The Games (Private #11)(6)

“There’s no easy way to say this,” Castro said. “We lost both of them.”

Fernanda collapsed into the arms of Pietro, her husband, and sobbed.

“How can that be?” Pietro demanded hotly. “I want to see them.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible, sir,” Castro said. “We believe they died from a highly infectious virus.”

“What? Like Ebola?” Pietro asked in disbelief.

“Different, but yes, dangerous like that.”

“Where are they?” Fernanda sobbed.

“Their bodies are under quarantine. And we need to do blood tests on both of you and anyone else who came into contact with your children in the past twenty-four hours.”

“Oh God,” the kids’ mother moaned. “Oh God, this is not happening.”

Her husband held on to her and sobbed too. Castro stayed with them until they could answer his questions. He learned that they lived in a sprawling slum in northeast Rio that was home to almost two hundred thousand people.

The father had a decent job as a security guard at the monument of Christ the Redeemer on Corcovado Mountain. Fernanda stayed home and took care of the children. They’d both noticed that Maria had been lethargic the evening before. In the middle of the night, she’d started vomiting. An hour later, so had Jorge.

“Where did they get the little cuts on their feet?” Castro asked.

“I don’t know,” Fernanda said. “They’re kids. They’re outside all the time.”

Barefoot? Castro thought, suppressing a shudder. In a slum?

The doctor had grown up in one of Rio’s favelas and knew all too well that hygiene in many of them was minimal at best. So whatever the kids stepped on had been infected with Hydra. But who or what had carried the virus there in the first place?

“Dr. Castro?”

He had looked up from the parents to see the hospital administrator standing there, rubbing his hands nervously. Beside him was an imperious little—



The bartender put a full shot glass of cacha?a on the bar in front of the doctor, taking Castro from his thoughts.

Castro picked up the shot glass and held it up to Desales. “To Igor Lima,” he said. “The dumbest cover-your-ass idiot I have ever met.”

The doctors clinked glasses.

They took the rum in one gulp, ordered another round, and almost immediately Castro’s thoughts began to swirl again to Igor Lima.

Lima worked in the office of the mayor of Rio. He specialized in public-health issues, and when Castro and the hospital administrator had met with him just a few hours before, the man had been mightily annoyed to have been called to work on the Saturday before the World Cup final.

“Viruses and diseases have a way of ignoring such things,” Castro had told him.

“What viruses?” Lima had asked. “What diseases?”

After looking at the hospital administrator, who turned his head away, Castro had brought Lima up to speed. The doctor finished with a plea to put the favela where the children had lived under quarantine.

The mayoral aide’s chin retreated. His lips did a stiff dance, and then he shook his head. “That’s not happening.”

“What?” Castro demanded. “Why?”

“Because you’re not sure it’s a virus that killed those kids.”

“I am sure. I—”

“You haven’t run the PCR tests,” Lima said. “You said so yourself.”

“Not yet, but—”

“But nothing, Doctor. We’ll keep the bodies and the ICU in quarantine pending autopsies and figure out where we are on Monday.”

“Monday?” Castro sneered. “You mean after the World Cup final, don’t you? That’s what’s behind this. You don’t want to have the mayor and FIFA embarrassed; you want the media broadcasting only good thoughts all over the world tomorrow afternoon. Right? That’s the reason you’re burying a potential epidemic, isn’t it?”

Lima sputtered, “I’m not burying an epidemic.”

Castro poked the bureaucrat in the chest with his finger, said, “When a variation of this virus hit a village up in the Amazon a few years back, we had a sixteen percent mortality rate. But this is a mutation of Hydra. The cells have six heads instead of five. It killed both those children. One hundred percent mortality.”

“Again, without tests and without autopsies, you can’t know that,” Lima said. “So for the time being, the quarantine begins and ends with those bodies and that ICU.”

Castro started to argue again, but the mayoral aide stepped back, said, “Doctor, I hate to do this, but given your history, I don’t think you can be considered rational enough to handle this situation. I think you should be quarantined too.”

“What?”

“You’re off the case, Dr. Castro,” Lima said, and then he turned to the hospital administrator. “Senhor Pinto, you are in charge of making sure that everything in that ICU is sanitized and those bodies autopsied tonight so they can be cremated as soon as possible. And test the doctors.”

The administrator shook his head. “Tonight? I…I can’t.”

“And why not?” Lima demanded.

“I have a ticket to the FIFA party at the Copacabana Palace,” Pinto said.