The Games

Chapter 1

Rio de Janeiro

Saturday, July 12, 2014

2:00 p.m.

Christ the redeemer appeared and vanished in the last clouds clinging to jungle mountains that rose right up out of the city and the sea. Then the sun broke through for good and shone down on the giant white statue of Jesus that looked over virtually all of Rio from the summit of Corcovado Mountain.

In the prior two months, I’d seen the statue from dozens of vantage points, but never like this, from a police helicopter hovering at the figure’s eye level two hundred and fifty feet away, close enough for me to understand the immensity of the statue and its simple, graceful lines.

I am a lapsed Catholic, but I tell you, I got chills up and down my spine.

“That’s incredible,” I said as the helicopter arced away, flying over the steep, jungle-choked mountainside.

“One of the seven modern wonders of the world, Jack,” Tavia said.

“You know the other six offhand, Tavia?” I asked her.

Tavia smiled, shook her head, said, “You?”

“Not a clue.”

“You without a clue? I don’t believe it.”

“That’s because I’m unparalleled in the art of faking it.”

My name is Jack Morgan. I own Private, an international security and consulting firm with bureaus in major cities all over the world. Octavia “Tavia” Reynaldo, a tall, sturdy woman with jet-black hair, a lovely face, and beguiling eyes, ran Private Rio. And we’d always had this teasing chemistry between us.

The two of us stood in the open side door of the helicopter, harnessed and tethered to the ceiling of the hold. I hung on tight to a steel handle anyway. The pilot struck me as more than competent, but I couldn’t help feeling a little anxious as we picked up speed and headed southeast.

I used to be a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Marine Corps; I got shot down in Afghanistan and barely survived. A lot of good men died in that crash, and because of their deaths, I’m not a fan of helicopters despite the fact that they can do all sorts of things that a plane, a car, or a man on foot can’t. Let’s just say I tolerate them when the need arises, which it had that day.

Tavia and I were aboard the helicopter courtesy of Mateus da Silva, the only other person in the hold. A colonel with the Brazilian military police, da Silva was also head of all security for the FIFA World Cup and the man responsible for bringing Private in as a consultant.

The final game of the tournament — Germany versus Argentina for the soccer championship of the world — was less than a day away. So far there’d been little or no trouble at the World Cup, and we wanted to keep it that way. Which was why da Silva had asked for an aerial tour of the Marvelous City.

After two months in Rio, I agreed with the nickname. I’ve been lucky enough to travel all over the world, but there’s no place like Rio de Janeiro, and certainly no more dramatic an urban setting anywhere. The ocean, the beaches, the jungle, and the peaks appear new at every turn. That day a million hard-partying Argentine fans were said to be pouring over Brazil’s southern border, heading north to Rio.

“This will give us a sense of what Rio might look like during the Olympic Games,” da Silva said as we peered down at dozens of favelas, shantytown slums that spilled down the steep sides of almost every mountain in sight.

Below the favelas, on the flats, the buildings changed. Here, on the city’s south side where the wealthy and superrich of Rio lived, modern high-rise apartment complexes lined the sprawling lagoon and the miles and miles of gorgeous white-sand beaches along the coast.

We flew over the tenuous seam where slums met some of the world’s most expensive real estate toward two arch-shaped mountains side by side. The Dois Irmãos — the Two Brothers — are flanked by the Atlantic Ocean to the east, the ultrachic district of Leblon to the north, and a sprawling favela known as Rocinha to the west.

Once one of the most violent places in any city on earth, Rocinha was among the slums Brazilian military police tried to “pacify” in the years leading up to the World Cup. The government trained a hard-core group of elite fighters known as BOPE (from the Portuguese words for “Special Police Operations Battalion”) and declared war on the drug lords who had de facto control over the favelas. Da Silva was a commander in BOPE.

The special unit killed or drove out the narco-traffickers in dozens of slums across the city. But they’d succeeded only partially in Rocinha.

The favela’s location — spilling down both flanks of a mountain saddle — made access difficult, and the police had never gained full control. Da Silva remained nervous enough about that particular slum to demand a flyover.

We went right over David Beckham’s new place in a canyon above Leblon. The British soccer star had caused a stir when he’d bought land in a favela; some of Rio’s wealthy were indignant that he would stoop to living in a slum, and advocates for the poor worried it would start a trend and displace people who desperately needed shelter.

The helicopter climbed the north flank of the mountain, allowing us to peer into the warren of pastel shacks built right on top of each other like some bizarre Lego structure.

“You might want to stand back from the door, Jack,” Tavia said. “They’ve been known to shoot at police helicopters like this.”

Tavia was very smart, a former Rio homicide detective, and she was usually right about things that happened in her city. But da Silva didn’t move from the open doorway, so I stayed right where I was too as we flew over the top of the slum, dropped off the other side, and curved around the south end of the Two Brothers.

We stayed low to avoid the ten or fifteen hang gliders soaring on updrafts near the two mountains. To the east, the coastal highway was clogged with traffic as far as we could see. The Argentines had come in cars and buses. They hung out the windows waving blue and white flags and bottles of liquor. Bikini-clad girls danced on the hoods and roofs of the vehicles and crowded the beach on the other side of the highway.

“They’ll be coming all night,” Colonel da Silva said.

“Can the city handle it?”

“Rio gets two million visitors on New Year’s Eve,” Tavia said. “And five million during Carnival. It might not be managed flawlessly, but Rio can handle any crowd.”

Da Silva allowed himself a moment of uncertainty, then said, “I suppose, besides traffic jams, as long as the final goes off tomorrow without incident, we’re good to—”

“Colonel,” the pilot called back. “We’ve got an emergency on Pão de Açúcar. We’ve been ordered to get a visual and report.”

“What kind of emergency?” the colonel demanded.

As we picked up speed, the pilot told us, and we cringed.

I hung out the door, looking north toward Pão de Açúcar, Sugarloaf Mountain, a thirteen-hundred-foot monolith of dark granite that erupts out of the ocean beyond the north end of Copacabana Beach.

“Can people survive something like that?” Tavia shouted at me.

