capable of any atrocity. Scary thing? Harry told him CIA estimated the total American S.O.A. prison membership already at over five thousand and climbing. That's five thousand suicidal terrorists sitting around in the slam every day thinking up new ways to kill Americans.
When Stoke told Shark it was a crappy job but somebody had to do it, he meant it. American prisons had quickly become America's own little madrassa hothouses, taxpayer-funded terror training schools where budding Islamic fanatics learned little tricks of the trade like how to blow up major hospitals.
See, you didn't need a 767 full of jet fuel to be a terrorist anymore, he'd told Sharkey right after Jackson Memorial blew sky-high. All you needed was enough suicidal gangbangers wearing backpack bombs and whacked out on meth and religion to take out a whole damn hospital. All you needed was a small sleeper cell school-bus driver in Poughkeepsie bringing his AK-47 to work one day in a pillowcase. And on and on.
What was your run-of-the-mill prison con learning in the joint these days? Not the finer points of vanity license plate production. No. It was how to embrace a hijacked religion, learn how to hate America and kill civilians, that's what, and it wasn't good. You couldn't even trust an ex-con to be patriotic anymore.
'Whaddya see up there, Stoke? Anything unusual? Any action between these two dickwads?'
Stoke shook his head slightly while still looking through the small binoculars. Nothing. But something weird was going on. He couldn't shake the odd feeling that there was more to this than they were seeing.
Yeah.
Definitely feeling jumpy, all of a sudden.
But why?
ELEVEN
THE BAD HUNCH MADE STOKELY JONES scan the beach area away from the blue Chevy several times but, aside from a skinny Jamaican Rasta guy, wearing nothing but his jockey tighty-whiteys and matted dreadlocks, doing a one-handed handstand on his skateboard, he saw nothing remotely out of the ordinary.
He shook off the jitters, grabbed a little handheld radio off the dash, and called the CIA Miami field agent sitting two blocks north.
'Armando, you see anyone or anything out of place around here, hombre?'
A raw, tobacco-cured voice came back. 'Nope. I gotta say, guys, this is one weird neighborhood for arms deals. What, are those two getting ready to move, you think?'
'No, just checking.' Stoke knew Armando Hernandez, the older Hispanic agent, alone in a low-key Jeep Cherokee, was probably happy just to have some time to sit and do that Sudoku stuff he loved so much. Filling in little squares with numbers for hours at a time? What was up with that? Stoke couldn't understand the attraction, but what the hell, the whole damn planet was suddenly flooded with stuff he didn't understand.
Hell, he couldn't even think of a single TV show he'd liked since Redd Foxx died and Sanford and Son went off the air.
One thing he had come to realize was just how many freaking third worlders had invaded the Miami metro area. As a New York City Police detective, he'd been assigned to the Bed-Stuy section of Brooklyn, which was a great town if you were a bullet. He had spent so much time on gangs that were either Hispanic or black that he never paid much attention to groups like these radical Muslims. One reason you had that first attack on the World Trade Center in '93?
Nobody gave a damn.
Now, seemed like the whole intel community had Pakistan under a microscope. That pissant, dicked-up country of mass confusion was up to its ass in radicals who wanted to kill Americans. Up in the Northern Territories, the Taliban and al Qaeda were taking turns, blowing shit up every other day. Plus, the fifth-largest country in the world population-wise had a dangerously unstable government, run by a crooked president who got in on a sympathy vote when his beautiful wife was assassinated.
On top of that, there was a whole shitload of loose nukes just sitting there about a mile from the Islamabad airport. Just imagine, Harry said, what would happen if the Taliban/al Qaeda axis of weasels managed to start a war between Pakistan and India. A war that took down the already shaky Pakistani government and put it in the hands of the radical Islamists in the Pak military? Now you've got the world's first Islamic rogue country with nuclear weapons, that's what.
That by itself had gotten Stoke's attention.
So, given all that, the racial profiling part of this current assignment he could understand. Maybe this Hassan guy was a Paki loose-nuke specialist, who knew? Maybe he was doing a drugs-for-weapons deal with Mr. Country Club. But, without more information, it was hard to get excited about stalking the guy's fat ass every damn day.
Brock, borderline bored to tears himself, said to his partner, 'How's Fancha doing these days?'
'Been in a bad mood ever since her first solo CD album went out.'
'Why?'
'Well, it didn't exactly go platinum.'
'Yeah? What did it go?'
'It went plastic.'
'Not good.'
'No. And now she wants me to give up my beautiful penthouse over on Brickell Key. Move in with her on Key Biscayne. Get married or something.'
'So?'
Stoke hated this subject. The whole marriage thing was beginning to spook him a little. Normally, he'd call his pal Hawke about it. But Hawke wasn't giving advice these days. He was still hurting big time over the loss of his fiancee and their baby. Stoke, at one point, had been so worried he'd flown over to Bermuda to surprise him. See if he couldn't get him to snap out of it. But Hawke had already snapped. And he was already completely out of it. After a few heartbreaking days, Stoke left Bermuda fairly sure he'd never see his old friend alive again.
Stoke hefted his binoculars. After a few seconds of holding them aloft, he rested them on the steering wheel and looked at Harry.
'Whoa, do you see that?'
Brock was still watching the two men yakking in the old blue Chevy. 'What is it?'
'Chick on Alton now walking straight toward us. More hookers looked like her they'd change the Constitution and make prostitution mandatory.'
Brock allowed his larger, high-powered binoculars to veer just far enough to see who his partner was talking about.
She had tight white jeans and long blond hair, but dark features. Her low-rider top exposed plenty of cleavage and her body had the movement and musculature of an athlete. For some reason she didn't really strike Harry as a prostitute. Dead wrong area of town for working girls in the middle of the day. She obviously had no bearing on whatever deal they were watching go down in any case, but he couldn't take his eyes off her.
Stoke refocused his binoculars on the two guys in the Chevy. They were speaking with a whole lot more animation and intensity now. Lots of hand gestures from the Pakistani Maltese Falcon-looking guy. The bosomy babe was still half a block away as he started to wonder why she would be dodging cars, walking down the middle of the damn street instead of over on the sidewalk.
Brock, eyes glued to his binoculars, said, 'If hookers were horses, this chick would be frickin' Secretariat.'
'Yeah, and if all the women in Texas are as ugly as your mama, the Lone Ranger's gonna be alone for a long, long time.'
Predictably, Harry fired off a single-digit salute.
Just as Stoke raised his tiny binoculars, Harry flinched in the front seat and shouted, 'Jesus F. Christ.'
Then Stoke heard the shots. He saw the image a split second later in the lenses of his binoculars. The long- legged prostitute had a small machine pistol pointed at the blue Bel Air and was spraying the two cats they had under surveillance.
She fired in short bursts, controlling the weapon, and keeping the barrel of the small automatic right on target.
