“Andy’s a big coup, and they know it,” I said, leading her to a seat. “They’re going to be extra careful before they contact us. And after the gunfire, they have to know there are federal police involved too. You’ve got to take a lot of deep breaths. Live in the moment until we know more.”
Wiping at her tears, Cherie said, “I’m sorry, Jack, I’ve just never been through anything remotely like this.”
“You have nothing to be sorry about,” I said. “Anybody in your boots has the right to cry.”
“Not very Jackie O. of me.”
“I’ll bet Jackie O. had more than her share of moments like this, times when she hadn’t slept and felt like she was all alone in the world.”
Cherie sighed, blew out her breath, and slumped in the chair.
“I suppose you’re right,” she said. “It’s just left me feeling so burned, so cheated. One minute I get the girls back and the next Andy’s gone.”
Cherie paused, tensing again, acting as if she were far away and contemplating the unthinkable.
“We’d been having trouble in our marriage, Jack,” she said. “I won’t bore you with the sordid details, but the truth is…I’ve been up all night because I want Andy back. I really do. I want to tell him that all is forgiven. I want to hear him say it to me.”
The billionaire’s wife looked tortured and forlorn as she drew her feet up, hugged her knees, and whispered again, “I want to hear him say it to me.”
Cherie seemed to grow in dimensions I had not imagined just a few moments before.
I said, “The fact that the girls were released in return for the ransom is a very good sign. I think if we cooperate, you’ll see him—”
My cell rang. It was Tavia.
“We were just contacted,” she said.
Chapter 51
FORTY MINUTES LATER, Cherie, Tavia, Acosta, and I were at the lab at Private Rio, watching impatiently as Sci and Mo-bot tried to analyze the metadata attached to the latest video. We’d wanted to watch it immediately, but they insisted on looking at it from the outside first for technical reasons I frankly didn’t understand.
Finally, shaking his curly head, Kloppenberg said, “I can’t quite figure out how they’ve done it, but the code’s corrupted, like it’s got a virus that worms through the code upon our receipt. Don’t know how they did it. Mo-bot?”
“It’s got me baffled too,” she said.
“Play it, then,” Lieutenant Acosta said.
Everyone looked at me.
“Put some kind of quarantine around it so it can’t attack our files, and then open it,” I said, and I glanced over at Cherie, who’d taken a seat and was holding her hands together tightly in desperate prayer.
Tavia went to sit at her side. She looked to me, and we shared a worried moment before the big screen in the lab came alive with the image of Andrew Wise. He was gagged and strapped to a stout chair, still wearing the blue jumpsuit.
The camera zoomed in and showed Wise’s face was bruised. Dried blood matted his hair. Drips and streaks of it showed on the chest of the coverall. He seemed alert, aware of his surroundings, but hurt and in considerable pain.
“Jesus.” Cherie moaned, and she buried her face in her hands. “Why are they doing this?”
“They released the girls,” Tavia said. “You’ll have him back soon.”
But then the camera retreated, revealing a white sheet behind the billionaire. On the sheet and above Wise’s head, there was crudely painted red lettering that read:
Favela Justice!
“What the hell is this?” Lieutenant Acosta said.
That same woman from the earlier video messages, Rayssa, wearing the primitive mask, appeared to Wise’s left. Walking with confidence all around the billionaire, she looked to the camera.
“For those of you who don’t know, this cancer of a man is Andrew Wise, the founder and chairman of Wise Enterprises, or WE,” Rayssa said in thickly accented English. “Senhor Wise is on trial here for his actions as they relate to the rape and persecution of Brazil’s poor through his company’s profiteering in the construction of the World Cup and Olympic Games venues.
“Favela Justice has all the damning evidence,” she went on. “Evidence you will see in the coming days. We’ll let you decide Senhor Wise’s guilt or innocence. If you judge him innocent, we let him go. You judge him guilty, and Favela Justice demands the payback of one billion dollars in gold, which will go to the poor of Brazil.”
