Tsar

“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.

“She has her own Fiji,” Stokely told him, maybe a little too loudly. “Estate-bottled for her in Fiji personally by David and Jill Gilmour right at the spring on their property at Wakaya.”

“Estate-bottled Fiji water?” Yuri said, finding it hard to believe there was some luxury item on the planet he’d not yet heard of.

“Of course.”

“Sheldon? My water?”

“I’ll be right there with it.”

“Chilled, Sheldon?”

“Chilled to perfection, goddess.”

17

Half an hour later, Fancha was onstage, in the middle of her first set, singing her little heart out. Stoke was busy invoking Rule One of fancy cocktail soirees: Circulate. He was cruising the crowd like a hungry shark, using his nom de guerre, Sheldon Levy, talking to anyone and everyone who looked interesting, just seeing what itch he could scratch here and there.

Aboard Fado, Harry’s digital audio recorders were picking up everything he was hearing at the party, so Stoke didn’t pay too much attention to most of these drunks. Still, some of what they were saying would no doubt prove useful to some intel wonk at Langley down the line. Harry also had rigged an online feed to VICAM. He could send video stills of anyone who caught his eye to D.C., right from Fado, and get instant rap-sheet feedback, should any of these distinguished gentlemen have a criminal record.

Stoke was hoping to bump into Ramzan himself, but so far, the birthday boy hadn’t shown for his own gig. Wanted to be fashionably late, Stoke guessed, an old Chechen custom, maybe. The Russians he did meet were mostly big and noisy. Most of them were noisy in slurred English. Vodka, Stoli, Imperia, all headed down wide-open hatches by the gallon at various bar tables situated under the palms around the property.

Not a drinker, he’d passed on the vodka in favor of Diet Coke, but he’d put away about a pound of Beluga caviar so far and felt he could probably go for another. There were mountains of the delicious stuff everywhere, so you didn’t have to feel greedy spooning two tablespoons onto your toast points.

The women, he had to admit, were mostly beautiful. Lots of low-cut dresses, sequins, and major bling. A whole lot of very big blonde hair. You had a good cross-section of wives, trophy wives, girlfriends, and professionals. Some of them had to be imports from the Ukraine, some of them were clearly home-grown, and a few were right up there with South Florida’s finest.

Sharkey deserved a lot of credit and maybe a raise for the idea of using Fancha’s yacht as the surveil vehicle. Since the party was mostly on the back lawn around the pool, the docked boat was the only feasible way to cover this assignment. He had to laugh every time he looked out at Fado, thinking about the countless hours he’d spent staking out some dirtbag in Queens, munching doughnuts, freezing his tail off behind the wheel of some crummy Dodge Dart with a bad heater.

Down below in the cabin, positioned in front of his monitors and camera controls, Harry Brock was a busy boy. Every time a couple of guys or a group out on the lawn strayed anywhere near the boat, you’d see that portside outrigger come creeping around, dangling the little Skycam over their unsuspecting heads. He even had instant replay on the damn thing.

Harry had been right about the outrigger as a camera and boom mike. People were so deep into the cocktail hour now that nobody seemed to notice when the stray outrigger on the big sportfish did weird things, waving around over people’s heads like a magic wand.

Stoke decided to make his way inside the palazzo. People were coming and going, and it wouldn’t hurt to see what was going on indoors, beyond the camera’s reach. The house, mobbed with people, was pretty much what you’d expect, a style Stoke called Early Boca. Twenty-foot ceilings. A lot of heavily gilded furniture and artwork that was supposed to look as if it had come from some Italian castle. Big curving stairway with a huge bad portrait of the owner’s wife halfway up the curving wall. Chandeliers of melting icicles they’d maybe bought at Mickey’s Magic Castle Gift Shoppe over in Orlando.

He pushed his way into the foyer (fwa-yay, as his buddy Chief Inspector Ambrose Congreve would say) and stepped through the double front doors at the home’s grand entrance. There he paused to admire the steady stream of gleaming Bentleys, Rollers, Escalades, Rangers, and big black Hummers. None of them, of course, could hold a candle to his 1965 black raspberry GTO convertible, capable of a standing quarter-mile