Ted Bell - Tsar

Kidnapping schoolchildren, blowing up Moscow apartment buildings, spraying bullets inside packed churches in Novgorod and kiddie matinee movie theaters, crap like that. No wonder the Kremlin was PO’d. So, Ramzan was wisely AMF out of Russia for the time being, keeping his head down, right here in sunny Miami.

He was in the country illegally, and federal marshals had been trying to find him for a month with no luck. Hard to believe, terrorists on the loose like that, but there you go. Good for business.

Tonight, according to Stoke’s extremely highly paid informants, Ramzan was going to stick his psycho head up just long enough to wolf down some ice cream and birthday cake.

You had a large expatriate Russian community here in Miami now. And a whole lot of them were dirty, some of them mobbed up. Stoke’s main clients, the Pentagon and Langley, were naturally very interested in seeing exactly who attended Ramzan’s Friday night birthday bash. Hence Stoke’s unannounced attendance.

Tactics International, Stoke’s private intel-gathering operation, had recently been hired by a Pentagon guy named Harry Brock. Assignment: Help Harry covertly surveil Russian and Chechen mafiya types who’d caught the eye of Homeland Security. Word was, the Russian bad guys were planning some kind of terror event on U.S. soil. Stir up more trouble between the U.S. and Russia. Why? That was what Harry Brock wanted Stoke and Company to find out.

Stoke’s little start-up had gotten a big shot in the arm with this one. Washington and Moscow at it again. And Russians had come to Miami in droves, buying up yachts and mansions, Bentleys and Bvlgari watches. Stoke had eventually heard about the party by asking all of his PIs about anything unusual on the Russian front. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to shoot lots of video of the attendees.

The skinny, according to Special Agent Harry Brock, was that U.S.-Russian relations, bad as they were recently, were about to get a whole lot worse. CIA intercepts indicated a bunch of U.S.-based Russian-American superpatriots with Kremlin ties were planning something big on the East Coast, just maybe right here in River City. These Kremlin bad boys didn’t seem to have any problem getting expatriated mafiya types to do their dirty work, either, Harry told Stoke.

“You mean, like back when the CIA hired Bugsy Siegel and his boys to try and whack Castro?” Stoke had asked Harry. Harry didn’t think that was very funny. He was sensitive that way.

Stoke stepped outside Fado ’s main cabin and called to the man atop the tuna tower, three stories up in the chill night air. The salty air felt good. It was cool in Miami tonight, even for December. The good news was, despite the forecast, it wasn’t raining. Rain would have put a real damper on their video surveillance plans.

“Come on up, man. See the world of the rich and famous,” Sharkey Gonzales-Gonzales called down to him from his tiny helm station thirty feet above the deck. The big yacht was going dead slow, sliding up the wide residential canal at idle speed. Huge mansions on either side of the waterway. Megayachts moored at docks along the seawall. You could see why the Russians would be taken in by all this glitz. Miami in December beat the shit out of Moscow in June or any other damn month.

Sharkey, the one-armed Cuban fishing guide who was Stokely’s sole employee, was running the boat from up top tonight. That’s where Harry had mounted the sophisticated gear, digital video cameras like the ones the unmanned spy birds carried, no bigger than a deck of cards but equipped with night vision and audio dish intercept stuff. There was even a tiny video camera mounted at the very tip of one of the tall outriggers. Harry had set it up so you could swing it around just like that Skycam the NFL used.

All this state-of-the-art tech stuff was provided by Mr. Harry Brock of JCOS at the P House. That’s Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon for anybody lucky enough to be living outside the Beltway.

Harry Brock was a spook, a Tactics client, but over the years, Stoke and his pal Alex Hawke had gotten to like the guy okay. He was a little too laid-back California for Stoke’s New York tastes, but he could be funny sometimes. Besides, he was a true hard case who’d helped save Alex Hawke’s life down in the Amazon a while back, so he had a lot of gold stars on his beanie.

“Coming right up,” Stoke said, starting up the stainless-steel ladder of the jungle-gym tuna tower.

There were four of them aboard the white Viking sport-fishing boat belonging to Stoke’s fiancée, the beauteous Fancha. The Viking was called the Fado, after the kind of music Fancha sang. Sad Portuguese ballads, and when she opened her mouth and sang them, man, the melodies stuck a knife in your heart. She’d come out of nowhere to become the hottest thing in Miami right now. That’s why Stoke had had little trouble getting her the terrorist birthday party gig.

Since leaving the dock at Fancha’s home on Key Biscayne, Stoke and Harry Brock had been huddled below in Fado ’s main cabin. They’d been looking at the four monitors broadcasting and recording direct live feeds from four very high-tech cameras and sound equipment mounted on the tuna tower. The stationary cameras were working great, but the mobile Skycam was giving Harry fits. It was tough to swing the outrigger around steadily enough to get a decent picture.

Fancha, Stokely’s main squeeze for these last few years, had inherited Fado, along with one of the more spectacular estates on Key Biscayne, Casa Que Canta, from her late husband. She was from the Cape Verde Islands and was beginning to make a serious name for herself as a singer. She had a new album out, Green Island Girl, nominated for a Latin Grammy as Breakthrough Album of the Year. He was proud of her. Hell, maybe he even loved her.

“Shark, my little one-armed brother, how you doing up here?” Stoke said, arriving up at the small helm platform. It felt like a hundred feet in the air, the way it swayed up here under the big black man’s weight. Tear Stokely Jones down, Hawke once said, and you could put up a very nice sports arena. Didn’t seem to bother Shark any. He was steering the boat with his good right arm and aiming one of the cameras with his flipper. Luis Gonzales-Gonzales was a former charter skipper down in the Keys. He’d lost most of an arm to a big bull shark one day and decided the spy business was a lot safer than fishing.

“Hey, Stoke.”

“Look at you up here, man!” Stoke said to the wiry little guy, “Busier ’n a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. You cool? Everything all right?”

“I’m cool. I’m having a tough time navigating some of the narrow canals, but we’re good to go, going to be at the man’s dock right on time. How are my TV pictures looking down below?”

“Brock says okay, but your zooms are a little shaky, and there could be sharper contrast. Maybe open up the apertures a squidge, he says. We’re not getting much moonlight tonight. You know what? Don’t worry about it. You drive the boat, Shark. I’ll see what I can do about the cameras.”

Stoke adjusted one of the camera’s aperture controls and did a slow zoom in on somebody’s patio and then back out to the wide shot. “How’s that, Harry?” he said into the lip mike extending from one of the headsets all three men were wearing for the operation.

“Better. Yeah, open all four of them up,” Harry replied in his headphones. “I’m recording sound now, doing a sound check, so watch what you two buttheads say about me up there.”

Stoke laughed and said, “Guy who called you pencil-dick, shit-for-brains, total butt-wipe a few seconds ago? You heard that? That was the Sharkman called you that, not me, boss.”