by Ted Bell
The burly, unshaven man in his fifties finally put his phone down, shook his head, and said in his guttural Afghan-accented Urdu, “I understand that you accomplished your goal, my darling child. My concern is the considerable amount of media attention you have brought upon yourself. Look at me.”
Her eyes drifted from him to the big plasma screen on the wall above the fake fireplace…LIVE AT FIVE BREAKING NEWS… . Bashi’s latest problem was scrawling across the bottom, MURDER ON THE BEACH!
“Bitch! You see what I am saying?”
“Following orders. Sir.”
“Yes. But, still.”
“Excuse me. Sir. You wanted these two dead. The last two alive who could tie us to Jackson Memorial. You didn’t think a double homicide in broad daylight was going to attract a media story?”
“Two men gunned down in a car is one thing, but a running gun battle with government agents is quite another. How many casualties did you suffer?”
She was silent, looking across the large room full of gilded furniture. A newly redecorated penthouse suite at the recently rejuvenated Fontainebleau Hotel, overlooking the Atlantic. Rented by the month. Twenty grand a month.
The awful blond wig she’d worn on the job was on a sideboard with the liquor, sitting atop one of the artfully arranged Styrofoam heads. Four colors. Another of his many fetishes, she thought. Wigs. Why else keep them so neatly arranged in his living room? And in the top drawer of the sideboard, the rest of his—
She looked him in the eye.
“Two casualties. Abdullah was wounded severely by the black agent who chased us, and I had to put him out of his misery. And the other man, Caucasian, arriving at the end, whoever he was, killed Machmud with a couple of extraordinarily well-placed head shots. On the run.”
“And this other shooter, the late arrival, he was also you believe with the CIA? Not local gendarmerie?”
She shook her head, her dark eyes glued on the fat man in front of her. Disgusted with herself that this pig was her lover. The things she had done. Willingly and unwillingly. She knew his background and the extraordinarily perverse evil he was capable of.
Until 1999, when he was quietly removed from the Khan nuclear lab in Islamabad, Bashi was one of the scientists who worked on the gas centrifuge program that Dr. Khan stole from the Netherlands and brought home to Pakistan. Then he’d designed the reactor at Khushab that produced fuel to move to the next level—a plutonium bomb. He was hailed as a genius, the hero of all Pakistan.
Over time, people started wondering if he was playing with a full deck. He was always talking about sunspots. He even wrote an extensive treatise in Urdu about the role sunspots played in triggering the French Revolution, World War II, and uprisings against colonial masters around the world. Sunspots. He still couldn’t shut up about them. They finally sent him north to forge alliances with the Taliban.
His name was Bashir al Mahmoud Bashi, because he was tight as a tick with the new prez, and still had access to the entire Pakistani nuclear program. The Sword of Allah sleeper agents who had penetrated the nuclear weapon storage facilities were under Bashi’s control. And the fat bastard was completely out of his fucking mind. No one knew that better than she.
She looked him in the eye.
“I told you I don’t know who the white guy was. He moved so blindingly fast and shot so well that none of us got a good look at him. He didn’t even show up until we were over in the city of Miami. I thought we had the big black man dead and done with. Then—well, you know the rest.”
Now the fat man made a show of tidying up his fingernails with his small solid gold nail clipper. Tiny little clips here and there. Delicate, like brain surgery. He purposefully didn’t look at her. This was the time of the biggest threat. Was he trying to lull her into a false sense of security? That was the way of the old-style Taliban commanders. Before they flayed you alive, they lulled you to sleep.
She knew Bashi had made his reputation long ago in Islamabad and later providing sophisticated nuclear weapons for Iran and North Korea. He would still be in a powerful position today had his mind not stripped a few gears over the ensuing years. And he would surely be dead, long ago, had the Soviets invading Afghanistan not turned his backbone to steel. And had he not come under the powerful protection of the Sword of Allah.
Now he looked up at her. His cold grey eyes were still powerful enough to send a slight shiver down her back.
“Are you ready to handle this other matter?”
She nodded.
“When?” he asked.
