Warlord

their reach extended deep inside the United States. What was frightening? They were turning American prisons into terrorist training camps.

Stoke had thought he was moving out of the terrorists' crosshairs when he left Manhattan.

Stokely Jones had finally said good-bye to his hometown of New York City for this beautiful stretch of ocean, and it seemed like he couldn't get enough of it. When his sainted mama had passed, the sale of their old house in Bayside, Queens, and an apartment in LeFrak City had paid for Stoke's penthouse condo in the sky over on Brickell Key. He loved having the Atlantic and Biscayne Bay for his new front yard.

Fancha, his fiancee, a well-known singer and a pretty good song-writer from the Cape Verde Islands, said he loved the ocean because water, all water, even the water he drank, was nature's way of 'purifying his soul,' whatever the hell that meant. He didn't like her equating his soul with tap water. Mess with my mind, he had told her, but don't go disrespecting my soul.

Stoke hadn't been listening, but apparently Harry had been talking awhile because he now heard the CIA man saying, '… so, anyway, I can't sleep, I'm channel-surfing, and I get this cable show called Black Gay Men Speak Out, which is fine, no problem. God bless 'em. But I'm thinking, why don't they ever, I mean ever, have a show called Straight White Guys Speak Out? Y'know what I'm sayin', Stoke? Think about it. Hell, maybe I'll get some guys, pals of mine, do a pilot. See what happens.'

'Can I be on the show? I ain't white, but I'm straight. That's 50 percent. Just shoot me, you know, from the waist up when I come on the set.'

Harry looked over at him, shaking his head.

'Why don't you come up with your own show, Stokely? Huh? Is that an idea?'

'I already came up with my show and believe me, you won't be on it.'

'Let me ask you a serious question. If you have sex with a prostitute against her will, is that considered rape or shoplifting?'

Stokely looked over at Brock, thinking: In Nam, in the godforsaken brown-water Delta, back in the day, in or out of combat, Harry would have been just the kind of guy Stoke and the other black dudes in his outfit would have seriously avoided.

A good soldier, just one too many shades too white for the brothers. Orange County white is how Stoke saw Harry. From some semi-ritzy development called Santa Rosita, if Stoke remembered it right. 'The Town That God Forgot,' Harry always called it, making some kind of joke about the place.

You just couldn't completely trust a guy who'd grown up in a gated community.

There had been times, over the years they'd worked together, that Stoke thought Harry Brock was just a complete waste of space. But Brock was a true patriot and a badass and he had saved Stoke's best friend Alex Hawke's life one time in the Amazon jungle. That overcame a whole boatload of Harry's negatives.

TEN

I'M SERIOUS, HARRY,' STOKE SAID, GETTING back to the topic at hand. 'We've had days and nights of this surveillance, and nothing to show for it. What exactly is the program?'

'You asking me?' Harry said, wiping a smidge of mayo from his chin.

'No. That other guy in the car.'

Brock, in the passenger seat, looked through the small CIA-issued binoculars to get a sharper image of their target. Big target. A rumpled fat man they had identified as Hamid Kassar, whatever kind of Indo-Pakistani name that was, sitting behind the wheel of a 1958 metallic-blue Bel Air bona fide pussy-magnet convertible. Top down, bald head back on the pleated white leather seat top, Chrome Hearts shades on, catching rays.

Hamid Kassar had been the lawyer for the two Pakistani guys who'd been released from Gitmo and headed straight for Miami. The ones who'd wasted no time getting themselves busted for a crime serious enough to send them out to the Glades. Hook up with the Sword of Allah gang. Six months later, they bust out with five other guys and blow up fucking Jackson Memorial Hospital.

Harry cursed the genius brigade on the Hill who'd voted to release Guantanamo prisoners. All you did was put hardened terrorists on the street. Or, almost worse yet, put 'em back into American prisons where they could recruit naive gangbangers with no education into believing in all this radical Islam 'Hate America' crap.

