by Marc Cameron
It made sense. The wicked little French knife was called a douk-douk, after the Melanesian god of chaos and doom.
* * *
—
Hala took him a back way out of her neighborhood that skirted all but one of the police checkpoints, the last on the outskirts of town, some two kilometers from the livestock market. They had to abandon the scooter and cut through a pasture of fat sheep to get around. Clark took the registration plate off the scooter and then set it on fire before they left, hoping any identifying numbers would be destroyed. It was better that the police respond to a fire than find a bike that belonged to Hala’s aunt abandoned so near the Sunday Market.
The walk to the caravanserai was relatively short, but the cumulative effects of jet lag and a near-constant flow of adrenaline left Clark dragging with exhaustion.
As usual, this caravanserai was a fortresslike affair of mud and brick built around a large courtyard where camels and goods could be brought inside while the travelers ate and slept.
An entire side had fallen in—a victim of the siege of time. There was spray-painted graffiti here and there on the remaining walls—tentative, like the artist had been in a rush, terrified of being caught. Clark couldn’t read the Arabic, but it was faded and old, much of it naturally sandblasted away by the wind. A bony rat hustled from one pile of stone to another, not nearly as worried about getting caught as the graffiti painter. Peeling paint on a dusty wooden sign out front suggested that someone had once tried to turn the place into a tourist attraction. WONDERS OF THE SILK ROAD, the peeling paint read in Chinese characters and English. For whatever reason, the project had failed—leaving this particular wonder of the Silk Road long abandoned and offering Clark and Hala what appeared to be the perfect place to hide.
Any straw or animal bedding had long since turned to dust, leaving nothing but the dirt ground and the blankets they’d brought with them for beds. Clark found a spot in the back corner of an old room.
There was a vacant hole in the thick clay wall a few feet to the left of his bed—a small window, or perhaps even a gun port. He had no firearm, but he could roll out of his bed quickly and the hole gave him a viable vantage point where he could see anyone who tried to approach from the road before they saw him.
This place would do for now.
He took the secure cell phone out of his pocket. The battery was dangerously low, and there was certainly no way to charge it here. Instead of calling, he entered the code to open the encrypted text capability behind his Walk-to-Me pedometer app and thumb-typed a quick message. It would disappear ten seconds after Midas read it.
Have package. All intact. RP Bravo.
Midas would know to try to meet at 0900, 1400, and 2100 local time. Other than that, there was nothing he could do.
Clark was a planner, a strategizer, and even a gambler if the stakes were high enough, but he didn’t waste much time on worry. He’d decide what to do next tomorrow, when a couple hours’ rest had cleared his head.
Hala, obviously accustomed to sleeping on the floor, made a nest for herself at Clark’s feet. She’d spoken only to give directions since they’d left the house, her collar always in her mouth, her arms trembling as she held on to his waist behind him on the scooter.
“Will you be warm enough?” Clark asked. He was unsure of what to say but felt like he needed to check on the poor kid before passing out himself. He wasn’t completely blind to the experience of having a daughter, but was honest enough with himself to know his wife had done the lion’s share of the parenting while he was traveling the world kicking ass for flag and freedom. What could he possibly say to any little girl to comfort her? That was Sandy’s job.
Hala Tohti was what? Ten years old? When Patsy was that age, she had a comfortable home and a warm bedroom full of Barbie dolls and posters of boy bands. Hala’s father was dead, her mother gone. Three hours ago, she’d witnessed her aunt stab one man to death in the neck and then helped her cut another man’s throat with a meat cleaver—and she still had the wherewithal to think of this place to hide.
Maybe this kind of kid deserved more bedtime stories, not less.
“I am fine,” she said. Her voice quivered as the events of the evening caught up with her. Nights were always the worst—for everyone. “Did you know that I am very good on the balance beam? The government even sent me to a special school.”
“You must be good, then,” Clark said. For some reason, her small, fragile voice in the darkness brought on him an immeasurable sadness.
“I was going to compete in the Olympics someday,” she said, “but I do not think that will happen now.”
