“Go left on Trinta Avenue,” I said. “They’re heading north.”
“I’ve got them now,” Tavia said. “No way a van’s outrunning this engine.”
Three hundred yards. Two hundred. One fifty. I spotted the van now. It couldn’t evade us. And the trackers were performing—
The icon on the iPad disappeared.
“Shit,” Mo-bot said in my earpiece. “Either the tracking devices all died at once or they’re jamming our signals.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “We’ve got the van right in front of—”
A second white Ford panel van shot out from the road on our right, and at the same time a third white Ford panel van roared in from our left. Both vans swung into the gap between us and the money van. That van crossed an overpass and took the exit onto a cloverleaf ramp.
We spiraled into a corkscrew left turn that shot us out onto Presidente Vargas Avenue, a wide four-lane thoroughfare that led straight east to the harbor front. The two vans directly in front of us began to slow and weave, keeping us from staying with the money van, which gained speed and distance.
“We’ve got the girls and the mom, Octavia,” a female voice said over the radio. “En route to hospital. Little beat up, but okay.”
“And we’ve got Wise,” a male voice said.
Stuck behind the other two vans, Tavia spotted a police turnaround and crossed left through it and into the westbound lane. A pair of headlights came at us. Tavia flicked her headlights and floored it. The car swerved out of our way.
We got past one of the blocking vans in the other lane just before we reached the next police turnaround in the median. With a snap of her wrist, Tavia shot us through and back into the eastbound lane between the two vans.
“One down, one to go,” Tavia said.
We were crossing Camerino Road, heading straight for the harbor. The second van was right in front of us, swerving, trying to keep Tavia from getting around. I caught glimpses of the money van’s taillights two hundred yards ahead.
Tavia got up on the bumper of the second blocking van. She deked left and then tried to get around on the right. The rear door of the van flew open. In the back, one of the guys in the blue workman’s jumpsuit was on his knees aiming an assault rifle at us.
He opened fire.
Tavia slammed on the brakes and swerved, but bullets strafed the hood and windshield of the X5. The glass shattered into a thousand little pieces. We couldn’t see a thing. Tavia had to slow and try to steer looking out her window.
But it was too late. The vans had taken a left on a road heading north, and we missed it, forcing us to backtrack. By the time we got turned around, they were nowhere to be seen. We went north and were past Pier Mauá when I spotted a white panel van, probably the one holding all that cash, sitting on the rear deck of a tugboat that was picking up speed out on Guanabara Bay.
“Reynaldo!” a male voice called over the radio. “We are under fire. Repeat, we are—”
The transmission died.
“That was Samuels,” Tavia said. “He and Branco had Wise!”
“Andy?” I said into the microphone. I got no answer. “Mo-bot, do you have Wise’s beacon?”
“Right here,” she said. “Tracker shows current location a half a mile south of the Sambadrome.”
“On our way,” Tavia said.
When we reached the spot where the tracking signal was coming from—an empty city lot—we found Samuels and Branco alive but unconscious, both with head wounds from blunt-force trauma. The back door of the car was open. Wise was gone. I walked with a flashlight and felt my stomach fall twenty stories when I spotted fresh blood spatter in the dirt and then the blue workman’s coverall.
When I picked it up with a stick, I saw that it too was spattered with blood and was in two pieces, like it had been sliced off the billionaire with a utility knife or a razor blade.
Chapter 42
Tuesday, August 2, 2016
4:30 a.m.
BY THE TIME we got to the private hospital in Leblon, I was thinking that we’d been played by very sophisticated criminals who now held hostage one of the richest men in the world. His abduction could not have happened as a secondary crime of opportunity. This was planned. Get Wise to walk away, expecting to be picked up, and then, when he was far from the Sambadrome, with everyone thinking the play was over, attack.
It had all happened on my watch. I had failed miserably. I felt like the world’s biggest fuckup.
Wise’s wife certainly thought so. She’d said it to me at least twenty times since we’d brought Samuels and Branco to the same hospital where the twins were being treated. I was actually surprised she hadn’t fired us.
“Will Andy be held for ransom as well?” she asked in the hallway outside the girls’ room.
“I would think so,” I said.
“I can’t imagine they’ll be happy about being shorted twenty million dollars for the girls,” Cherie said. “His own damn fault. The cheap idiot.”