Even from eight miles away, I could clearly make out the sheer, unforgiving cliffs where they fell away from the peak. I thought about what we’d been told and how bad the injuries might be.

“Miracles happen every day,” I said.

Chapter 2

In a lab at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio’s Centro District, Dr. Lucas Castro tried to steady his trembling hands as he waited impatiently for a machine to finish preparing a tissue sample for examination.

Please let me be wrong, Dr. Castro thought. Please.

There were two others in the lab, young technicians who were paying more attention to the television screen on the wall than to their work. Soccer analysts were discussing the next day’s game and still shaking their heads over the thrashing Brazil had taken in the semifinal against Germany.

Seven to one? Castro thought. After everything done to bring the World Cup to Brazil, after everything done to me, we go down by six goals?

The doctor forgot about the tissue sample for a moment, felt himself seized by growing anger yet again.

It’s a national embarrassment, he thought. The World Cup never should have happened. But, no, FIFA, those corrupt sons of—

The timer beeped. Castro pulled himself out of the thoughts that had circled in his brain ever since the crushing loss four days before.

The doctor opened the machine. He scratched his beard, a habit when he was anxious. He retrieved and cooled a small block of sterile medium that now encased a sample of liver tissue he’d helped extract from a very sick eight-year-old girl named Maria. She and her six-year-old brother had been brought to the institute’s clinic violently ill in a way Castro had rarely seen before: sweating, shaking, decreased function in almost every major organ.

The doctor took the block to another machine that shaved razor-thin slices off it. He stained these, mounted them on slides, and took them to a microscope. Castro was a virologist as well as an MD. In any other situation, he would have run a time-consuming test to determine whether a virus was involved, but if his suspicions were right, looking at the cells themselves would be a much quicker indicator.

He put the first slide under the lens.

Please let me be wrong about this.

Castro peered into the microscope, adjusted it, and saw his fears confirmed in several devastating seconds. Many of the cells had been attacked, invaded, and hideously transformed.

They looked like bizarre, alien reptiles with translucent coiled-snake bodies and multiple heads. Seeing them, Dr. Castro flashed on a primitive jungle village exploding in flames and felt rattled to his core.

How many heads? he thought in a panic. How many?

Castro zoomed in on one of the infected cells and counted five. Then he looked at another and found six.

Six?

Not five? Not four?

He looked and quickly found another six-headed cell, and another.

Oh dear God, this can’t be—

A nurse burst into the lab, cried, “The girl’s crashing, Doctor!”

Castro spun away from the microscope and bolted after her.

“Who’s with her?” he demanded as they raced down a hallway and through a door that led them outside onto a medical campus.

“Dr. Desales,” she said, gasping.

Castro blew by her and sprinted down the street to the institute’s hospital.

He reached the door of the ICU two minutes later. A man and a woman in their thirties stopped him before he could go in.

“No one will tell us anything, Doctor!” the woman sobbed.

“We’re doing our best,” Castro told the girl’s parents, and he dodged into the ICU, where he yelled at the nurses, “Get us hazmat suits. Quarantine the room. Then quarantine the entire unit!”

Castro grabbed a surgical mask, went to the doorway, saw Dr. Desales working furiously on a comatose eight-year-old girl. “John, get out of there.”

“If I do, she dies,” Dr. Desales said.

“You don’t, you could die.”

Various alarms started sounding from the monitors and machines attached to a six-year-old boy in the bed next to the girl. Dr. Castro scanned the numbers, saw the boy was crashing too.

Throwing aside all caution, Castro yanked on sterile gloves and went to work, frantically adding a series of medicines to the IV.

“What the hell is it?” Desales demanded.

“A virus I’ve seen only once before,” Castro said. “We called it Hydra. Goes after the major organs.”

“Transmission?”

“Not certain, but we think body fluids.”

“Mortality rate?”

“Roughly sixteen percent the last time it appeared,” Castro said. “But I think there have been mutations that made it deadlier. C’mon, Jorge, fight.”

But the boy continued to fail. The doctors tried everything that had helped in these cases before, but no matter what they did, Jorge and his sister kept slipping further from their control. Their kidneys shut down. Then their livers.

Eleven minutes after Castro entered the ICU, blood began to seep from the little girl’s eyes. Then Maria was racked by a series of violent convulsions that culminated in a massive heart attack.

She died.

Fourteen minutes later, in the same terrible way, little Jorge did too.

Chapter 3

Four hundred yards off the shore of Copacabana, Colonel da Silva and I, harnessed and tethered, hung out the side of the helicopter and peered through binoculars.

Tens of thousands of crazed Argentine fans were partying on the famous beach. But my attention was totally focused on Sugarloaf.

“Do you see them, Jack?” Tavia shouted.

Through the shaky binoculars, I kept getting various glimpses of a thousand feet of black rock, but nothing—

“There,” I said, spotting something bright yellow against the cliff several hundred feet below the summit and something red and white below that.

“Jesus,” I said. “That’s bad.”

The pilot flew us beneath the cables of the aerial tram that took tourists to the top of Sugarloaf and hovered a hundred yards from the climbers, a man and a woman dangling by harness, rope, and piton. The man was lower than the woman by twenty or thirty feet.

Neither of them moved their arms or legs, but through the binoculars I could see that the woman’s eyes were open. She was crying for help. The man appeared comatose. His rib cage rose and fell erratically.

“I think we’re looking at possible spinal damage,” I said. “Does Rio have a search-and-rescue team?”

“For something like this?” Tavia replied dubiously.

“No,” da Silva answered. “Not for something like this.”

“Then we need to land on top,” I said.

“And do what?” the colonel demanded.

“Mount a rescue,” I said.

“You can do something like that, Jack?” Tavia asked.

“I had a lot of rope training in my early Marine years,” I said. “If the right gear’s up there, yeah, I think I can.”

Da Silva gave me a look of reappraisal and then shouted at the pilot to find a place to land on the mountain’s top. We spiraled up, away from the climbers. The pilot coordinated with security officers at the summit to clear the terrace, and in a minute or two, we put down.

An off-duty Rio police sergeant who’d been on the summit when the accident occurred led us around to the tram station, where one of the big gondolas was docked and empty.

