“I can’t,” Acosta said.
One of the doctor’s first shots had hit the lieutenant in the right shoulder. He was trying to support his quivering arm with his left hand enough so that he could get a decent sight picture on Castro.
“Gimme the gun,” I said.
The lieutenant handed it to me.
I set it in my lap, reached up, and undid the slide window.
Air rushed in. I took the control stick with my right hand and pushed the gun out the window with my left. I spun the chopper one hundred and eighty degrees and saw Castro lift his head and his gun, grinning like a madman.
The instant I had a sight picture, I shot, shot, and then shot again.
Chapter 100
THE FIRST BULLET went right by Dr. Castro’s left ear.
Before he could return fire, the second slug hit him squarely just below the sternum. He bucked at the impact; it was like he’d been punched in the gut, except this punch was as hot as lava. Castro managed to squeeze off one round.
The pilot shot a third time and hit Castro high in the right chest.
The doctor was flung against the hatch frame. He swooned in shock and pain. The pistol slipped from his fingers, bounced off the statue’s arm, and fell to the terrace below.
Castro was dazed, but not confused. The doctor knew who he was and wanted to show the police that it didn’t matter what they did; he’d already won.
Castro held up the phone and with a bloody smile waved it at the helicopter and the men inside. Then he dropped it inside the arm.
It is done, he thought happily as he slumped toward death.
It is irreversible.
It is…good.
Chapter 101
WE WATCHED CASTRO sag against the hatch, drop the phone into the arm of the Christ, and die.
General da Silva saw him die too, said, “Now get control of that drone.”
“We can’t get control,” Acosta said. “He’s put it on autopilot. That’s why he waved his phone at us before he died.”
I hadn’t understood then, but now I agreed. If Castro had gone to this extreme, he must have had backups.
Swinging the helicopter away from the statue and accelerating north, I said, “General, evacuate that stadium.”
“The opening ceremony’s already started,” da Silva said indignantly.
“That drone’s flying right at you and forty-five thousand other people with more than a billion people watching. Your call.”
“Find the drone,” he said. “Knock it out of the sky.”
“It’s a pretty big sky, General,” Acosta said with a grunt as he got his belt around his upper arm and pulled the tourniquet tight.
“Actually, it’s not,” I said, and I took the helicopter up to one hundred and sixty miles an hour. “We know where it’s going. We’ll just get there first.”
“I’m going to have the cellular towers shut down, Jack,” da Silva said.
“What? Why?”
“That phone controls it. We’ll cut the link.”
“Don’t do it,” I said. “If you cut the link, it could go off anywhere, and we’ll never get a crack at intercepting it.”
I didn’t wait for a reply, said into the headset, “Mo-bot, are you there?”
“In the security center, Jack.”
“Patch me through to Sci,” I said as we closed on the stadium, which was glowing brilliantly.
“I’m sitting right beside her, Jack,” Kloppenberg said.
“We have a drone on autopilot heading toward the stadium with Hydra-9-infected blood on board. We have to figure out how to stop it.”
After a moment, Sci said, “How will it be dispersed?”
“I’m not sure,” I said as I dropped our airspeed over the parking lots of Maracanã and turned the chopper around. We hovered there, looking back toward the Redeemer.
Sci said, “If the drone’s navigation is on autopilot, it’s heading to a specific location. Which means that the triggering device of the delivery system has to be location-specific as well. Once the drone hits a certain GPS spot, the virus is released.”
“So if we stop it from getting to the stadium, there will be no release?”
“Unless he put redundancies in place.”
“Such as?” I asked.
“Maybe if it crashes, it goes off?”
“Great,” I said, gaining altitude and turning back toward the stadium.
I flew right over the top of Maracanã and hovered there about three hundred feet up. Below us, athletes from more than one hundred countries were surrounded by troops of samba dancers shaking their stuff on raised stages. “They’re pointing at us,” Acosta said, looking out his window. “They think it’s part of the show.”
I didn’t care. I was scanning the horizon back toward the mountains. Where was it? A minute ticked by.
General da Silva said, “You’ve upset the organizers by hovering up there.”
“I don’t give a damn,” I said, still peering back to the southeast.
Where was the drone? Had it crashed? Had something gone wrong? Was the drone down? Was Hydra-9 already killing somewhere outside the—
Blip! Blip!
Glancing at the millimeter-wave radar readout, I said, “Here it comes. Six hundred and fifty yards out.”
I pushed the stick forward and we flew toward the drone.
“What do you want me to do?” Acosta said.
“Pray,” I said.
“What are you going to do?”
I thought of Sci warning me not to knock it down. I thought of the location-specificity in the triggering device. I thought of the helicopter I was flying.
In the next instant I saw our only chance.
Chapter 102
“THERE IT IS,” Acosta said when our spotlight caught the drone, which was three hundred and fifty feet away and puttering along at fifteen miles an hour. “Looks like an octopus or something.”
“Tanks, hoses, and airbrushes,” I said. “The dispersal system. I’m going to try to hook it with the front of my strut.”
I turned the screen to camera view. It was a fish-eye lens and showed both landing struts at a curved angle.
