The favela’s location—spilling down both flanks of a mountain saddle—made access difficult, and the police had never gained full control. Da Silva remained nervous enough about that particular slum to demand a flyover.
We went right over David Beckham’s new place in a canyon above Leblon. The British soccer star had caused a stir when he’d bought land in a favela; some of Rio’s wealthy were indignant that he would stoop to living in a slum, and advocates for the poor worried it would start a trend and displace people who desperately needed shelter.
The helicopter climbed the north flank of the mountain, allowing us to peer into the warren of pastel shacks built right on top of each other like some bizarre Lego structure.
“You might want to stand back from the door, Jack,” Tavia said. “They’ve been known to shoot at police helicopters like this.”
Tavia was very smart, a former Rio homicide detective, and she was usually right about things that happened in her city. But da Silva didn’t move from the open doorway, so I stayed right where I was too as we flew over the top of the slum, dropped off the other side, and curved around the south end of the Two Brothers.
We stayed low to avoid the ten or fifteen hang gliders soaring on updrafts near the two mountains. To the east, the coastal highway was clogged with traffic as far as we could see. The Argentines had come in cars and buses. They hung out the windows waving blue and white flags and bottles of liquor. Bikini-clad girls danced on the hoods and roofs of the vehicles and crowded the beach on the other side of the highway.
“They’ll be coming all night,” Colonel da Silva said.
“Can the city handle it?”
“Rio gets two million visitors on New Year’s Eve,” Tavia said. “And five million during Carnival. It might not be managed flawlessly, but Rio can handle any crowd.”
Da Silva allowed himself a moment of uncertainty, then said, “I suppose, besides traffic jams, as long as the final goes off tomorrow without incident, we’re good to—”
“Colonel,” the pilot called back. “We’ve got an emergency on P?o de A?úcar. We’ve been ordered to get a visual and report.”
“What kind of emergency?” the colonel demanded.
As we picked up speed, the pilot told us, and we cringed.
I hung out the door, looking north toward P?o de A?úcar, Sugarloaf Mountain, a thirteen-hundred-foot monolith of dark granite that erupts out of the ocean beyond the north end of Copacabana Beach.
“Can people survive something like that?” Tavia shouted at me.
Even from eight miles away, I could clearly make out the sheer, unforgiving cliffs where they fell away from the peak. I thought about what we’d been told and how bad the injuries might be.
“Miracles happen every day,” I said.
Chapter 2
IN A LAB at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio’s Centro District, Dr. Lucas Castro tried to steady his trembling hands as he waited impatiently for a machine to finish preparing a tissue sample for examination.
Please let me be wrong, Dr. Castro thought. Please.
There were two others in the lab, young technicians who were paying more attention to the television screen on the wall than to their work. Soccer analysts were discussing the next day’s game and still shaking their heads over the thrashing Brazil had taken in the semifinal against Germany.
Seven to one? Castro thought. After everything done to bring the World Cup to Brazil, after everything done to me, we go down by six goals?
The doctor forgot about the tissue sample for a moment, felt himself seized by growing anger yet again.
It’s a national embarrassment, he thought. The World Cup never should have happened. But, no, FIFA, those corrupt sons of—
The timer beeped. Castro pulled himself out of the thoughts that had circled in his brain ever since the crushing loss four days before.
The doctor opened the machine. He scratched his beard, a habit when he was anxious. He retrieved and cooled a small block of sterile medium that now encased a sample of liver tissue he’d helped extract from a very sick eight-year-old girl named Maria. She and her six-year-old brother had been brought to the institute’s clinic violently ill in a way Castro had rarely seen before: sweating, shaking, decreased function in almost every major organ.
The doctor took the block to another machine that shaved razor-thin slices off it. He stained these, mounted them on slides, and took them to a microscope. Castro was a virologist as well as an MD. In any other situation, he would have run a time-consuming test to determine whether a virus was involved, but if his suspicions were right, looking at the cells themselves would be a much quicker indicator.
He put the first slide under the lens.
Please let me be wrong about this.
Castro peered into the microscope, adjusted it, and saw his fears confirmed in several devastating seconds. Many of the cells had been attacked, invaded, and hideously transformed.