Next to the tram, a sandy-haired woman in her twenties sat with her back to the rail, sobbing. A wiry olive-skinned man crouched next to her, staring off into space. Beside them, turned away from us, stood a taller, darker man who was looking over the railing. All three wore climbing gear.

Ignoring the few other people on the dock, we went straight to them and quickly learned what had happened. Alexandra Patrick was an American from Boulder, Colorado. Her older sister, Tamara, was the woman on the rope.

The young man beside Alexandra was Tamara’s boyfriend, René Leroux, a French expatriate living in Denver. The three of them had been traveling around Brazil seeing various games in the World Cup tournament. All were experienced climbers.

So was the tall Brazilian, Flavio Gomes, who worked for Victor Barros, the comatose man on the rope. Barros’s company had been guiding advanced climbers up the face of Sugarloaf the past eight years. Nothing even close to this had ever happened.

“We set every anchor,” Gomes said. “We check them every time. It all looked solid. And then it wasn’t.”

Gomes, Leroux, and Alexandra had been on a different, easier route than Tamara and Barros. Tamara was a far better climber than her sister or boyfriend and had asked to go up a more difficult way. Gomes’s group had gone first and was one hundred and fifty vertical feet above the other two when, apparently, an anchor bolt gave way, and then another. Only Alexandra saw the entire event.

“They fell at least fifty feet,” she whimpered. “And then they just kind of smashed into each other, whipsawed, and crashed into the wall. I could hear Tamara screaming for help, saying that she couldn’t feel her legs. There was nothing we could do from our position.”

Gomes nodded, chagrined. “I’m a solid climber, but I only just started guiding, and I’ve never been on a rescue like this. It’s out of my league.”

Leroux hung his head, said, “She’s gonna be paralyzed.”

I ignored him, went to the rail, and saw an anchored nylon rope going over a pad on the belly of the cliff and disappearing into the void.

“Were they on this line?” I asked.

“No, that line runs parallel to their rope, offset about eight inches,” Gomes said. “Another one of our normal safety measures.”

Thinking about the position of the injured climbers, thinking about what I was going to have to do to get them off the cliff, I decided against going down the secondary rope.

I looked at da Silva and said, “I need you to make a few things happen very fast, Colonel. Two lives depend on it.”

Chapter 4

Thirty-eight minutes later, I was on my belly on the floor of the tramcar. The doors were open. I was looking over the side, straight down more than a thousand feet, and fighting vertigo.

The second I spotted Tamara Patrick on the cliff, I said, “Stop.”

Colonel da Silva repeated the order into a radio. The tram halted and swung on the cable about twenty-five feet out from the summit station.

“How far down are they?” da Silva asked.

“I’m calling it three hundred feet,” I said, getting up to look at two Brazilian soldiers who’d come from an army base located less than a mile from the bottom tram station. They were almost finished attaching a truck winch to the steel floor of the cable car.

“One hundred meters,” I said to the soldiers. “Does it get me there?”

Tavia translated my words into Brazilian Portuguese, and they answered her.

She said, “With the extra rope, they think so.”

Gomes was checking the knots and carabiners that connected a climbing rope to the winch’s quarter-inch steel cable. I checked the space that separated the winch drum from the floor. Three, maybe four inches of clearance. With that much rope going onto the drum, it would be a tight fit.

We threaded the other, looped end of the climbing rope through a large carabiner we’d attached to a steel hook above the door frame. A closed D ring connected the rope to the harness I wore.

“Radio?” da Silva said.

I reached up and double-clicked the mike clipped to my chest.

The other people in the car — da Silva, Tavia, Gomes, the two soldiers, and the off-duty sergeant — nodded. They got in a line and grabbed hold of the rope with gloved hands.

I went to the edge of the open door, willed myself not to look down. Just before I stepped out, I said, “No slipping, now.”

Then my weight came into the harness and my legs were in space, and I was pushing off the bottom of the tram. Free of the car and dropping, I went into a slow twirl that got me dizzy and forced me to close my eyes to the jungle treetops so far below.

Sometimes I think I’m crazy. This was one of those times.

It took them a full minute to lower me the entire length of the climbing rope.

“You’re on winch now.” Da Silva’s voice crackled over the radio.

“Got it,” I said, feeling the descent go smoother and faster.

A minute later, I was almost to Tamara Patrick, eight, maybe nine feet above her and four feet out from the wall.

“Stop,” I said into the mike, and the winch halted.

“Help me!” Tamara called out weakly.

“That’s what I’m here for,” I said. “My name is Jack, and we’re going to get you out of here.”

“I can’t feel anything from the waist down,” she said, starting to cry.

“But you can feel your arms?”

“A little,” she said. “Yes.”

“Both hands?”

“The left more than the right,” Tamara said, getting herself under control.

“That’s good, that’s a start,” I said, looking down twenty-five feet to the guide hanging there limply.

“Has your guide said anything since the fall?” I asked as I started to kick and pump like a kid on a swing.

“No,” Tamara said. “How are you going to get me off here?”

“With a little imagination,” I said, swinging closer to the wall and then farther away.

On the third swing I caught that secondary rope coming down from the top. I rigged my harness to it and called into the mike, “Give me eight feet of slack, then bring the litter down.”

“Got it,” Tavia said.

I waited until a loop of rope hung almost to the injured climber before I started down. When I reached Tamara’s side, she rolled her head over to look at me, another good sign.

“I’m scared,” she said.

“Me too,” I said. “I hate this kind of shit.”

She smiled feebly. “And I love this kind of shit.”

“Your sister told me that.”

“Am I gonna be paralyzed, Jack?”

There was so much pain and fear in her voice and face that I felt tears well up in my eyes. I looked away and said, “I’m no doctor.”

She said nothing. I glanced at her. She was staring up.

I craned my head back and saw the stiff backboard twisting lazily on a second rope dropping from the tramcar.

“Jack?” Tamara said. “Could you hold my hand until it gets here?”

“I’d be honored,” I said, reaching out and taking her left hand. It felt cold and clammy, and I realized she was probably almost in shock.

“Did you see René up there?” she asked.

“I’m wearing his harness.”

