“I could never forget,” I said, and I hugged her just for being there.
Then my cell phone rang. Justine pulled back, smiling sympathetically.
“Let it ring,” I said. “Hungry?”
“Famished,” she said. “Let’s order room service and talk about Tavia?”
The old me would have dismissed that out of hand. My inability to open up was what had ultimately done in my romantic relationship with Justine. But I had to talk about Tavia. I had to tell someone about the love I’d lost.
“I’d like that,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “I’ll order. You get showered and dressed.”
I gave her a mock salute and headed to the bathroom, thinking once again how great Justine was. Goddamn it, even though I’d blown it with her and even though she was with someone else now, Justine still had the purest heart of anyone I’d ever met. Just having her to rely on made the burden of Tavia’s death seem almost bearable.
I climbed out of the shower and was dressing when my cell phone began to ring again. I looked at the caller ID and answered.
“General da Silva?”
“There’s a good chance I will be fired today,” he said stiffly. “Getting a police helicopter and several men shot out of the sky in full view of many of the Olympic venues evidently does not sit well with the president.”
“I imagine it wouldn’t,” I said.
“If I am relieved of command, you’ll continue on?”
“In any role the government wants,” I promised.
“I appreciate it, and I can’t say how sorry I am about Tavia. She was one of a kind, a special person, and the only woman I have ever truly feared.”
I laughed at that, said, “She could be fierce at times. That’s one of the things I loved about her.” Then my laugh turned wistful and died.
“I’ll be in touch once I know,” da Silva said.
“I’ll eat and then get to work.”
He hung up. Mo-bot called a minute later.
“You sleep?” she asked.
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“On the couch here at Private Rio,” she said.
“Seven and a half solid hours here.”
“That’s a blessing. How are you? I mean…”
“It’s tolerable as long as I don’t think about it, meaning about every minute or so I get stabbed in the gut. But Justine’s here.”
“That’s a help. Jack, you poor thing. Listen, I finally tracked down the articles of incorporation for Dr. Castro’s business. You’ll never guess what the company was organized to do.”
“Infectious-disease research?”
“How’d you guess that?”
“The way things are going, I just imagined the worst-case scenario and threw it out there.”
Chapter 84
DR. CASTRO DROVE southwest through Rio, using every little trick he knew to avoid the strangling traffic, but then it started to rain and that mucked up everything and he was stuck again in the midst of bumper-to-bumper vehicles. To pass the time, he tuned to an all-news radio station and listened intently to the description of the government raid on the Favela Justice terrorists.
Billionaire Andrew Wise had been rescued, and Amelia Lopes, aka Rayssa, was dead, along with a dozen of her followers, including a notorious gangster named Urso who’d used a rocket launcher to take down a BOPE helicopter. Several people had died in the crash, among them Octavia Reynaldo, head of Private Rio.
Wise had gone out in front of cameras and microphones and announced his intention to spend the rest of his life figuring out how to better the lives of the poorest of the poor. A reporter asked if his daughters were in custody, and he’d said they were under arrest.
Amelia Lopes and the Wise twins, Castro thought. Kindred spirits. I would have liked to have known them. Daughter of a saint, product of poverty, Lopes saw the inequities and acted. Guilty rich girls confronted with the inequities of life joined her. It made sense to him, and in many ways he agreed with their goals.
But Amelia Lopes had thought about the gap between rich and poor in entirely economic terms, the benefits and losses, the income, the greed, the want. To Castro, the biggest gap was in health care. The richest had access to the best medical care and a sanitary environment conducive to long human life. The poorest had feces flowing past their doors, pestilence, and recurrent plagues. The richest couldn’t see that a simple rise in the living standards of the poor would lead to fewer crippling diseases and fewer early deaths.
Why? Because the rich were ignorant of what it was like to live at the mercy of a parasite, a disease, or a virus. So they have to be taught, the doctor thought as traffic began to ease and he picked up speed. They have to be shown.