by Marc Cameron
Albania had offered Beg refugee status as a favor to the United States. As far as Yao knew, he’d kept his affiliation with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, technically still on the terrorism watch list. There was a good chance that if he smelled anything remotely CIA or U.S. government about Murphy, he might not be all that pleased to see her.
* * *
—
Joey Shoop got the summoning whistle from Rask the moment the door swung shut behind Murphy. Shoop stood quickly—that’s what you did when the boss called—and tucked the errant tail of his peach oxford button-down into his pants. As much of a slob as the chief was, he liked his troops to look tidy. Vlora cocked her head to one side and looked down her nose at him. She spoke fluent Albanian and lorded it over everyone in the office. She touched her finger to her nose.
“Got a little hanger-on there, Joey.”
Shoop knew she was just messing with him, but he wiped his nose just in case on the way to Rask’s office.
The chief was staring at his computer screen, working on some memo. “Go after her,” he said.
“To her haircut?”
“She’s not getting a haircut,” Rask said. “Go.”
“Right,” Shoop said. “I’ll have her back.”
Now Rask looked up. “I want you to follow her. In your car. Let me know where she goes.”
“You got it,” Shoop said.
Rask raised both hands, palms up. “Unless you got a tracker on her car, you’d better get on after it.”
Shoop grabbed his jacket and left at a trot, hitting the door at the same time Rask called Vlora into his office—probably to keep her from ratting them out.
Murphy turned north out of embassy parking, heading for downtown. It seemed like every other car on the road in Tirana was gray or white, and many of those were Mercedes sedans. Murphy’s little Ford Fiesta melted into the background.
She crossed the Lana like she might be going to the city center, but then turned left, paralleling the river. Maybe she was just running a surveillance-detection route, crossing the river before she worked her way back to Blloku, just ahead on her right. It made sense. There were lots of high-end boutiques and shops there. Under Soviet rule, only Party elite were even allowed in “the Block.” Now it was the place to go to watch the upper crust of Tirana do their thing. The grim influence of the less-than-halcyon days of Soviet rule had long since been painted over with a riot of reds and yellows and blues. The architecture still resembled large boxes that more attractive buildings must have come in, but now, instead of dull gray cubes, multicolored blocks in the shadow of Mount Dajti lined streets named after U.S. presidents and packed with Mercedes-Benz sedans.
But Murphy didn’t turn until she reached the middle ring road, cutting north now, passing the embassies of Greece and Great Britain as she skirted downtown. She arced to her right, continuing east until she reached the Mother Teresa, at which point she turned right again on Rruga Bardhyl, generally going back toward the office.
Shoop pounded the steering wheel of his Taurus. Did she know he was following her? She was stopping at all the lights, wasn’t doubling back on herself, getting on and off a highway, or any of the usual countersurveillance-run maneuvers. She was barely even maintaining the speed limit. Shoop had to ride the brakes to keep from overtaking her. They were doing the same damn route again. When was she going to turn?
He stayed in the shadow of three other cars and a large delivery van with a picture on the side of what looked like the Albanian version of the Three Stooges.
They’d just taken the roundabout past the British consulate, heading east—again—when a silver Mercedes S 500 pulled alongside the Taurus at the same time the delivery van slowed. Boxed in, Shoop tapped his brake. He lost sight of Leigh Murphy for a grand total of six seconds—but when the van pulled forward and gave him enough room to squirt around in front of the Mercedes, the little gray Ford was nowhere to be seen.
Shoop’s stomach fell. He smacked the steering wheel again, cursing, craning his head back and forth, searching a sea of gray sedans for the gray sedan he was after. He thought he saw it, a gray Ford beneath a scraggly elm tree, pocked with early spring buds—but a fat man got out.
“Think!” Shoop chided himself.
A concrete median divided the boulevard, so she must have taken one of the two streets to the right. No way she had enough time to make it to the next cross street. Had she?
Shoop would have seen her if she’d taken the first right, so he turned down the second right, trying to put himself in Murphy’s shoes.
He didn’t know where she was going, but it sure as hell wasn’t to get a haircut.
26
Leigh Murphy took the first left after the roundabout, working her way through the narrow streets and double-parked cars in front of a mix of boxy apartment buildings and back-street shops that sold everything from pastries to truck tires. Zoning appeared to be an afterthought here. Sides of beef or mutton might hang in a butcher’s window next to an engine repair shop. Mehmet Akif High School for Boys was just over a block from Prison 313, a windowless fortress of brick, chipped concrete, and concertina wire.
