Джеймс Паттерсон - The Games

“We’ll be right back, Jack,” Tavia called into the radio.

My fingers were on Barros’s neck by then. His skin was still warm to the touch, but there was no pulse that I could feel.

“Take your time,” I called sadly into the mike. “He’s gone.”

I hung there on the side of the cliff with the dead guide until the tram came back and lowered the winch rope. Then I clipped it directly to his harness and released him from the rope that had snapped his back and killed him.

Twenty minutes later, they pulled me into the tram. I sat against the wall opposite the corpse, feeling wrung out, and the cable car began to drop toward the mid-station.

“You okay, Jack?” Colonel da Silva asked.

“Honestly? I feel like I could sleep for a week.”

Tavia looked at her watch and grimaced. “I’m afraid you can’t, boss. We’re already running way late.”

I glanced at my own watch, closed my eyes, and groaned.

In a boteco, a small, open-air bar not far from the hospital, Dr. Lucas Castro took another belt of cachaça, Brazil’s potent sugarcane rum. He stared numbly at the television screen, which showed some American guy hanging off a rope running out of one of the tramcars on Sugarloaf Mountain.

Castro turned to Dr. Desales, said bitterly, “A climber dies. A climber’s rescued. It’s on every channel. But two kids from the favelas dying from a virus? The day before the World Cup final?”

“Not a chance,” Desales said, nodding.

Dr. Castro ordered another shot, unable to stop the events of the past five hours from spinning again in his head, getting him angrier and more resentful by the moment. He and Desales had stood there after little Jorge died, drenched in sweat as they watched the flat lines on the monitors, stunned by how fast the boy and his sister had deteriorated and succumbed. The children had been in their care less than three hours.

“We’ve got to get out of here and decontaminate,” he’d said at last.

Shaken, Desales had followed Castro through the plastic sheeting the nurses had put up while the doctors tried to save the children.

They went to a special room off the ICU, stripped, and put their clothes in a hazardous-waste bin for incineration. Then they examined each other for any possible body-fluid exposure. Satisfied that there had been none, they lathered head to toe in a mild bleach solution that they rinsed off under high-pressure hoses.

When they’d emerged from decontamination they found Manuel Pinto, the hospital administrator, waiting for them.

A puffy-faced fifty-something man in a finely cut linen suit, Pinto asked, “What the hell’s going on?”

“We lost two, a young boy and a girl from the favelas,” Dr. Castro replied. “It’ll take a PCR test to confirm it, but I believe it’s a virus that has broken out only once before. Upper Amazon Basin. Three years ago.”

“You were there?”

“With a World Health Organization unit,” Castro said.

“Mortality rate?”

“Sixteen percent,” Desales answered.

“But we’ve just had a hundred percent incident,” Castro said. “We need to quarantine the hospital and the entire favela where those kids lived.”

“An entire favela?” Pinto said doubtfully. “I don’t have that authority.”

“Then find someone who does. I’m going to talk to the parents.”

The mother, a sweet young woman named Fernanda Gonzalez, looked pleading and afraid when Dr. Castro walked out of the ICU into the waiting room.

“There’s no easy way to say this,” Castro said. “We lost both of them.”

Fernanda collapsed into the arms of Pietro, her husband, and sobbed.

“How can that be?” Pietro demanded hotly. “I want to see them.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible, sir,” Castro said. “We believe they died from a highly infectious virus.”

“What? Like Ebola?” Pietro asked in disbelief.

“Different, but yes, dangerous like that.”

“Where are they?” Fernanda sobbed.

“Their bodies are under quarantine. And we need to do blood tests on both of you and anyone else who came into contact with your children in the past twenty-four hours.”

“Oh God,” the kids’ mother moaned. “Oh God, this is not happening.”

Her husband held on to her and sobbed too. Castro stayed with them until they could answer his questions. He learned that they lived in a sprawling slum in northeast Rio that was home to almost two hundred thousand people.

The father had a decent job as a security guard at the monument of Christ the Redeemer on Corcovado Mountain. Fernanda stayed home and took care of the children. They’d both noticed that Maria had been lethargic the evening before. In the middle of the night, she’d started vomiting. An hour later, so had Jorge.

“Where did they get the little cuts on their feet?” Castro asked.

“I don’t know,” Fernanda said. “They’re kids. They’re outside all the time.”

Barefoot? Castro thought, suppressing a shudder. In a slum?

The doctor had grown up in one of Rio’s favelas and knew all too well that hygiene in many of them was minimal at best. So whatever the kids stepped on had been infected with Hydra. But who or what had carried the virus there in the first place?

“Dr. Castro?”

He had looked up from the parents to see the hospital administrator standing there, rubbing his hands nervously. Beside him was an imperious little—

The bartender put a full shot glass of cachaça on the bar in front of the doctor, taking Castro from his thoughts.

Castro picked up the shot glass and held it up to Desales. “To Igor Lima,” he said. “The dumbest cover-your-ass idiot I have ever met.”

The doctors clinked glasses.

They took the rum in one gulp, ordered another round, and almost immediately Castro’s thoughts began to swirl again to Igor Lima.

Lima worked in the office of the mayor of Rio. He specialized in public-health issues, and when Castro and the hospital administrator had met with him just a few hours before, the man had been mightily annoyed to have been called to work on the Saturday before the World Cup final.

“Viruses and diseases have a way of ignoring such things,” Castro had told him.

“What viruses?” Lima had asked. “What diseases?”

After looking at the hospital administrator, who turned his head away, Castro had brought Lima up to speed. The doctor finished with a plea to put the favela where the children had lived under quarantine.

The mayoral aide’s chin retreated. His lips did a stiff dance, and then he shook his head. “That’s not happening.”

“What?” Castro demanded. “Why?”

“Because you’re not sure it’s a virus that killed those kids.”

“I am sure. I—”

“You haven’t run the PCR tests,” Lima said. “You said so yourself.”

“Not yet, but—”

“But nothing, Doctor. We’ll keep the bodies and the ICU in quarantine pending autopsies and figure out where we are on Monday.”

“Monday?” Castro sneered. “You mean after the World Cup final, don’t you? That’s what’s behind this. You don’t want to have the mayor and FIFA embarrassed; you want the media broadcasting only good thoughts all over the world tomorrow afternoon. Right? That’s the reason you’re burying a potential epidemic, isn’t it?”

Lima sputtered, “I’m not burying an epidemic.”

Castro poked the bureaucrat in the chest with his finger, said, “When a variation of this virus hit a village up in the Amazon a few years back, we had a sixteen percent mortality rate. But this is a mutation of Hydra. The cells have six heads instead of five. It killed both those children. One hundred percent mortality.”