Tsar: A Thriller (Alex Hawke)

by Ted Bell

  Alex zipped up his trousers and looked at her. He’d never felt so ridiculous in his life.

  “Ah. May I sit for a moment? I’m a bit dizzy for some strange reason.”

  “Listen, what are you so anxious about? You’re going to be famous, you know.”

  “Famous?” Hawke said, sitting, the blood freezing in his veins. He’d had a chilling premonition of C pausing before a portrait at the exhibition and saying, “Good Lord, Stevens, that can’t be Alex Hawke, can it?”

  “Yes, famous. Shall we say next Tuesday at one o’clock? The light will be good for two hours.”

  “Tuesday?” Hawke said absently. “Yes. I think Tuesday will be fine.”

  He couldn’t help himself now.

  He was already too far gone.

  16

  MIAMI

  Friday night, Stokely Jones Jr. was on his way to a birthday party. He was arriving in style on Fancha’s beautiful sixty-foot sport-fishing boat, Fado. Invited, not, but that was completely irrelevant. This soiree was strictly business. The birthday boy was a psychotic Chechen terrorist warlord with a price on his head, rumored to be a pretty big number. Apparently, this psycho, name of Ramzan Baysarov, had royally pissed off the Kremlin kingpins.

  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.”

  Sharkey laughed. “How’s the star doing? She ready?”

  “Getting ready. Doing her hair and makeup down in the owner’s stateroom.”

  “That’s one gorgeous chick, man. Very, very special lady. You know that, right?”

  “I kinda had that feeling already, but I appreciate the added input, Shark.”

  “Hold on!” Sharkey shouted suddenly.

  Stoke reached out and grabbed hold of the back of the helm seat. The wake of a passing boat plus his own massive weight atop the stainless-steel erector set made the tower sway sickeningly. He wasn’t used to being up on the tuna tower, and he didn’t much like it. He hated fishing, always had, and he hated tuna more than most fish. The ex-SEAL belonged under the surface, not rocking and rolling up on some Frisbee-sized platform. But his size was an asset in business.

  Stoke, who was about the size of your average armoire, was a good guy to have around when you needed someone to, say, run through a solid brick wall or knock down a mature oak tree.

  “That’s the house up ahead, all lit up,” Shark said, throttling back to neutral. The big boat instantly slowed to a crawl. “See it? Out on that point.”

  “See it? How can you miss it? Looks like a country club.”

  “Yeah. Russians have all the money now, seems like.”

  “Okay, Harry,” Stoke said into his mike. “We’ve got the house in sight. Headed for the dock. Five minutes.”

  The huge, bloated house was situated on a point of land sticking out into the bay, with a wide apron of grass extending to the canal on two sides. It was one of the newer McMansions, all glass and steel, very Miami Vice, Stoke thought. The pool was a free-form infinity number and had little bridges and rocky grottos that meandered down to the seawall at the seaward end of the point.

  There was a large terrace surrounding the pool, where tiki bars and catering tables had been set up. The party was scheduled to begin in less than half an hour, and the only people visible were waiters and sound technicians, setting up the speaker systems for Fancha’s performance.

  Stoke saw the small stage set up on the near side of the pool. Fancha’s six-piece fado band had just arrived, tuning up, the amped-up sound of a guitar easily carrying all the way across the water. The neighbors weren’t going to be getting much sleep tonight.

  The dock was unoccupied, just the way it had been when Sharkey had scouted the location earlier that afternoon. The host, a Mr. Vladimir Lukov, didn’t own a yacht, Sharkey had learned. Sharkey had been counting on them being early, the only guests to arrive by sea. At the very least, he hoped he’d be first and get the dock before anyone else. It looked as if he’d been right. Or maybe just lucky.

  Shark maneuvered the big boat alongside the wooden dock, then used his bow and stern thrusters to crab the boat sideways toward the piling fenders. Two young guys appeared on the dock, ready to take Fado’s lines. Stoke saw another couple of guys in black, clearly security, making their way down the sloping lawn to the dock.

  “I’ll take the helm,” Stoke said to Sharkey. “You go down and handle the lines.”

  Sharkey turned the wheel over to his boss, then scrambled below to heave the preset bow and stern lines to the boys waiting at either end of the dock.

  “Here we go, Harry,” Stoke said into the mike as they bumped up against the rubber fenders. “Roll tape.”

  “You got it. We’re rolling. Perfect camera position, by the way, great angle from up there. We got the back of the house, the whole terrace, the pool, perfect. My compliments to the camera crew.”

  “Fancha ready?” Stoke asked.

  “Our star’s coming up on deck right now. Wait till you see her outfit, Stoke. Unbelievable.”

  Stoke shut the twin two-thousand-horsepower CAT diesel engines down, removed his headset, and stowed it in the compartment under the helm station. He’d be wearing a different commo system now. An invisible earbud and a tiny mike hidden inside the sleeve of his jacket would keep him in constant contact with Harry Brock aboard Fado as he moved through the party.