“Soon.”
“Are you planning to make it a message or do it quietly?”
She looked up and leveled her eyes at him. “It is a fluid situation. Missing two of my best men, I may decide to do it quietly. Do you have a preference?”
“People have been asking far too many other people far too many questions. I don’t know exactly how much they know about Pakistani ISI operations, but in the interest of caution he must be eliminated. I don’t care how.”
“What about the two CIA men who chased us? Should we handle them as well?”
“Did either get a good look at you?”
“The black one saw me in my wig with plenty of cleavage. Usually that’s all American men notice. But we did face off over our gun sights. He looked into my eyes.”
“Then you might want to spend a little time finding out more about these inquisitive federal agents. You have names?”
“The giant black man only. It shouldn’t be too difficult to learn the other.”
“Good girl. I will talk to you after this fucking traitor general has been eliminated. Do you know the American agent’s full name? This black man who saw you?”
“Yes.”
“How did you learn it?”
“He runs a company called Tactics International. Over in the Grove. He questioned me a few months ago about my visa. He had a list and thought my visa was illegal. When he found out it wasn’t, he scratched me off the list, apologized, and went away. It was before my facial surgery. He won’t remember.”
“Who is he?”
“Stokely Jones is his name. Pity you’re not handling this one yourself, Bashi. You could hit him. He’s a very, very big target.”
TWENTY-TWO
MIAMI
STOKELY JONES DOWNSHIFTED, GRABBING third, accelerating up and over the humpbacked bridge. It crossed over from downtown Miami to his magical island hideaway, Brickell Key. Is this living, or what? he asked himself, hearing the satisfying blip of the black-raspberry metallic GTO convertible’s race-tuned engine, feeling the deep rumble of the tuned twin exhausts in his bones. Sex? Something like that, maybe.
Sometimes he actually had to wonder: Does sex with Fancha, his gorgeous fiancée, even hold a candle to this completely badass Pontiac?
The answer was always, unequivocally, yes. Nothing could ever hold a candle to his love for Fancha. Period. Still, Stoke curled his hand around the ivory shift knob of the Hurst four-speed shift lever as he downshifted again. If they had cars up there in heaven, he had no doubt, all those angels up there in paradise, they cruised GTOs down those streets of gold.
Passing the entrance to the ridiculously expensive and beautiful Mandarin Hotel on his right, top down, salt air breezes blowing, speakers blaring “Let’s Stay Together,” one of Al Green’s greatest hits, Stoke got that old feeling again: complete disbelief at his current tropical luxury lifestyle. Former Harlem homeboy gangsta makes good? Oh, yes indeedy, life was good.
God was good. America was good. And, God, please bless America. We could sure use it right now.
Damn, I must be in a really good mood, he thought, approaching the tall glass and steel Brickell Towers on his right. He slowed for the turn, singing a song:
Yeah, we’re movin’ on up, movin’ on up, to a dee-luxe apartment in the sky…and I feeeeel good, da-da-da-dum . . .
Keeping time to the lyrics and rhythms in his head, palm beating on the steering wheel, an
d, man, here he was, home again at last.
He hooked a right and swung into the gently curving palm-lined driveway leading to his own personal paradise, his condo in the sky, the light-filled penthouse overlooking Biscayne Bay that he called home. Paid for with the sole proceeds of his sainted mama’s six-story apartment house in Bayside, Queens. He’d only lived in Miami a couple of years. Now he couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. New York?
Fuggedaboutit.
He kept an eye peeled for the building’s aging security man, Fast Eddie Falco, normally scouring the premises in his custom Rolls-Royce grilled golf cart at this hour. Stoke had stopped by Books & Books in the Grove, picked up a couple of paperback copies of the selection his two-man book club would be reading this week. The John D. MacDonald’s Men’s Reading Society would soon be digging into The Dreadful Lemon Sky.
Eddie, a former jockey, had spent his entire life as a railbird over at Hialeah before retiring. Never read word one not related to his beloved ponies and the jocks. Then one day Stoke introduced him to Travis McGee and his houseboat, the Busted Flush. Boom! Just like that, Eddie Falco found a whole new reason for living besides horses and football.
