The Games (Private #11)(71)

Oh Jesus, I thought, and closed my eyes. It was real, then. The weird gut sense I’d had being around Castro the first time had been true.

“What’d you find?” Lieutenant Acosta said.

I showed him the bag of blood and the label. “Luna Santos-1—Hydra-9 virus. I don’t know what contraído means.”

“‘Contracted,’” Acosta said. “As in disease.”

Contracted July 30, 2016, then. “That was the day Luna died,” I said. “Castro was using this secret lab to develop a deadly virus, using humans as his guinea pigs, and…”

I turned back to the freezer, leaned way in, and studied the color of the dead couple’s skin.

“This wasn’t just a lab,” I said. “It was a propagation operation too.”

“Meaning what?”

“We know he drained Luna of blood. Judging by the extreme pallor, the male victim has been drained of blood too. But there’s only one blood bag in the fridge, and not enough in the vials to make up for the difference. We’re talking liters of infected blood. We need experts in here, and we need to find Castro.”

“You really think he plans on…” Acosta looked sick.

“Based on this place? I think he’s been planning for a long, long time.”

I glanced at the clock. It was a quarter to five, two hours and…

I knew it all then, fought a queasy, liquid feeling, said, “We need to get out of here. Now. I think I know where he’s going to attack.”

We shut the freezer, put the IV bag holding Luna Santos’s infected blood back in the fridge, and returned to the air lock, where we took bleach showers and shed the white suits.

“What is it?” Justine asked.

“Bad,” I said, punching in General da Silva’s number.

“You still have your job?” I asked when he answered.

“Holding on by the skin of my teeth.”

“Then this is going to be tough to hear, General, but Acosta and I think Lucas Castro is going to release a plague at the opening ceremony.”





Chapter 87

Friday, August 5, 2016

1:45 p.m.

Five Hours and Fifteen Minutes Before the Olympic Games Open



THE SUN HAD broken through the clouds, and the heat from Bahia just kept rising. The heat and the north wind had come as a surprise to Dr. Castro. It did not help him, but it could be dealt with. And he believed that the winds would change again before sunset, turn back out of the southeast.

But now, it was just plain stupid hot. Dr. Castro stopped, wiped his brow, and shrugged off the heavy backpack. He drank and ate a piece of jerky before setting off again, climbing higher through the jungle toward the base of a long charcoal-colored cliff.

The faint path to the cliff was steep, but the doctor kept at it, pulling himself up over roots and through brush, slippery fern beds, and stands of wild bamboo, trying to distance himself from the apartment buildings below.

Two o’clock had come and gone before he reached an even fainter trail inside the tree line below the cliff. He had found the path in his scouting trips and used a machete to trim out the rough spots.

The doctor studied the damp earth there and saw no tracks. He’d learned that most people wanting to follow the contour of the mountain took a heavily used trail some two hundred vertical feet below. In his experience only the odd rock climber or two came this far up, and even they rarely used this trail.

He’d met a few over the past two months. One of them had used a Cinder 55 backpack as a cargo bag for ropes and such. An American. Billy White from Fort Collins, Colorado. He’d recommended the pack.

Good guy, Dr. Castro thought. Nice guy.

The faint path ahead continued through the jungle, and he had to be sure of his footing, keeping his weight and balance shifted toward the steep slope to his left. One false step and he’d go down hard. Very hard. And tumble and then hit hard again.

The north breeze ebbed. The rain forest turned even more oppressively hot. Insects were buzzing, birds were calling, and somewhere a monkey chattered. But no human voices. Not even a distant car horn.

It suited Castro. He did not want to run into anyone today. He wished to be like a virus: Alone. Mutating. Incubating. Not existing in people’s minds until their friends started dying all around them.

Dr. Castro pushed on into one of the mountain’s deep and densely forested side canyons. For all intents and purposes, he was invisible.

Alone. Moving. Mutating. Incubating.

Castro imagined he was becoming like Hydra-9. In the shimmering heat he was hyperaware of everything. He felt part of nature now, the buzzing and sawing, the building and destruction, all of it unfolding in an imperfect but inevitable process.

One species becomes dominant, and then, with something as insignificant as a twist in the strand of a virus, the same species is laid low, making way for some better, stronger, and smarter creature.

Great good will come of this, he thought. The population is out of control. The rich are out of control. This will be a check. This will create some balance.

“Hey there, Doc.”

Dr. Castro startled at the soft voice, almost tripped off the wrong side of the trail, but he managed to grab onto a vine. He looked up and saw Billy White sitting on a rock about fifteen feet above him, tanned, bare-chested, ripped, Petzl helmet and a pack next to him, chewing on an energy bar.