We caught a taxi to our hotel. I tried to ask him for more details on what I was meant to do here, what meetings there might be, or what information he hoped to get out of Celso. Kilpatrick shook his head. He pointed at the taxi driver with his eyes and placed a finger against his lips.
Under other circumstances, the secrecy might have been thrilling. I was, after all, in the field, doing spy stuff with the director of the NSA. Instead, it was just irritating. I was tired and stressed and worried about my father. I was starting to think it would have been better if I’d missed my flight, or else called Kilpatrick and cited my father’s hospitalization as a family emergency. Then I would be home, talking with my dad and making sure Paul didn’t do anything stupid, instead of sitting in a taxi next to a powerful man with no idea how to act or what was expected of me.
CHAPTER 16
The next morning, I woke to a steady rain outside my window. It was still the rainy season here, so it would rain most days, though rarely for very long at a time. It was also a good thirty degrees warmer than it was in Maryland, which would make for a nice change.
I found Kilpatrick at the breakfast bar, digging into a plate piled high with eggs, ham, couscous, tapioca crepes filled with requeijão, and fresh fruit. I sat across from him. “So,” I said. “What am I supposed to be doing today?”
“I think you know.”
“But what am I supposed to find out? What do you want me to ask him?”
“You’re a smart kid. I’ll leave that up to your judgment.” He produced a pen from a hidden pocket in his uniform and scribbled something on a napkin. He slid it over to me. It said, We can be heard.
I frowned. He hadn’t bothered to explain my mission to me ahead of time, and now, apparently, we couldn’t speak freely. “And what will you be doing?”
He munched on his eggs and didn’t answer, just looked at me over his fork. I gave up. Outside, the rain had stopped, and mist steamed from the wet streets. I could see the twin towers of the National Congress, and beyond them, the sparkling blue of Paranoá Lake. Somewhere over there, too far to see, was the Palácio da Alvorada, where the president of Brazil lived.
Brasília could be difficult to navigate on foot, since the city was pretty much designed for cars. The roads were almost all throughways, with no traffic lights or places for pedestrians to cross. Pedestrians had their own paths, often circuitous routes that looped around shopping malls or passed through long tunnels underneath the highways. For a tourist, it would have been nearly impossible, but I had grown up there. Half an hour later, I was strolling through the tree-lined greenery of the Campus Universitário Darcy Ribeiro. It could almost have been any university in the United States, though I saw a lot more mixed-race faces and a lot more bright yellow soccer jerseys.
Celso didn’t know I was coming. I had thought of texting him several times, first from the US, then once I was in Brazil, but it never seemed like a good time, and I kept putting it off. I found his dormitory address from the campus office. As I walked toward it, I realized I was half hoping not to find him. That he would be in class, or soccer practice, or better yet, on travel for the week to some other location. I didn’t want to meet a friend under false pretenses or try to manipulate him into giving me information the government of his country was unwilling to share.
Five years had passed since I last saw him, but I recognized him immediately. He was kicking around a soccer ball on the grass in front of his dormitory, only the ball was five times the size it was supposed to be. A half-dozen other young men and women fought for the ball, laughing and shouting in Portuguese and occasionally tumbling over one another in their attempts to maneuver the oversized ball with their feet.
Celso saw me before I said anything. He shouted and left the game to half-tackle me with an embrace. “Hey, parceiro! What are you doing here?”
I clapped him on the shoulders. “Look at you,” I said. “You never change.” He was shorter than me, athletic, and smelled of sweat and fresh grass. He wore a red and black striped shirt and a Yankees baseball cap turned backward on his head, and his smile was the same easy, devil-may-care grin I remembered from our youth.
He introduced me to some of his friends. I couldn’t help noticing, however, that although some of them smiled and shook my hand, others gave me openly hostile looks, especially when he told them I was from the United States.
“What’s their problem?” I asked Celso. “Did I interrupt your game?”
Celso shrugged, dismissing them. “They’ve got a thing about Americans.”
“Seriously? Why?”
“It’s suddenly the popular thing on campus. It’s all about protecting the Amazon. Americans come here, they talk like the rainforest belongs to them, or at least like it belongs to the world. They want to tell us how we should run things in our own country.”
I didn’t remember there being such fervor about the rainforest in the urban centers of Brazil when I had lived here. It reminded me of the anti-tourism sentiment that was apparently gaining traction in Brazil’s northern states. “What about you?” I asked.
He gave another expressive shrug. “Seems a stupid reason to hate three hundred million people,” he said.
“Will your friends give you a rough time, just because you hang out with an American?”
“Not any of my real friends.”
Fifteen minutes later, we were sitting on the ground on one of Brasília’s many park-like plots of grass, eating skewers of hot roasted beef from a street vendor. I had forgotten how much I loved the food here. The sun burned through the haze enough to warm our faces. We talked about old memories, about teasing Celso’s white pit bull puppy and climbing onto the roof of his house to drop water balloons on his sisters and paddle surfing in the lake to check out the gatinhas in their bikinis and stealing all the soccer balls from the school’s equipment closet to pile them up inside the athletic director’s Fiat. He asked me about my parents and my brother and sister, and I said they were well. I told him about Julia’s new baby daughter.
We spoke English, mostly, with a Portuguese word or phrase thrown in where no English one would do. All the time we were talking, a knot of anxiety twisted in my stomach, even though none of our conversation had anything to do with his father or the Ligados or Brazilian national secrets. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to come clean.
“Here’s the deal,” I said. “I’m working for the NSA now. I flew down here with the director, and the only reason he brought me was because you and I used to be friends.”
Celso raised an eyebrow, but his relaxed smile didn’t waver. “So he wants you to grill me. Find out what I know.”
“I guess.”
“He thinks my father tells me secrets.”
“He must. But what information he’s looking for, or why he thinks you would tell me, is beyond my ability to guess. So let’s just agree that I’m not going to press you for secrets and you’re not going to tell me any, and then I can just relax and enjoy my churrasco and reminisce about the old days.”
I looked at his face, the cheerful expression just as unconcerned and amiable as ever. And I realized that, despite the fact that I had showed up practically on his doorstep unannounced, he had never asked me what brought me to Brasília.
“You knew,” I said.
“Knew?”
“You already knew I worked for the NSA. You knew I was here before I showed up.”