Clark swallowed, having a little trouble speaking. It was odd the things that got to him lately.
Hala saved him. “May I ask a question?”
Clark rolled up on his side, resting his elbow on the ground as he peered through the dusty darkness at the lump of blankets. He swallowed again, working very hard to smooth the gravel in his voice. Many years of being John Clark had given his personality more jagged edges than he liked to admit.
“Of course,” he said.
“Am I . . .” Now she sat up, looking back at him. “Am I your prisoner?”
“Oh, no, no,” Clark said. “Not at all. I am going to get you to safety.”
“That is what you told me at my aunt’s house,” the girl said, breathless, like she might get up and run at any moment. “But one can never be sure with men. They give you cake and tell you lies.”
“That is true about many men,” Clark said. “But not me. I am running, too.” He gave a soft chuckle, hoping it would help to calm her. “And I have no cake.”
“And no lies?” Stone sober now.
“No lies,” Clark said. “We’re in this together.”
She sighed and lay back down. “The Bingtuan have eyes everywhere. How will we get away?”
“Truthfully,” Clark said, “I’m not sure. But we’ll meet my friend tomorrow. We can decide what to do then. You should get some rest if you can.”
“Okay,” she said in the darkness. He could tell she was sucking on her shirt collar again. Poor kid.
Clark pulled the blanket up over his shoulder. He was so exhausted he figured he might even get two or three hours’ sleep on the uneven dirt floor before he woke up with his old bones half crippled.
Somewhere in the darkness, the tiny claws of a rat clicked across the dusty floor. The room smelled of a thousand years of camel dung and far more recent rodent urine, leaving Clark to wonder what kind of biblical plagues he might breathe in while he slept. He shrugged away the thought and rested his head on his outstretched arm. It didn’t matter. Considering the present situation, a plague wasn’t what would kill him.
25
CIA case officer Leigh Murphy ended the call from Adam Yao and leaned back in her chair to work out a plan for her getaway. Dunny blond hair hung just above smallish shoulders. There was some curl to it, but not enough to get her noticed. Now, throw on an LBD—little black dress—instead of her usual faded jeans and loose hooded sweatshirt, dab a little makeup around her green eyes, and she could get herself noticed, all right. She’d learned early in life how to, as her mother put it, “turn her wiggle off and on.” A good skill to have as an intelligence officer.
Fredrick Rask, the station chief, slouched in his office. The mini-blinds were up on his window, and he watched the bullpen intently, homing in on her. Rask must have sensed she was up to something. He licked his chops like a male lion waiting for the lioness to go out and hunt because he was too lazy to get off his own fat ass and kill something. That was Fredrick Rask’s specialty—benefitting through the efforts of others.
Murphy scribbled the address Adam Yao had given her on a piece of scratch paper and stuffed it into her pocket while she thought through a couple of possible approaches. It was going to be touchy, talking to this particul
ar guy—but that was her strength. Besides, Albania had been on her dream sheet of posts from the beginning, and Adam Yao had helped her get here. She owed him. A lot.
She’d known Adam since Kenya, her first foreign posting after graduating from CIA’s Career Training Program and Camp Peary, or The Farm—the facility officially referred to as an Armed Forces Experimental Training Activity. Yao had come up with a lead on a Chinese businessman smuggling a shipment of tramadol from Guangzhou to Mombasa via private charter. Dope smugglers, as deplorable as they were, didn’t exactly fall into a CIA case officer’s wheelhouse—except this particular load of dope was being smuggled by the son of a Chinese People’s Liberation Army general in Guangzhou. The PLA, or at least high-ranking members of it, appeared to be behind the operation—and that information could fill in some big puzzle pieces for the analysts at Langley and Liberty Crossing.