Urkesh Beg lived between the school and the prison, in a tired-looking concrete six-story apartment building surrounded by a mote of gravelly alleys and a spooky overgrown lot that had once been paved but was probably rubble when the Russkies ruled Albania. An overpowering smell of garbage hung in the chilly air. The little ditch next to where Murphy parked gurgled merrily along with what she felt reasonably sure was sewage. A tumbledown brick wall—the kind where gobs of mortar look mashed from between each brick like the layer cake of an overzealous baker—ran along the street. In the shadow of the wall, an eight-by-eight block shed with a rusted tin roof sat tucked into the scrub brush. Murphy found herself wishing she’d parked farther away—or even on the other side of the apartment building. This place looked like a private stockade, or the cottage belonging to a resident witch. Either way, it creeped her out and she sped up, ready to deal with a disgruntled Uyghur.
He was smaller than she’d expected him to be. She’d looked up his photo while on the phone with Adam, and seen his descriptors. This guy might have been five nine, a hundred and seventy pounds at some point, but not anymore. Life had pounded him down good and hard, bending him where people were not meant to bend and shaving pounds and surely years off his life.
Murphy didn’t speak Uyghur or Chinese, so she greeted him in Arabic.
“As-salamu alaikum.”
He eyed her warily, bent as if he might topple forward at the slightest breath or misstep.
“Wa alaikumu as-salam,” he said.
He spoke English, haltingly, but assured her that he understood it very well from his time in U.S. custody.
Murphy introduced herself as a member of an NGO that was working to reunite Uyghur refugees with their children. To her surprise, he invited her in immediately.
“Come, come,” he said, raking the air with a cupped hand. “Please. I make you tea.”
He lived alone, with no family and few hobbies, from the looks of the sparse interior of the shabby but clean apartment. His nails were long, his hair unkempt. His only friends appeared to be the neat stacks of books and magazines in Arabic script and English stacked in various spots around the living area. Murphy noted just a few of the English titles—A Raisin in the Sun, 1984, The Invisible Man, assorted Kafka . . . A well-worn copy of To Kill a Mockingbird sat open and facedown next to a mug of tea on a small table beside a sagging easy chair, as if he’d been up to the business of reading it when she’d knocked on his door. Not exactly books she’d expected to see in a Uyghur refugee’s home in the suburbs of Albania, but there was definitely a theme. You could get only so much by reading a person’s file.
He brought her tea and then retrieved his own, using a strip of white paper to mark his spot before
reverently closing To Kill a Mockingbird and setting it gently on the table. Sitting across from Murphy, he told her that he was sorry but he could not help because he had no children to be reunited with. Where an American or European man might bawdily joke that he had no children “that he knew of,” Urkesh Beg looked at her soberly and left it at the apologetic denial.
Murphy learned early—likely well before The Farm—that a lie was easier to swallow when buttered with some truth. She set her teacup on her knees and bent forward, trying to make herself seem as small and unthreatening as possible. “Mr. Beg,” she said. “I am here on a very delicate matter. There are members of certain . . . shall we say . . . groups that China has deemed . . . outside the law—”
Beg’s countenance fell dark at the mention of China.
Murphy held up her free hand. “Please understand, I am in no way connected to the Chinese government. On the contrary, I do not even represent the American government.”
“That is good,” Beg said. “Because I hate the U.S. only a little less than I hate the Chinese government.”
Murphy had read the man’s file. She felt the urge to explain that although there was no question that the Uyghur people had been severely mistreated, it was no small thing to align oneself with Taliban forces, even for training, and then fire toward U.S. troops. Urkesh Beg was, in point of fact, fortunate to be upright and still breathing. Still, criminals in the United States did less time than he had for a hell of a lot worse. It wasn’t Leigh Murphy’s job to prove to him how right the United States was or was not in detaining him for so long. She needed to find out what he knew.
She took a contemplative sip of tea, letting the silence sink in before beginning. “The people I work with represent separated children, not nations. Unfortunately, members of the groups I’m talking to you about do not contact authorities regarding the location and fate of their little ones because they are afraid the Chinese government—”
Beg scoffed. “Or the U.S.”
“Or whomever,” Murphy continued. “Parents aligned with groups operating on the edges of the law fear making contact, leaving my organization with no way to find extended family for the children in our care—many of whom are too young to communicate with us.”
“Maybe you give me names of the people you are looking for,” Beg said. “I am not part of all this you speak of, but I know people who know.”
“I have a list at my office,” she said. “Perhaps we can meet tomorrow or the next day and speak in more detail. I do remember several of the smaller children had family members in the ETIM . . .” Murphy listed two other known Uyghur groups before bringing it home. Yao had been vague about why he was looking for Medina Tohti, but did mention she had a daughter. Murphy flipped the script on the details but kept the issue of parent and child the same. “. . . at least one, a three-year-old boy, if I am correct, has a father who is part of . . . I’m not sure I’m saying it correctly, the Wuming group.”
Beg shook his head emphatically, lips pursed, a child refusing to eat his oatmeal. He took two slow, deep breaths before saying, “Wuming?” His hand trembled as he took a sip of tea. “Wuming means nameless. Nobody.”
