’ll have to adjust its position so we see what you do.”

She’d given Wise a high-end digital camera small enough to be hidden in the palm of his hand.

The icon disappeared from the screen.

“Parking,” Wise said.

Tavia pulled over six hundred yards east on Valadares Avenue. Cherie leaned over the seat when the iPad screen came to life. We were getting Wise’s view via the camera. He’d parked the van diagonally, facing into the Sambadrome. He had us looking through the windshield across a security chain at the road and the flanking grandstands that on a big night during Carnival would be filled with tens of thousands of people. Now the place was so empty it looked forlorn. It was a forgotten venue except for a few nights a year. A secluded spot in the middle of the city. Perfect for trading hostages for money.

The iPad screen flashed with bright lights. Headlights.

Wise said, “There’s a white van coming into the other end.”

“Hold the camera steady and I’ll zoom in,” Mo-bot said.

A moment later we saw the van turning sideways about one hundred yards inside the north end of the Sambadrome.

“They had to have cut the security cable at that end,” Tavia said.

Wise got a message from Alicia’s phone. Leave the van. Walk south on de Mar?o.

Wise texted back, Not until I see girls leave van.

For a few tense moments there was no reply. Then the side door of the other white van slid open. The girls, bound at the wrists and blindfolded, were pushed out by two figures wearing masks and blue workman’s coveralls. They held pistol-grip shotguns to the girls’ heads.

Then they tore off the blindfolds and Cherie Wise gasped with joy. “It’s them. Oh, thank God, it’s them.”

Wise got a text from Alicia’s phone. Get out of the van and go, it said. Or see them die.

“Get out, Andy!” Cherie screamed.

He texted back, Not until I see them walking away.

After a long moment’s hesitation, the gunmen nudged them to move. Uncertainly, the girls began walking east, away from their captors and toward the grandstands.

The camera moved, refocused from its position on the dashboard. Due to the curved windshield, we got a skewed image of the girls starting to climb the grandstands and the audio of Wise leaving the van and shutting the door.

“Walking away south,” Wise said.

“Car two, secure the girls, evaluate, and transport to our doctor,” Tavia said. “Car one, you’ve got Mr. Wise.”

“Where are we going?” Cherie asked.

“After the money,” I said.

Tavia put the car in gear and floored it. We’d no sooner gotten up to speed than a masked man in a blue workman’s jumpsuit appeared on the iPad screen, caught by the camera on the money van’s dashboard. He had bolt cutters and snipped the security chain into the south end of the Sambadrome.

Someone climbed into the passenger side. We heard the driver’s-side door slam. The van took off, screeching into the road between the grandstands, heading north fast toward the other white van, which was turning around.

That’s all we saw before one of the people in the van swore and grabbed the camera. The screen went jerky and twisty: The ceiling of the van. The chest of a blue workman’s suit. The window opening as the van accelerated, and then the camera was hurled into the stands, spinning in the air and catching fleeting images of the fleeing Wise girls climbing higher and higher.