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.