The Panic Zone (2 page)

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

T
he next day, Gabriela Rosa, a reporter at the Rio Bureau of the World Press Alliance, reached across her desk to answer her phone.

“
Alo,
Gabriela Rosa, WPA.”

“Eu tenho que falar a—”
The female caller's voice was overtaken by street noise. She was likely using a pay phone.

“Please speak louder.”

“I have to talk to a reporter with your news agency about a big story.”

“I am a reporter,” Rosa said. “What's the story?”

“Not over the phone, we have to meet.”

“Give me your name, please?”

“I can't.”

“Perhaps you could come to our office?”

“No. I want to meet you somewhere public. I have documents. This has to get out as soon as possible.”

The woman's voice betrayed fear and desperation, as if she'd had trouble summoning the courage to make this call, forcing Rosa to make a quick decision. She had nearly finished a feature on crime on the metro. Then she'd planned to visit a detective, but she could skip it.

A good reporter never turned a tipster away.

Rosa would meet the caller but she would be careful.

“Fine,” Rosa said. “We are in the Centro on Rua do Riachuelo near
O Dia's
offices. Do you know it?”

“Yes.”

“Five blocks west of us on Rua do Riachuelo there is the Café Amaldo. Meet me there at 2:00 p.m. sharp. My name is Gabriela Rosa. I have brown hair. I'll be wearing sunglasses, a pink shirt and white slacks. I'll be reading
Jornal do Brasil
and I'll have my white bag on the table. I will be alone. Are you coming alone?”

“Yes.”

“Give me your name.”

“No name. I'll find you.”

“Fine, meet me at two sharp. I'll give you my cell-phone number in case you must cancel. Do you want to give me a number?”

“No. I will be there at two.”

“Can you give me some sense of what this story is?”

“I will tell you when we meet.”

Afterward, as Rosa finished her feature, she took stock of the empty office. The bureau chief was out of town. The stringer and photographer were on assignments. The news assistant was off. Rosa was alone as she pondered her tip and WPA's rules for staff called out to meet unknown sources: “Tell people where you are going, who you are meeting and never go alone.”

Rio was one of the world's most beautiful cities. It was also one of the most violent. Much of its major crime arose from drug dealing and gang wars afflicting the favelas, the crowded shanty towns that blanketed the hillsides overlooking the metropolis.

Rosa, like other news reporters in Rio, was mindful of the risks. Criminals had kidnapped and murdered journalists who threatened to expose their networks. She would not meet her source alone. She called a cell-phone number.

“
Alo,
Verde,” a man answered.

“Marcelo, it's Gabriela. Are you getting back soon? I need you for a job.”

“I'm leaving Santa Teresa now. Got some very nice pictures New York will love. I have to get lunch.”

“No. Meet me on the street in front of Café Amaldo. I'll buy you lunch.”

“That's a deal. What's the job?”

“I'm meeting a source and you're my backup. Be there at one-thirty. Don't be late. Call me if you are delayed.”

Later, as Rosa prepared to leave the bureau, she called John Esper, her husband, who was also the bureau chief and who, by her estimation, would now be on a return flight from São Paulo, where he'd helped cover news of the upcoming visit by the U.S. vice president. Rosa left Esper a voice mail on his cell phone advising him she would be meeting an anonymous source at the Café Amaldo but would be with Marcelo.

Rosa walked to her meeting, absorbing the bustle of downtown Rio with its beautiful colonial buildings juxtaposed with highrises, shops and corporate towers. Some days, she could feel the city's excitement mounting in the lead up to the World Cup and the Summer Olympics. But today, as she neared the café, she thought only about the call she had received.

Sure, it could be something but these things never amounted to much. Usually, they had more to do with a personal matter of a malcontent who wanted a reporter to publicly embarrass their adversary. If that happened today, it wouldn't be a total waste. She would at least have lunch at Café Amaldo and a tale to tell Esper.

Marcelo met her near the restaurant. He was one of Brazil's best news photographers, an ex-beach bum from Copacabana who was also a bodybuilder.

“My source is meeting me here in thirty minutes. A woman,” Rosa said. “You know the drill. Can you set up over there?” She nodded to the cantina across the busy street.

