Chapter 85
Friday, August 5, 2016
12:30 p.m.
Six and a Half Hours Before the Olympic Games Open
Justine and I climbed from a taxi outside a long steel building in a light-industrial complex in Rio’s Estação District.
Lieutenant Acosta pulled in behind us and got out. For an early Friday afternoon, the entire complex seemed empty. Then again, the president had declared the opening day of the Olympics a national holiday in Brazil.
We went to the door of AV3 Research and knocked. No one answered.
“Think you have enough cause to enter?” I asked.
“We’re in Brazil,” Lieutenant Acosta said. “I’ll invent a cause, say I was doing a well-being check on Castro. If we find nothing, we’re good and we back out.”
We tried to force the door, with no luck. It was reinforced steel and triple dead-bolted. Acosta called a locksmith. After we’d waited for forty minutes in the lieutenant’s car to get out of the suddenly oppressive heat, the locksmith had the door swinging open.
The outer office wasn’t much — file cabinets, an old desk. But we found the second door and had the locksmith pick it. It was 1:25 p.m. when we finally gained access to Castro’s inner sanctum, turned on the lights, and saw the clean room.
We walked around it, finding the entrance, but looking first through glass windows into a spotless, elaborate, and meticulously arranged laboratory.
“I’m not going in there,” Justine said.
“I’ll go,” I said.
“I will too,” Acosta said.
“We don’t know what we’re dealing with, Jack,” Justine said.
“We’ll have a look around outside first,” I said. “Get a clue.”
We walked through the workshop, finding a metal band saw, a bender, and lengths of titanium rods and flats. Jars of titanium screws and bolts. A small welding setup. Cargo netting. Various gas canisters of different sizes.
“Someone’s building and looking to save weight,” I said.
“For what?” Acosta asked.
“I can’t figure it out. Maybe he left a design or something.”
I began opening drawers, finding the usual tools but also calipers, a guide to stress testing, stout metal fittings, and lengths of high-pressure hose. In a bottom drawer I found something odd: a short length of black hose clamped to what looked like an airbrush.
“What’s that for?” Acosta asked.
“No idea,” I said. I set it aside and moved on toward a second bench that smelled like airplane glue and featured tiny wood clamps, fine-toothed saws, and scalpels. There were thumbtacks and little bits of paper stuck to the wall above the bench. Something had been torn down.
On top of the bench were two airbrushes and a can of hose glue. I opened drawers and found sheets of balsa wood, cardboard tubes, and what looked like little plastic fins. What the hell was he building?
“We haven’t seen anything that says he’s a threat,” Justine said.
“If it’s anywhere, it’s in there,” I said, gesturing to the laboratory.
“I’ll wait here,” she said.
Acosta and I went through the zipped door into a kind of anteroom. Hanging on one wall was a protocol list with a diagram that we followed to suit up safely. The hoods and gauntlets went on last.
“Part of me thinks this is nuts, Jack,” Lieutenant Acosta said.
“I think that part of you is right,” I said, getting used to the way he sounded over the little motorized HEPA filter that cleaned the air we were breathing.
I bent down, unzipped another door, and climbed into an air lock with an exhaust fan and ductwork leading to a large air-scrubbing device overhead. Near the exhaust fan there was a showerhead with a sign next to it: 2 % bleach.
Lieutenant Acosta climbed in after me and peered through the porthole window on the opposite door. “So there are infectious diseases in there?”
“Strong enough to require a Clorox bath afterward,” I said, and I shivered before unzipping the third door and stepping out into the lab.
I was struck again by how regimented the room seemed. Everything had a place and everything was in its place.
I spotted Justine looking in through the small window in the far wall and gave her the thumbs-up before walking past a row of glass cages and seeing wood chips and rodent feces in the bottom. Above the glass enclosures there were unplugged electronic monitors. What did they measure?
I walked over to the refrigerator. Acosta circled the other way, looking at the scientific apparatus near a lift-top freezer.
I opened the fridge and felt my breath catch.
Hundreds of vials of blood hung in racks inside. They were labeled in code on the side of the trays: I-1:7V, I-1:7M, I-1:8V, I-1:8M...
What did any of that mean? I had no idea. I picked up an IV bag of blood lying on the lower shelf.
I turned it over in my hand and read what was written there.
LSANTOS-1 — H:9V CONTRAIDO: 7.30.16.
“Lieutenant?” I called. “You better come see this.”
“Not before you see this, Jack,” Acosta said.
Still holding the IV bag, I shut the fridge door and saw Acosta holding up the freezer top and pointing inside.
Chapter 86
I stared in at the frozen couple. Their lips — his gray and hers blue — barely touched. On the young woman’s back, there was a rectangular piece of freezer paper. Someone had scrawled across it in big block letters: Enfin os ricos estão atormentados.
“What’s it mean?” I asked.
“You can translate it two ways,” Acosta said. “‘For once the rich are tormented,’ or ‘For once the rich are plagued.’”
Oh Jesus, I thought, and closed my eyes. It was real, then. The weird gut sense I’d had being around Castro the first time had been true.
“What’d you find?” Lieutenant Acosta said.
I showed him the bag of blood and the label. “Luna Santos-1 — Hydra-9 virus. I don’t know what contraído means.”
“‘Contracted,’” Acosta said. “As in disease.”
Contracted July 30, 2016, then. “That was the day Luna died,” I said. “Castro was using this secret lab to develop a deadly virus, using humans as his guinea pigs, and...”
I turned back to the freezer, leaned way in, and studied the color of the dead couple’s skin.
“This wasn’t just a lab,” I said. “It was a propagation operation too.”
“Meaning what?”
“We know he drained Luna of blood. Judging by the extreme pallor, the male victim has been drained of blood too. But there’s only one blood bag in the fridge, and not enough in the vials to make up for the difference. We’re talking liters of infected blood. We need experts in here, and we need to find Castro.”
“You really think he plans on...” Acosta looked sick.
“Based on this place? I think he’s been planning for a long, long time.”
I glanced at the clock. It was a quarter to five, two hours and...
I knew it all then, fought a queasy, liquid feeling, said, “We need to get out of here. Now. I think I know where he’s going to attack.”
We shut the freezer, put the IV bag holding Luna Santos’s infected blood back in the fridge, and returned to the air lock, where we took bleach showers and shed the white suits.
“What is it?” Justine asked.