The Games (Private #11)(64)

That familiar ghostly green world appeared, but it was a world I’d seen before only from the noisy cockpit of a helicopter, with a shield blocking me from the wind and constant radio chatter in my ears. We picked up speed. The wind bit at our faces and goggles and whistled in our ears as we flew through a narrow canyon between the mountains, two miles long and barely five hundred yards wide.

For almost fifteen hundred feet below us, there was nothing but khaki-colored air and then the deep jade forest canopy. The vegetation seemed to undulate like a tranquil sea. Ahead, framed in the far mouth of the canyon, the lights of Ipanema, Copacabana, and Leblon burned an emerald fire.

My pilot had us eighty yards out from and almost parallel to the rim of the canyon. Tavia soared with her pilot a hundred yards ahead and one hundred feet lower than us. The pilots had said it was the safest way to go as we hugged the contour of the mountain.

“ETA?” General da Silva’s voice crackled in my earpiece.

“Four minutes? Five?” I said.

“Mark that,” the general said. “Diversionary fire will commence downslope at twenty-one hundred hours fourteen minutes. Full BOPE support at twenty-one hundred hours twenty-six minutes.”

That gave us only twelve minutes to figure out where Wise was.

“Can you delay support until twenty-one thirty-two?” I asked.

After a pause, da Silva said, “Agreed, Jack. You’ll have eighteen minutes to find him.”

We banked away from the cliff wall and zigzagged into a long, gradual descent toward the mouth of the canyon. Two minutes later we flew out of the gap. The lights of Leblon were so bright, I turned the goggles off. We’d lost nine hundred feet in altitude by the time we banked after Tavia’s glider.

Far below us, raucous, celebrating crowds were partying on the mosaic walkways along the beaches, and vendors were doing a booming business. No one looked up that I could see. We were like big black bats, invisible against the night sky.

“Two minutes out, General,” I said.

We turned and flew west now, straight toward the lower end of that jungle clearing. I drew my Glock from my chest holster.

Tavia’s pilot stalled slightly to let us pass and land first. I flipped the night-vision goggles on. We dropped under five hundred feet.

Shooting began in the trees far downslope of the clearing, a short burst followed by four or five random shots and then nothing.

Three hundred and fifty feet. Two fifty. There were men with weapons and flashlights running downhill toward the shooting. We flew right over them, no more than seventy feet above their heads. They never looked up, just dashed on into the trees.

My pilot pulled a release, and our legs dropped. He stalled the glider hard. We floated toward the ground. We reached our feet out like night birds in search of a roost and landed with barely a sound.

Tavia and her pilot landed just as quietly about twenty yards away.

“We’re down,” I said, getting myself free of the harness.

“Eighteen minutes,” the general said.

“Understood.”

The glider pilots knew to go to the tree line and wait there in cover until the BOPE forces landed. Tavia and I split up. She took the right flank of the clearing and I had the left.

The Glocks out and ready, we snaked fast through the trees to within fifty yards of the shacks. I switched the goggles to infrared mode. The wavering heat glow of three people showed inside the near shack’s walls. Two people were in the shack closer to Tavia. Armed men, five of them, were arrayed across the front of both buildings.

“Tavia, stay put, cover me, I’m going to go in there, see if I figure out which one’s holding Wise.”

“Sitting tight,” she replied.

I slipped around and got higher up the mountain than the shacks. Then I dropped in behind them, sneaking the last twenty yards to a lit open window at the back of the larger shack.

I turned off the goggles, eased up, peeked inside, and saw a kid in front of several computer screens. I recognized him—the pickpocket who’d taken Cherie Wise’s purse. Beyond him, an armed man stood in the doorway. Where was the third person I’d seen in the infrared?

The middle computer screen in front of the boy came on and showed Andrew Wise sitting in that familiar chair, blinking at the lights.

The billionaire looked haggard and drawn, but his eyes still had a spark.

Wearing that primitive mask, Amelia Lopes appeared beside him.





Chapter 77



“WELCOME TO THE Favela Justice show,” Amelia said, facing the camera. “We had sixty-three million votes in that short time. Isn’t that incredible? Sixty-three million. And the hash tags? Top three on Twitter for the last six hours. The size of the vote speaks volumes about the interest people have in the plight of the poor. So what was the outcome?”

Amelia turned the mask this way and that, as if considering the results.

“Before we give you the final tally,” she said, “let’s review the highlights of the case against Andrew Wise.”

For the next few minutes, she did just that. The billionaire said nothing.

When she finished, she said, “What do you think the numbers are going to be, Senhor Wise?”

“I have no idea,” Wise said. “They don’t matter.”

“They don’t matter? Poor people don’t matter?”