“One billion?” Sci said.
Mo-bot whistled, said, “Got to be the highest ransom demand in history.”
I glanced at Cherie and saw her lose all color.
Rayssa paused at Wise’s left side and addressed the camera. “All news organizations gathered in Rio: You have been sent an excerpt from the trial of Andrew Wise. Every afternoon at three thirty eastern daylight saving time, you should expect another one. Tomorrow’s excerpt: the evidence revealed.”
The screen went blank.
“A billion dollars. Three thirty p.m. eastern,” I muttered, seeing where this was going. “Fuck.”
I left the room, pulling out my cell phone. “Fuck.”
“What?” asked Tavia, following me into the hall.
“I went through a nightmare at the last Olympics in London, and here comes another one,” I said, trying to wrap my head around what had just happened in there.
Was all of this solely about the billionaire? Or were they using the billionaire to attack the Olympics? Was Favela Justice connected to Luna’s death? Were the games being threatened once again?
When General da Silva answered my call, I said, “I’ve got news, and you’re not going to like it one bit.”
I laid it out for him: The story of the ransom and the kidnap. The video and the potential ramifications.
The general said shit in Portuguese.
“Exactly.”
“Get me that video,” he said. “Then we’ll talk.”
“Straightaway,” I said, and I returned to the lab, where Sci, Mo-bot, Lieutenant Acosta, and Cherie Wise were watching the video again.
“Andy’s hurt, but not out of it. He knows what’s going on around him,” Cherie said when she saw me. Then she started to cry. “Can we convince the media not to broadcast this?”
I shook my head and said, “I won’t lie to you, Cherie. The Olympics don’t start until Friday. That leaves three days with a gaping news hole. There’s a reason they’re delivering their messages at three thirty p.m. eastern. That’s a half an hour before the big news organizations’ early deadlines. A billion-dollar demand? The global media will eat this up.”
Chapter 52
THAT EVENING, THE video of Andrew Wise played on a flat-screen as Dr. Lucas Castro worked on his invention in the shop outside the clean room. The billionaire’s kidnapping and ransom demand dominated every channel.
A billion dollars in gold for the poor? Castro thought. That’s a solid penalty. That’ll sting the pockets. I think I like this Favela Justice, whoever they are.
He stood back, looking at his intricate device. In a titanium frame hung a hammock of black-mesh fabric that held two large canisters fitted to a central green hose; that hose was attached to nine smaller black hoses sticking out of the bottom of the mesh. They hung down several feet, like tentacles with airbrushes attached to their ends.
“Perfect,” Castro said proudly.
Now he had to make sure it worked.
Castro removed one canister from the central hose and attached it to a small air compressor with a remote control.
This was a test, after all, and Dr. Castro wished to exceed the pressure his device called for. It wouldn’t do to blow a gasket and fail at the moment of truth. No way that was happening. Not when he had so little time left on earth.
He used the bleed valve to draw off the air in the fitting and closed it when red-dyed water seeped out. Castro flipped on the compressor, stood back, and pulled out his iPhone. He called up an app that c
onnected him to the compressor control. The doctor hit the Go button.
A second later, clouds of red mist shot out of the nine airbrushes, which whipsawed, throwing the aerosol this way and that. It spattered the bench and floor like a measles rash. It raised a red fog that drifted to the doctor, tingled on his face, and gathered until drips of it rolled down his cheeks like bloody tears.
Dr. Castro was grinning wildly, elated.
He’d patterned his delivery system after Hydra-9 itself. Together, the nine-armed device and the virus that produced nine-headed cells were a single organism about to strike Rio with great and terrible wrath.
Chapter 53
Tuesday, August 2, 2016
8:30 p.m.
Seventy and a Half Hours Before the Olympic Games Open
TAVIA DROVE US up a steep hill in the Bangu District of Rio.
