Джеймс Паттерсон - The Games

But we reached the bottom of the stairs without incident. It was cooler and drier in the cellar than it was above. There was so little light down there that the goggles only barely revealed a blurry green hallway with doors on both sides.

“Take your goggles off,” I murmured. “Go to flashlight.”

“You sure?”

“I’d rather risk being shot at than make a mistake because of the goggles.”

She understood, pulled her goggles off, and went to her vest for a Mini Maglite. I did too, setting my goggles down on the floor and sliding the thin, powerful flashlight under the barrel of the Beretta before flipping the switch on.

The beam cut the gloom all the way to the back of the hallway. We went down it, trying the doors, finding them unlocked, and peering inside each. These rooms were evidently where the tobacco had been stored, but they were empty now.

The hallway reached a T. A heavy wooden door stood at each end of the stubby arms. The right-hand door was padlocked. The left was ajar. A breeze from the other side caused it to move slightly.

I heard a voice. Female. Scared. Crying behind the padlocked door. I immediately cupped the end of the flashlight, and Tavia did the same, both of us letting just enough light through our fingers to see our way toward the voice.

Tavia and I snuck forward. Another woman spoke, louder, threatening in tone, but too muffled to make out. Tavia pressed into the wall two feet shy of the door, shotgun up.

I stepped right up to the door, started to check my watch.

Beyond the door, there was a loud, flat crack of wood on flesh. The first woman began to scream and sob.

I shot the lock.

The bullet snapped the hasp.

I ripped the lock free, pressed the latch, and shouldered my way into a dirty concrete-floored room with a painting on the rear wall. The mural depicted scenes from a town during a tobacco harvest. Dead center of the painting, on their knees in front of a church, were the two praying children we’d seen in the background of the ransom video.

The Wise twins were gone. There was no one in the room. All we found were two mattresses, a filthy yellow cotton scarf, a thin hemp bracelet, several empty water bottles, some greasy waxed paper, and, on a stool, a tablet computer playing a two-minute video loop.

In the video, Natalie was slumped in a chair, unconscious, the yellow scarf around her neck. The camera swung, revealing Alicia on her knees, praying like the children in the mural, showing the hemp bracelet on her wrist. She was begging her parents to pay the ransom and not try another rescue.

Then the woman in the primitive mask appeared.

She hit Alicia with a blackjack, knocked her senseless and bleeding to the floor. Then she spoke evenly to the camera.

“You will be contacted tomorrow regarding payment, Senhor Wise,” she said. “No cops. No Private. The money for your daughters, a quick exchange. Unless you try to fuck with us. In that case, all you’ll get back is their worthless bodies.”

Tavia bagged the tablet, Natalie’s scarf, and Alicia’s bracelet and went back for the samba mask. I checked the other door, the one that had been ajar and moving slightly in a breeze. The hallway continued on. At the far end it met another staircase that went up to another door.

I opened it. The pit bulls came at me like blitzing linebackers.

I yanked the door shut just in time, heard them thud, howl, and scratch violently against it. I knew now: the kidnappers had taken the girls out through the lumberyard.

It was almost daybreak when we slipped back out the window.

Urso eased out of the shadows. “They in there?”

“They were until they spotted you,” I said.

“That’s bullshit,” Urso said. “No one sees the Bear unless he wants to be seen.”

“Then they saw one of your friends,” I said. “They escaped through an underground passage to a shed in that lumberyard. You see anybody coming out of it? A gray van?”

The Bear looked uncertain, said, “I dunno. We were watching this place.”

“Did you go in there before us?” Tavia asked. “Look around?”

“No way, Reynaldo,” Urso said hotly. “I heard the chimes, figured the train distance, left to call my boys into position. End of story until you showed up.”

“How long were you gone when you went to get your friends?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Ten minutes? I walked around the corner to make the call where I wouldn’t be heard.”

“Whatever it was, something spooked them,” Tavia said.

Urso said, “I still get paid, though. I found them.”

Tavia hesitated, but I said, “He did his job. Pay him.”

I’d no sooner said that when my cell phone rang. It was General da Silva.

“General?” I said, stifling a yawn. “You’re up early.”

“I’m always up early,” the Olympic security chief said.

“That’s why you’ve always got things so well in hand.”

“Not this morning,” he said. “We’ve had a murder in the ranks, Jack. I want you and Octavia at the crime scene as soon as possible.”

Traffic was building. It took us almost an hour to drive from the cigar factory to Barra da Tijuca, a newer district of Rio south of Leblon. Shopping malls. Strip malls. Tract houses with red-tile roofs. It looked like large swaths of Orange County, California, had been slapped down in coastal Brazil.

We followed General da Silva’s directions to a residential street on a hillside that had a view of the beach and the ocean. Da Silva was waiting for us by a police barrier along with Lieutenant Bruno Acosta. There was a fire truck up the street, and firemen reeling in hoses. The air was tainted with a sickly smoke.

“Media hasn’t gotten word of it,” Tavia said.

“Yet,” da Silva said, not happy.

“We meet again,” Lieutenant Acosta said to me. “You find those missing girls?”

“No.”

“Ransom note?”

“Not yet,” Tavia said a little too quickly. “At least, we haven’t heard about one.”

“Let’s focus on what’s going on right here, okay?” the general said.

Acosta studied Tavia and me a beat and then motioned us through the barrier and down the road. The smell became more ungodly the closer we got to the driveway of a single-family home set behind lush hedges.

We came around the corner of the hedge and saw a tropical garden in front of a beautiful Mediterranean-style two-story home. The only thing that marred the idyllic setting was an incinerated car with the silhouette of a charred corpse in the driver’s seat; puddles of water surrounded the vehicle.

“The water’s unfortunate,” Tavia said. “Probably compromised evidence of whoever—”

“Get out of my way!” someone yelled behind us. I looked over my shoulder, saw a fit man in his late thirties wearing a business suit and no tie running up the street toward us. “What the hell is going on?”

“Senhor Santos. Antonio,” da Silva said, trying to stop him. “You don’t want to see this.”

“See what?” Antonio Santos cried, and he dodged around him, went to the end of the driveway, and halted.

His jaw sagged open and his eyes got hazy with disbelief. Then the corner of his lower lip began to quiver, and he sank slowly to his knees.

“Luna!” he howled. “Oh God. Oh...”

He retched and then fell over and curled up into a fetal position. We waited until the spasms that racked his body eased and then helped him to his feet.

“Can we talk to you inside?” da Silva asked.

Antonio Santos nodded numbly. Then he stole another glance at the horror, said, “Did they... was she... burned alive?”

The medical examiner, a big-bellied man named Cardoso who’d been studying the body, joined us, and the general looked to him. Cardoso shook his head. “Gunshot wound to the back of the skull. She probably died instantly and long before the fire.”