Forty minutes behind schedule, at eleven a.m., Dr. Castro finally drove into Laranjeiras, a largely residential neighborhood in south Rio with a funky street vibe. Little cafés, nice parks, lots of vendors. And the base station for the cog railway that climbed to the top of Corcovado Mountain.
The rain lightened to a drizzle. Castro went past the rail station, slowed along a high wall, and then turned through a pair of iron gates into a cobblestoned courtyard in front of the shambles of a palace built in the early 1800s by the dethroned king of Portugal’s doctor. The palace must have been grand and glamorous once.
Squatters lived there now; the limestone walls were slick with moss, and the wooden shutters hung off their hinges and moldered. Castro had seen the palace many times. The building had been one of his wife’s favorites. Sophie always thought it should have been in a movie, that it was the perfect place for a vampire to await sundown. Castro sat there a moment after he parked, swearing he could see Sophie right there, entranced by the decrepit building.
Then he shook the memory off and got out, confident that this was the perfect place to leave his car. After dark, the squatters would strip it, take it apart, and sell the pieces. Nothing would go to waste.
Castro got the backpack out of the trunk, threw his keys inside, and shut it. He felt eyes watching him, looked up three stories, and saw a boy looking down at him through the lightly falling rain. The kid was shirtless and eating something, but he was also clearly watching the doctor.
That pleased Castro as he walked back through the gates. If the kid saw him toss the keys in the trunk, the car would be gone within the hour. He walked away, heading west and uphill past the Museum of Native Art and onto Rua Cosme Velho, a twisting, climbing road.
The rain stopped and behind it came a breeze from the northeast, from the equator, bringing equatorial heat to Rio. Castro reached the entrance to the sports complex at the College of St. Vincent de Paul, where he had been doing a weekly clinic for athletes the past six months. The security guard recognized him, asked him what was in the pack.
“Sand, mostly,” Castro replied. “I’m going climbing in the Andes in December and getting into shape. Walking everywhere I can with this on.”
The guard looked at him like he was kind of nuts but nodded and let him pass through. Castro headed to the athletic department building.
But when he got there, he cut back to his right, out of sight of the guard, and made his way across a practice field and around grandstands to the rear corner of the college grounds.
Castro went to a heavy iron gate, pulled the cotter pin that held the latch tight, and opened the gate, praying that the squealing it made would not attract attention. He exited, shut the gate, and breathed a sigh of relief.
The doctor was in the dripping, steaming jungle now, safe from all prying eyes. He just had to be careful and stick to a route he’d plotted for months. He had a brutal series of climbs and traverses ahead of him. There were other ways, some of them probably easier, but Castro had chosen this approach because from above he would be invisible, and because he wanted to suffer.
Chapter 85
Friday, August 5, 2016
12:30 p.m.
Six and a Half Hours Before the Olympic Games Open
JUSTINE AND I climbed from a taxi outside a long steel building in a light-industrial complex in Rio’s Esta??o District.
Lieutenant Acosta pulled in behind us and got out. For an early Friday afternoon, the entire complex seemed empty. Then again, the president had declared the opening day of the Olympics a national holiday in Brazil.
We went to the door of AV3 Research and knocked. No one answered.
“Think you have enough cause to enter?” I asked.
“We’re in Brazil,” Lieutenant Acosta said. “I’ll invent a cause, say I was doing a well-being check on Castro. If we find nothing, we’re good and we back out.”
We tried to force the door, with no luck. It was reinforced steel and triple dead-bolted. Acosta called a locksmith. After we’d waited for forty minutes in the lieutenant’s car to get out of the suddenly oppressive heat, the locksmith had the door swinging open.
The outer office wasn’t much—file cabinets, an old desk. But we found the second door and had the locksmith pick it. It was 1:25 p.m. when we finally gained access to Castro’s inner sanctum, turned on the lights, and saw the clean room.
We walked around it, finding the entrance, but looking first through glass windows into a spotless, elaborate, and meticulously arranged laboratory.
“I’m not going in there,” Justine said.
“I’ll go,” I said.
“I will too,” Acosta said.
“We don’t know what we’re dealing with, Jack,” Justine said.
“We’ll have a look around outside first,” I said. “Get a clue.”
We walked through the workshop, finding a metal band saw, a bender, and lengths of titanium rods and flats. Jars of titanium screws and bolts. A small welding setup. Cargo netting. Various gas canisters of different sizes.
“Someone’s building and looking to save weight,” I said.
“For what?” Acosta asked.