Джеймс Паттерсон - The Games

“Jack, I’m looking at your camera feed. I can see the drone hanging there, and there’s something flashing green in that hammock thing.”

I looked down and through the lower door window and saw a small digital readout blinking in bright green: 00:60, 00:59, 00:58, 00:57...

“Jack, it’s a timer!” Justine said. “It’s going off in—”

“Fifty-four seconds,” I said, gritting my teeth, gaining altitude, and wondering what in God’s name I was going to do.

In far less than a minute, Castro’s biological weapon of mass destruction was going to trigger about three feet below me. The tanks were full of Hydra-9 virus. Those hoses and airbrushes were going to let loose a mist of death over Rio de Janeiro.

“Jack,” Lieutenant Acosta said, truly frightened. “Are we going to—”

I swung the helicopter in a tight three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn, scanning, looking, trying to figure out where to go.

“Forty-five seconds, forty-four...” Justine said.

I ignored her, and when the chopper’s nose came around to the east-northeast, I saw the cruise ships docked around the Pier Mauá and others moored in a small cove of Guanabara Bay toward the commercial piers at Caju.

“Thirty-eight,” Justine said. “Thirty-seven, thirty-six...”

“Hold on,” I said and accelerated the helicopter straight at that cove.

“Twenty-five, twenty-four...”

We roared over throngs of people partying in the streets of Gamboa, celebrating Rio and the Olympic Games, blissfully unaware of the danger flying above them.

“Eighteen, seventeen, sixteen...”

I dropped altitude fast as I came over the crowded central bus station. The spire of Santo Cristo church flashed by.

“Ten, nine, eight...”

“Hold on!” I shouted at Acosta as we flew fifty feet over traffic-jammed Kubitschek Avenue and the sea wall that holds back the bay.

“Six, five, four...”

We barely cleared the top of a cruise ship moored there.

“Three...”

I drove the stick down.

“Two...”

We dropped like a stone the final thirty feet.

The last thing I remember before impact was the inky surface of the bay coming up fast and Justine saying, “One...”

“Jack?”

I heard someone call my name from far down a long, dark tunnel.

“Jack, can you hear me?”

I recognized the voice as Justine’s, took a deep breath that hurt like hell, and forced open my eyes. At first it was all blurry and nothing made sense. Then things came more into focus.

I was lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by monitors. Justine sat in a chair next to me. She was holding my left hand with both of her hands and grinning at me with watery eyes.

“Welcome back to the living,” Justine said. “God answered our prayers.”

My head swam. “How long have I...”

“Four days,” she said, taking away one hand to wipe away her tears. “In addition to a broken sternum, you sustained a head injury in the crash. You had some brain bleeding and swelling. They kept you in a medically induced coma until they could drill holes in your skull to relieve the pressure. That was two days ago.”

“What a difference two days make,” I said, and laughed, which made my chest hurt and started a clanging in my head.

I must have moaned because Justine stood up from the chair all worried and said, “You shouldn’t move a lot.”

“I just figured that out,” I said. “Is there anything they can do for the ax-in-my-skull feeling?”

A nurse bustled in. “He’s awake! When?”

“Five minutes ago,” Justine said. “And he’s amazingly alert. Knows me. Logical. Coherent.”

The nurse looked up at the clock and brightened. “I win, then. We had a pool going on how long it would be for you to wake up once we took you off the sedatives. I got it by eighteen minutes.”

“Glad to be of service,” I said.

“His head hurts,” Justine said.

“I imagine so,” the nurse said. “I’ll get the doctor.”

My eyes drifted shut, and I fell into a dreamless sleep until the neurosurgeon shook me awake. Justine was still there, and she made phone calls while the doctor examined me.

He seemed satisfied with my progress and told me he’d give me something to take the edge off the pain. I wanted to kiss him.

Shortly after I was given the drugs, some of the fire in my chest and the pounding in my head ebbed. I started to drift off again.

Seymour Kloppenberg and Maureen Roth came in and woke me up again. Sci grinned and bobbed his head. Mo-bot burst into tears.

Fussing over my sheets, she blubbered, “We were all so worried.”

“You shouldn’t have been. My head’s the hardest part of me,” I said.

“Not anymore,” Sci said. “It’s the holiest part of you.”

“Funny,” I said.

“That was a brilliant move, in case no one’s told you yet.”

I blinked in confusion. “What was?”

“Crash-landing that helicopter and Castro’s virus into salt water.”

“It was the only thing I could think of. Did the device go off?”

“It did,” Sci said. “But Castro developed Hydra-9 as an airborne pathogen. The saline and the pollution in the bay killed the virus, probably on contact. There’s no evidence of it anywhere in the cove, anyway, and they’ve been testing around the clock.”

“That’s our superhero at work,” Justine said with a wry smile.

“I am no superhero,” I said. “Lots of people helped stop Castro, and none more important than Maureen.”

“Oh, c’mon.” Mo-bot tittered. “My part was luck.”

“You thought to look,” I said.

“No, I happened to glance at the NBC raw feeds and in came footage of the Redeemer shot just before dark when there was this weird reddish color in the western sky. I thought it was dramatic, so I blew it up on the big screen in the command center. One second the statue’s right arm was flat, and the next second it was like it had biceps — you know, a big bump that wasn’t there before?”

“But you saw the bump, and you magnified the image enough to see it was Castro standing in the hatch,” I said.

“Well, yes, I did do that,” Mo-bot said.

“Thank God you did,” I said. “Even though we figured Castro had gone up Corcovado Mountain, we never would have located him inside the statue in time to save forty-five thousand people from a deadly virus. This one’s all you, Maureen Roth. You saved the day.”

Mo-bot beamed and laughed, said, “I’ll take some of the credit, but you did all the crazy stuff to stop him and his drone.”

“Acosta was a big part of it too,” I said. “He took a bullet. How is he?”

They sobered. Justine said, “Bruno died on impact, Jack.”

I’d been growing stronger by the minute until then. I sagged and felt shitty.

Acosta was dead. Tavia was dead. I was involved in both tragedies. I was a contributing factor in both deaths. I’d survived them both and felt the guilt of that like a heavy blanket around me.

“Bruno was a great cop,” I said. “Smart. Tough. As brave as they come. But I couldn’t figure out any other way to handle the virus than to crash.”

“You did the right thing,” said General da Silva, who’d just come into the hospital room. “Acosta would have said the same. He died a hero and a martyr for every single person in that stadium and for every single person who might have contracted the virus afterward. You two prevented a national calamity, Jack. I know the president wishes to thank you personally when you’re up to it.”

That was nice, but losing Tavia and Acosta in the process of keeping the Olympic Games safe was a bitter pill to swallow, one I was sure I’d be tasting in the back of my throat for years.