Megan set the pencil down and yawned. She stared at Wolfgang a moment, then cocked her head. “What do you think?”
The question surprised Wolfgang. It was the first time Megan had ever looked to him for direct input, and somehow, the gesture made him uncomfortable. He sipped the Sprite to stall for time. “I think . . .” He hesitated some more, then shrugged. “I think that wherever that necklace is, it’s not a place we want to stumble up to like Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
“The same could be said for most of Rio.”
“That bad? Show me.”
Megan gestured to the map with her pencil. “A little under seven million people live in metro Rio de Janeiro, making it the second-most populous city in Brazil. Those seven million souls are spread out over an area just over seventeen hundred square miles, most of it mountainous and unsuited to proper streets and buildings. Rio itself is divided into four governmental zones—West, North, South, and Central.”
Megan beckoned for Wolfgang’s Sprite, took a sip, then pointed to the map with the pencil. “The Central Zone consists of the core of the city, including downtown and the financial district. The South Zone is situated south of the Central, along the Atlantic coast. All your postcard shots of Rio beaches are from the South Zone, but there’s some community living built in, as well.”
She moved the pencil inland from the coast and gestured with it to a sprawling area of metropolis. “The West Zone is by far the largest, consisting of roughly fifty percent of the city’s total area. It contains a number of lower and middle-class neighborhoods, industrial centers, a couple parks, and a smattering of tourist attractions.”
Again, she moved the pencil, this time indicating a small area just north of the bay. She tapped the spot, and her voice lowered. “This is the North Zone. It’s home to the Maracanã football stadium, along with Rio’s most iconic landmark, the Redeemer statue.”
“Christ on the mountaintop, with his arms spread?” Wolfgang asked.
“Right. But beneath all that, built along the hillside, there’s something a lot less tourist friendly. Are you familiar with the term favela?”
Wolfgang squinted. He’d heard the word before but couldn’t place it. “Not really.”
“It’s Portuguese. Roughly translated, it means a shantytown, or a slum. We don’t really have anything like it in America. The Cliffs Notes history is that over the past century, poverty-stricken residents with no proper homes moved into the hills of the North Zone and built themselves a community out of scraps. Bits of tin, wood, tarp—whatever they could find. These structures are illegally constructed by the thousands, clinging to the hillsides and stacked on top of one another to form a city within a city. Most of them don’t have electricity or running water. Those that do often siphon it illegally from the main water and electric lines that serve Rio. Most of Rio’s favelas are arranged on the hillsides of the North Zone, overlooking downtown and the bay.”
“You keep saying favelas. Plural. How many are there?”
Megan shrugged. “There’s around a thousand of them in Rio alone. The biggest of them is called Rocinha and is home to about a hundred thousand people.”
Wolfgang let out a low whistle. The sheer gravity of the number was difficult to wrap his mind around. He tried to imagine the population of good-sized city living in shacks built along a mountainside and still couldn’t picture it. It was just too abstract.
“Of course, it gets worse,” Megan said. “You don’t pack over a hundred thousand people into a shantytown full of illegal housing without creating a hotbed for organized and violent crime. The favelas are, for all intents and purposes, lawless. They’re run by completely self-sustained, brute-force governments, usually under the control of whatever drug dealer or militia is running the show at the time. Many of those militias and drug gangs are rivals, of course, so even if the residents of a given favela recognize the authority of the gang and enjoy protection from them, that doesn’t stop another gang from mounting a territorial attack. The Brazilian police have made multiple attempts to move in and regain control of the favelas, most notably with their Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora, or Police Pacification Units, beginning three years ago in two thousand eight. Such efforts have met with varying success. Favela residents, by and large, distrust police, and many of the favelas are still under complete control of the drug cartels. Homicide, rape, and everything in between is the heartbeat of favela life. These aren’t safe places.”
Wolfgang crossed his arms. “Let me guess . . . Rose’s tracker necklace is pinging from one of these lawless favelas?”
“Bingo,” Lyle said, still not looking up from his computer. He passed a sheet of notebook paper to Megan, and she scanned it before leaning over the map and resting the pencil tip over a hillside portion of the city deep within the North Zone. “Here, I think. That’s outside of Rocinha. I think that’s…shit.”
Megan grew quiet, and Wolfgang wanted to ask, but knew to wait. Megan didn’t withhold information to build drama. She was computing, even now, reviewing the data she’d already consumed about Rio and confirming her suspicions.
“That’s inside Vila Cruzeiro. I read about it a little while ago. It’s currently under the disputed control of a gang known as the Comando Vermelho—the Red Command. They’ve been around for decades. Back in the eighties, they were something of a far-leftist revolutionary group, fighting to spread communism into Brazil. According to my reading, most of their ideology has faded, and they’re pretty much just another drug gang at this point, albeit a brutal one. The Brazilian police have been combatting them, of course, trying to drive them out of the favelas, but that’s only