“Sure.” He had his hand out. “But you promised me lunch.”

Shaking her head, Rosa put a few bills in his palm.

“I want a receipt and the change, buddy.”

Marcelo winked then left Rosa, who found an outdoor café table with a clear line of sight for Marcelo. She put her bag on the table, adjusted her sunglasses and read her newspaper.

Twenty minutes later, a taxi stopped near the café, cuing a chorus of horns. As the female passenger paid the driver, a motorcycle with two people aboard growled around it. After scanning the crowded café, the taxi's passenger approached Rosa's table and stood before her.

“May I help you?” Rosa asked.

“Gabriela?”

“Yes.”

“I am the woman who called.”

She had a tight grip on the strap of her bag, running her thumb over her knuckles as she took quick stock of the busy restaurant. Rosa set her newspaper aside.

“Sit down, please.”

The two women filled Marcelo's lens. As he prepared to take his first shot from his table across and down the street, a large truck making a delivery blocked his view. Marcelo cursed under his breath, left money for his drink, grabbed his bag and trotted toward the Café Amaldo, passing by the mouth of a dark alley.

He did not notice that the same motorcycle, which earlier had sped by the cab, was now in the alley, sitting back from the street. Two men stood next to it, their attention fixed on the café. The driver talked in low tones on his cell phone. His passenger, dressed in a suit like a downtown banker, checked his hair in the side mirror. He slid on dark glasses, then he unfastened a tan leather briefcase that was strapped to the motorcycle's backrest.

At the café, Marcelo found a table inside, next to the large open-air window that looked out over the alfresco area. He liked the Amaldo and had used it many times like this with
reporters. It had Wi-Fi wireless access. And with his camera's Eye-Fi card preconfigured, he was good to go.

Marcelo ordered a soda and sandwich then worked ever so casually, so that anyone watching would conclude he was merely cleaning his lens, when in fact he was shooting photos.

Rosa tapped her pen on her notebook while waiting for the woman to tell her story. The woman was in her twenties. She had a good figure and was pretty. She seemed educated and poised but her hand shook and she spilled some of the cream meant for her coffee.

“Forgive me, please. I'm nervous.”

“What are you nervous about?”

“They could be watching me.”

“Who?”

“Give me a moment. I want to do this. But I need to go to the lavatory.”

Rosa was a veteran reporter, not easily frightened or fooled. She sensed something genuine about this woman and was relieved when a few minutes later she returned.

“You know,” Gabriela said, “you should tell me what's going on.”

“No one will believe it. It goes beyond Brazil. It's why I chose your news agency. You must tell the world.” The woman extracted a brown envelope from her bag. “You have to investigate, it has to be exposed.”

“What has to be exposed?”

“Some of it is in these documents.”

At that moment, a man in a suit, wearing dark glasses, navigated his way among the tables of the crowded café. He reached inside his jacket for his wallet but dropped it.

As he bent over to retrieve it amid the din, no one saw him place his tan briefcase under a chair occupied only by shopping bags. The chair was being saved for someone who had not yet arrived at the crowded table.

Brushing off his wallet, the man walked into the restau
rant and left unnoticed by a side door. He strode to a corner while pressing several numbers on his cell phone. A motorcycle stopped next to him and he put on a helmet then climbed on behind the driver.

At her table, Rosa began flipping through the documents as her source explained the story.

Two tables away, as a group of well-dressed women cleared the chair of shopping bags for their friend who had arrived, the tan briefcase under it fell over.

The woman nearest to it blinked in question.

One of them reached down toward it, but the briefcase disappeared in a blinding flash of hot light. Glass in buildings near and above the café exploded in the concussive wave. Blood, flesh and debris showered on the street, pelting people a block away.

A fireball rolled skyward.

New York City

T
he World Press Alliance headquarters is at midtown Manhattan's western edge.

Jack Gannon hurried back to it, walking by the Long Island Railroad maintenance yards, where Thirty-third Street slopes into a bleak wasteland near the Hudson River. From here, he could see the helicopters lifting off and landing at the West Thirtieth Street Heliport.

Beyond that: New Jersey.

His cell phone vibrated again. Another text message: Where are you?

