The camera zoomed in and showed Wise’s face was bruised. Dried blood matted his hair. Drips and streaks of it showed on the chest of the coverall. He seemed alert, aware of his surroundings, but hurt and in considerable pain.
“Jesus.” Cherie moaned, and she buried her face in her hands. “Why are they doing this?”
“They released the girls,” Tavia said. “You’ll have him back soon.”
But then the camera retreated, revealing a white sheet behind the billionaire. On the sheet and above Wise’s head, there was crudely painted red lettering that read:
“What the hell is this?” Lieutenant Acosta said.
That same woman from the earlier video messages, Rayssa, wearing the primitive mask, appeared to Wise’s left. Walking with confidence all around the billionaire, she looked to the camera.
“For those of you who don’t know, this cancer of a man is Andrew Wise, the founder and chairman of Wise Enterprises, or WE,” Rayssa said in thickly accented English. “Senhor Wise is on trial here for his actions as they relate to the rape and persecution of Brazil’s poor through his company’s profiteering in the construction of the World Cup and Olympic Games venues.
“Favela Justice has all the damning evidence,” she went on. “Evidence you will see in the coming days. We’ll let you decide Senhor Wise’s guilt or innocence. If you judge him innocent, we let him go. You judge him guilty, and Favela Justice demands the payback of one billion dollars in gold, which will go to the poor of Brazil.”
“One billion?” Sci said.
Mo-bot whistled, said, “Got to be the highest ransom demand in history.”
I glanced at Cherie and saw her lose all color.
Rayssa paused at Wise’s left side and addressed the camera. “All news organizations gathered in Rio: You have been sent an excerpt from the trial of Andrew Wise. Every afternoon at three thirty eastern daylight saving time, you should expect another one. Tomorrow’s excerpt: the evidence revealed.”
The screen went blank.
“A billion dollars. Three thirty p.m. eastern,” I muttered, seeing where this was going. “Fuck.”
I left the room, pulling out my cell phone. “Fuck.”
“What?” asked Tavia, following me into the hall.
“I went through a nightmare at the last Olympics in London, and here comes another one,” I said, trying to wrap my head around what had just happened in there.
Was all of this solely about the billionaire? Or were they using the billionaire to attack the Olympics? Was Favela Justice connected to Luna’s death? Were the games being threatened once again?
When General da Silva answered my call, I said, “I’ve got news, and you’re not going to like it one bit.”
I laid it out for him: The story of the ransom and the kidnap. The video and the potential ramifications.
The general said shit in Portuguese.
“Exactly.”
“Get me that video,” he said. “Then we’ll talk.”
“Straightaway,” I said, and I returned to the lab, where Sci, Mo-bot, Lieutenant Acosta, and Cherie Wise were watching the video again.
“Andy’s hurt, but not out of it. He knows what’s going on around him,” Cherie said when she saw me. Then she started to cry. “Can we convince the media not to broadcast this?”
I shook my head and said, “I won’t lie to you, Cherie. The Olympics don’t start until Friday. That leaves three days with a gaping news hole. There’s a reason they’re delivering their messages at three thirty p.m. eastern. That’s a half an hour before the big news organizations’ early deadlines. A billion-dollar demand? The global media will eat this up.”
Chapter 52
That evening, the video of Andrew Wise played on a flat-screen as Dr. Lucas Castro worked on his invention in the shop outside the clean room. The billionaire’s kidnapping and ransom demand dominated every channel.
A billion dollars in gold for the poor? Castro thought. That’s a solid penalty. That’ll sting the pockets. I think I like this Favela Justice, whoever they are.
He stood back, looking at his intricate device. In a titanium frame hung a hammock of black-mesh fabric that held two large canisters fitted to a central green hose; that hose was attached to nine smaller black hoses sticking out of the bottom of the mesh. They hung down several feet, like tentacles with airbrushes attached to their ends.
“Perfect,” Castro said proudly.
Now he had to make sure it worked.
Castro removed one canister from the central hose and attached it to a small air compressor with a remote control.
This was a test, after all, and Dr. Castro wished to exceed the pressure his device called for. It wouldn’t do to blow a gasket and fail at the moment of truth. No way that was happening. Not when he had so little time left on earth.
He used the bleed valve to draw off the air in the fitting and closed it when red-dyed water seeped out. Castro flipped on the compressor, stood back, and pulled out his iPhone. He called up an app that connected him to the compressor control. The doctor hit the Go button.
A second later, clouds of red mist shot out of the nine airbrushes, which whipsawed, throwing the aerosol this way and that. It spattered the bench and floor like a measles rash. It raised a red fog that drifted to the doctor, tingled on his face, and gathered until drips of it rolled down his cheeks like bloody tears.
Dr. Castro was grinning wildly, elated.
He’d patterned his delivery system after Hydra-9 itself. Together, the nine-armed device and the virus that produced nine-headed cells were a single organism about to strike Rio with great and terrible wrath.
Chapter 53
Tuesday, August 2, 2016
8:30 p.m.
Seventy and a Half Hours Before the Olympic Games Open
Tavia drove us up a steep hill in the Bangu District of Rio.
“How are you holding up?” I asked.
“I get waves of energy,” she said. “And when there’s no wave to be had, I drink espresso.”
“So you’re pragmatic?”
“A pragmatic romantic.”
“It suits you. You wear it well.”
“You’re sweet,” Tavia said; she blew an air kiss my way and pulled up in front of a blue gate set in a high stone wall.
There had been little we could do after seeing the video from Favela Justice but leave it to Sci and Mo-bot to wrestle with the corrupted metadata and take Cherie Wise back to the hospital to see her girls. She said being with them was the only way she’d be able to sleep.
Tavia and Lieutenant Acosta and I had decided to work different angles. Acosta was going to plumb the federal police intelligence files for any mention of Favela Justice. We returned to the idea that the Wise girls, who’d been in Brazil under assumed identities, must have been spotted by someone who knew them by sight. Unless the girls had told someone who they were.
When we’d asked the twins, who were both doing much better, about it again, they had once more strongly denied that they’d revealed their identities. We wanted to talk to them some more, but both of them were tired and Cherie told us to come back in the morning. They were all going to sleep the night away.
We left them, realizing that if an individual had taken a particular interest in the girls, somebody at one of the three charities they’d volunteered for might know about it. We couldn’t try the sanitation project or the NGO because they were closed.
But the third charity, the orphanage, was a different story.