Chapter 493 Rio, Here I Come

This way, nobody in the DEA except that bigshot would know about Luke’s involvement.

As long as Luke kept the information a secret, nobody else would know what he had read. Selina clicked her tongue. “Exactly how bad is their rat problem?” Luke chuckled. “Who knows?” Nobody could be mighty forever; that was also true for countries, to say nothing of the DEA, which was just a law enforcement agency. Luke put the case aside and began preparing food for Selina. Gold Nugget was satisfied with snacks, which it had become a fan of recently. Selina could always buy a heap of snacks whenever she passed by the supermarket.

As he was cooking, Luke started to think about what he could do in Rio de Janeiro.

Cooking was his way to practice multitasking and to settle his mood.

After so long, he had become used to formulating a lot of plans while he cooked.

The plans he made in this situation were always rational and objective.

Rio de Janeiro, or commonly known as Rio, was a world-famous tourist city. It was truly an extremely beautiful place.

But while Los Angeles was known as “Crime City,” it was paradise on earth compared with Rio de Janeiro.

At the very least, the drug dealers and gangsters in Los Angeles didn’t carry automatic weapons out in the open as they guarded street ends and defended their territory. Of course, it might just be that the drug dealers and gangsters in Los Angeles didn’t want to stick out; usually, they hid their guns under their clothes and hung around inconspicuous corners.

Rio was very similar to Los Angeles in that the prosperous city housed a huge number of poverty-stricken residents. The affluent city center and the tourist areas in southern Rio were the places visited most by the wealthy and international tourists, while the slums big and small throughout the city were like a different world. The informant whom the DEA was looking for probably wouldn’t be in the city center or the southern region; the biggest possibility was that they had fallen into the hands of drug dealers in the slums.

It was only in places like these that the DEA found it very hard to find any leads.

As Luke pondered, his hands never stopped moving.

After lunch, he started to give Selina and Gold Nugget some safety training. Now that he was going away, he had to give Gold Nugget a cram lecture. Only by developing certain habits in daily life could they avoid being exposed. They could chat freely at home because Luke had made several modifications to the house.

Any surveillance on the house would be blocked, and the house even had a warning system if it detected external surveillance.

Even so, Gold Nugget shouldn’t come out so often.

Technology developed rapidly in this age, and who knew when even more high-end probe technology would appear. Or, they might be unlucky enough to run into someone with super abilities. That was also the reason why Voracious had been renamed Gold Nugget.

There was no rule which said that a dog could only have one name. Dollar and Gold Nugget were in the same style, and at most would just suggest that… Selina loved money.

Gold Nugget needed more training, but Selina could take it to work.

With her current status in the Major Crimes Division, nobody would say anything about her taking Dollar into the office every now and then.

Luke and Selina then started looking for information together. Luke mostly looked for information on the gangs in Rio, while Selina helped him look up maps and transportation, and information like local rumors.

He would copy everything into his laptop, so that he could look it up at any time during his trip. That night, Luke received a call. He went out and returned two hours later empty-handed. Looking at Selina’s inquiring expression, he shrugged. “Time is short. I’m setting off tonight.” This time, Selina didn’t yell that it was unfair or that she wanted to go too. She simply nodded and transferred the files to his laptop.

Looking at her expression, Luke felt a little doubtful. “Are you alright?”

Selina was at a loss. “Huh? Why shouldn’t I be?”

Luke gazed at her for a moment but didn’t say anything. Was it because she had Dollar, so it was no longer boring being home alone? Also, there was Gold Nugget now. This is good too, Luke murmured to himself.

Luke packed simply, and everything fit into a small, carry-on knapsack.

He didn’t take his gun, badge or a change of clothes with him; he only had things like his passport and credit cards. Watching Luke drive off in the secondhand Ford, Selina petted Dollar next to her. “Alright, time for us to train and test ourselves.” Dollar pushed its head against her hand to show its agreement.

After a flight that was over ten hours long, Luke walked out of Rio de Janeiro International Airport. Instead of taking a taxi, he got on a bus and entered the world-famous City of God. Looking at the diverse and bustling city, Luke simply said to himself, I’m here, Rio!

The skyscrapers outside the window in the city center were very eye-catching in the early morning light.

When he passed the most famous Copacabana Beach and looked at the mass of beautiful girls in bikinis at a distance, Luke could only sigh. He wasn’t here for fun. Before he completed this mission at least, he wouldn’t be staying there.

Otherwise, he would have to spend a lot of time traveling every day. For someone who only slept one to two hours a day, this was too much of a waste of time.

More than its famous beach and modern plazas, Rio was better known for its slums.

Countless slums of all sizes were scattered across the city, and a third of Rio’s citizens lived there.

Luke didn’t find that surprising. The buildings were piled up on each other like toy blocks, which wasn’t anything out of the ordinary to him either.

In his previous life, he had seen how farmers built their houses densely packed together in some small cities in China.

There was no rhyme or reason to buildings like these. Everybody built their own houses, and as they accumulated year after year, it was only natural that they became stacked up like building blocks.

Even more interestingly, many slums occupied the best parts of the city on the mountains. The rich districts, on the other hand, were at the foot of the coastal mountains. This was different from other places where the poor people lived on the plains and the rich people lived on the mountains.

Luke didn’t look for a place to get some rest. Instead, he simply went to Rocinha, the slum where the informant had gone missing and which was one of the biggest slums in Rio. Ironically, Rocinha was built on the world-famous Corcovado, which featured the Christ the Redeemer statue.

On top of the mountain, the statue of the benevolent god stood high and mighty, but under its feet was where the poorest people of Rio lived.

Even if the residents here could see the most beautiful Ipanema Beach from their homes, their lives were still hard. When Luke arrived, he looked for a place to disguise himself so that he looked like a regular tourist as he surveyed everything. But the other tourists basically all moved in groups as they followed a local tour guide. Few of them wandered around alone like him.