It was like Washington believed we couldn't import, or, worse, let in enough effing terrorists slipping across our unprotected borders, so that now, now, we had decided to start growing our own! And when they kill us, we get them lawyered up like they were American citizens!

Insanity? Ya think?

In the Bel Air's passenger seat was this older, more refined lounge-lizard type, blue blazer, Bing Crosby straw hat with a madras hatband, and, if the chunky gold Rolex was real, maybe even affluent, but still unidentified. Looked druggy. Country Club druggy maybe, but definitely druggy. In his notes, Stoke had written WM instead of a name. White male was the best he could do right now.

Still looking through the field glasses, Brock said, 'Contrary to what you may think, the quesos grandes in Washington don't consult me on these sensitive matters, Stoke. Hard to believe, I know. But, see, somebody at the Pentagon, or the White House, or on the Seventh Floor at Langley, they order me to do things. And I go do 'em. Or I pay you, or other people like you, to do 'em for me. Get it?'

'I get it,' Stoke muttered, letting Harry get under his skin, which was stupid.

'Good. I would think you were old enough and experienced enough in this line of work to understand that fairly basic concept by now.'

Harry Brock, handsome in a square-jawed Bruce Willis kind of way, was a ripped, hard-bitten CIA paramilitary officer, now a field agent. He played his assignments pretty close to the vest, but Stoke had always figured Harry for a guy who'd killed more people than most battalions.

Brock and the human mountain known as Stokely Jones, formerly of the U.S. Navy SEALs, the New York Jets, and the New York City Police Department, had enjoyed a lengthy and mostly rewarding working relationship over the years. First working directly with Stoke's closest friend, British MI6 intelligence officer Alex Hawke, and, more recently, Harry'd been hiring Stoke's small intel company, Tactics International, based here in Miami, to work cases in Florida and the Caribbean.

Tactics, jointly owned and operated by Stokely Jones and Alex Hawke, was now operating under government contract to do special ops in south Florida, working for the CIA. Since the federal agency was Tactics's largest client by far, Stoke made nice to Harry even though his wiseass California sense of humor sometimes got on his nerves. Bit of a piss-artist, that's what Alex Hawke had called Harry Brock one time. Right on the money.

'My eyes hurt,' Brock said. 'Take these glasses for a while, all right?' Stoke shot out a hand the size of a Smithfield ham and palmed the tiny binos. Brock flicked open the glove compartment and pulled out a large pair of Zeiss high-powers. Less discreet, maybe, but easier on the eyeballs.

The supersized Pakistani, suddenly magnified, was instantly more interesting. The guy kept his dark eyes moving constantly, in the rearview, side to side. Looking, or waiting, for someone? Harry felt himself go from simmer to low boil. The Pakistanis, with their unstable government, loose nukes, and Taliban-al Qaeda connections, were giving Iran a run for its money at the very top of the CIA's shit list over the last couple of years.

And a lot of Pakistani emigres like the chubby legal eagle up there, in the United States either legally or illegally, still officially TBD, were kept under close surveillance these days. Especially since the tragedy at Jackson Memorial Hospital, spearheaded by this puke's two Sword of Allah clients, sprung from Gitmo, who'd escaped prison and killed hundreds of innocent civilians.

What you were seeing were immigrant terrorist gangbangers doing hard time in the prison system, joining or starting Muslim Brotherhood gangs, and then recruiting non-Muslims in the joint and getting the brothers radicalized before they were released into the community.

At this very moment, Stoke's sole employee, Luis Gonzales-Gonzales, a one-armed Cuban he called Sharkey, was one of many who had been sent undercover inside Florida and other state prisons like the Glades, aka the Florida Correctional Institution, trying to penetrate the Sword of Allah.

S.O.A. was one of the newer Muslim gangs to take power within the American prison system, after only two, maybe three years of existence in the United States. It was a group that had already proven itself extraordinarily