The Games (Private #11)(8)
With traffic moving in only one direction, taxis and cars were slow bringing guests to the Copacabana Palace. Though more celebrities stayed at the Hotel Fasano in Ipanema these days, the Palace remained the place to throw a high-society bash.
As he walked along the sidewalk toward the main entrance, Dr. Castro was thinking that the Palace was also FIFA’s hotel. It only made sense that the final big party of the tournament would be held here.
Castro was wearing his best suit, navy blue, tropical wool, with a lightly starched white dress shirt and a red tie with soccer balls on it. He saw security men eyeing him as he approached. He lifted his hand to scratch his beard then remembered he’d shaved it off and put his hand in his coat pocket instead.
A couple climbed out of a cab just ahead of him. Both wore FIFA credentials on lanyards around their necks. The woman carried an invitation.
For a moment, the doctor hesitated.
Did he need FIFA credentials to get inside? Would he be turned away?
Castro forced an easy smile and held up his invitation.
Security waved him up the stairs.
A doorman opened one of the double doors. Castro stepped into a crush of well-dressed partygoers, his left hand still holding the invitation. His right hand protected his front pants pocket and all that it contained.
Slipping to the outside of the knot of people, Dr. Castro saw a table where guests were checking in. He also noticed a second security team: a big, beautiful Brazilian woman to the left of the grand staircase, and a tall, muscular blond-haired guy on the right. Both wore radio earpieces. Both were attentive and scanning the crowd.
It took four or five minutes for the doctor to reach the table. He held up the invitation to a grinning woman wearing FIFA credentials, said, “Manuel Pinto.”
She turned a few pages on her list, found Pinto’s name, and ran a pink line through it. Then she handed him a small ID badge that he clipped to his breast pocket. He smiled, thanked her, and walked around the table.
Joining others moving toward the staircase, Dr. Castro kept that easy smile going, trying to look as if he were about to meet an old friend. He turned his head slowly toward his left shoulder and then toward his right as he got close to the second security team. The doctor was using body language; by exposing his neck to the Brazilian woman and then the blond man, he was saying, I am not a threat. Not a threat to anyone at all.
It seemed to work, as neither of them paid him much attention. He stole glances at the badges they wore: REYNALDO, PRIVATE. MORGAN, PRIVATE.
Dr. Castro stiffened as he went by them.
Private.
He vaguely knew of the company and its reputation.
What were they doing here?
Where the staircase split, the doctor went right, climbing to the mezzanine and wondering whether having Private around made going through with his plan too risky. Maybe he should just have a drink and slip out. But then he flashed on images of bulldozers and rubble and a torn, bloody lab coat and those kids dying today, and the anger came back, along with his purpose and resolve.
Dr. Castro turned left on the mezzanine and moved with the crowd past walls covered with photographs of notable guests of the Palace, almost all of them Hollywood actors, European royalty, music greats, or the superrich and powerful. He found it all of only mild interest, although he did note that novelist Anne Rice’s picture was above and in a much more prominent position than Brigitte Bardot’s.
The doctor entered a ballroom set up for a banquet and continued along with the throng out onto a terrace that overlooked Avenida Atlantica, the beach, and the ocean. Night had fallen.
Across the street, under spotlights, men were playing beach volleyball. There were drums beating and whistles blowing somewhere, and Argentine and German fans were crushed in around the open-air bars and kiosks along the waterfront.
The crowd on the terrace was much more well-heeled. Dr. Castro guessed dignitaries, FIFA officials, local politicians, and a smattering of tycoons.
Everyone who had benefited, he thought bitterly.
The majority of people he’d come in with were already pressing on toward the bars on either side of the terrace. The doctor figured he’d had enough for one night but thought he’d look out of place without a drink in his hand. He waited patiently and ordered club soda with lime on the rocks.
When Dr. Castro turned away from the bar, he glanced through the crowd and was startled to see Igor Lima six people away and to his left. The mayor’s aide was drinking champagne, talking to a blonde six inches taller than him, and looking very self-satisfied. For a long moment the doctor got so enraged he considered making Lima the direct object of his wrath.
But he restrained himself. Too obvious. And Lima might recognize him, and that would do Castro no good in the long run.
It had to be a more fitting choice, the doctor thought. A statement. A…
The party dynamics shifted, some guests leaving the terrace to check on their seating for dinner. The exodus opened up space in the celebration and revealed new faces, including another one that Dr. Castro recognized.
He felt the rightness of that choice begin to vibrate everywhere in and around him. His skin tingled. It made him shiver.
Breathe, he told himself. Breathe, and then calmly, coldly, finish this.
Castro shifted his drink to his left hand, reached into his pants pocket, found the long thin cylinder, and grasped the length of the slender barrel. With his thumbnail, he flicked off the cap.
“Please, if you will all come inside, dinner is about to be served,” a woman called, prompting the crowd, including his target, to surge toward the banquet hall.