“How are you holding up?” I asked.
“I get waves of energy,” she said. “And when there’s no wave to be had, I drink espresso.”
“So you’re pragmatic?”
“A pragmatic romantic.”
“It suits you. You wear it well.”
“You’re sweet,” Tavia said; she blew an air kiss my way and pulled up in front of a blue gate set in a high stone wall.
There had been little we could do after seeing the video from Favela Justice but leave it to Sci and Mo-bot to wrestle with the corrupted metadata and take Cherie Wise back to the hospital to see her girls. She said being with them was the only way she’d be able to sleep.
Tavia and Lieutenant Acosta and I had decided to work different angles. Acosta was going to plumb the federal police intelligence files for any mention of Favela Justice. We returned to the idea that the Wise girls, who’d been in Brazil under assumed identities, must have been spotted by someone who knew them by sight. Unless the girls had told someone who they were.
When we’d asked the twins, who were both doing much better, about it again, they had once more strongly denied that they’d revealed their identities. We wanted to talk to them some more, but both of them were tired and Cherie told us to come back in the morning. They were all going to sleep the night away.
We left them, realizing that if an individual had taken a particular interest in the girls, somebody at one of the three charities they’d volunteered for might know about it. We couldn’t try the sanitation project or the NGO because they were closed.
But the third charity, the orphanage, was a different story.
We heard a television playing and children laughing when Tavia pulled the cord on the bell at the front gate. A man came to the entrance and looked at us suspiciously until we showed him our identification and asked to see Mariana Lopes.
“She’s not here,” he said.
“We called the clinic, and they said she was here,” Tavia said.
“It’s late,” the guard said. “She’s tired. Come back tomorrow.”
“It won’t wait,” Tavia said. “Could you tell her Octavia Reynaldo and Jack Morgan are here and that it is very important?”
He had a scowl on his face and spit out something in Portuguese as he walked away.
“I didn’t catch that.”
“He said, ‘They never leave that poor woman alone.’”
Five minutes later the gate opened. We walked into a walled area surrounding a large, rambling, three-story building painted in a riot of pastel colors. In front of it was a playground with all kinds of toys strewn about.
Mariana Lopes shut the gate behind us and smiled, though we could see she’d been under strain and hadn’t slept.
“We’re sorry to bother you, Mariana,” Tavia said.
“You said it was important, so it’s not a bother. Do you want tea? There’s some in the kitchen.”
“Tea would be fine,” Tavia said.
Lopes led us through a maze of hallways, past bunk rooms and common areas and lavatories and a laundry, to a cramped but well-equipped industrial kitchen that was spotless.
“You did all this yourself?” I asked. “The clinic and the orphanage?”
“I had help,” she said. “Lots of it.”
“But you were the guiding light,” Tavia said. “It was all your idea.”
“I picked from a lot of good ideas,” Lopes said.
“How many kids?” I asked as we sat down at a table.
“At any one time the census is somewhere between sixty-five and seventy-five. Is that why you’re here? If you wanted a tour, I could have arranged it for—”
“Do you remember these girls?” Tavia asked, showing Lopes a photo of the Wise sisters on her cell phone.
The orphanage director put on her reading glasses, looked closer. “Of course,” she said. “The Warrens. Why? Are they the girls who were kidnapped?”
“And returned for ransom,” I said.
“Oh my God,” Lopes said, her hand at her mouth. “I never put it together.”
“We never told you who the girls were,” Tavia said. “Tell us about them?”
Lopes shrugged. “We have many volunteers like the Warrens who come through here, usually four, five at a time, so they tend to blur a bit, but I remember those two well. They had a rough go of it at first, but they turned out to be wonderful girls. If I could get those kinds of volunteers all the time, the children would be the better for it. Oh, this is awful. Are they all right?”
“They’re going to be fine,” Tavia said. “But you said they had a rough go of it. In what way?”
