“You actually picked up,” Mariana Lopes said in a disapproving tone.
“I’ve been busy,” Amelia said. “Wrapping up the fieldwork. I told you.”
“A mother longs for her daughter’s voice every once in a while.”
No matter how much kindness and empathy she dispensed in the course of a day, Amelia’s mother was always putting guilt trips on her daughter.
“You don’t have time for me now?” Mariana said. “I understand.”
Rayssa would have hung up, but Amelia was sensing that Rayssa’s existence was coming to an end. And for the first time, she realized the dire consequences of her actions.
“I have ten minutes, Mom,” she said. “Let me get somewhere I can talk.”
Chapter 72
“CAN YOU HEAR me, Mom?” Amelia Lopes said.
We’d put Amelia on speaker. Mariana Lopes looked at Sci and Mo-bot, who were trying to track Amelia’s location, and then at Tavia and me. Tavia nodded.
“Loud and clear, dear,” Mariana said, but there was a tremor in her voice. She was still shocked by the fact that her daughter was the ringleader of the Favela Justice plot. She had refused to believe it until Estella, Urso’s woman, told her what she knew: that Amelia met, slept with, and brainwashed the Bear after he was driven from Alem?o favela.
“She made him believe that the way we live is a crime,” Estella said. “She made him believe that not fighting the situation was a worse crime.”
This evidently sounded like something Amelia would say because Mariana’s shoulders slumped and she wept, and then she agreed to help us.
She got more confident the longer the conversation with her daughter went on. They chatted about challenges at the orphanage. They talked about Mariana’s hip, which had been bothering her enough that she was considering hip-replacement surgery, and about when Amelia might be finished with her field research and able to come back to Rio to see her.
“Soon,” Amelia said. “After the Olympics are over. When it’s less hectic.”
Mariana looked over at us. I made a spinning motion with my finger and she tried to talk about Amelia’s field research some more.
But after two minutes in that vein, Amelia said, “Mom, I’ve got to go now.”
“Oh,” Mariana said, growing nervous. “Of course. Call me tomorrow?”
“If I can,” Amelia said. “Mom?”
“Yes, dear?”
“Are you proud of me? Of the way I’ve lived my life?”
Mariana looked at us. Tavia nodded and I twirled my finger again.
“Mom?”
“Of course I’m proud of you,” Mariana said, tears welling in her eyes. “You’re a woman of great learning, conviction, and kindness.”
We heard a sniff over the speaker. “Thanks, Mom. I needed to hear that.”
“Are you okay, Amelia?”
“I’m fine,” her daughter said, and sniffed again. “Love you.”
“I love you too.”
The line went dead. Mariana began to weep again.
“Did you get her?” I asked as Tavia moved to comfort Mariana.
“Wait a sec,” Mo-bot said, not picking up her head.
Sci didn’t look up either. They both pounded at their keyboards and then suddenly, virtually in unison, they stopped.
“Got her,” Mo-bot said with a satisfied grin.
Sci said, “Give the software a minute or two and we’ll have a position for you within ten feet of where she was standing.”
“You did fine,” Tavia was saying to the orphanage director when I walked over beside them.
“I feel like Judas Iscariot,” Mariana said.
I said, “What you did was noble. A mother looking out for her child.”
Mariana glanced up. “Don’t kill her. Please? She’s my only child.”
I frowned, said, “Senhora Lopes, we are not assassins. We will not intentionally harm your daughter. But she is a kidnapper, a murderer, and a terrorist. She’ll be brought to—”
“There she is,” Sci said.
“Throwing it on the screen now,” Mo-bot said.
At the far end of the conference room, Google Earth appeared showing a satellite view of Rio de Janeiro. A red pin blinked off the north flank of the Two Brothers Mountains.
Sci manipulated the image, zoomed in, and tilted the perspective so we could see that Amelia had been in the jungle five or six hundred yards east of the Rocinha favela and close to the bottom of a cliff that went up two thousand feet to the top of the second mountain.
Sci zoomed in again, and a blurred view of the slope below the cliff appeared. Mo-bot used filters to clear the image, and we saw the pin blinking at the upper end of a long narrow clearing just off the spine of the slope. Near the pin, in the trees up the hill and closer to the cliff, there were several shacks.
“If that’s where they’ve got Wise, it’s going to be a bitch getting in there quietly,” Tavia said. “If we go in on foot we’ll have to go through Rocinha or Vidigal, and that will raise all sorts of alarms. They’ll no doubt have sentries, people watching the trails to and from the favelas. And they’re probably in the trees all around the clearing.”