Murphy was fresh to the field then, but she’d been identified by her station chief as a rising star—able to read and recruit assets, from the Chinese ambassador’s Kenyan housekeeper to a major in the National Police Service. With the help of Murphy’s contacts, Yao tipped the correct dominos to get them all falling in just the right order. In the end, they seized over a hundred pounds of a fentanyl analogue known as China White—worth almost two million dollars—and five peach crates containing seven hundred and fifty thousand tablets of the synthetic opiate tramadol. The fentanyl would have ended up in relatively affluent cities like Nairobi or Johannesburg, where at least some of the population could afford heroin. Slums along the East Africa coast provided outlets for the tramadol. No one involved was under the mistaken impression that they’d suddenly won a drug war—but they’d won this battle, and maybe, just maybe, the tide was held back for a week or two before some other group filled the void in the marketplace. At the very least, they took several million dollars out of the pockets of evil men—while gaining useful intelligence about the PLA’s activities in East Africa.
The Guangzhou general’s son went to prison, and, thanks to Leigh Murphy’s stable of assets in-country, so did a sizable criminal outfit whose operation spanned from Nairobi to Mauritius to Cape Town. Yao added the information he gleaned from the general’s son to his intelligence file, but the CIA didn’t take credit for busting a narcotics ring, even one that large. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had a robust presence during the operation from the beginning, and they, along with the National Police Service, got the headlines.
Leigh Murphy and Yao had slipped away from the limelight—like good intelligence officers do—and celebrated over a plate of nyama choma—in this case, traditional grilled goat—at a quiet bar in the upscale Nairobi neighborhood of Kilimani. The light was low, the afterglow mixed with the slight buzz from her third Tusker lager. Stupidly, like some giddy schoolgirl with a crush, she’d looked into his eyes across the table and tapped the neck of her beer to his.
“Bia yangu, nchi yangu.”
He was impressed that she spoke Kiswahili, but she admitted that it was written on the Tusker bottle—My beer, my country.
It just sounded cool.
They spent two days together, debriefing . . . and whatnot. The romantic part of the equation never seemed to work out. Both were still working on their careers. Prohibitions against dipping your pen in company ink weren’t the problem. Agency relationships made for a tighter circle of trust. Long-distance relationships sucked, though, and could take an operative’s mind off the game. Neither of them wanted that. So Adam Yao had slipped back into his secret life of a NOC—no official cover—operative somewhere in Asia—he’d never even told her exactly what his cover was. It was safer that way for both of them. They kept in touch, and Yao had become her behind-the-scenes unofficial mentor and confidant. When it was time for Murphy to have a new posting, he put in a good word with his boss, who talked to her boss, who got her posted to Tirana.
She’d do anything for him, even this. She just needed to figure out how to do it without pissing off her chief—or, worse, doing something to cause an incident and making the papers by pulling back the sugar coating of the Albania she loved.
On the outside, the country was a wonderland, gorgeous mountains, delicious food, friendly people, not to mention the Adriatic, but there was a hidden underbelly—a bad spot on the melon—that required a delicate touch.
Albania—Shqiperia, to the locals—was an incredible place to be a young intelligence officer. Korrieri, one of the country’s now defunct newspapers, had once run the headline during an American state visit—PLEASE OCCUPY US! Americans might have a difficult time finding Albania on a map, but people from the Land of the Eagles loved all things red, white, and blue—and made no bones about telling the world how they felt. The Albanian ambassador to the United States had once written an opinion piece in The Washington Times that said, among other things, “If you believe in freedom, you believe in fighting for it, and if you believe in fighting for freedom, you believe in the United States.”
But Langley didn’t send her here for the love and good feeling. She was interested in seedier stuff. If she was going to play patty-cake with America-lovers, they had to know something important about people who didn’t feel the same way.
Some experts denied the existence of a true Albanian Mafia, but those paying for protection, or being trafficked by one of the Fifteen Families, likely thought otherwise. These families controlled organized and unorganized crime all over the country. Drugs, human trafficking, and, of particular interest to Leigh Murphy, military arms sales simply did not happen in Albania without at least one of the Fifteen having a hand in the pot.
