The Games (Private #11)(49)

At three fifteen, there was a knock on the door. I opened it, and Natalie entered. She looked high on painkillers and pressed an ice pack to her bruised face as she walked by me in search of her mother. Following her, Alicia looked miserable. She was paler, and her eyes were sunken.

“Why release them from the hospital?” I muttered to Tavia as she came in behind Alicia. “They look like hell.”

“The doctors figured it would be fine as long as they were monitored by a nurse,” Tavia said. “There’s one on the way.”

We joined the Wises back in the suite’s sitting area; the girls sat on the sofa flanking their mother, who had her arms around both of them.

“My head still hurts,” Alicia said. “Why can’t I have something like Natalie’s getting? She’s sitting there with that goofy smile and I’ve got, like, the worst headache ever.”

Tavia said, “The doctors don’t like to use narcotics with concussions.”

“When the nurse gets here, we’ll see what we can do,” Cherie promised.

My cell rang. It was Sci.

“We got a Zip file just now from Favela Justice,” he said.

“Forward it to Tavia’s e-mail and then get to work on it,” I said.

“Coming right at you.”

I hung up, looked at Cherie, said, “It’s here.”

Wise’s wife blanched, said, “Girls, there’s something you’re going to see that you won’t like, but Jack and I think it’s important for you to watch in case you recognize anything or anybody.”

“What kind of thing?” Natalie asked.

“You’ll see,” Tavia said, getting out her computer and calling up her Gmail account. “By the way, we talked to a friend of yours last night.”

“A friend?” Alicia asked. “Who?”

“Amelia Lopes,” I said.

Natalie blinked dumbly, and her chin retreated. Alicia stared at us in a kind of dazed disbelief.

“You talked with Amelia last night?” Natalie said. “How is she?”

“Fine; working hard on her research,” Tavia replied as she typed on her keyboard. “She says she hopes you’re okay.”

“Where is she?” Alicia asked, looking confused.

“Some town near Porto Alegre,” I said.

“Oh,” Alicia said. “I couldn’t remember what it was near before.”

“She’s, like, the smartest person ever, Mom,” Natalie said.

“I think your dad holds that title,” Cherie said.

“Sure, but, like, she has insight, you—”

“Sorry, here we go,” Tavia said, and hit Return.

The screen blinked to life.





Chapter 57



A BRILLIANT RED logo—FAVELA JUSTICE—came spinning out of a void before leveling out on the screen.

Then it faded, revealing Andy Wise staring out at us. Still gagged and strapped to that heavy wooden chair, the billionaire looked worn from his experience.

Rayssa, the woman in the primitive mask, appeared, said, “We’ll let the evidence speak for itself.”

She vanished into a series of smash-cut video clips and images crafted like a news segment on Vice.com, a hip, visual story with Rayssa explaining what we were seeing in a voice-over. Documents fluttered onto a wooden table, dozens of them, and then hundreds, piling up on the table, falling off the sides, and drifting in the air.

One appeared in close-up for less than five seconds as Rayssa said, “These are copies of WE invoices for rebar, which is used to reinforce concrete. Mr. Wise’s company bought rebar in volume, right off the boat from Poland, for three hundred dollars per metric ton.”

Another document flashed by with the WE logo, too quick to read, and then dozens more, one after the other, rapid-fire, as Rayssa said, “But as internal accounting documents show, Mr. Wise’s company was charging the Brazilian government and Olympic authority three thousand dollars per metric ton.”

Over images of the Olympic village and the World Cup stadiums, she said, “Favela Justice gets that Mr. Wise is in business to make a profit, but a nine hundred percent profit? That’s gouging any way you look at it.”

The video went on showing images of cement mixers while Rayssa alleged that WE billed raw cement at nearly six times the amount other private construction firms did. Then the scene shifted to images of favelas and favela people all over Rio.

“The Brazilian government took on hundreds of billions in debt to finance the stadiums,” Rayssa said. “This was money that could have gone to better schools, better sanitary conditions in the favelas, hope for the vast majority of Brazilians who want a better life. Instead, like the Roman emperors who built the Colosseum, the government bought entertainment for the impoverished, and men like Wise pocketed the lion’s share of what could have been our future.”

The screen returned to that image of the billionaire in captivity.

“To enrich himself, Wise made us all poorer,” Rayssa said. “Took the money right out of our hands and made it look legal, and the poorest will suffer for it. Unless you vote to find him guilty. Then he owes the poor one billion in gold.”

The screen went blank.

There was a long silence in the room before Alicia looked at her mom and said in a trembling voice, “Is that all true? About Dad.”