Warlord

TEN

I'M SERIOUS, HARRY," STOKE SAID, GETTING back to the topic at hand. "We've had days and nights of this surveillance, and nothing to show for it. What exactly is the program?"

"You asking me?" Harry said, wiping a smidge of mayo from his chin.

"No. That other guy in the car."

Brock, in the passenger seat, looked through the small CIA-issued binoculars to get a sharper image of their target. Big target. A rumpled fat man they had identified as Hamid Kassar, whatever kind of Indo-Pakistani name that was, sitting behind the wheel of a 1958 metallic-blue Bel Air bona fide pussy-magnet convertible. Top down, bald head back on the pleated white leather seat top, Chrome Hearts shades on, catching rays.

Hamid Kassar had been the lawyer for the two Pakistani guys who'd been released from Gitmo and headed straight for Miami. The ones who'd wasted no time getting themselves busted for a crime serious enough to send them out to the Glades. Hook up with the Sword of Allah gang. Six months later, they bust out with five other guys and blow up fucking Jackson Memorial Hospital.

Harry cursed the genius brigade on the Hill who'd voted to release Guantanamo prisoners. All you did was put hardened terrorists on the street. Or, almost worse yet, put 'em back into American prisons where they could recruit naive gangbangers with no education into believing in all this radical Islam "Hate America" crap.

It was like Washington believed we couldn't import, or, worse, let in enough effing terrorists slipping across our unprotected borders, so that now, now, we had decided to start growing our own! And when they kill us, we get them lawyered up like they were American citizens!

Insanity? Ya think?

In the Bel Air's passenger seat was this older, more refined lounge-lizard type, blue blazer, Bing Crosby straw hat with a madras hatband, and, if the chunky gold Rolex was real, maybe even affluent, but still unidentified. Looked druggy. Country Club druggy maybe, but definitely druggy. In his notes, Stoke had written WM instead of a name. White male was the best he could do right now.

Still looking through the field glasses, Brock said, "Contrary to what you may think, the quesos grandes in Washington don't consult me on these sensitive matters, Stoke. Hard to believe, I know. But, see, somebody at the Pentagon, or the White House, or on the Seventh Floor at Langley, they order me to do things. And I go do 'em. Or I pay you, or other people like you, to do 'em for me. Get it?"

"I get it," Stoke muttered, letting Harry get under his skin, which was stupid.

"Good. I would think you were old enough and experienced enough in this line of work to understand that fairly basic concept by now."

Harry Brock, handsome in a square-jawed Bruce Willis kind of way, was a ripped, hard-bitten CIA paramilitary officer, now a field agent. He played his assignments pretty close to the vest, but Stoke had always figured Harry for a guy who'd killed more people than most battalions.

Brock and the human mountain known as Stokely Jones, formerly of the U.S. Navy SEALs, the New York Jets, and the New York City Police Department, had enjoyed a lengthy and mostly rewarding working relationship over the years. First working directly with Stoke's closest friend, British MI6 intelligence officer Alex Hawke, and, more recently, Harry'd been hiring Stoke's small intel company, Tactics International, based here in Miami, to work cases in Florida and the Caribbean.

Tactics, jointly owned and operated by Stokely Jones and Alex Hawke, was now operating under government contract to do special ops in south Florida, working for the CIA. Since the federal agency was Tactics's largest client by far, Stoke made nice to Harry even though his wiseass California sense of humor sometimes got on his nerves. Bit of a piss-artist, that's what Alex Hawke had called Harry Brock one time. Right on the money.

"My eyes hurt," Brock said. "Take these glasses for a while, all right?" Stoke shot out a hand the size of a Smithfield ham and palmed the tiny binos. Brock flicked open the glove compartment and pulled out a large pair of Zeiss high-powers. Less discreet, maybe, but easier on the eyeballs.

The supersized Pakistani, suddenly magnified, was instantly more interesting. The guy kept his dark eyes moving constantly, in the rearview, side to side. Looking, or waiting, for someone? Harry felt himself go from simmer to low boil. The Pakistanis, with their unstable government, loose nukes, and Taliban-al Qaeda connections, were giving Iran a run for its money at the very top of the CIA's shit list over the last couple of years.

And a lot of Pakistani emigres like the chubby legal eagle up there, in the United States either legally or illegally, still officially TBD, were kept under close surveillance these days. Especially since the tragedy at Jackson Memorial Hospital, spearheaded by this puke's two Sword of Allah clients, sprung from Gitmo, who'd escaped prison and killed hundreds of innocent civilians.

What you were seeing were immigrant terrorist gangbangers doing hard time in the prison system, joining or starting Muslim Brotherhood gangs, and then recruiting non-Muslims in the joint and getting the brothers radicalized before they were released into the community.

At this very moment, Stoke's sole employee, Luis Gonzales-Gonzales, a one-armed Cuban he called Sharkey, was one of many who had been sent undercover inside Florida and other state prisons like the Glades, aka the Florida Correctional Institution, trying to penetrate the Sword of Allah.

S.O.A. was one of the newer Muslim gangs to take power within the American prison system, after only two, maybe three years of existence in the United States. It was a group that had already proven itself extraordinarily capable of any atrocity. Scary thing? Harry told him CIA estimated the total American S.O.A. prison membership already at over five thousand and climbing. That's five thousand suicidal terrorists sitting around in the slam every day thinking up new ways to kill Americans.

When Stoke told Shark it was a crappy job but somebody had to do it, he meant it. American prisons had quickly become America's own little madrassa hothouses, taxpayer-funded terror training schools where budding Islamic fanatics learned little tricks of the trade like how to blow up major hospitals.

See, you didn't need a 767 full of jet fuel to be a terrorist anymore, he'd told Sharkey right after Jackson Memorial blew sky-high. All you needed was enough suicidal gangbangers wearing backpack bombs and whacked out on meth and religion to take out a whole damn hospital. All you needed was a small sleeper cell school-bus driver in Poughkeepsie bringing his AK-47 to work one day in a pillowcase. And on and on.

What was your run-of-the-mill prison con learning in the joint these days? Not the finer points of vanity license plate production. No. It was how to embrace a hijacked religion, learn how to hate America and kill civilians, that's what, and it wasn't good. You couldn't even trust an ex-con to be patriotic anymore.

"Whaddya see up there, Stoke? Anything unusual? Any action between these two dickwads?"

Stoke shook his head slightly while still looking through the small binoculars. Nothing. But something weird was going on. He couldn't shake the odd feeling that there was more to this than they were seeing.

Yeah.

Definitely feeling jumpy, all of a sudden.

But why?