Just before turning into the ground-floor garage, he thought he caught a glimpse of Eddie’s heavily customized fire-engine-red cart. Seemed to be parked beneath a palm tree. Actually, shit, it looked like he’d rammed the damn tree head-on. Stoke, thinking heart attack, screeched to a stop, leaped out over the closed passenger door, and ran across the thick green grass. Eddie was slumped forward over the wheel. Damn it! Unless a coconut had landed on his head, he’d probably blown an artery.
“Eddie! You okay?” he cried, racing toward his friend.
Eddie was definitely not okay. But it wasn’t a coconut head bop or a heart attack. Looked like he had a deep wound in his right leg, just above the kneecap. The blood had soaked one whole leg of his khaki pants and pooled around his shoes. What the hell? He’d let a palm tree run into him, yeah, but not hard enough for even a minor injury.
Stoke leaned under the fringed white canopy, examining the hole in his pal’s knee.
“Eddie, what the hell, man? What’d you do to your leg?”
“Ouch!”
“Sorry.” Stoke probed the wound with his index finger. Narrow, but deep, down to the bone.
“The grille. How’s it look?” Eddie said through clenched teeth.
“The what?”
“The grille!”
“What grille?”
“The goddamn Rolls-Royce grille! Did I dent it? Scratch it? Tell me, Stoke. I can take it.”
“Eddie, f’crissakes, forget the grille. What the hell happened to your leg?”
“Aw, shit, Stoke. Somebody stabbed me.”
“Stabbed you?”
“Yeah. I’m bleedin’ to death, here, f’crissakes,” Eddie croaked, and he looked like he might croak for real, too. Old man was in shock, his face white as a sheet, eyes dilated. And blood was seeping out of him, out of the cart, onto the grass.
Stoke pulled out his cell, punched in 911, and whipped off his belt, cradling the phone between his shoulder and his ear, waiting for an answer as he wrapped the belt tightly around Eddie’s thigh just above the wound. “C’mon, answer me, damn it…”
“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”
“Listen carefully. My name is—”
Eddie eyed him with a watery eye. “Don’t you hate it when they say, ‘Por Español, press one’?”
“My name is Stokely Jones Jr., resident at Icon Brickell Towers, 495 Brickell Avenue, Brickell Key, downtown Miami. I have a stabbing victim here, deep puncture wound to the thigh, lost a lot of blood. I need both EMS and Miami-Dade Police assistance immediately.”
“Yes, sir. Could you repeat—”
“You heard me. This man needs help now. Make it happen.” He snapped his phone closed and cinched the belt tighter. The flow eased up a lot.
“Stoke, am I gonna die here?” Eddie moaned, looking up at him.
“Die? Shit, no, you ain’t even about to die. I got this belt cinched above your knee. Cut off the bleeding. Ambulance on the way. You’re going to be good as new. What the hell happened here, Ed? Take a deep breath and talk to me.”
“Some wacky broad, man. Trespassing on private property. I spotted her ass over there in the garden, trying to hide behind the birds-of-paradise, looking up at the building with a pair of binoculars. Asked what she wanted, she says the master key card, crazy bitch. Ow! Fuck!”
“Sorry, it has to be real tight. Hurts like a bitch, I know. Can’t help it.”
“Yeah, but Jesus, Stokely.”
“What happened next?”
“I drive over here, tell her to leave. She tells me go fuck myself. Then she pulls this goddamn diamond stiletto out of her handbag, jams it in my damn knee, that’s how I rammed this tree. She says gimme the key card or I make it an even pair. My fuckin’ knees! What am I gonna do? I hand it over. She takes the key card and splits and—hell, I dunno, I must have passed out.”
“Diamond stiletto?”
“Yeah, the whole handle was gold, encrusted with diamonds.”
“What did she look like, Eddie?”
“She was fuckin’ beautiful, that’s what. Some blond babe with tits out to here, that’s what she looked like. Shit! This hurts!”
