Джеймс Паттерсон - The Games

That gave us only twelve minutes to figure out where Wise was.

“Can you delay support until twenty-one thirty-two?” I asked.

After a pause, da Silva said, “Agreed, Jack. You’ll have eighteen minutes to find him.”

We banked away from the cliff wall and zigzagged into a long, gradual descent toward the mouth of the canyon. Two minutes later we flew out of the gap. The lights of Leblon were so bright, I turned the goggles off. We’d lost nine hundred feet in altitude by the time we banked after Tavia’s glider.

Far below us, raucous, celebrating crowds were partying on the mosaic walkways along the beaches, and vendors were doing a booming business. No one looked up that I could see. We were like big black bats, invisible against the night sky.

“Two minutes out, General,” I said.

We turned and flew west now, straight toward the lower end of that jungle clearing. I drew my Glock from my chest holster.

Tavia’s pilot stalled slightly to let us pass and land first. I flipped the night-vision goggles on. We dropped under five hundred feet.

Shooting began in the trees far downslope of the clearing, a short burst followed by four or five random shots and then nothing.

Three hundred and fifty feet. Two fifty. There were men with weapons and flashlights running downhill toward the shooting. We flew right over them, no more than seventy feet above their heads. They never looked up, just dashed on into the trees.

My pilot pulled a release, and our legs dropped. He stalled the glider hard. We floated toward the ground. We reached our feet out like night birds in search of a roost and landed with barely a sound.

Tavia and her pilot landed just as quietly about twenty yards away.

“We’re down,” I said, getting myself free of the harness.

“Eighteen minutes,” the general said.

“Understood.”

The glider pilots knew to go to the tree line and wait there in cover until the BOPE forces landed. Tavia and I split up. She took the right flank of the clearing and I had the left.

The Glocks out and ready, we snaked fast through the trees to within fifty yards of the shacks. I switched the goggles to infrared mode. The wavering heat glow of three people showed inside the near shack’s walls. Two people were in the shack closer to Tavia. Armed men, five of them, were arrayed across the front of both buildings.

“Tavia, stay put, cover me, I’m going to go in there, see if I figure out which one’s holding Wise.”

“Sitting tight,” she replied.

I slipped around and got higher up the mountain than the shacks. Then I dropped in behind them, sneaking the last twenty yards to a lit open window at the back of the larger shack.

I turned off the goggles, eased up, peeked inside, and saw a kid in front of several computer screens. I recognized him — the pickpocket who’d taken Cherie Wise’s purse. Beyond him, an armed man stood in the doorway. Where was the third person I’d seen in the infrared?

The middle computer screen in front of the boy came on and showed Andrew Wise sitting in that familiar chair, blinking at the lights.

The billionaire looked haggard and drawn, but his eyes still had a spark.

Wearing that primitive mask, Amelia Lopes appeared beside him.

“Welcome to the Favela Justice show,” Amelia said, facing the camera. “We had sixty-three million votes in that short time. Isn’t that incredible? Sixty-three million. And the hash tags? Top three on Twitter for the last six hours. The size of the vote speaks volumes about the interest people have in the plight of the poor. So what was the outcome?”

Amelia turned the mask this way and that, as if considering the results.

“Before we give you the final tally,” she said, “let’s review the highlights of the case against Andrew Wise.”

For the next few minutes, she did just that. The billionaire said nothing.

When she finished, she said, “What do you think the numbers are going to be, Senhor Wise?”

“I have no idea,” Wise said. “They don’t matter.”

“They don’t matter? Poor people don’t matter?”

“I didn’t say that,” Wise said.

“The world just heard you say that,” Amelia said, turning back to the camera. “Sixty-three million votes. Final tally in the case against Andrew Wise. For hash tag WiseGuilty: twenty-nine million. For hash tag PayTheBillion: eleven million.

“But hash tag WiseDecision? Only twenty-three million votes in favor of the accused and now convicted Mr. Wise.”

She paused, then turned her thumb up, then turned it down. “Forty million people thought Mr. Wise should pay the billion-dollar penalty. But is a billion enough when a man has so many billions? Shouldn’t we exact some greater punishment for his deeds?”

Amelia reached around behind her and came up with a pistol. “Shouldn’t Andrew Wise pay for his greed in a much more permanent way?”

She aimed the pistol at Wise’s head, said, “Any last words?”

Wise looked frightened for the first time. He glanced at her and said, “Forty million people said I should pay a billion dollars to the poor. I get that, but they never said a thing about killing—”

He stopped his defense at the sound of a helicopter coming hard.

I heard the BOPE’s helicopter coming too. So did one of Urso’s men, who roared out an alarm. Things started going downhill fast from there.

The armed guy went to the pickpocket, said, “We’re going, Alou!”

Then he looked through the window and saw me, tried to swing his gun my way. I shot him twice in the chest and then aimed at the boy.

“Where are they?”

Terrified, he pointed toward the second shack.

“Stay there,” I said and I was turning to run that way when I saw movement beyond the boy and caught a fleeting glimpse of someone running out the front door carrying something that turned my blood cold.

Bolting to my right, I shouted, “Abort the landing, General! Repeat, abort the landing! They’ve got a—”

A man holding a machine gun appeared, started firing wildly in my direction. Tracers ripped past me like shooting stars as I sprinted around the corner of the shack.

The helicopter was close now. I could see the bays open, crowded with men in SWAT gear, even as more gunfire erupted. They weren’t aborting.

I heard several shots.

“I’m engaged,” Tavia said.

“Shoot Urso! He’s got a rocket grenade!”

I came around the front of the shack. Caught in the spotlight, the Bear was on one knee and already aiming. Tavia shot and I shot, and we both hit Urso, but not before he triggered the surface-to-air missile.

With a thud, the rocket fired and flame blew out the back of the launcher. The recoil tore it from Urso’s grasp and he began to crumple as a thin plume of fire trailed the missile into the crowded hold of the police chopper. The warhead exploded in a boom and a brilliant flash that engulfed the bay.

The bird made a metallic groan that I knew all too well. The helicopter listed, shuddered, and tumbled from the sky. It struck ground and cartwheeled across the slope into a tree before rupturing in a churning ball of blinding fire.

For a second I was so shocked I just stood there. Then I charged the second shack, hearing shooting to my right and bullets behind me.

When I hit the front porch, I fired two shots to my right and then threw my shoulder into the door. The door frame splintered. I hit it again and it gave way. I stepped into a short passage that led to a black curtain rimmed in bright light.

“Hear them coming?” I heard Wise say. “You can’t win.”

“No, rich man,” Amelia said. “It’s you who can’t win. It’s you who won’t win. No matter what happens to me, I want you to know who helped me. I want you to know the tragedy of your fucking life.”