Tamara nodded, her lower lip trembling. “He can’t deal with stuff like this.”

“Like what?”

“A paralyzed girlfriend,” she said, tears dripping down her cheeks.

“What is he? An imbecile of titanic proportions?”

Tamara laughed through her tears. “Sometimes.”

I kept up the light chat with her until the backboard reached us. It took quite a bit of finagling on both our parts to get Tamara strapped to the board, and the winch cable rope attached to the four lines supporting it. But we did it.

“Have a nice ride,” I said after I’d separated her from the rope that had saved her. “Very few people have ever done anything like this.”

“Thank you, Jack,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” I said, giving her hand one last squeeze. “And whatever happens, you’re going to be fine in the long run. Okay?”

“You think?”

“Only an imbecile of titanic proportions wouldn’t.”

She smiled and closed her eyes.

“Take her up,” I said into the mike, and I watched her rise for a few moments before starting toward Victor Barros.

By the time I’d climbed down to the guide’s side, Tamara had disappeared inside the tram, and the cable car was moving to the summit station.

“We’ll be right back, Jack,” Tavia called into the radio.

My fingers were on Barros’s neck by then. His skin was still warm to the touch, but there was no pulse that I could feel.

“Take your time,” I called sadly into the mike. “He’s gone.”

I hung there on the side of the cliff with the dead guide until the tram came back and lowered the winch rope. Then I clipped it directly to his harness and released him from the rope that had snapped his back and killed him.

Twenty minutes later, they pulled me into the tram. I sat against the wall opposite the corpse, feeling wrung out, and the cable car began to drop toward the mid-station.

“You okay, Jack?” Colonel da Silva asked.

“Honestly? I feel like I could sleep for a week.”

Tavia looked at her watch and grimaced. “I’m afraid you can’t, boss. We’re already running way late.”

I glanced at my own watch, closed my eyes, and groaned.

Chapter 5

In a boteco, a small, open-air bar not far from the hospital, Dr. Lucas Castro took another belt of cachaça, Brazil’s potent sugarcane rum. He stared numbly at the television screen, which showed some American guy hanging off a rope running out of one of the tramcars on Sugarloaf Mountain.

Castro turned to Dr. Desales, said bitterly, “A climber dies. A climber’s rescued. It’s on every channel. But two kids from the favelas dying from a virus? The day before the World Cup final?”

“Not a chance,” Desales said, nodding.

Dr. Castro ordered another shot, unable to stop the events of the past five hours from spinning again in his head, getting him angrier and more resentful by the moment. He and Desales had stood there after little Jorge died, drenched in sweat as they watched the flat lines on the monitors, stunned by how fast the boy and his sister had deteriorated and succumbed. The children had been in their care less than three hours.

“We’ve got to get out of here and decontaminate,” he’d said at last.

Shaken, Desales had followed Castro through the plastic sheeting the nurses had put up while the doctors tried to save the children.

They went to a special room off the ICU, stripped, and put their clothes in a hazardous-waste bin for incineration. Then they examined each other for any possible body-fluid exposure. Satisfied that there had been none, they lathered head to toe in a mild bleach solution that they rinsed off under high-pressure hoses.

When they’d emerged from decontamination they found Manuel Pinto, the hospital administrator, waiting for them.

A puffy-faced fifty-something man in a finely cut linen suit, Pinto asked, “What the hell’s going on?”

“We lost two, a young boy and a girl from the favelas,” Dr. Castro replied. “It’ll take a PCR test to confirm it, but I believe it’s a virus that has broken out only once before. Upper Amazon Basin. Three years ago.”

“You were there?”

“With a World Health Organization unit,” Castro said.

“Mortality rate?”

“Sixteen percent,” Desales answered.

“But we’ve just had a hundred percent incident,” Castro said. “We need to quarantine the hospital and the entire favela where those kids lived.”

“An entire favela?” Pinto said doubtfully. “I don’t have that authority.”

“Then find someone who does. I’m going to talk to the parents.”

The mother, a sweet young woman named Fernanda Gonzalez, looked pleading and afraid when Dr. Castro walked out of the ICU into the waiting room.

“There’s no easy way to say this,” Castro said. “We lost both of them.”

Fernanda collapsed into the arms of Pietro, her husband, and sobbed.

“How can that be?” Pietro demanded hotly. “I want to see them.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible, sir,” Castro said. “We believe they died from a highly infectious virus.”

“What? Like Ebola?” Pietro asked in disbelief.

“Different, but yes, dangerous like that.”

“Where are they?” Fernanda sobbed.

“Their bodies are under quarantine. And we need to do blood tests on both of you and anyone else who came into contact with your children in the past twenty-four hours.”

“Oh God,” the kids’ mother moaned. “Oh God, this is not happening.”

Her husband held on to her and sobbed too. Castro stayed with them until they could answer his questions. He learned that they lived in a sprawling slum in northeast Rio that was home to almost two hundred thousand people.

The father had a decent job as a security guard at the monument of Christ the Redeemer on Corcovado Mountain. Fernanda stayed home and took care of the children. They’d both noticed that Maria had been lethargic the evening before. In the middle of the night, she’d started vomiting. An hour later, so had Jorge.

“Where did they get the little cuts on their feet?” Castro asked.

“I don’t know,” Fernanda said. “They’re kids. They’re outside all the time.”

Barefoot? Castro thought, suppressing a shudder. In a slum?

The doctor had grown up in one of Rio’s favelas and knew all too well that hygiene in many of them was minimal at best. So whatever the kids stepped on had been infected with Hydra. But who or what had carried the virus there in the first place?

“Dr. Castro?”

He had looked up from the parents to see the hospital administrator standing there, rubbing his hands nervously. Beside him was an imperious little—

The bartender put a full shot glass of cachaça on the bar in front of the doctor, taking Castro from his thoughts.

Castro picked up the shot glass and held it up to Desales. “To Igor Lima,” he said. “The dumbest cover-your-ass idiot I have ever met.”

The doctors clinked glasses.

They took the rum in one gulp, ordered another round, and almost immediately Castro’s thoughts began to swirl again to Igor Lima.

