“How bad was it back in the day?”
Tavia raised her eyebrows, pursed her lips, said, “In the 1980s and 1990s, Alem?o may have been worse than Rocinha, an outlaw city inside the city. No police would go there. The drug traffickers developed their own justice system and social codes. Rape, burglary, murder, and disloyalty to the gang were forbidden. The punishment was almost always death.”
“But the BOPE changed that?”
She nodded. “The German favela was one of the first they tried to pacify. The BOPE made an announcement that they were coming to drive out the narcos. The traffickers were waiting, armed to the teeth. When a police helicopter flew over the slum to call out movement to the BOPE ground forces, someone fired a bazooka and blew the helicopter out of the sky.”
“Is that right?” I said, shocked. Despite what Hollywood might lead you to believe, back in L.A., you just didn’t hear about bazookas firing on police choppers.
“The bazooka was the last straw,” Tavia said. “They brought in da Silva as commander the next day, and he was ruthless. Fifteen or twenty gangsters were killed in less than eight hours. The others escaped into the jungle, and even now they keep trying to come—”
I saw what had stopped her. Up ahead, in what had been blackness, lights were coming back on, flickering and then strengthening and spreading across hill after hill.
“That’s Alem?o,” Octavia said as the taxi slowed down and stopped a short distance from several police cars blocking the road, their blue lights flashing.
We climbed out, paid the driver, and moved toward the officers in the squad cars. Octavia did the talking, showing her Private badge and gesturing to me. They didn’t seem too impressed until she told them that the two dead men had worked for us, and we worked for General da Silva.
In short order we were led to the gondola base and told to get out at the fourth station up the line. When the gondola shut and we swung out into space above the slum, I admit that I was thinking about bazookas.
But then I looked out the window and saw troops of military police in body armor, all of them carrying automatic rifles and moving across the twisting paths of the slum, passing one rickety building on top of five others on top of ten more. Lit up like that, the favela looked post-apocalyptic, right out of Mad Max.
Two heavily armed officers met us at the fourth station and, with flashlights, led us down to the school. The slum was an assault on the senses: putrid smells, unsavory odors, shacks that looked ready to tumble, a general din punctuated by music blaring, voices yelling, and babies crying. The deeper I went, the more claustrophobic and inescapable the favela seemed.
Lieutenant Bruno Acosta of the Brazilian military police was waiting for us at the school, which had been cordoned off. Acosta was in his mid-thirties, built like a tombstone, and very bright.
The lieutenant knew who we were and the connections we had, so he seemed to hold nothing back. The attack had come in the last light of day. Two different snipers had shot Alvarez and Questa just before the favela’s main transformer was blown with an improvised explosive.
“There were a lot of people here when it happened,” Acosta said. “The shooting and the bombing caused a near riot. In the darkness, a ground force of four, maybe five masked men swept in on the church group. They had flashlights, found the sisters, took them, and left. There were threats, but no other shots were fired.”
“How long until police were on the scene?” I asked.
“Nine minutes,” the lieutenant said.
“Enough time to hide them or get them out of here,” Tavia said.
“Who are they?” Acosta asked. “Why were they targeted?”
Mindful of the agreement we had with the twins’ parents, I said, “The Warren family is very wealthy.”
“So a kidnap for ransom?”
“You have another motive?” Tavia asked.
Acosta shook his head. “The parents know?”
“Not yet,” I said. “Can we talk to some of the witnesses?”
The lieutenant thought, replied, “It was basically mayhem in here and it was dark. Several of the kids in the church group got trampled and were taken to the hospital. The group leader’s still here, though, I think.”
We found Carlos Seitz, coordinator of the twenty-person church contingent. Seitz was understandably distraught.
“What am I going to tell their parents?” he said.
“We’ll take care of that,” Tavia said. “How were they?”
“Up until the shots? They seemed fine.”
Seitz described the twins as hardworking, unlike some of the others, who went on missions only because it looked good on their résumés.
“You know, the two-month good deed of their lives,” the mission’s leader said. “But the Warren girls, you could tell they believed they could really help down here. They were smart, idealistic, and passionate about things.”