I had three windows to look out—two in the door and one down by my ankles that gave me a solid view in front of the left strut. I swung the helicopter gingerly in behind the drone, which got caught in our rotor wash and dropped altitude fast.
I backed off and for a second I thought I’d blown it and knocked it out of the sky. But then the drone began to climb again.
I decided I couldn’t do this with finesse. I was going to have to swoop in, dive at it, and, hopefully, hook it.
We were three hundred yards from the stadium when I made a nifty move with the control stick, came in at a steep angle, and missed snagging the drone by inches.
“It’s almost here!” General da Silva cried as I spiraled up and away from the drone, getting in position for one last try.
“Jack told you to evacuate the stadium, General,” Lieutenant Acosta said. “You wouldn’t listen to him.”
I ignored all of it, searched for the drone, and spotted it ten yards from entering the airspace right above the stadium and dropping altitude fast. I hit the throttle and dove the chopper once more, tilting the bird almost on its side so I could watch the strut knife right at the drone.
I missed again.
But a foot peg on the strut support about two feet back hooked the mesh hammock.
The drone now dangled upside down below the hammock with its five propellers spinning wildly.
“Got it,” I said, and I pulled away from the stadium.
Ten voices started hooting and cheering in my headphones.
“Well done, Jack!” General da Silva roared.
“Perfectly executed,” Sci said.
“Almost perfectly,” I said, exhaling long and low. “But we’ll take it. Any idea where we should bring the virus?”
“Take it to Castro’s lab,” Sci s
aid. “The clean room is still up. It can be contained and dealt with there.”
Before da Silva could comment, Justine’s voice came over my headset.
“Jack, I’m looking at your camera feed. I can see the drone hanging there, and there’s something flashing green in that hammock thing.”
I looked down and through the lower door window and saw a small digital readout blinking in bright green: 00:60, 00:59, 00:58, 00:57…
Chapter 103
“JACK, IT’S A TIMER!” Justine said. “It’s going off in—”
“Fifty-four seconds,” I said, gritting my teeth, gaining altitude, and wondering what in God’s name I was going to do.
In far less than a minute, Castro’s biological weapon of mass destruction was going to trigger about three feet below me. The tanks were full of Hydra-9 virus. Those hoses and airbrushes were going to let loose a mist of death over Rio de Janeiro.
“Jack,” Lieutenant Acosta said, truly frightened. “Are we going to—”
I swung the helicopter in a tight three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn, scanning, looking, trying to figure out where to go.
“Forty-five seconds, forty-four…” Justine said.
I ignored her, and when the chopper’s nose came around to the east-northeast, I saw the cruise ships docked around the Pier Mauá and others moored in a small cove of Guanabara Bay toward the commercial piers at Caju.
“Thirty-eight,” Justine said. “Thirty-seven, thirty-six…”
“Hold on,” I said and accelerated the helicopter straight at that cove.
“Twenty-five, twenty-four…”
We roared over throngs of people partying in the streets of Gamboa, celebrating Rio and the Olympic Games, blissfully unaware of the danger flying above them.
“Eighteen, seventeen, sixteen…”
I dropped altitude fast as I came over the crowded central bus station. The spire of Santo Cristo church flashed by.
“Ten, nine, eight…”
“Hold on!” I shouted at Acosta as we flew fifty feet over traffic-jammed Kubitschek Avenue and the sea wall that holds back the bay.
“Six, five, four…”
We barely cleared the top of a cruise ship moored there.
“Three…”
I drove the stick down.
“Two…”
We dropped like a stone the final thirty feet.
The last thing I remember before impact was the inky surface of the bay coming up fast and Justine saying, “One…”
Chapter 104
“JACK?”
I heard someone call my name from far down a long, dark tunnel.
“Jack, can you hear me?”
I recognized the voice as Justine’s, took a deep breath that hurt like hell, and forced open my eyes. At first it was all blurry and nothing made sense. Then things came more into focus.
I was lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by monitors. Justine sat in a chair next to me. She was holding my left hand with both of her hands and grinning at me with watery eyes.
“Welcome back to the living,” Justine said. “God answered our prayers.”
My head swam. “How long have I…”
“Four days,” she said, taking away one hand to wipe away her tears. “In addition to a broken sternum, you sustained a head injury in the crash. You had some brain bleeding and swelling. They kept you in a medically induced coma until they could drill holes in your skull to relieve the pressure. That was two days ago.”
“What a difference two days make,” I said, and laughed, which made my chest hurt and started a clanging in my head.
I must have moaned because Justine stood up from the chair all worried and said, “You shouldn’t move a lot.”
“I just figured that out,” I said. “Is there anything they can do for the ax-in-my-skull feeling?”
A nurse bustled in. “He’s awake! When?”
“Five minutes ago,” Justine said. “And he’s amazingly alert. Knows me. Logical. Coherent.”
The nurse looked up at the clock and brightened. “I win, then. We had a pool going on how long it would be for you to wake up once we took you off the sedatives. I got it by eighteen minutes.”
“Glad to be of service,” I said.
“His head hurts,” Justine said.
“I imagine so,” the nurse said. “I’ll get the doctor.”