Lima worked in the office of the mayor of Rio. He specialized in public-health issues, and when Castro and the hospital administrator had met with him just a few hours before, the man had been mightily annoyed to have been called to work on the Saturday before the World Cup final.

“Viruses and diseases have a way of ignoring such things,” Castro had told him.

“What viruses?” Lima had asked. “What diseases?”

After looking at the hospital administrator, who turned his head away, Castro had brought Lima up to speed. The doctor finished with a plea to put the favela where the children had lived under quarantine.

The mayoral aide’s chin retreated. His lips did a stiff dance, and then he shook his head. “That’s not happening.”

“What?” Castro demanded. “Why?”

“Because you’re not sure it’s a virus that killed those kids.”

“I am sure. I—”

“You haven’t run the PCR tests,” Lima said. “You said so yourself.”

“Not yet, but—”

“But nothing, Doctor. We’ll keep the bodies and the ICU in quarantine pending autopsies and figure out where we are on Monday.”

“Monday?” Castro sneered. “You mean after the World Cup final, don’t you? That’s what’s behind this. You don’t want to have the mayor and FIFA embarrassed; you want the media broadcasting only good thoughts all over the world tomorrow afternoon. Right? That’s the reason you’re burying a potential epidemic, isn’t it?”

Lima sputtered, “I’m not burying an epidemic.”

Castro poked the bureaucrat in the chest with his finger, said, “When a variation of this virus hit a village up in the Amazon a few years back, we had a sixteen percent mortality rate. But this is a mutation of Hydra. The cells have six heads instead of five. It killed both those children. One hundred percent mortality.”

“Again, without tests and without autopsies, you can’t know that,” Lima said. “So for the time being, the quarantine begins and ends with those bodies and that ICU.”

Castro started to argue again, but the mayoral aide stepped back, said, “Doctor, I hate to do this, but given your history, I don’t think you can be considered rational enough to handle this situation. I think you should be quarantined too.”

“What?”

“You’re off the case, Dr. Castro,” Lima said, and then he turned to the hospital administrator. “Senhor Pinto, you are in charge of making sure that everything in that ICU is sanitized and those bodies autopsied tonight so they can be cremated as soon as possible. And test the doctors.”

The administrator shook his head. “Tonight? I... I can’t.”

“And why not?” Lima demanded.

“I have a ticket to the FIFA party at the Copacabana Palace,” Pinto said.

“That’s your problem, not mine,” Lima said.

“You can’t be serious.”

“Deadly serious,” the mayor’s aide replied, and he turned to depart.

Castro’s hands balled into fists. He wanted to belt the little man but restrained himself, said, “Anyone else dies, it’s on your head, not ours!”

“Go into quarantine, Dr. Castro, and you as well, Dr. Desales,” Lima said over his shoulder.

Chapter 6

The bartender put two more shot glasses in front of the doctors.

They’d been drinking since their tests, and the children’s parents’, had come back negative. Dr. Castro drank his down and ordered another. Dr. Desales finished his and said he was done. He and his wife had dinner plans and he didn’t want to be wasted when he got home.

Dr. Castro wasn’t done and he had no one to go home to anyway. He suddenly wanted to get good and drunk and do something brazen, or vengeful, or both. He didn’t know what yet, but Lima’s actions could well have doomed many people. Even though he and Desales were clean, there were bound to be others. There needed to be a response. Right?

He couldn’t just turn the other cheek again. Right?

That was right. There had to be a response, a just response, a goddamned wake-up call.

Desales set an envelope on the bar in front of Castro.

“Ticket to the big FIFA bash at the Copacabana Palace,” Desales said. “Pinto gave it to me because he couldn’t use it, but we have plans with the in-laws and my wife won’t break them. You should go.”

“Screw that,” Castro said, and he picked the envelope up, pivoted, and flicked it into a trash can behind him.

Desales sighed, clapped Castro on the shoulder, and left.

The bartender set another shot down in front of the doctor just as the television screen changed from news back to World Cup coverage. More analysts. More dissection. More ruminating on Brazil’s brutal loss.

Seven to one? After everything, seven to one? For Brazil to go out before the finals was bad enough, but to get demolished? Annihilated?

Castro’s thoughts turned circular again, brought up old bitterness and grief he’d told himself a thousand times to leave behind. But the doctor couldn’t leave bitterness and grief behind. They were such constant companions, they might as well have been friends.

The doctor drank the shot down and ordered one more.

The screen cut to Henri Dijon, a FIFA spokesman, a French guy with a superior attitude and a five-thousand-dollar suit. Dijon was standing at a bank of microphones in front of the Copacabana Palace.

A reporter asked whether FIFA considered Brazil’s World Cup a success despite the protests in the months leading up to the tournament. Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians had gone into the streets in cities across the country to decry government corruption and the spending of billions on sports stadiums that might never be used again while the poor of Brazil got nothing.

“FIFA considers the tournament a smashing success for Brazil, for Rio, and for everyone involved,” Dijon said, and he kept blathering on in that vein.

For everyone involved? Castro thought, tasting acid at the back of his throat. For everyone involved?

Maybe the greedy bastard politicians who’d skimmed millions could consider it a success. And the construction companies. And FIFA, the most corrupt sports organization in the world. For those three groups and some others, the World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympic Games would be smashing successes.

But not for the poor, Castro thought angrily. The poor, as usual, had gotten shafted. Thrown out of their homes to make way for the stadiums, doomed to substandard health care, poor sanitation, and inferior educations.

Or destroyed, like that favela family today. Or like Castro two years ago.

He shook his head. He wouldn’t go there. He wouldn’t allow those memories to cripple him. Not tonight.

Instead, he watched the FIFA spokesman prattle on, ignoring the misery created by the sporting event and speaking only of the joy. Castro couldn’t ignore the pain or the misery. He couldn’t have if he’d tried because he had suffered as much as anyone and more than most.

As a result, Dr. Castro hated all of them, everyone who had anything to do with the World Cup. In his mind, the suffering was entirely their fault. And now, probably starting in that favela where Maria and little Jorge had lived, there would be even more pain because of a stupid soccer game.