Stoke heard sirens screaming in the distance. He looked at Eddie hard. The bleeding had stopped. His color was coming back. He’d live.
“Hold on, Ed.”
He ran for the entrance to his deluxe apartment in the sky.
“Stoke! Wait!” he heard Eddie screech behind him.
He stopped short and turned around. “What?”
“Did ya get the books? Dreadful Lemon Sky?”
“Jesus, Ed. Yeah, I got the books, okay?”
Eddie smiled and grimaced at the same time, and Stoke ran for the elevators.
TWENTY-THREE
FLASHY BLONDE WITH A HUGE RACK was gunning for him, huh? Great. He’d been thinking about her, the chick with the MAC-10 at the beach and in the black Charger, wondering if she’d come calling. She knew he’d seen her face and she seemed like a woman not out to meet new friends. He’d given Miami-Dade and the feds her description. And he’d been keeping his eye out for her, ever since the little shoot-out over on South Beach four days earlier.
Now he wished he’d said something to Eddie about keeping an eye out for her too. But he hadn’t been that smart, and now Eddie had paid for Stoke’s own stupidity and he cursed himself for it.
The beach bimbo was right now waiting for him up in his apartment. Had to be. Why else would a woman stab an old security guy and demand his master key? He hit PH and leaned back against the elevator’s marble wall, trying to see how this was all going to go down. Picture the thing in his mind.
There was a big black leather chair in the living room. His personal chair. An Eames chair, the wispy decorator had called it. Chair faced south, out toward Biscayne Bay and the Keys; it had a matching leather footstool. His “watch the Dolphins get their asses kicked again” chair, he called it. It also swiveled.
It would be the most likely place for her to wait. Sit in that chair, swiveled around, directly facing the front door, cradling your nasty little black machine gun in your lap, your finger on the trigger, the lever set on three-shot bursts. Yeah. Maybe make it fun. Pour yourself a nice glass of wine from the jug of Almaden in the fridge, sit there all afternoon and wait for the big black dude to come home. That’s the way he saw it going down anyway, and he was pretty good at visualizing this shit.
The elevator stopped on 60 and the doors slid open.
To the left was the corridor leading to his apartment. To the right was a door with a stairway leading to the roof. Stoke knew it wasn’t locked because painters had been up there for the last couple of days, painting all the air-conditioning and heating equipment with some kind of rust-proofing paint. Shit got rusty fast in Miami, he’d learned from E
ddie.
He quickly climbed the steps to the roof, trying to remember if he’d left the main sliding glass doors to his terrace open or shut. Open, he thought. But today was hot as hell, so he may have closed them and let the AC cool the place down while he was out. If they were open, he had an idea.
The entire rooftop, big as a football field, was covered with tiny white stones and the glare of the sun was painful. He crossed over to the eastern side of the building and calculated exactly where his terrace would be, right below the southeastern edge of the roof. He knelt down, looking below, suddenly very conscious of the amazing height sixty stories high in the sky.
He dropped to his knees and placed his hands carefully, shoulder width apart, gripping the raised four-inch steel rim sheathed in aluminum that went all the way around the four-sided building, took a deep breath.
Then he stretched out flat on the roof, digging the toes of his shoes into the stone, edging his body out into midair till his belt was almost to the edge. He could now lean out and down, take a quick peek at his terrace doors.
Please be open.
Closed.
And locked, he remembered. Shit. He always locked those sliding glass doors, even though it was ridiculous up here in the sky. Old habits die hard. He pushed back, heaved himself up, and got to his feet, thinking. Can’t go in the front door and the terrace is locked up tight.
Es un grande problema, hombre, as Fancha would say. But big men solve big problems. He lifted his shirt, pulled the SIG 9mm out of the holster in the small of his back, checked his weapon. One round in the chamber and a full mag.
Now what?
The terrace. Yeah. The terrace was the only way. She’d have her back to it, eyes focused on the doorknob of the front door. The good news: the terrace behind her was just about the last place on earth anyone would be expecting company to drop in unexpectedly.