My eyes drifted shut, and I fell into a dreamless sleep until the neurosurgeon shook me awake. Justine was still there, and she made phone calls while the doctor examined me.
He seemed satisfied with my progress and told me he’d give me something to take the edge off the pain. I wanted to kiss him.
Shortly after I was given the drugs, some of the fire in my chest and the pounding in my head ebbed. I started to drift off again.
Seymour Kloppenberg and Maureen Roth came in and woke me up again. Sci grinned and bobbed his head. Mo-bot burst into tears.
Fussing over my sheets, she blubbered, “We were all so worried.”
“You shouldn’t have been. My head’s the hardest part of me,” I said.
“Not anymore,” Sci said. “It’s the holiest part of you.”
“Funny,” I said.
“That was a brilliant move, in case no one’s told you yet.”
I blinked in confusion. “What was?”
“Crash-landing that helicopter and Castro’s virus into salt water.”
“It was the only thing I could think of. Did the device go off?”
“It did,” Sci said. “But Castro developed Hydra-9 as an airborne pathogen. The saline and the pollution in the bay killed the virus, probably on contact. There’s no evidence of it anywhere in the cove, anyway, and they’ve been testing around the clock.”
“That’s our superhero at work,” Justine said with a wry smile.
“I am no superhero,” I said. “Lots of people helped stop Castro, and none more important than Maureen.”
“Oh, c’mon.” Mo-bot tittered. “My part was luck.”
“You thought to look,” I said.
“No, I happened to glance at the NBC raw feeds and in came footage of the Redeemer shot just before dark when there was this weird reddish color in the western sky. I thought it was dramatic, so I blew it up on the big screen in the command center. One second the statue’s right arm was flat, and the next second it was like it had biceps—you know, a big bump that wasn’t there before?”
“But you saw the bump, and you magnified the image enough to see it was Castro standing in the hatch,” I said.
“Well, yes, I did do that,” Mo-bot said.
“Thank God you did,” I said. “Even though we figured Castro had gone up Corcovado Mountain, we never would have located him inside the statue in time to save forty-five thousand people from a deadly virus. This one’s all you, Maureen Roth. You saved the day.”
Mo-bot beamed and laughed, said, “I’ll take some of the credit, but you did all the crazy stuff to stop him and his drone.”
“Acosta was a big part of it too,” I said. “He took a bullet. How is he?”
They sobered. Justine said, “Bruno died on impact, Jack.”
I’d been growing stronger by the minute until then. I sagged and felt shitty.
Acosta was dead. Tavia was dead. I was involved in both tragedies. I was a contributing factor in both deaths. I’d survived them both and felt the guilt of that like a heavy blanket around me.
“Bruno was a great cop,” I said. “Smart. Tough. As brave as they come. But I couldn’t figure out any other way to handle the virus than to crash.”
“You did the right thing,” said General da Silva, who’d just come into the hospital room. “Acosta would have said the same. He died a hero and a martyr for every single person in that stadium and for every single person who might have contracted the virus afterward. You two prevented a national calamity, Jack. I know the president wishes to thank you personally when you’re up to it.”
That was nice, but
losing Tavia and Acosta in the process of keeping the Olympic Games safe was a bitter pill to swallow, one I was sure I’d be tasting in the back of my throat for years.
Wanting to change the subject, I said, “How are the games going?”
The general smiled and opened his hands wide. “Since the opening ceremony, my marvelous Rio has been showing its true colors. The games have been a nonstop party so far. The greatest the world has ever seen.”
“I’d expect nothing less,” I said.
“The doctors said you’ll be able to leave in maybe two days,” da Silva said. “So any event you want to go to after that, you’ll have the best seats in the house. Next Sunday night is the men’s hundred-meter. Fastest-man-on-earth race.”
I’d seen the finals in London and almost turned him down, but then said, “Get me four tickets.”
“Done.”
I gestured to Sci, Mo-bot, and Justine. “You’re coming with me.”
Roth clapped and Sci seemed pleased.
“Sure you don’t want me back in L.A., looking after things?” Justine said.
“I kind of need you here.”
She smiled, held my hand again, and said, “I’ll stay in Rio as long as you want me here.”
Chapter 105
THEY LET ME out of the hospital two days later. I could walk, but the pain drugs and the holes in the head and the broken ribs ruled out my driving or doing anything strenuous for the foreseeable future.
General da Silva arranged for us to stay in his sister’s two-bedroom rental in Ipanema while I convalesced. Justine and Mo-bot took turns taking care of me. We watched the Olympics and really got into the rowing and the indoor bicycle racing for some reason. Very exciting stuff.
Justine spent a lot of time on the phone with Emilio Cruz, her boyfriend. Cruz works in my L.A. office. I could tell there was some friction over her not returning until the games were over.
“You can leave anytime,” I told her. “I’m feeling better.”
“I’ll leave when I believe you can take care of yourself,” she said.
“You sure?”
“Jack, yes, I’m sure,” Justine said, pushing back her hair. “I almost lost you. I…don’t think I could have…I just have to make sure you’re okay.”
The Games Page 24
