She moved the binoculars, paused, and held them on a group of church volunteers standing on what passed for a playground at the school, distributing clothes and food. She studied the line of slum dwellers awaiting their handouts as well as the knot of young, foreign do-gooders doling out the contributions. Two girls, roughly nineteen, pretty, fair-skinned Caucasians, stood out. She watched them for a long time, seeing how tense and uncomfortable they were. Then Rayssa panned beyond the girls to two beefy guys watching over the whole scene.
Rayssa studied them for fifteen or twenty seconds before lifting her eyes from the binoculars and looking up at the sky. It was already dusk. Within minutes it would deepen into the time when jaguars hunted.
A fourteen-year-old boy came padding up to her. “They’re ready.”
“Get ready to disappear, Alou,” she said.
“Like smoke in the wind. The binoculars good?”
“The best,” she said. “Good steal.”
Alou grinned. “Lightest fingers in the city.”
Rayssa picked up a cell phone, sent a group text: Set.
She brought up the binoculars again. Lights were starting to blink on in shacks all around the slum. She peered toward the police station just over a mile away, scanned the paths and alleys below it. No men in SWAT gear. Just the good people of the favela going home after a day of backbreaking work.
Rayssa lowered the binoculars. She looked at the school with her naked eye now, gauging the deepening gloom. You didn’t want to go too early because the element of chaos and surprise would be reduced. You didn’t want to go too late because the chaos and surprise might be too much and it would all be for—
She snatched up the phone, texted Now.
Rayssa had just enough time to grab the binoculars before two rifle shots barked and echoed over the slum. Two bullets hit the beefy guys watching over the church group, one in each man’s head, dropping them in their tracks a split second before a thudding explosion lit up a street two miles away.
Every light in the favela died.
“Go, Alou!” Rayssa whispered, and she heard the boy leap up and run.
Under cover of night, Rayssa stood there a moment, hearing shouting and yelling far below her near the school, none of the words clear or distinguishable from that distance, just panicked voices all melding together and sounding to her like the throaty, hissing-whip roars of one very pissed-off jaguar.
Chapter 11
Darkness was starting to fall over Botafogo Harbor, ending the splendor we’d been watching from the spectacular table that recently promoted General Mateus da Silva had gotten us at Porcão, a restaurant that boasted dramatic views of the harbor and Sugarloaf Mountain.
Porcão offered Brazilian churrasco, with guys walking around carrying big skewers of freshly braised meat that they sliced off for you at your table. Tavia and I had eaten and drunk enough that we waved off a chance for more excellent rib eye, and I held my hand over my glass when da Silva attempted to fill it again.
“You don’t think there’s even a chance of a terrorist act at this Olympics?” I asked incredulously.
The general looked annoyed, poured more wine for Tavia, and said, “It’s not something I stay awake thinking about, my friend, and I’ll tell you why.”
I sat back, tried not to cross my arms, said, “I’m listening.”
“Do you think a foreign terrorist could mount some kind of action in Rio without help from the locals?” da Silva asked.
“I’m not following you,” Tavia said.
“Black September attacked at the Munich Olympics,” da Silva replied. “They were all Palestinians, but they had help, people in Germany who believed in their cause. But in Brazil, you will not find people to help foreign terrorists, just as you will not find homegrown terrorists here.”
“And why’s that?” I asked.
Acting as if it should have been obvious, the general said, “Brazilians and, especially, Cariocas do not have the right mind-set for terrorism. They’re too happy with their lives. Let’s say you are some crazy Middle Eastern terrorist and you come to Brazil and you say to your neighbor, ‘Hey, Senhor Carioca, let’s build a bomb to change the world.’ You know what Senhor Carioca is going to say?”
I raised my eyebrows. Tavia smiled as if she knew the answer.
The general continued, “He says, ‘No, you go on, Mr. Crazy Terrorist. I am heading to the beach. Cold beers, soccer balls, the ocean, many fine women in bikinis with big round bundas for me to look at and many muscular men with six-pack abs for the women to look at. This is all we want in life. This is all any Brazilian wants in life. Not terror, Mr. Crazy Man. Not bombs.’”
I glanced at Tavia, who was highly amused.
“You agree with this argument?” I asked.
“For the most part,” she said, chuckling.
“But what about Henri Dijon?” I asked.
General da Silva groaned. “Not again, Jack. That was no attack. No evidence of intentional harm was found.”
“Because the autopsy was not exactly thorough.”
“You blame the doctors for not wanting to risk their lives if there were no other incidents of infection?”
“Can I speak freely?”
“I’ve never known you not to.”
“You guys wanted the way Dijon died to be hushed up.”
Da Silva went stone-faced, said, “We wanted to avoid a panic if it was unnecessary, and history has proven us right. Dijon and those two children were the only ones who contracted that virus. You and Tavia didn’t get it, did you? The nurse didn’t get it, did she? If the mysterious plastic surgeon had gotten it, we would have heard, but we didn’t, did we? In fact, there were absolutely no new cases after Dijon, isn’t that so?”
“Correct,” I said.
“There you go. End of story.”
Tavia said, “But General, you have to admit it’s strange that two kids from a favela and one visiting dignitary were the only victims.”
“Why strange? Who knows where Dijon had been in the prior few days? And again, it doesn’t matter. No new cases in more than two years now.”
Tavia’s cell rang. She looked at it, said, “The office.”
She got up from the table, answered, and walked away.
I said, “I still think you’d be smart to beef up the number of hazmat teams at the venues.”
The general thought about that, shrugged, and said, “My budget is stretched thin as it is, thanks in part to Private’s exorbitant fees, but I’ll see.”
I had no time to respond to the not-so-subtle charge of price gouging because Tavia came back, highly agitated. “Sorry to dine and dash, General, but we have a problem with another client.”
Da Silva looked mightily displeased. “I didn’t know Private had another client in Brazil during the Olympics.”
“During the games, we don’t,” Tavia said. “These clients are supposed to leave next Wednesday night, before they start.”
I blinked, felt hollow in my stomach. “The twins?”
She nodded grimly. “They’ve gone missing, Jack. And Alvarez and Questa are dead.”
Chapter 12
Five minutes later, Tavia and I were in a cab speeding through tunnels and over bridges and down highways toward northwest Rio and the Alemão favela, one of the biggest slums in the city.
“This wasn’t how I’d hoped the evening would go,” Tavia said wistfully.
“I had other plans too,” I said, and squeezed her hand.
“You want me to make the call to Alvarez’s and Questa’s wives?”
“I’ll do it,” I said. “But let’s get the facts straight first.”