There has to be some kind of response, Castro decided as the bartender put down the new shot glass full of rum. There has to be some kind of balance restored, some kind of penalty, something to...

A thought came winging out of the blind rage he’d worked himself into. The doctor dismissed it out of hand at first and picked up the shot glass.

Then he thought about it some more, and again.

Dr. Castro put the glass down, understanding that restoring balance would mean crossing a line, after which there was no coming back. Ever.

I don’t care, he thought. This isn’t vengeance. It’s the right thing to do.

Castro sat there a moment, swelling with justness, purpose, and resolve. Then he pushed the shot glass aside, paid his tab, and went over to the trash can, feeling stone-cold sober.

Chapter 7

By six thirty that evening, Avenida Atlântica was jammed with partying Argentines. The police had shut down the lane closest to the beach to take care of what had become a dangerous situation: the drunken revelers wandering off the famous black-and-white-mosaic sidewalks directly into traffic.

With traffic moving in only one direction, taxis and cars were slow bringing guests to the Copacabana Palace. Though more celebrities stayed at the Hotel Fasano in Ipanema these days, the Palace remained the place to throw a high-society bash.

As he walked along the sidewalk toward the main entrance, Dr. Castro was thinking that the Palace was also FIFA’s hotel. It only made sense that the final big party of the tournament would be held here.

Castro was wearing his best suit, navy blue, tropical wool, with a lightly starched white dress shirt and a red tie with soccer balls on it. He saw security men eyeing him as he approached. He lifted his hand to scratch his beard then remembered he’d shaved it off and put his hand in his coat pocket instead.

A couple climbed out of a cab just ahead of him. Both wore FIFA credentials on lanyards around their necks. The woman carried an invitation.

For a moment, the doctor hesitated.

Did he need FIFA credentials to get inside? Would he be turned away?

Castro forced an easy smile and held up his invitation.

Security waved him up the stairs.

A doorman opened one of the double doors. Castro stepped into a crush of well-dressed partygoers, his left hand still holding the invitation. His right hand protected his front pants pocket and all that it contained.

Slipping to the outside of the knot of people, Dr. Castro saw a table where guests were checking in. He also noticed a second security team: a big, beautiful Brazilian woman to the left of the grand staircase, and a tall, muscular blond-haired guy on the right. Both wore radio earpieces. Both were attentive and scanning the crowd.

It took four or five minutes for the doctor to reach the table. He held up the invitation to a grinning woman wearing FIFA credentials, said, “Manuel Pinto.”

She turned a few pages on her list, found Pinto’s name, and ran a pink line through it. Then she handed him a small ID badge that he clipped to his breast pocket. He smiled, thanked her, and walked around the table.

Joining others moving toward the staircase, Dr. Castro kept that easy smile going, trying to look as if he were about to meet an old friend. He turned his head slowly toward his left shoulder and then toward his right as he got close to the second security team. The doctor was using body language; by exposing his neck to the Brazilian woman and then the blond man, he was saying, I am not a threat. Not a threat to anyone at all.

It seemed to work, as neither of them paid him much attention. He stole glances at the badges they wore: REYNALDO, PRIVATE. MORGAN, PRIVATE.

Dr. Castro stiffened as he went by them.

Private.

He vaguely knew of the company and its reputation.

What were they doing here?

Where the staircase split, the doctor went right, climbing to the mezzanine and wondering whether having Private around made going through with his plan too risky. Maybe he should just have a drink and slip out. But then he flashed on images of bulldozers and rubble and a torn, bloody lab coat and those kids dying today, and the anger came back, along with his purpose and resolve.

Dr. Castro turned left on the mezzanine and moved with the crowd past walls covered with photographs of notable guests of the Palace, almost all of them Hollywood actors, European royalty, music greats, or the superrich and powerful. He found it all of only mild interest, although he did note that novelist Anne Rice’s picture was above and in a much more prominent position than Brigitte Bardot’s.

The doctor entered a ballroom set up for a banquet and continued along with the throng out onto a terrace that overlooked Avenida Atlântica, the beach, and the ocean. Night had fallen.

Across the street, under spotlights, men were playing beach volleyball. There were drums beating and whistles blowing somewhere, and Argentine and German fans were crushed in around the open-air bars and kiosks along the waterfront.

The crowd on the terrace was much more well-heeled. Dr. Castro guessed dignitaries, FIFA officials, local politicians, and a smattering of tycoons.

Everyone who had benefited, he thought bitterly.

The majority of people he’d come in with were already pressing on toward the bars on either side of the terrace. The doctor figured he’d had enough for one night but thought he’d look out of place without a drink in his hand. He waited patiently and ordered club soda with lime on the rocks.

When Dr. Castro turned away from the bar, he glanced through the crowd and was startled to see Igor Lima six people away and to his left. The mayor’s aide was drinking champagne, talking to a blonde six inches taller than him, and looking very self-satisfied. For a long moment the doctor got so enraged he considered making Lima the direct object of his wrath.

But he restrained himself. Too obvious. And Lima might recognize him, and that would do Castro no good in the long run.

It had to be a more fitting choice, the doctor thought. A statement. A...

The party dynamics shifted, some guests leaving the terrace to check on their seating for dinner. The exodus opened up space in the celebration and revealed new faces, including another one that Dr. Castro recognized.

He felt the rightness of that choice begin to vibrate everywhere in and around him. His skin tingled. It made him shiver.

Breathe, he told himself. Breathe, and then calmly, coldly, finish this.

Castro shifted his drink to his left hand, reached into his pants pocket, found the long thin cylinder, and grasped the length of the slender barrel. With his thumbnail, he flicked off the cap.

“Please, if you will all come inside, dinner is about to be served,” a woman called, prompting the crowd, including his target, to surge toward the banquet hall.

Castro forced that easy smile onto his face and lifted his drink before him, which got people to move out of his way. He angled and slipped and sped up until he was right behind Henri Dijon.

Quick as a whip, he drew his weapon, held it tight to his body, and then...

“Ahh!” Dijon yelled.

