Koran.
Papa Top’s sphere of influence now included terrorist cells and guerilla units across the length and breadth of South America. Each of these was a curious amalgam of drug dealers, arms dealers, and common street criminals. Each one had undergone rigorous paramilitary training under Top’s commanders. His melting-pot army consisted of a seething blend of radical leftists, radical Muslims, and common street criminals whose loyalty was vouchsafed only to him.
“Our next stop is across the river,” Top said. “The Robotic Weapons Research Center. Is everyone ready to move on?”
“Yes,” Abu Khan said, eyes glittering in the electric blue light. “Weapons. Let us go and see our glorious Robot Warriors.”
28
OVER THE ATLANTIC
G in!” exclaimed Ambrose Congreve, splaying the winning hand upon the patch of green baize in a perfect fan: three queens, three jacks, and a royal straight. Ambrose, already looking tropical in a three-piece suit of rumpled seersucker, sat back in his seat, took a small sip of his spicy Bloody Bull, and relished the expression on his vanquished opponent’s face.
“Gin?” Hawke said, startled out of his reverie by his opponent’s sudden declaration of victory. He stared at the winning cards magically appearing on the table for a moment and then said, “Impossible.”
“Improbably swift, perhaps, but hardly impossible. Read them and weep, dear boy, for n’ere shall you see their like again.”
“How can you gin? We’ve hardly begun this bloody hand. You only drew three cards.”
“Indeed, I drew three cards. To wit, the third queen, the ace of diamonds, and the jack of spades filling in a lovely straight. Gin is the name of the game, my good fellow, now tote me up. Let’s see what you’re hiding. Unless I’m very much mistaken, I believe I’ve caught you with a gross surplus of costly royalty in your hand. Am I correct?”
Hawke sighed in frustration, and reluctantly began showing his cards. Congreve bent forward, smiling eagerly as out they came. He was not disappointed. Two kings, two jacks, pair of nines, pair of sevens, and some other cats and mice. The hand was worth eighty and change. Not bad, Congreve thought.
“Well, well, well,” Congreve said, picking up the score pad and gleefully adding up the totals. “That puts me ahead by a comfortable margin. Just time for one more hand. I spy something that looks suspiciously like Florida down there.”
Hawke glanced out of his window and experienced a pleasurable shudder of anticipation. The Atlantic far below was shading from a deep blue to a lovely aquamarine near the shoreline as the small jet began its gradual descent toward the eastern coastline of the sprawling peninsula. For the first time since waking, he smiled.
After the recent weeks of damp cold, Alex had been keenly looking forward to leaving gloomy England astern and spending some time in the warm tropical sunshine. According to his crew in the cockpit, they would be landing in time for breakfast on board Blackhawke. It had been over a year since he’d set foot on his beloved vessel.
“I suppose one of us should wake Miss Guinness,” he said.
“Yes. I have to say C has chosen a most decorous aide-de-camp for this adventure. Don’t you agree?”
“She’s not an ADC, that I promise you.”
“What is she, then?”
“A spy.”
Hawke was only half kidding. British SIS had long used female operators. It was not well known, but, during the Second World War, women had been involved in not a few nasty, physical operations. And, since they had always acquitted themselves quite well, there had been little resistance to getting them involved in elite commando or espionage operations ever since. There were several generations of lady operators out there now. Somewhere in the world, Hawke knew, was a cherubic grandmother with a license to kill.
Congreve was trying to get his pipe lit. “A spy? You mean for C? Yes, that would make perfect sense. Sent to keep an eye on you.”
“What else could she be doing?”
“She’s quite brainy, I believe.”
“I don’t need another brain. I’ve got you.”
“Well, I daresay she’s lovely to look at. Remarkable protuberances.”
“Dishy. As long as she keeps her protuberances out of my way. I intend to admire her from afar.”
“She certainly doesn’t have to stay out of mine. I’m quite looking forward to this tropical holiday you know. There’s something bracing about near-naked females splashing in the surf, don’t you agree? Stiffens one up before the fray, I daresay.”
Near naked? Stiffens one up? Hawke looked for a trace of irony in Congreve’s dancing blue eyes, but could find none.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Constable. You’re practically a married man. I promised Diana I’d keep an eye on you and I intend to do so.”
“You remember what Sherlock Holmes had to say on the subject of marriage, my dear fellow? In the Adventure of the Noble Bachelor?”
“No, I do not. And, frankly, I—”
“Gin,” Ambrose said, a small smile of satisfaction playing about his crinkly eyes.
“Again?” Hawke said, throwing his cards down in disgust.
Hawke sensed someone stirring behind him and collapsed back into his seat.
“Oh! Good morning, Mr. Congreve,” Pippa Guinness said, peeking at Ambrose over the back of her reclined seat. She yawned and wiped the sleep from her eyes with the back of her right hand. Hawke, who was facing aft, had his back to her and chose not to acknowledge this greeting by feigning sleep.
He’d made a troublesome discovery the evening prior at the Con-naught Bar. Over drinks with an old colleague who was recently employed at Legoland, he had learned that the lovely Miss Guinness was the source of many of C’s misgivings regarding his Amazon reports. According to his chum, Barry Donohue, Pippa had provided C with her own assessment of the current threat level in the Amazon Triangle. Apparently, she found it significantly lower than Hawke’s own estimates. Told C Hawke was overstating his case.
Hawke wouldn’t have minded that necessarily, but then he’d learned that the young woman had never set foot in the Amazon Basin. Her summary conclusions, passed along to C, were handwritten in the annotated margins of Hawke’s own carefully prepared reports. According to Donohue, all of her conclusions were all based on the accounts of various low-ranking embassy staffers notorious for collecting dated and even erroneous intel in the comfort of their plush offices in Buenos Aires, Caracas, Santiago, and Montevideo. Going out into the field would rarely even occur to them.
It was precisely the reason C had sent Hawke up the river on his “expedition.”
None of this, however, seemed to have occurred to the lovely Miss G. Or, to be honest, C himself.
Hawke suffered no delusions about C’s assigning Pippa Guinness as his “aide” on this trip. The possibility that she was a bona fide field agent was remote. She was tagging along to keep an eye on him and report back to C on all and sundry that she saw and heard in Key West. HM Government had a big stake in Brazil. He was sure the Foreign Secretary had urged C to keep tabs on its erstwhile field agent whilst he was deep inside the American camp.
Miss Guinness was seated just aft of the forward bulkhead on the left. A flat-screen monitor mounted there showed a GPS map of the lower southeastern United States and displayed their current airspeed, estimated time of arrival, and the time and temperature at their destination. The temperature in Miami, Hawke had noted with satisfaction just before they took off from RAF Sedgwick, was a balmy seventy degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature in London had plummeted into the thirties.
After supper aboard, Hawke’s steward had offered to run a film, presenting Pippa Guinness a choice from the onboard DVD library. She’d chosen Bad Boys, a fairly recent Will Smith comedy shot in Miami. As it happened, the
