Джеймс Паттерсон - The Games

Thursday, August 4, 2016

1:30 p.m.

Twenty-Nine and a Half Hours Before the Olympic Games Open

Moving down the hall at Private Rio, talking on my cell, I told Cherie Wise that I would be at her suite by three thirty to watch the latest release from Favela Justice. Then I hung up and entered the lab.

Mo-bot and Sci had six big screens running as they helped Tavia look into the life and times of Dr. Lucas Castro. I scanned the various web pages and documents they’d already called up.

Dr. Castro seemed an all-star by anyone’s estimation. Born in a small favela in northern Rio, orphaned young, Castro defied crushing odds and won a full scholarship to the federal university, where he excelled.

Castro studied medicine and virology, graduating with an MD and a PhD, credentials that won him a place at the prestigious Oswaldo Cruz Institute, arguably Brazil’s finest medical-research facility. The doctor garnered high praise for his early research and then took a two-year leave of absence to work with the World Health Organization.

Castro worked in Uganda, Haiti, and in the Upper Amazon River Basin, where he was a member of the team that first encountered Hydra. A Brazilian physician named Sophia Martine was also on the team. Martine was a river doctor, moving up and down the Amazon’s tributaries by boat and offering medical service to the poorest of the poor. She was the first to hear of a virus plaguing the primitive peoples of the rain forest.

“That’s her,” Tavia said, pointing to a picture of an attractive young woman doctoring a baby in a jungle setting. “They married soon after meeting. Castro returned to his job at the Cruz Institute. She gave up her river practice to work for a Rio-based NGO that gets medical care into the favelas.”

“And where is she now?”

“Dead,” Mo-bot said, calling up the death certificate.

It said Sophia Martine Castro. Cause of death: Accidental. Massive blunt-force trauma.

“Car accident?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” Tavia said, pensive. “I think I remember this case.”

She went to a keyboard, typed several words into Brazilian Google, and hit Enter. Scanning the list, she said, “It’s her. I don’t know why I didn’t put the names together before.”

A clipping from the newspaper Folha de São Paulo appeared on the screen with the same picture of Dr. Martine doctoring the baby.

“What’s it say?” I asked.

Tavia said, “She was killed during a protest in a favela that was being demolished to make way for one of the World Cup stadiums. Eyewitnesses said she got too close to one of the bulldozers, walked toward it at an odd angle. The machine operator claimed he never saw her, ran right over her while razing the slum.”

“That’s brutal,” Mo-bot said.

“Maybe brutal enough to threaten her husband’s sanity,” I said.

Arms crossed, Tavia said, “I still don’t fully understand why you’re suspicious of him.”

“I don’t either,” I admitted. “Not fully. But there was that look of admiration. And what possible reason would someone have to shoot Luna Santos, drain her blood, and burn her?”

“Rage?”

“There’s that explanation,” I agreed. “It was all an expression of some deep homicidal anger we might never understand. Except Luna was infected and ravaged by Hydra-9 before she was shot and burned.”

“Okay?” Sci said.

“What if the killer was trying to hide the infection rather than the gunshot wound? If so, the killer had to have known the infection was there. And the best person to make that sort of diagnosis is Dr. Lucas Castro.”

Tavia said, “Maybe the best, but not the only.”

“Granted,” I said.

“Jack,” Mo-bot said. “You haven’t explained why Castro would shoot Luna and then burn her. And you don’t have anything that links Castro to Luna. There’s no reason why she’d go to him for a diagnosis only to have him flip out, kill her, and burn her.”

“Unless he infected her,” I said.

“Why would he do that?” Tavia asked. “How could he do that?”

“I don’t know,” I said, staring at the screens, seeing his birth certificate. “This may be nothing, but check his parents’ death certificates. I’d like to know what they died of.”

Mo-bot was already typing.

“What other Brazilian databases can you access that might give us another look at Dr. Castro?” I asked.

Tavia thought about that, went to the keyboard, and got into property and tax records. Castro currently worked at Hospital Geral and as a virology professor at the federal medical school. He rented a small apartment in Santa Teresa. In the secretary of state’s files, she found Castro listed as principal of AV3 Research, which rented space in a light-industrial area of northwest Rio.

“Jack?” Mo-bot called. “I found Castro’s parents’ death certificates.”

Tavia left her screen, went to Mo-bot’s. As she read, her facial muscles tensed. “They died of dengue fever within a day of each other. Castro was six.”

“So maybe Castro grows up obsessed with viruses because a virus took his parents,” I said. “He spends his professional life obsessed with them. And somehow Luna crosses his path, and either she’s infected and he realizes it, or he infects her and wants to cover it up.”

Tavia’s cell rang. She turned away, answered.

“But why Luna?” Mo-bot said. “Was she random?”

“Doesn’t feel random to me. Their paths crossed for a reason.”

“We just have to find out where,” Sci said, nodding.

I thought about the manner of Sophia Martine Castro’s death and what that might have done to her husband, tried to see it from his perspective. His wife was dead. Whom did he blame?

The construction worker? No.

The construction company? No again.

The authorities behind the building of the stadiums, the people his wife was protesting against when she died? Yes, that was the scenario that felt right.

But where did Luna fit in?

“Check Luna’s husband, Antonio,” I said. “Tell me if he was working for the World Cup organizing committee at the time of Sophia Martine’s death.”

My cell rang. Cherie Wise was calling. It was 3:28, two minutes before the latest update on her husband was to be delivered.

“Cherie,” I said. “I apologize, I’m hung up in the lab at Private Rio.”

“At Private Rio?” she shouted, sounding like she’d been drinking. “We have to watch this alone?”

“Stay on the phone with me,” I said. “The girls are with you?”

“You said you’d be here, Jack,” she snapped. “I thought I could count on you for that, at least.”

Tavia came over, giving me a time-out signal.

“Hold on one second, Cherie,” I said and pushed the mute button.

“That was Mariana Lopes,” Tavia said. “If she’s right, we’ve been played.”

“What? By who?”

“Urso. The Bear.”

That afternoon, the digital controls of the brand-new subway system failed and went offline for three hours, snarling traffic from one end of Rio de Janeiro to the other just as the bulk of the international athletes were arriving.

Tavia and I were stuck in a cab heading back toward Alemão and Spirit. Favela Justice was late delivering the video clip of Andy Wise, and I was trying to figure out how we’d been so conned.

Mariana Lopes said that earlier in the day a woman named Claudia had overdosed on heroin and was brought to her clinic near the Alemão favela. Nurses administered an opiate antagonist and Claudia began to come out of it.

The television was on in an adjacent room, tuned to the coverage of the Wise trial and the billion-dollar penalty.