Be there in ten, he responded.

Nearly trotting now, he passed the graffiti-covered wall of a shipping depot where shopping-cart pushers sorted their morning bounty of cans. One man in dreadlocks and a faded Obama T-shirt was dismantling a TV for recycling.

“Can you help your brother? I need food.”

Gannon reached into his pocket where he still had the change from his hot-dog lunch and fished out a crumpled five.

“Bless you. Have a long, happy life.”

Gannon was still new to the city, and his heart had not hardened toward the hard-luck cases he saw every day.

Since he'd left Buffalo for his new job at the WPA, he'd taken to walking New York's streets whenever he could. He
was on desk duty today and had come to this isolated tract on his lunch break to be alone.

To think.

He was five months into his dream of working at one of the world's largest news organizations and he still had not landed a good story.

So far he'd reported on a homicide, and helped with the coverage of a school shooting in California and a charter bus crash near the Grand Canyon. He'd inserted national paragraphs into stories from WPA's foreign bureaus. He had also been assigned to night shifts helping edit copy on the national and world desks. Soon, he realized that not everyone at WPA wanted him there, something made clear the night he'd overheard two copy editors kibitzing by the features desk.

“What do you make of Jack Gannon?”

“I haven't seen any pizzazz. He's out of his league.”

“Didn't the
Buffalo Sentinel
fire him, or something? I missed all that.”

“He's one of Melody Lyon's projects. She hired him after he broke that story on the Buffalo detective and the missing women.”

“That one wasn't bad.”

“Gannon's got more luck than talent, if you ask me. What's he done since?”

“Not much.”

“That's my point. And you're right, he was fired by the
Sentinel,
so was his managing editor. It was a stinking mess. I heard that O'Neill and Stone were against Gannon's hire but that Melody wanted it done. I hear he's disappointed people and there's talk they might let him go.”

“Really?”

“It's a rumor. I think he should be punted back to Buffalo.”

“Didn't his bio say that he'd been nominated for a Pulitzer way back for the story on the jetliner and the whacked-out Russian pilot?”

“A Russian-speaking guy in the
Sentinel
's pressroom did all the talking to sources overseas, Gannon just took dictation.”

That was a load of bull!

Gannon had bristled on the other side of the file cabinets, out of sight.

They were wrong about him.

Dead wrong,
he repeated to himself now, as he jogged to a crosswalk to make the light. He'd earned his shot with the WPA, crawled through hell to get to New York. He belonged here and he'd prove it.

Gannon entered the twenty-story WPA building, swiped his ID badge at the security turnstile and stepped into the elevator.

He checked his phone. Nineteen minutes since Melody Lyon, the deputy executive—the WPA's number two editor after Beland Stone—had summoned him with her first text.

* * *

We need to see you now.

* * *

He got off the elevator on the sixteenth floor with a measure of honor as he strode by the reception wall displaying WPA news photos of history's most compelling moments from the past hundred years.

The World Press Alliance was one of the world's largest news wire services, operating a bureau in every major U.S. city, and two hundred bureaus in seventy-five countries, providing a nonstop flow of information to thousands of newspapers, radio, TV, corporate and online subscribers.

The WPA's demand for excellence had earned it twenty-two Pulitzer prizes and the respect of its rivals, chiefly the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Bloomberg, China's Xinhua News Agency and Russia's fast-rising Interfax News Agency.

Gannon entered the newsroom with a sense of foreboding.

Something was breaking on the flat-screen monitors that streamed video and data from around the world. Whatever
it was, it had hit the WPA. Some reporters looked shaken. A few were standing, hugging each other.

“Did you know Gabriela? Poor John.”

A few editors quietly cursed at their keyboards.

Gannon was headed toward Melody Lyon's office when a news assistant caught up to him.

“Jack, they're all in the conference room. Go there now.”

A teleconference was in progress, and solemn-faced senior editors sat around the polished table. Concentrating over her bifocals on the call, Melody Lyon, who was running the meeting, pointed at an empty chair beside her. As Gannon took it, an assistant passed him a folder.

“Sign this.” Her pen tapped a signature line on the documents. Gannon glimpsed the words
Consulado-Geral do Brasil em Nova York—Visa Application form
and a note affixed: “Request for Urgency.”

