The Games (Private #11)(46)

Chapter 52



THAT EVENING, THE video of Andrew Wise played on a flat-screen as Dr. Lucas Castro worked on his invention in the shop outside the clean room. The billionaire’s kidnapping and ransom demand dominated every channel.

A billion dollars in gold for the poor? Castro thought. That’s a solid penalty. That’ll sting the pockets. I think I like this Favela Justice, whoever they are.

He stood back, looking at his intricate device. In a titanium frame hung a hammock of black-mesh fabric that held two large canisters fitted to a central green hose; that hose was attached to nine smaller black hoses sticking out of the bottom of the mesh. They hung down several feet, like tentacles with airbrushes attached to their ends.

“Perfect,” Castro said proudly.

Now he had to make sure it worked.

Castro removed one canister from the central hose and attached it to a small air compressor with a remote control.

This was a test, after all, and Dr. Castro wished to exceed the pressure his device called for. It wouldn’t do to blow a gasket and fail at the moment of truth. No way that was happening. Not when he had so little time left on earth.

He used the bleed valve to draw off the air in the fitting and closed it when red-dyed water seeped out. Castro flipped on the compressor, stood back, and pulled out his iPhone. He called up an app that connected him to the compressor control. The doctor hit the Go button.

A second later, clouds of red mist shot out of the nine airbrushes, which whipsawed, throwing the aerosol this way and that. It spattered the bench and floor like a measles rash. It raised a red fog that drifted to the doctor, tingled on his face, and gathered until drips of it rolled down his cheeks like bloody tears.

Dr. Castro was grinning wildly, elated.

He’d patterned his delivery system after Hydra-9 itself. Together, the nine-armed device and the virus that produced nine-headed cells were a single organism about to strike Rio with great and terrible wrath.





Chapter 53

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

8:30 p.m.

Seventy and a Half Hours Before the Olympic Games Open



TAVIA DROVE US up a steep hill in the Bangu District of Rio.

“How are you holding up?” I asked.

“I get waves of energy,” she said. “And when there’s no wave to be had, I drink espresso.”

“So you’re pragmatic?”

“A pragmatic romantic.”

“It suits you. You wear it well.”

“You’re sweet,” Tavia said; she blew an air kiss my way and pulled up in front of a blue gate set in a high stone wall.



There had been little we could do after seeing the video from Favela Justice but leave it to Sci and Mo-bot to wrestle with the corrupted metadata and take Cherie Wise back to the hospital to see her girls. She said being with them was the only way she’d be able to sleep.

Tavia and Lieutenant Acosta and I had decided to work different angles. Acosta was going to plumb the federal police intelligence files for any mention of Favela Justice. We returned to the idea that the Wise girls, who’d been in Brazil under assumed identities, must have been spotted by someone who knew them by sight. Unless the girls had told someone who they were.

When we’d asked the twins, who were both doing much better, about it again, they had once more strongly denied that they’d revealed their identities. We wanted to talk to them some more, but both of them were tired and Cherie told us to come back in the morning. They were all going to sleep the night away.

We left them, realizing that if an individual had taken a particular interest in the girls, somebody at one of the three charities they’d volunteered for might know about it. We couldn’t try the sanitation project or the NGO because they were closed.

But the third charity, the orphanage, was a different story.

We heard a television playing and children laughing when Tavia pulled the cord on the bell at the front gate. A man came to the entrance and looked at us suspiciously until we showed him our identification and asked to see Mariana Lopes.

“She’s not here,” he said.

“We called the clinic, and they said she was here,” Tavia said.

“It’s late,” the guard said. “She’s tired. Come back tomorrow.”

“It won’t wait,” Tavia said. “Could you tell her Octavia Reynaldo and Jack Morgan are here and that it is very important?”

He had a scowl on his face and spit out something in Portuguese as he walked away.

“I didn’t catch that.”

“He said, ‘They never leave that poor woman alone.’”

Five minutes later the gate opened. We walked into a walled area surrounding a large, rambling, three-story building painted in a riot of pastel colors. In front of it was a playground with all kinds of toys strewn about.

Mariana Lopes shut the gate behind us and smiled, though we could see she’d been under strain and hadn’t slept.

“We’re sorry to bother you, Mariana,” Tavia said.

“You said it was important, so it’s not a bother. Do you want tea? There’s some in the kitchen.”

“Tea would be fine,” Tavia said.

Lopes led us through a maze of hallways, past bunk rooms and common areas and lavatories and a laundry, to a cramped but well-equipped industrial kitchen that was spotless.