“That right? Now, why would Private bodyguards be in a favela?” he asked her.
“There’d been threats to a church group. My men were volunteers.”
“See there?” the Bear said, looking to me. “Do-gooders getting killed. Always happens. It’s why I try never to do that much good.”
He translated, and his buddies broke up laughing and fist-bumped.
I said, “Two American girls went missing after the shooting. Twins.”
“That right?” He seemed surprised. “Hadn’t heard that.”
Tavia showed Urso a picture of Natalie and Alicia. The Bear whistled and held the photo out for his friends to see. They reacted with similar admiration.
Urso said, “We’d remember those two lindíssimas. You don’t see too many gorgeous americanas in Alemão or Spirit.”
“Will you ask around for us? There’d be real money in it if you came up with something strong,” Tavia said.
“Yeah? How much?”
“You put us onto them, I’ll give you fifty thousand reais.”
Urso snorted. “Make it worth my time. Make it dollars and I’m yours.”
Tavia glanced at me, and I nodded.
“All right, L.A.,” Urso said with that gold-capped grin, and he bumped my knuckles again. “Bear’s on it, and I’ll find you those girls, ’cept I need an advance for me and the boys to go to work.”
“Give him five,” I said to Tavia.
“Ten,” Urso said.
“Seven.”
The Bear winked and grinned lazily as if he’d just scratched his back against the bark of an old tree.
Chapter 18
At three fifteen that same day, Tavia and I stood on the tarmac of a private jetport at the domestic airport on the Rio harbor front. We had a Mercedes-Benz armored limousine at our backs and four operators armed with H&K submachine guns nearby.
I still felt nervous as the Gulfstream appeared out of the sun.
“What are they like?” Tavia asked. “I mean, in person?”
“The mom, Cherie, can be intense, passionate, idealistic, and, at times, irrational,” I said. “Andy’s your typical engineering über-mind: brilliant, but socially awkward, probably two or three clicks along the autism spectrum.”
The Gulfstream landed, revealing the logo: WE. The jet taxied and rolled to a stop in front of us. Tavia signaled her guards. They moved in pairs, two men on each side of the exit ramp as it lowered.
Cherie Wise, a pale redhead in her early forties, came out wearing red capri pants, sandals, a blue Hamilton College sweatshirt, a straw hat, and oversize sunglasses. Andy Wise, a lanky, balding man with round wire-rimmed glasses, followed her. He wore Wranglers, a green polo shirt with the WE logo on the breast pocket, and running shoes, and he carried an iPad under one arm.
A structural engineer with a Stanford MBA, Andy and his company, Wise Enterprises, had slain giants, making billions in public works and telecommunications projects around the world: Hotels in Dubai. Tunnels in China. Hydroelectric dams in southern Africa. Cellular networks all over the Third World. In Brazil, WE had been involved in the construction of the World Cup stadiums and many of the Olympic venues.
Wise’s wife was no slouch either. An English major and former Peace Corps volunteer, she was a tough administrator with an advanced degree from Wharton. She ran WE Help, the Wise family’s philanthropic foundation, which gave away tens of millions of dollars every year to various worthy causes.
“Tell me again why I shouldn’t fire you, Jack?” Cherie said coldly by way of greeting.
“As ineffective as we were in this case, we’re still the best,” I replied, having anticipated the challenge. “Without Private’s help, you’ll be significantly weakened in your effort to find and free your daughters.”
Andy Wise stared at me like I was a disappointment, said, “Status of your investigation?”
“We’ve got every agent in the Rio office assigned to your case,” Tavia said, and she introduced herself.
“And I’ve mobilized a secondary team of my top operators. They’ll be leaving Los Angeles within the hour,” I said.
“So you are in the organizational stage,” Wise said, staring over my shoulder as if there were something behind me only he could see.
“And data-gathering,” I said, trying to speak his language. “Tavia’s joined forces with a favela insider who has a team tracking your daughters’ whereabouts. But, please, I’d feel better if we were in the limo.”
Cherie glanced around, said, “We aren’t safe here?”
“I think we’re perfectly safe here,” I said. “But I don’t want to take any chances until we know why your daughters were abducted. We’ll bring you to your hotel, talk on the way.”
The four of us climbed into the limo. Tavia and I sat in the seats facing backward, across from the couple.
When the doors were shut and locked, Wise rolled his head and rocked slightly, said matter-of-factly, “I don’t think there’s a question about why they were taken, Jack. The hostage and ransom business is booming in South America. Talk to the people at Global Rescue and they’ll tell you that.”
“Andy, stop,” Cherie said. “I’m sure they—”
Wise ignored her. “I’ve seen the statistics. I know the odds of us ever seeing our daughters safe and—”
“Stop it!” Cherie snapped. “They’re not statistics, Andy. They’re our daughters, for Christ’s sake!”
“Get emotional if you wish,” Wise said. “But the numbers don’t lie. It’s why I didn’t want them down here in the first place. I knew the threat. I informed you of the threat. But, no, I was ignored. The statistics were ignored just so you could make the girls look better on some future résumé.”
“That had nothing to do with it,” Cherie shot back. “I wanted them to see the world for real, not in the abstract. I wanted them to understand people and their plights on a gut, emotional level, not as some goddamned number or statistic.”
“And look where it’s gotten us,” Wise said.
Tavia’s cell phone rang. She answered, listened, said, “We’ll be right there.”
She hung up, turned around in her seat, and knocked on the divider, which lowered. “Change of plans,” she said. “We’re going to Private Rio.”
“Why?” Cherie asked. “I need a shower, a change of—”
“We’ve been contacted by the kidnappers, Mrs. Wise,” Tavia said. “They’ve sent a video of the girls.”
Chapter 19
“Mom? Dad?” Natalie Wise sobbed. “You’ve got to help us.”
“Please?” Alicia whimpered. “We want to come home.”
“Oh God,” Cherie Wise said, and she buried her face in her husband’s chest.
We were in the lab at Private Rio, watching the video on a big screen. The billionaire rubbed his wife’s back mechanically and looked at his daughters with little affect, as if he considered the images nothing more than a gathering of blips and algorithms.
But I was studying everything the camera revealed. The girls were bound with leather straps to ladder-back chairs. The chairs were set about a foot from each other in front of a black curtain parted to show a painting of children on their knees praying.
Natalie and Alicia were frightened, filthy, and showing signs of abuse. Natalie, a redhead like her mother, had a severely swollen left cheek. Alicia, sandy blond and the smaller of the two, had a split lip and eyes that looked like she hadn’t slept in days.
Two masked figures in black appeared, a male and a female. The man’s mask had feathers and green sequins; the woman’s was more primitive, a rudely carved face with a diamond-shaped mouth and painted cat’s eyes.