“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 summit 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 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 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 better climber by far 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 that went over a pad on the belly of the cliff and disappeared 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.”
About the Author
James Patterson holds the Guinness World Record for the most number one New York Times bestsellers. He is a tireless champion of the power of books and reading, exemplified by his new children’s book imprint, JIMMY Patterson, whose mission is simple: he wants every kid who finishes a JIMMY book to say, “Please give me another book.” He has donated more than one million books to students and soldiers and has over four hundred James Patterson Teacher Education Scholarships at twenty-four colleges and universities. He has also donated millions to independent bookstores and school libraries. James will be investing his proceeds from the sales of JIMMY Patterson books in pro-reading initiatives.
Marshall Karp has written for stage, screen, and TV and is the author of the Lomax and Biggs series. He is also the coauthor, with James Patterson, of the other books in the NYPD Red series.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Prologue: The Red, Red Carpet ONE
TWO
PART ONE: LONG DAYS. SHORT NIGHTS. CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
PART TWO: BEST. MOM. EVER. CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
PART THREE: SOME DAYS ARE DIAMONDS. CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
CHAPTER 70
CHAPTER 71
CHAPTER 72
CHAPTER 73
CHAPTER 74
CHAPTER 75
PART FOUR: THE NEW NORMAL CHAPTER 76
CHAPTER 77
CHAPTER 78
CHAPTER 79
Acknowledgments
An
unsolved murder at the World Cup in Rio was just a warning. Now come the Olympics.
About the Author
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Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2016 by James Patterson
Excerpt from Private Rio © 2016 by James Patterson
Cover design by Keith Hayes; art from Shutterstock
Author photograph by Sue Patterson
Cover copyright © 2016 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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