The FIFA spokesman spun around, slapping at his butt cheek and looking everywhere. His shoulder collided with a young waitress carrying a tray loaded with cocktails. He knocked her off her feet. The drinks and the tray crashed to the stone terrace, sending booze and shards of glass flying.

During the same three or four seconds, Castro kept moving and pocketed his weapon. Far enough away now, he blended in with the other guests as they all turned to check out the carnage. Dijon looked mortified as he helped the waitress back to her feet, saying, “I’m so, so sorry. I got stung by something, and I...”

The doctor drifted off. He didn’t want to seem too interested. Besides, the job was done.

As he moved through the banquet hall, he monitored his reaction. He had crossed the line, and yet he felt no remorse and no guilt. None whatsoever.

That’s easier, he thought. Better.

Dr. Castro left the banquet room, walking with a slight hitch in his stride so he wouldn’t accidentally jab himself with his weapon. He found a men’s restroom. He took a stall, put his drink down, felt wobbly, and leaned against the wall with his eyes closed for several long beats.

Then Castro gingerly went into his pocket and drew out the syringe. He studied it, feeling more than satisfied. When the doctor had gone out onto the terrace, there had been five ccs of little Jorge’s blood in the cylinder. And now?

Now there were only three.

Chapter 8

Sunday, July 13, 2014

6:45 p.m.

I played division 1 football. I know what it’s like to be an athlete surrounded by a raucous crowd on a big game day, how you feed off it, how the fans feed off your play.

I have also been lucky enough to be in the stands for four World Series games, three NBA Finals, two Super Bowls, a Stanley Cup contest, and the men’s hundred-meter track final at the London Olympics.

But I will tell you flat-out that I have never felt anything close to the extraordinary energy inside Maracanã Stadium after ninety minutes of nail-biting regulation play and fifteen minutes of dramatic overtime left Germany and Argentina locked zero to zero in the winner-take-all game for the soccer championship of the world.

Going to their respective benches for water and coaching before the second overtime period began, the players looked like they’d been through a war. The fans in the stadium looked like they’d witnessed a war and were holding on to one another for strength.

I got it. Like them, I’d seen twenty-two men playing beyond their hearts for one hundred and five minutes, striving for supremacy under incomprehensible pressure, while all around the globe, literally billions of fans were living and dying on their every fevered move.

This is different, I thought as I climbed up the stands and scanned the crowd. This is a whole other dimension of sport.

Don’t get me wrong. I love baseball, football, basketball, and hockey, but you can’t tell me those games yield true world champions the way soccer does. More people play soccer than the four of those sports put together, and the World Cup pits all nations against all nations, with almost every country on earth competing during the four years of qualifying that lead to the final tournament.

As the players returned to the field, the emotion in the crowd of seventy-five thousand rabid fans was off-the-charts electric. I had trouble staying on task when the referee blew his whistle and Maracanã Stadium morphed again into a madhouse crackling with hope and pulsing with fear.

When the ball went out-of-bounds and the din died down a little, I triggered my lapel mike, said, “Tavia?”

“Right here,” she said from the opposite side of the stadium.

“Tell everyone that this is not over yet, and we stay sharp until the very last person leaves this place.”

I heard her speaking Portuguese and then the crowd roared, drowning her out and sucking me right back into the game at the hundred and twelfth minute.

In a full sprint, Germany’s André Schürrle drove the ball down the left side of the pitch with Argentine defenders in hot pursuit. Schürrle dribbled toward the corner and just as he was about to be double-teamed, he struck the ball with his left foot.

The rising ball flew beautifully between both Argentine defenders and past a third before dropping to the chest of Germany’s Mario Götze, a substitute player sprinting toward goal. The ball bounced off Götze’s chest. Before it could hit the ground, he let loose with a nifty feat of kung fu, booting the ball out of the air and into the net.

The place went insane with a roar that hurt my ears. The Germans were deliriously singing “Deutschland über Alles” while the Argentines screamed in disbelief, ripped at their hair, and cried as if a wedding had just turned into a funeral.

I’d never seen anything like it.

More than seven minutes remained in the overtime, but I began to move laterally through the stadium toward a blue stage erected in the stands high above midfield. This was where the trophies would be awarded. I figured that if there was going to be a security issue, it would happen when the politicians and lords of FIFA emerged from their bulletproof hospitality suites and exposed themselves to the players, the fans, and the world.

Only four minutes remained on the clock by the time I got to the area. Already a large company of burly Brazilian policemen in matching blue suits, ties, and white gloves were moving to positions on either side of the aisle of steps the players would climb to reach the stage. Colonel da Silva was coming down the stairs on the opposite side, inspecting the security line.

On the stage itself, on a long table draped in white, the trophies were being assembled and positioned. Behind the table, overseeing the arrangements, was a man I knew slightly, an acquaintance, really. Henri Dijon was French and the primary spokesman for FIFA.

In every encounter I’d had with Dijon, he’d been unflappable, well spoken, and impeccably dressed. He was also a health nut and ordinarily appeared tanned and fit. But in those last minutes of the World Cup final, Dijon looked pale and weak as he patted his sweaty brow. And his clothes seemed, for him, anyway, disheveled.

The crowd roared. I spun around, saw Argentina’s superstar Lionel Messi lining up for a free kick about thirty-five yards from the goal with less than two minutes on the clock. If Argentina had a chance, this was it.

Instead of raising the decibel level, all the Argentines had gone silent and apprehensive. Then Messi booted the ball over the top of the goal, and a great wave of groaning broke over the stadium.

When the referee blew the whistle a short while later, ending the game, the Argentines were wretched and the Germans dancing. Down on the field, it was the same, the world champions celebrating and the almost champions grieving and despondent at what might have been.

“Jack, da Silva says the VIPs are ready to move,” I heard Tavia say in my earpiece. “Chancellor Merkel will come last with her own security contingent.”

“Roger that,” I said, turning away from the field.

My intent was to climb high above the stage before any of the VIPs started down. But I’d taken no more than two steps when I saw Henri Dijon come toward me as if he were drunk and forced to walk a high wire.

The man was drenched with sweat and trembling. He lurched and stumbled, and I caught him before he could face-plant on the concrete.

“Henri?” I said.

