Джеймс Паттерсон - The Games

“Kloppenberg’s quirky, but he’s the only person I know who’s an honest-to-God genius,” I said, which provoked odd looks from both of the Wises. They obviously considered themselves somewhere high in that lofty realm.

“Who is Mo-bot?”

“Maureen Roth. She works for Sci as a technical jack-of-all-trades. She’s also one of the most well-read people I know.”

The screen flickered and returned, divided into thirds, the video of the girls in the middle, Sci on the left, and Mo-bot’s motherly face smiling on the right.

“We’ve got you,” I said. “Can you see us?”

“Yes, we’ve got it working now,” Mo-bot said.

“Apologies,” Sci said. “But we’ve both had a run at the kidnappers’ video in the last hour and come up with a few things for you.”

Kloppenberg said the video had been sent to Private Rio from an Internet café in Kuala Lumpur through a server in Pakistan.

“Got enemies in either of those places, Mr. Wise?” Mo-bot asked.

Wise thought and then said, “Not that I’m aware of.”

“Done work in those countries? Pakistan? Malaysia?”

“Both,” he said.

Sci said, “I find it telling that the video was sent to Private Rio and not to the Wises.”

“Good point,” Tavia said. “The kidnappers must have known the girls had Private Rio bodyguards. So they sent the video here first.”

“But how did the kidnappers know the guards were with Private?” Mo-bot asked. “They were in street clothes, correct?”

“Correct,” Tavia said.

Wise said, “Then someone in Private Rio talked, or my girls did.”

“The girls?” his wife said. “That’s absurd. They knew the risks. Why would they do such a thing?”

Wise cast an even gaze at her, said, “Natalie could have fallen in love again. Or Alicia could have been trying to impress someone. You know how naive, trusting, and impressionable they can be. So quick to become someone’s best friend forever or rally to some politically correct cause without doing the research necessary to justify their support. They’re just like...”

“Me?” Cherie demanded. “Why don’t you just say it?”

Her husband blinked, took off his glasses, said, “At times, yes.”

“Andy, I honestly don’t know why you stay with me.”

Wise frowned, clearly puzzled, said, “How do you make that logical jump?”

Sci cut them off, said, “We blew up some stills from the video, Jack.”

The images appeared one after another: the Wise twins in the chairs, the painting of the children kneeling in prayer, and the masks their captors wore.

Mo-bot said, “See how the painting has no frame? And there’s the suggestion of other figures to either side of the children. It’s part of a mural.”

“Why cover the rest of it?” Cherie asked.

“The mural might be recognizable,” Tavia said.

“Then why show it at all?” Wise asked. “Why not just cover up the whole thing?”

“They’re trying to play on your emotions,” I said. “Two kneeling, praying children behind your girls. What about the masks?”

Tavia said, “The feather-and-sequin mask is samba. You could find one like it in many places in Rio. But the primitive one I’ve never seen before.”

“Looks animist to me,” Sci said.

“Are there animists in Rio?” Cherie asked.

“Macumba,” Tavia said, nodding. “It came with the slaves the Portuguese brought from Africa to work on the rubber plantations. Macumba’s more widely practiced up on the northeast coast in Bahia, but it’s here in Rio too, especially in the favelas.”

“Make a note to figure out where this second mask came from,” I said. “Anything else from the video?”

“Sounds,” Mo-bot said. “Three different background noises.”

She typed. Dogs barked, one with a gruff tone, another a yapper. Then we heard a train whistle blow close by, followed by a gentle tinkling melody that changed to clanging and then died.

“What was that sound?” Cherie asked.

“High-tone chimes,” Mo-bot said. “Moving on a gust of wind.”

The wind, Dr. Castro thought. What will it be?

Castro sat in a small cramped office at the medical school of the Federal University of Rio, hunched over a laptop computer, studying real-time meteorological data displayed on the screen. He paid scant attention to the temperature and barometric-pressure readings from various stations around Rio, focusing instead on wind direction and speed.

The doctor jotted notes on a chart. Then he reviewed those notes before coming up with a hypothesis. Now he just had to conduct an experiment to see if his hypothesis was right.

Pensive, the doctor exited his browser and shut his computer down. He put the laptop in a knapsack and then picked up a mason’s leather and canvas bag from the floor beneath his desk.

Outside, it was a mild, midwinter day in Rio, temperatures in the low seventies and an ocean breeze that was northeasterly, coming down off the equator. As Dr. Castro walked, he wondered whether the breeze would stay prevailing and steady with a building warm trend or change out of the south, as the latest forecasts indicated.

“Dr. Castro? Professor?”

The doctor had hoped to get off campus quickly, but he turned. A smiling young man ran up, trying to catch his breath.

“I’m sorry, Professor,” he said. “But I have a question from last week’s lecture on retrovirus reverse transcription.”

Castro had important things to attend to, but he was devoted to his students, especially this one: Ricardo Fauvea. Ricardo reminded Castro of his younger self. Like the doctor, Ricardo had grown up desperately poor in one of Rio’s favelas and had defied the odds. Despite a public-school education, he had scored well enough on an entrance exam to earn a spot in one of Brazil’s excellent tuition-free universities. He’d done it again getting into the medical school, just as Castro had.

“Walk with me,” the doctor said.

“What’s in the bag?” Ricardo asked.

Dr. Castro flushed, slightly embarrassed. “A new hobby.”

Ricardo looked at him quizzically. “What sort of hobby?”

“Come along, I’ll show you,” he said, and hailed a taxi. “How are you anyway?”

Castro’s young protégé recounted the latest events in his life on the short cab ride to the village of Urca, on the bay in the shadow of Sugarloaf Mountain. They got out of the cab and walked the rocky shoreline to a secluded, crescent-shaped beach.

“So that’s me up to date,” Ricardo said. “How about you, Doctor?”

“I’m fine,” Castro said, walking out onto the sand and happy to see the little beach was empty. “What did you want to know about reverse transcription?”

“Right,” Ricardo said. “I wanted to know why RT doesn’t produce exact copies of viruses all the time.”

“Because retroviruses are unpredictable. I suppose that’s why I enjoy my new hobby so much.”

The doctor opened the mason’s bag, revealing the components of an Estes model rocket. “This toy is ingenious and predictable. I know for certain that if I put everything together correctly, it will fly spectacularly.”

Castro loaded the nine-inch rocket with an engine and attached it to a starter and battery. “Now, some viruses are like this toy: stable, predictable. Those kinds of viruses reproduce predictably.”

Setting the rocket on its launchpad, he said, “But retroviruses are notoriously unstable and mutate constantly. Those unpredictable ones are the ones you have to fear, because by the time you’ve figured out a cure, the one you’re trying to kill has already mutated into something else.”