The Games (Private #11)(77)
Before I could futz with the screen, my phone rang again.
“Here,” I said, handing him his phone and answering mine. “Things are kind of intense at the moment, Mo-bot.”
“They’re about to get more intense,” she said. “I’ve got him. He made a mistake and I’ve got him. Or at least where he was about fifty minutes ago.”
Lieutenant Acosta glanced up from the map on his phone with a puzzled look and said, “Due west; he’s up on Corcovado Mountain.”
“On Corcovado Mountain?” I said into my phone.
“How did you know that?” Mo-bot said, sounding deflated.
“An educated guess based on where he entered the jungle.”
“Oh,” she said, happy again. “Well, believe it or not, I’ve got video of him sticking his gray self up out of Christ’s right arm. I’m sending it to you now.”
I didn’t wait for it, just started running toward the helicopter.
No pilot.
Acosta had followed me. “What’s going on?” he demanded as I wrenched open the army chopper’s front door.
“Castro’s going to launch his rocket off the Redeemer.”
Chapter 96
Friday, August 5, 2016
6:54 p.m.
Six Minutes Before the Olympic Games Open
IN THE HEADLAMP beam, Dr. Castro gazed at his masterpiece reassembled on the inner floor of the Redeemer’s right arm. The Hydra-9 and propellant canisters fit snugly into the payload hammock. The hoses were all tight. So were the airbrush connections.
He’d paired his phone via Bluetooth to a small joystick in his shirt pocket. He’d also linked the phone through apps and a local cellular service to a GoPro Hero camera and to the GPS navigator on board the workhorse of his delivery system: a Freefly Alta drone.
Castro had bought the Freefly drone on the Internet for $8,495. It was worth every penny. With a fold-up design, collapsible struts, and five propellers, the drone could carry a payload of fifteen pounds for more than ten miles.
The doctor’s delivery system weighed in at a little over ten pounds, and the Freefly didn’t need to carry it more than five miles. Castro felt confident knowing he had more than enough fuel and power to reach the stadium and get the job done right.
He folded the struts and props so he could get the drone up through the hatch and carefully set it on the Christ’s right arm. The doctor glanced down at the two NBC employees more than one hundred feet below him.
One of them was taking a piss off the side of the terrace.
The other one was still looking at his iPad and said, “It’s starting.”
Perfect, Dr. Castro thought as he snapped the drone’s arms quietly into place. We’ll be fashionably late, coming to the show with the last of the stragglers, making it a full house.
Castro gave the Freefly a command through his phone. The battery-driven motors started up. The propellers slowly turned.
The doctor reached around to arrange the hoses and airbrushes one last time. Taking a deep breath, he said, “Boa viagem.”
Castro got the joystick control. He increased the power until the propellers were a blur and watched with delight as the drone lifted off with its precious load.
When the Freefly was ten feet overhead, the doctor used the joystick to send the drone north and at an angle to the southeast wind. With the black-mesh hammock, the nine hoses, and the airbrushes dangling below the drone, he thought it looked kind of like a jellyfish as it left the spotlights for the darkness.
“Hey!” someone yelled.
Dr. Castro twisted and looked down, saw the two from NBC looking up at him. He had a moment of panic, but then decided to ignore them.
There was no way they could get inside the statue in the fifteen or twenty minutes it would take for the drone to fly the five miles. There was no way to stop him until it was too late. But just in case, Castro picked up his phone and called up another feature on the drone’s navigation app.
“Hey, what the hell are you doing up there?” one of the men shouted.
The doctor wanted to watch the screen of his phone, wanted to stay glued to the feed from the GoPro, seeing the lights of Maracan? Stadium out there in the distance already.
But he turned his head and looked down.
The cameraman had aimed his lens up at Castro. The producer was on a phone talking excitedly.
It doesn’t matter, Castro thought. Nothing matters any—
He heard the thumping of a helicopter in the darkness to his west but couldn’t make out running lights. It was circling and coming closer.
Dr. Castro didn’t try to duck down or hide. He was done hiding.
Using the joystick, flying the drone, the doctor felt totally at peace with his decisions, no fear now, no regrets now.
None at all.
Chapter 97
“SON OF A bitch, there he is,” said Lieutenant Acosta, who sat beside me in the copilot’s seat of the police helicopter looking through high-powered binoculars.
“You have eyes on him?” da Silva demanded over the radio.
“Affirmative, General,” Acosta said. “Right where Mo-bot spotted him.”
“Where’s the rocket?”
“I don’t see any rocket.”
“Then get closer, goddamn it, and throw your lights on him. And put on your radar and the camera, Jack. I want to see what you’re seeing.”