George Wilson, the third most powerful editor after Lyon, was in charge of WPA's foreign bureaus. He eyed Gannon, checked his BlackBerry then said to the caller, keeping his voice loud: “Everyone, Reuters just moved an item claiming two journalists are among the victims. No other details. Frank, let's run through that again.”

Frank Archer, WPA's São Paulo bureau chief, who was on the speaker phone, kept his emotions under control. He had landed in Rio de Janeiro and was at the scene. Sirens could be heard in the background.

“John Esper was returning to Rio from São Paulo where he was helping with coverage of the U.S. vice president's upcoming visit,” Archer said. “John landed in Rio about four hours ago and learned the news about the Café Amaldo bombing. At that time he picked up Gabriela's message saying she was headed to the café with Marcelo Verde—”

Gannon read the note Lyon had passed to him:

“John Esper is WPA's Rio de Janeiro bureau chief. Bureau reporter Gabriela Rosa is his wife. Marcelo Verde is WPA's Rio photog.”

Archer continued, “John first thought Gabriela and Marcelo were en route to
cover
the bombing but when he couldn't reach them, he rechecked her message about meeting a source at the café. That's when it hit him—they were there when the bomb exploded at the café. It was the last thing John said to me before I rushed to the airport. I can't reach him now.”

“Frank, it's George,” Wilson spoke up. “John texted us saying that he'd gone to the hospital where they took most of the victims.”

“Wait!” Archer said. “A friend at Globo just told me that police have found Marcelo Verde's wallet and Gabriela Rosa's bag among the dead and debris.”

“Oh, my lord.” Melody Lyon cupped her hands to her face. “It's true.”

Gannon's stomach tightened.

“The toll,” Archer struggled, “is now seven dead and several critically injured, so it will rise. George, we need help down here.” Archer was fighting emotion. “Our Rio bureau's been—George, we need help.”

“We're on it, Frank. I've sent in our people from Buenos Aires and Caracas. We're also sending help from New York.”

Wilson looked at Gannon.

“Melody here, Frank. Any claims of responsibility? Any thoughts on who's behind the attack?”

“
O Dia
says it's narco gangs from the favelas, but who knows. I have to go.”

“Keep us posted, Frank.”

George Wilson removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes and took stock of the other editors, stopping at Melody Lyon, who outranked them all.

“Jesus, Mel, I think we just lost two of our people. Did you alert Beland?”

“He's in Washington. We told him when the unconfirmed reports first broke. I've been updating him.”

A soft rap sounded at the door. “Excuse me, Melody?” The news assistant had returned.

“Yes, Rachel.”

“Melissa's left in a cab to the Brazilian Consulate to get Jack's visa application processed. Our consular contacts expressed concern and agreed to expedite Jack's application.”

“Thank you, Rachel.”

“Jack.” Lyon turned to Gannon. “There's a TAM flight that leaves JFK in five hours. It's direct to Rio de Janeiro, arrives 8:30 a.m. tomorrow.”

“You're sending me to Brazil?”

“We need you to help our team there.”

Gannon's heart beat a little faster.

“Certainly,” he said, “but you should know, I've never been there and I don't speak Portuguese, or Spanish.”

“Local support staff will help you,” Lyon said. “Go home and pack.”

A vein in George Wilson's temple pulsed as his steel gray eyes locked on Gannon.

“I want you to know,” Wilson said, “that I don't think you're the right person to send down there at this time.”

“George, please,” Lyon said, “we've been over this.”

“Melody's the boss, Gannon, and she believes your fresh eyes, as she calls them, could be an asset.”

“I will do my best,” Gannon said.

“You'll do as you're told,” Wilson said. “You'll take direction from New York and from my correspondents down there who have far more foreign-reporting experience than you ever saw at the
Buffalo Sentinel,
and you will stay out of the goddamned way.”

That's not what I do.

Gannon looked to Lyon for support but she was pondering the Empire State Building, Manhattan's skyline and her anguish. Everyone's hurting now, he thought. Out of respect, he bit back on his words and absorbed Wilson's misdirected insult.

“I will do my best, George,” he repeated.