“Well, they came here straight off the plane. First stop. I think they might have believed they’d go to Copacabana or something, but that didn’t happen.”
Chapter 54
A SECURITY GUARD came into the kitchen. Mariana Lopes went over and spoke to him for a few moments, then returned to us, pushing back a wayward strand of hair as she sat down.
“You were saying that when the twins came here, they thought they were going to Copacabana?” Tavia said.
“I’m saying they were shocked by the poverty,” Lopes said. “You could tell it really bothered them. They were well aware that there were poor people in the world, but this was clearly the first time they’d seen it in person. They kept getting tears in their eyes, and on the second or third day, I overheard one of them, I can’t remember which, telling the other that she didn’t know if she could take it, seeing kids suffering when they’d been given so much.”
“But they got through the shock?” Tavia said.
Lopes nodded. “I walked over and told them that this was the point of volunteering. They were giving back because of all that they’d been given. That seemed to change their attitude. And they’d both studied Portuguese before they came, so they could talk with the kids. They befriended many of the children and staff in their time here. I wish my daughter, Amelia, were here to tell you. She had more interaction with them.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s been down in Porto Alegre the last two weeks, doing fieldwork for her PhD.”
“But she was here when the Warren girls were?” I asked.
“For part of their time with us. Give her a call. She’ll remember them.”
“Do you have her number?” I asked.
“I do,” she said, pulling out her phone. “It’s best to try her in the evenings. She’s been putting in long…” The orphanage director stopped, looked up at us. “If the girls have been ransomed and returned, why are you here?”
We exchanged glances, knowing it was all going to come out soon, if it hadn’t already.
“Because the girls’ real last name isn’t Warren,” Tavia said. “It’s Wise, as in WE, Wise Enterprises.”
Now Lopes seemed completely confused. “Okay?”
“You don’t know the company? WE? Big construction projects?”
She squinted. “I guess.”
“The girls’ father, Andrew Wise, the founder of WE, was grabbed during the ransom exchange. A group called Favela Justice has claimed responsibility and
they plan to put him on trial and tape it.”
Lopes pondered that. “You mean like vigilantes?”
“Kind of,” I said. “They’ve accused him of gouging the government during the construction of World Cup and Olympic projects and impoverishing the slum dwellers.”
That annoyed her. “Slum dwellers? Mr. Morgan, they prefer the term favela people. This group…what did you call it?”
“Favela Justice,” Tavia said.
“Well, I don’t know who they are, but I’m inclined to believe their charges.”
“Why?”
“Government contractors overcharging and paying off politicians in Brazil? It’s been a constant story since, I don’t know, the beginning of Brazil.”
I glanced at Tavia, who shrugged, said, “That’s true.”
Lopes fought a yawn.
“We should go, then,” Tavia said. “And you should sleep, Mariana. We appreciate the help.”
“Have I been of any?” she asked, getting up wearily.
“Some,” I said.
“Well, as I said, call Amelia,” Lopes said. “She knows more about the girls than I do.”
Chapter 55
THE ELEVEN O’CLOCK news in Brazil and the cable news shows were dominated by Favela Justice and the plight of Andrew Wise. Several broadcasts featured aerial images of various World Cup and Olympic venues that Wise Enterprises had helped build, including the athletes’ village in Barra da Tijuca.
“The charges are price gouging and financial oppression by a man who benefited greatly from the construction boom,” one newscaster brayed. “What’s next in this strange story? Stay tuned as it unfolds.”
“Enough,” Tavia said, and she shut off the television.
I handed her a glass of excellent Argentine Malbec. “Here you go. Decompression, stage one.”
Her cell phone rang. She sighed, looked at it. “Amelia Lopes, finally.”
Like her adoptive mother, Amelia spoke excellent English, and Tavia put her on speaker.
“Yes, of course I remember the Warren girls,” Amelia said. “Very sharp and very—how do you say?—sympathetic.”
The Games Page 14