And then there was gjakmarrja. Albanians had made the blood feud an art form. The philosophy of a head for a head was part of the social code or canon of twelve books known as the Kanun. Revenge was deeply ingrained in Albanian society, with gjakmarrja vendettas passing from generation to generation.
Still, even an asshole station chief, blood feuds, and Fifteen Family hit men who were often more disciplined and brutal than the Russian Mob—the good outweighed the bad. For Leigh Murphy, it was more of a calling than a job post.
Chief Rask made it out of his office on his gouty legs about the time she stood up.
“You know how I feel about lone meetings,” he said. “Grab Joey or Vlora to go with you.”
Two other case officers looked up from their respective desks in the bullpen, deadpan, clearly not wanting to get involved with more of Rask’s BS. Joey was a kiss-ass, but he was almost as lazy as Rask and didn’t feel the need to overwork himself tagging along on some meeting that was probably bullshit—like ninety percent of them were.
Murphy remained stone-faced. “Who said I was going on a meeting?”
“We read people,” Rask said. “It’s literally part of the job description.”
“Well, Chief, you misread. Just going to get a haircut.”
There was no set of circumstances where she wanted the station chief sticking his nose in this interview before she was done. She told Adam as much and he’d agreed. Besides, Rask would break into a wicked-gross mental fit if he got wind that she’d just been on the phone with a well-respected senior intelligence officer in the Agency—one who cared about the people he worked with and didn’t use their backs as rungs on his career ladder. Rask didn’t like other lions sniffing around his pride.
He sneered, licking his lips. Maybe he didn’t believe her, or maybe he felt deprived of the meat he’d expected when he saw her on the phone. Langley wanted frequent results. How was he supposed to kick intel up the line to make himself look good if his chief hunting lioness worried more about her personal grooming than making a kill?
He screwed up his face like he was about to sneeze. Murphy wasn’t sure he even knew he was doing it. The man wore his emotions like a neon sign. The polygraphers surely had a good old time with him.
“You sure you’re just getting a haircu
t?”
The rusty adage of not being able to kid a kidder applied doubly to a liar. But then, lying to a liar was CIA tradecraft 101.
She thought of popping off to him, something like “You can try and follow me if you want . . . oh, I forgot, you haven’t run a surveillance op in ten years . . .” but a smartass attitude would only give him some juice to write her up on come performance evaluation time. It was her job to work people. Might as well start with her boss.
She gave him her most benign smile. “Yep, just a haircut, Chief.” He relished it when subordinates called him that. She looked at her watch, then grabbed a tweed sport jacket from the back of her chair and put it on over the sweatshirt, adjusting the hood so it draped over her collar in back. Her mom back in Boston would have called the outfit a Fall River Tuxedo. “I came in early, and I’ve got scads of comp time.”
Rask waved a hand in the air over his shoulder, already shuffling back to his office. “Better be logged.”
Murphy took the Glock 43 and inside-the-pants holster from her lap drawer and shoved it down the waistband of her jeans, over the small of her back. Her dad, a Boston PD detective, had always said that God made that little hollow in a person’s back just the right size to carry a .45. He was a big guy, and could get away with carrying a big gun. Just under five-five, she stuck with the baby Glock nine-millimeter. Single-stack, the pistol carried only six in the mag and one in the pipe, but she was a case officer, not some ground branch operator. If she had to resort to her sidearm, things had gone terribly wrong.
She paused, turning to grab a spare magazine from her desk before Rask made it to his desk and turned around again. Wouldn’t hurt to go in prepared.
Adam Yao had asked her to interview Urkesh Beg, a Uyghur man who until recently had been held as an enemy combatant at a CIA black site—off the grid and away from the rules of the U.S. justice system. He was released when a military tribunal determined that although he was likely in Afghanistan, training with known terrorists, he was no longer an enemy combatant against the United States. Due to the rules of engagement, Beg’s association, and proximity to, known terrorists meant that U.S. forces could have put a warhead on his forehead if they’d hit the terrorist training camp with a couple of Hellfire missiles, but after holding him for four and a half years, decided they were not inclined to keep him in custody indefinitely.
