blast site.
The stuff had been carried along on a virtual flight path.
Sloppy police work, he thought. It helped explain why Rio’s homicide clearance rate was around 3 percent, while the average back home was about 65. Using what he’d seen at the site, and on the TV footage, to guide him, Gannon figured that most of the material had ended up in the alley across the street from the café.
Although police were present, the alley was not sealed. The narrow passage between the tall buildings was vacant and dark, but there was enough natural light remaining. Gannon’s pulse quickened.
A number of papers were on the pavement among other debris, or pressed to the walls. He began collecting them. Were they from the blast? Who knew? He’d study every one he could find.
“Hey! Que você está fazendo lá?” a voice boomed down the alley. He was in trouble.
“Que você está fazendo lá?”
The voice was now closer; two figures were approaching from a distance. Gannon turned and walked in the opposite direction.
“Batente!”
The figures were moving faster, Gannon’s breathing quickened and he started a fast trot.
“Polícia! Batente agora!”
His heart pounding, Gannon ran from the alley.
Don’t let the police get near you.
He cut across a busy street to a large hotel, entered the lobby and rushed through it, finding a rear exit that opened to an ornate gurgling fountain, which led to a plaza.
Sirens echoed through the city.
Were they for him?
Fueled by adrenaline, he kept moving.
Without looking back he hurried around the plaza’s statues. Two or three blocks away, the lights of a theater, nightclubs and restaurants glittered in the dusk. He slipped into the crowds on the sidewalk and made his way toward the restaurants until he saw a taxi.
The driver was in his fifties, wearing a white cap. Gannon neared the cab, pointing at it then himself. The driver nodded, making the small silver cross on the chain around his neck sway a little.
“Hotel de nove palmas,” Gannon said after getting in the back.
The taxi pulled away. No police were in sight.
As Gannon’s breathing settled, he analyzed the situation. All he’d done was gather trash from a public street in an unsealed area near a crime scene.
Still, if Estralla learned of it, it would be disastrous.
Gannon dragged the back of his hand over his moist brow and glimpsed the driver’s eyes studying him in the rearview mirror. Gannon felt a small ache in his right hand. He was still gripping the papers, a sheaf nearly half an inch thick.
As the cab worked its way through Centro, Gannon inserted his earpiece into his digital recorder and played Gabriela’s last message, cuing up the key aspect.
“…I got a call from an anonymous woman who claims to have a big story and documents for us. I set up a meeting at the Café Amaldo…”
Gannon replayed “and documents for us,” several times.
If Gabriela met her source, and if that source brought records, then it’s possible the blast scattered some of them to the street.
Those documents could be in his hands now.
A few of the papers were charred. Some had burned edges.
They had to have come from the blast.
Gannon caught his breath when he stopped at one page.
It looked like it was smeared with blood.
As soon as he got to his hotel room he started working.
This wouldn’t be easy. The papers were in Portuguese. He set them out on the desk and switched on his laptop. Some papers had letterheads, some looked like spread sheets, sales records, membership lists, business correspondence.
He typed phrases into free online language services and translated what he could into English. It gave him a sense of what each record was. When he found pages that obviously belonged together, he grouped them. The documents were from computer companies, law firms, banks, churches. It was meticulous work but he kept at it until exhaustion overtook him and he went to bed.
7
Big Cloud, Wyoming
A continent away, Emma Lane was plunging through darkness with her eyes closed, her thinking unclear.
They’re gone, Emma.
Nooooo…
Joe and Tyler are with the angels now.
She was trapped in a nightmare.
There was a flash, a scream on a rushing wind, then her world vanished and she floated out of herself but came back to now.
Emma smelled the antiseptic smell of a hospital. A faint message echoed on the PA and she sensed laundered linen, a pillow under her head. She was thirsty, and her head ached as her mind streaked with images: of a perfect day, of driving to the river for a