  “Harry?” he said into his sleeve. “Radio check.”

  “Loud and clear,” Harry said, and Stokely hurried down the ladder. It sounded like one of the badass security guys was already giving Sharkey a hard time. These weren’t rent-a-cops trucked in for the birthday party. Stoke could tell just by the way they moved and carried themselves that these Russian boys were in the death business.

  “You got a problem, chief?” Stoke asked the big blond Russian dressed head to toe in black combat fatigues. The guy was standing on the dock with his feet wide apart and his arms folded across his chest, giving Stoke what must have passed for the evil eye back in Mother Russia.

  “Nyet. You got a problem. Your little one-armed bandit here says he doesn’t have an invitation. This is a private function on private property. So, unless you show me an invitation, and your name appears on my list, you got two minutes to get this boat out of here.”

  “I’m sorry,” Stoke said, stepping to the rail and smiling at the guy. “I’m sure we spoke on the phone. But I’ve forgotten your name. You work for Mr. Lukov, right? Chief of security? Boris, isn’t it?” It was the first Russian name that popped into his head, but it didn’t seem to faze the guy.

  Stoke stuck his hand out, and the man instinctively took it. Stoke squeezed a second too long and caught the guy wincing. He was a seriously big guy, ex-military, no doubt about it. Had that unmistakable special-forces look about him.

  “Who the fuck are you?” the man said, withdrawing his hand with some difficulty from Stoke’s bone cruncher. Boris’s black nylon windbreaker fell open, and Stoke saw a Mac-10 light machine gun hanging from a shoulder sling. Probably to keep the kids in line bobbing for apples or playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey later.

  Stoke smiled at Boris again. “Levy, Sheldon Levy, Suncoast Artist Management. That ring a bell?”

  No reply.

  “We’re providing tonight’s entertainment.”

  “What entertainment? The birthday singer?”

  “Exactly. The singer. And look, Boris, here she is now.”

  Fancha stepped out of the shadows of the boat’s main salon as if out of a dream. Her bold brown eyes, slightly uptilted at the corners, were shining beneath a fringe of silken black hair. She climbed two steps in her shimmering sequined red dress and stood on the bridge deck next to Stokely. He’d never seen her look so beautiful. He looked at the Russian.

  “This is—”

  “Fancha,” the security guy said, trying to keep his jaw off the deck. He looked as if he was going to dissolve into a puddle and just drip over the gunwales into the canal. He looked around at his buddies. “It’s Fancha,” Boris said, reverent, as if Madonna had suddenly popped out of a pumpkin.

  Stoke looked at her and smiled. “Some dress, huh, Boris? Who’s that designer you’re wearing tonight, Fancha? Oscar? Lacroix? Zac Posen?”

  “What a lovely house,” Fancha said, ignoring Stoke and smiling at the drooling security guy. “Sorry I’m late, gentlemen. I hope my band hasn’t been waiting too long for the sound check.”

  “Oh, no, not at all,” the guy said, “They just got there. Here, I mean. Still setting up. I will escort you up there to the pool? I’m afraid the grass is a little wet still from the sprinklers, and it can be slippery. Please?”


  “You’re so kind.”

  Stoke rolled his eyes as Boris held out his hand to her. She took it and stepped lightly from the boat onto the dock, beaming at the good-looking Russian.

  Stoke’s fists clenched involuntarily. He knew this guy. Didn’t really know him, of course, but knew his type, guessed who he was. One of the Kremlin’s storm troopers in a previous life. The Black Berets, they were called. Riot police, which, in the new post-Democratic Russia, meant they had the legal right to beat the crap out of anybody whose skin color they didn’t like. Namely, black. Black covered a lot of territory in Russia and included Chechens, Jews, and, of course, Africans and their cousins, African-Americans.

  “And what’s your name?” Fancha asked the guy, smiling up at this dickhead as if he was freakin’ Dr. Zhivago.

  “I am Yuri. Yuri Yurin.”

  “I’m Fancha, Yuri,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Let me give you my card,” Yuri said, pulling out a business card and handing it to her. Without even glancing at it, she handed it to her one-man entourage, Stokely, and started off across the grass, letting Yuri hold her by the damn arm the whole way.

  Stoke turned the card over in his hand. It had a picture of a sleek offshore racing boat, a Magnum 60. Beneath was Yuri’s name, Yuri Yurin, and his office address over on Miami Beach. Something called the Miami Yacht Group Ltd. So, Yuri only moonlighted as security. His day job was yacht salesman. Fish where the fish are, Stoke thought. Russians were buying most of the big yachts these days. Yuri was probably getting rich, too.

  “That’s pronounced ‘Yurin’ like in piss, right?” he called after the Russian, but he guessed Yurin hadn’t heard him, because there was no reaction.

  Fancha paused to look back at Stoke, still holding onto the guy. “Oh, Sheldon?”

  “Yes, my Fancha?” Stoke said, bowing slightly from the waist.

  “My Fiji water?”

  “We have Fiji at all the pool bars,” Yuri said, the little shit.