The Games (Private #11)(5)

“Jack?” Tamara said. “Could you hold my hand until it gets here?”

“I’d be honored,” I said, reaching out and taking her left hand. It felt cold and clammy, and I realized she was probably almost in shock.

“Did you see René up there?” she asked.

“I’m wearing his harness.”

Tamara nodded, her lower lip trembling. “He can’t deal with stuff like this.”

“Like what?”

“A paralyzed girlfriend,” she said, tears dripping down her cheeks.

“What is he? An imbecile of titanic proportions?”

Tamara laughed through her tears. “Sometimes.”

I kept up the light chat with her until the backboard reached us. It took quite a bit of finagling on both our parts to get Tamara strapped to the board, and the winch cable rope attached to the four lines supporting it. But we did it.

“Have a nice ride,” I said after I’d separated her from the rope that had saved her. “Very few people have ever done anything like this.”

“Thank you, Jack,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” I said, giving her hand one last squeeze. “And whatever happens, you’re going to be fine in the long run. Okay?”

“You think?”

“Only an imbecile of titanic proportions wouldn’t.”

She smiled and closed her eyes.

“Take her up,” I said into the mike, and I watched her rise for a few moments before starting toward Victor Barros.

By the time I’d climbed down to the guide’s side, Tamara had disappeared inside the tram, and the cable car was moving to the summit station.

“We’ll be right back, Jack,” Tavia called into the radio.

My fingers were on Barros’s neck by then. His skin was still warm to the touch, but there was no pulse that I could feel.

“Take your time,” I called sadly into the mike. “He’s gone.”

I hung there on the side of the cliff with the dead guide until the tram came back and lowered the winch rope. Then I clipped it directly to his harness and released him from the rope that had snapped his back and killed him.

Twenty minutes later, they pulled me into the tram. I sat against the wall opposite the corpse, feeling wrung out, and the cable car began to drop toward the mid-station.

“You okay, Jack?” Colonel da Silva asked.

“Honestly? I feel like I could sleep for a week.”

Tavia looked at her watch and grimaced. “I’m afraid you can’t, boss. We’re already running way late.”

I glanced at my own watch, closed my eyes, and groaned.





Chapter 5



IN A BOTECO, a small, open-air bar not far from the hospital, Dr. Lucas Castro took another belt of cacha?a, Brazil’s potent sugarcane rum. He stared numbly at the television screen, which showed some American guy hanging off a rope running out of one of the tramcars on Sugarloaf Mountain.

Castro turned to Dr. Desales, said bitterly, “A climber dies. A climber’s rescued. It’s on every channel. But two kids from the favelas dying from a virus? The day before the World Cup final?”

“Not a chance,” Desales said, nodding.

Dr. Castro ordered another shot, unable to stop the events of the past five hours from spinning again in his head, getting him angrier and more resentful by the moment. He and Desales had stood there after little Jorge died, drenched in sweat as they watched the flat lines on the monitors, stunned by how fast the boy and his sister had deteriorated and succumbed. The children had been in their care less than three hours.

“We’ve got to get out of here and decontaminate,” he’d said at last.

Shaken, Desales had followed Castro through the plastic sheeting the nurses had put up while the doctors tried to save the children.

They went to a special room off the ICU, stripped, and put their clothes in a hazardous-waste bin for incineration. Then they examined each other for any possible body-fluid exposure. Satisfied that there had been none, they lathered head to toe in a mild bleach solution that they rinsed off under high-pressure hoses.

When they’d emerged from decontamination they found Manuel Pinto, the hospital administrator, waiting for them.

A puffy-faced fifty-something man in a finely cut linen suit, Pinto asked, “What the hell’s going on?”

“We lost two, a young boy and a girl from the favelas,” Dr. Castro replied. “It’ll take a PCR test to confirm it, but I believe it’s a virus that has broken out only once before. Upper Amazon Basin. Three years ago.”

“You were there?”

“With a World Health Organization unit,” Castro said.

“Mortality rate?”

“Sixteen percent,” Desales answered.

“But we’ve just had a hundred percent incident,” Castro said. “We need to quarantine the hospital and the entire favela where those kids lived.”

“An entire favela?” Pinto said doubtfully. “I don’t have that authority.”

“Then find someone who does. I’m going to talk to the parents.”

The mother, a sweet young woman named Fernanda Gonzalez, looked pleading and afraid when Dr. Castro walked out of the ICU into the waiting room.