It was Luis Gonzales-Gonzales, a Cuban guy he’d recently put on his Tactics International payroll. He was the new company’s very first employee, he told Luis, so he’d better be good. Luis’s nickname, Sharkey, was because as a boy fishing with his father, he’d lost some of his left arm to a big bull shark down in the Keys. All he had now was a stump. He looked like, yeah, a Sharkey, Stoke had decided. Shark was a fairly laidback individual, maybe just a little nervous for Stoke’s taste, but he’d been a mate on a charter out of Key West for a couple of decades and he knew his way around that vicinity.
Not long after he was hired, Shark had told Stoke he liked this espionage gig a whole lot more than fishing. Stoke paid him five hundred a week plus expenses. Sharkey thought he’d died and gone to heaven. Went out and bought himself a sharkskin blazer to wear to work. Pair of secret agent sunglasses pushed back on his forehead, answering the phone in the rented office space in Coconut Grove. Stoke had to laugh.
Gonzales-Gonzales was Stoke’s only employee. Hell, it was only a month now since Tactics even had a payroll. But Stoke’s newly formed company had recently landed its first client and it was a good one. His clients had their home office in a big five-sided building up in D.C. called the Pentagon.
Hawke had given Stoke the seed money to get his company started. He’d even helped steer a guy they’d both worked with before, a CIA spook named Harry Brock, to him. Brock, who was now a military intelligence advisor to the Joint Chiefs, had met with him and had put Tactics on a retainer. They wanted him to poke around a little bit down in the Caribbean. Five grand a week plus expenses was a good start. It covered the rent and payroll and even kept the lights on.
From what Stoke was allowed to know, it seemed Harry Brock was planning on making some big presentation at an upcoming seminar on Latin American terrorist activities. Harry had hired Stoke to gather information to fill in the holes in a presentation he was planning to make. Harry told Stoke to look into one specific area, namely Cuba and the Florida Straits.
Harry’s boss in Washington, JCS chairman General Charley Moore, was getting very worried about a rising tide of anti-Americanism in Latin America. He was especially juned up about the new Cuba-Venezuela connection. It was that connection that had Washington’s pantyhose all twisted up at the moment. Harry Brock was calling in a lot of his sources. Every one of them was tasked to gather intel on the Chavez-Castro love-fest for the State Department’s Key West pow-wow.
The State Department was convinced Fidel was buying arms from the Russians with money from Chavez in Venezuela. Then he was shipping out weapons to all his new Latin American buddies. That was the theory anyway. But they needed confirmation and Stoke was one of the guys assigned to do that.
“How’s it hanging, Senor?” Sharkey’s recorded voice said. “Que pasa, hombre? Listen, man, I think I got something for you. This is still very private but we got to move fast or it won’t be. Like, we got to fly down first thing in the morning. Does that work? It does if you want to see this thing before the Federales find out about it. So, lemme know, okay, because—”
Stoke hit the save button and speed-dialed Sharkey’s cell.
“Fly down where?” he said the second the real-live Sharkey answered his phone.
“Dry Tortugas. Just south of Key West.”
“Tell me why, Luis.”
“Fortune offers us an opportunity, boss.”
“Good answer.”
“Oh, yeah. Look, I got us a seaplane out of Dinner Key. She’s called the ‘Blue Goose.’ Seven o’clock a.m. Manana. Don’t be late.”
“What about the pilot?”
“Name is Mick. Mick Hocking. No worries, mate, like the man says. Dude ain’t saying nothing about nothing to nobody, man. I checked him out through a friend of mine at Miami-Dade PD. He’s okay. From Australia or New Zealand or some place. I’ll give you his number, you want to call him on his ‘mi-ble’ like I do all the time.”
“What’s a ‘mi-ble’?”
“What this Mick Hocking calls his cell phone.”
“Oh. Mobile. Got it. Hey. You know what the shark said to the clown?”
“No.”
“You taste funny.”
“That is so lame. Man, I can’t believe you even tell a handicapped person a joke like that.”
“I’m politically incorrect. Hey, listen. What are we looking at down there? It better be good, compadre, I’m telling you, ’cause I got a lot of paperwork and shit to deal with right here on the homefront.”
“It’s good. You’ll see.”
“Yeah, I’ll see. I’ll swing by and pick you up at six-thirty.”
“You get the car?”
“You’ll see.
6
THE AMAZON BASIN
W ould you kill for a cigarette? Commit murder for a single puff of burning weed? Could the sweet scent of Turkish tobacco drive a man insane? These were the questions the wild creature squatting inside the bamboo cage asked himself. The guard, who smoked in a very civilized manner, affected an air of boredom. He was leaning casually against a wooden bollard, gazing at the river.
Inside the small dock office, an argument was raging. Wajari’s basso profundo rose and fell.
Hawke, desperate for a smoke, decided to try to communicate with his guard.
The tall, coppery fellow’s uniform was torn and faintly recognizable as British. On his head, a filthy white turban splotched with brown patches that appeared to be dried blood. An Arab, certainly, though perhaps of mixed descent. He carried himself with authority and his dark, heavily lidded eyes betrayed an intelligence beyond his station.
“Speak any English?” he asked, with little hope of a response.
“What’s that?” the man said, looking over at him with annoyance.
He spoke in a clipped English accent, with the unmistakable air of a chap unaccustomed to being addressed by caged animals.
Surprised, Hawke answered, “Actually, I asked if you spoke a bit of English.”
“More than a bit.” Afghani, on one side of the coin.
“What’s in the crates?” Hawke asked.
“Who wants to know?” the man said, as if the prisoner were a piece of rotted meat even the tigers wouldn’t touch.
“The Great Satan, of course,” Hawke said.
The man bent over and peered intently through the bars for a few seconds.
“Satan, I’ll grant you. But, great? I think not.” He rapped the muzzle of his gun on Hawke’s cage. “Tell me who you are.”
“The fifth richest man in England, at your service. Now give me a cigarette for Christ’s sake.”
“You’re not Hawke?”
“Not me.”
“Lord Alexander Hawke? You must be”
“Never heard of him.”
“It’s you, all right. I was expecting an Englishman, not the wild man of Borneo. Damn it, man! I’ve been half expecting you to show up around here. You were supposed to surface a week ago.”
“Sorry I’m late. I was detained. Cigarette?”
“Why not? I have to wait until they finish your paperwork anyway.”
“My paperwork?”
The man didn’t answer. Leaning his carbine against the bollard, he lowered himself to the dock, letting his legs dangle over the edge.