“Doctor,” he said thickly. His eyes were unfocused and bloodshot.

“We’ll get you a medic,” I said.

“No,” Dijon gasped. “Not here. I don’t want to ruin the ceremony.”

Tavia had seen Dijon falter and came across the stage in time to hear him. She said, “Let’s get him to the clinic.”

We held him under his arms and supported and lifted him up the twenty or so stairs. Having the wall of guards on either side made it easier for us and less humiliating for the FIFA spokesman.

“Oh God,” Dijon moaned. “Something’s wrong. Terribly wrong.”

Tavia put her hand on his brow after we’d gotten him out of the stands and into the deserted halls of the stadium.

“He’s burning up,” she said, and we dragged him to the clinic.

The nurse on duty got him on a bed and tried to check his vital signs. But Dijon went into some kind of seizure; his whole system seemed to go haywire, his body arching grotesquely with violent spasms.

“Call for a doctor,” the nurse cried as she tried to hold Dijon down. “There has to be one in the stands. I can’t handle something like this, and I don’t think he’d survive an ambulance ride.”

Tavia radioed Colonel da Silva, who relayed the message. A moment later, over the loudspeaker, a man’s calm voice asked for any physicians in the stadium to go to the clinic, where there was a medical emergency.

In two minutes, a shaggy-haired blond man with a mustache came running up to the clinic. “I’m a doctor. What have you got?”

The nurse started firing off the patient’s vital signs as the doctor grabbed sterile gloves and a mask and went to Dijon’s side. The man’s spasms had slowed to tremors. The doctor set to work and the nurse drew the curtain.

In the hall outside the tiny clinic, Tavia, shaken, said, “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“I saw some rough stuff in Afghanistan, but that was right up—”

The doctor tore back the curtain and hustled toward the door with the nurse crying after him, “Are you sure?”

“Sure enough to be getting out of that room,” he yelled. “You should too.”

“What’s happening?” Tavia demanded as he rushed out.

“He’s dead,” the doctor said, hurrying by us.

“Where are you going?” the nurse cried.

“I’m a plastic surgeon, no expert on infectious diseases, but that looks like Ebola to me,” he shouted over his shoulder. “And because I am no expert, I am getting the hell out of here before this entire stadium is put under quarantine!”

The doctor broke into a run and left us there. Gaping at this news, I stared in at the lifeless form of Henri Dijon, who was sprawled on the bed at an unnatural angle, his skin now livid, almost purple, and blood trickling from his lips.

I looked to Tavia and the nurse, who were also in shock.

“Call da Silva,” I said. “And tell the nurse to shut that door.”

Tavia put in the call while the nurse sealed off the room where Dijon lay.

“Da Silva’s on his way,” Tavia said. “Says to talk to no one. Jesus, Jack, we could be infected. What do we do?”

Feeling afraid and shaky for the first time, I said, “Strip, burn our clothes, and cover ourselves in Saran Wrap?”

Chapter 9

Lucas Castro waited until he was blocks away from Maracanã Stadium before he removed the blond wig and fake mustache and dropped them in a trash can.

They can’t ignore that, the doctor thought, looking back at the brilliantly lit stadium where Shakira was singing. Someone will pay attention now. The deaths of Jorge and his sister won’t be in vain. The death of—

A firework rocket soared over the stadium and exploded in a series of thundering claps and flashes, then dwindled away to silver glints that rained down on the World Cup venue like a brilliant mist. The image was satisfying enough to turn Castro toward home.

Dr. Castro had no doubt that he would hear how the crisis was handled. Once the body was examined, someone would come to him, and he’d be able to blame it on Igor Lima. No histrionics that might raise suspicions. Just a clear account of the truth.

I warned Senhor Lima. But he was more interested in protecting the World Cup than the people of Rio.

Dr. Desales would back him up. No doubt. And when it came to it, Pinto, the hospital administrator, would do the same, if only to save his own ass.

When Dr. Castro reached home, he was pleasantly tired, and he poured himself a glass of wine, proud of himself. He hadn’t stood back. He’d fought for something, sacrificed for it, even spent four thousand dollars for a scalped ticket to the game.

The doctor had watched Henri Dijon through binoculars for the entire match, or at least whenever he was visible. After seeing those same two from Private catch the FIFA spokesman and lead him away, he knew it was only a matter of time before a call went out for a doctor, a call that he would answer.

Encountering Morgan and Reynaldo again, he’d had a moment of panic that they would recognize him from the night before. But his disguise and the urgency of the situation had been enough to keep all attention on the dying man.

Dijon had conveniently expired before Castro had time to make even a mock examination. Then it was simply a matter of suggesting Ebola was the culprit and acting the scared, unethical plastic surgeon out to save his own hide.

By now the entire stadium must be under lockdown, the doctor thought as he poured himself a second glass of wine and turned on the television, expecting the late local coverage that Sunday night to be all about the virus outbreak.

But there was nothing. Just stories about the game and how smoothly it had all gone. Not even a protest had marred the event. FIFA and the government were declaring the tournament and the final a classic, one for the ages. Never once was Henri Dijon mentioned. And watching a live stand-up inside Maracanã, he could see that the stadium was empty.

Castro couldn’t believe it.

They’re burying Dijon’s death, he thought with growing bitterness. Even the death of someone like Dijon wasn’t enough to shatter the facade. They were burying the story for FIFA’s and Rio’s image, just like they’d buried the two poor kids.

The doctor sat there for hours staring at the screen, telling himself that at some point, word of Dijon’s death and its manner would get out. But by dawn, watching the early newscasts, he wasn’t even trying to believe it anymore.

Dijon’s death will be attributed to a heart attack or something. The virus will never be mentioned. I’ll never be contacted. And more will die until...

No, that’s not happening, Castro decided, feeling angrier and more obsessed than ever. There has to be payback. That is all there is to it.

He owed those dead kids payback. He owed all the poor of Rio payback as well. And Sophie? He owed her most of all.

Castro went to his refrigerator and pulled out a vial. He held it up to the morning light and swore he could see the ghosts of Sophie, the children, and even Dijon swirling in the rest of the contaminated blood.

Every single ghost was howling at him to go on.