“Anonymous?” Murphy offered. If this man was reading A Raisin in the Sun and George Orwell, he had a decent vocabulary.
“Yes,” Beg said. “Anonymous. Maybe other groups do things and Wuming gets the blame.”
“Or the credit,” Murphy said. “The Chinese believe they are behind several killings.” She put her hand to her chest now, over her heart. “This boy I spoke of, he believes his father is Wuming. I hope they are real. Someone needs to fight the Chinese oppression.”
Beg leaned back in his chair, eyeing her carefully. “Do you know of Baihua Qifang?”
Murphy thought for a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t recognize it.”
“The Hundred Flowers Campaign,” Beg said. “Decades ago, Mao allowed open criticism of the Communist government. ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred differing thoughts contend.’ A Chinese poem.” Beg turned up his nose. “Far inferior to Uyghur verse.”
He was certainly finding his vocabulary now.
“I have heard of the Hundred Flowers Campaign,” Murphy said. “It did not go well.”
“It did not,” Beg said. “Some say it started with good intentions, but I think Mao told everyone to speak the truth of how they disagreed with him so he could kill them or put them in prison later.”
“Fair assessment,” Murphy said. “But what does that have to do with us?”
“You come to my house, telling me you are happy with crimes committed against Han Chinese military and police. You think this will make me agree with you and get me in trouble.”
“I told you,” Murphy said. “I represent no specific country, but I am obviously not Chinese.”
Beg gave a derisive laugh. “You Americans believe only people who look Chinese help Beijing. China has lots of money. Americans who look like you help China, Africans help China, even some greedy Uyghur work for China against other Uyghur. I told you, I am not a part of any organization you are asking about and I have no children.” He stood. “There are Uyghur families in many free countries who I imagine would happily raise these children. I think you should go and use your time to contact them.”
“I will,” Murphy said, getting to her feet. The fire in Urkesh Beg’s eyes made her grateful for the weight of the little Glock in her waistband. “But I would still like to try and place the children with family if possible. You said you know people who might know. This little boy who says his father is Wuming is so—”
“Wuming is no one. Little children’s stories, yes, but that is all. Wuming is just story.”
Murphy bit her bottom lip, making her chin quiver. She could not only turn her wiggle off and on, but the waterworks as well. “Honestly,” she said, sniffing for effect. “Hundred Flowers Campaign be damned. Think whatever you want. Whoever is doing these things, Wuming or whatever they are called . . . Who could blame them? There are evil people out there, taking children from parents, husbands from wives . . . I worry about the children, but you’re probably right. It would be better to place them with unrelated Uyghur families. Chinese authorities are relentless. They will eventually find and imprison everyone who even thinks a separatist thought, even the Wuming.”
“I will tell you this much,” Beg said, growing animated. “If Wuming was real, no stupid Han Chinese soldier would be able to find them. Wuming is shapeless. No . . . how do you say it? Formless. Wuming can never be caught. They would never preach. Never say a bad word against China. Never talk aloud of a free East Turkestan. He shook his head again, snorting, almost a chuckle. “Wuming is no one, but could be anyone. So many borders, they will never be found. They don’t speak of what they must do, they do what they must. If anyone looks, they will only disappear into wilderness like fox or melt back into the fabric of regular folk.”
“I understand,” Murphy said. “Do you have a mobile?”
Beg looked around his modest apartment and gave a wan smile. “A phone is expensive,” he said. “And I have no one to call.”
“I’ll check back tomorrow or the next day,” she said.
“As you wish,” Beg said. “But I doubt I can help.”
She said her good-byes and left a card with a hello-phone callback number—the voicemail gave an extension, not a business name. Pondering what a colossal dead end this had proven to be, she rounded the brick wall on the way back to her car and nearly jumped out of her skin when Joey Shoop stepped from behind the creepy witch’s cottage.
“Nice haircut,” he said.
“Hey,” she said, trying to remain nonchalant.
“Hey, my ass,” Shoop said and sneered. “I about smacked into a meat truck trying to find you. What’s with trying to lose me back there?”
“I wasn’t trying to los
e you, nimrod.” She wagged her head. “I was running this little thing we do in intelligence work called a surveillance-detection route. Maybe you’ve heard of them.”
Shoop just stood there, glaring at her. “Rask was right to wonder about you. You got something going on, don’t you?”
“You’re an idiot, Joey. You want to hear him yell at me, I’m going back to the office to type up a report now.” She gave him a disdainful shrug. “I guess you’re welcome to follow me if you think you can keep up.”
27
Adam Yao was running out of options. Two days of interviews and meetings hadn’t got him any closer to finding Medina Tohti. Leigh Murphy had come up dry as well.
The Usenovs were his last shot.
Adam Yao arrived unannounced, but that did not matter. Kambar Usenov answered the door, heard Yao say he was a journalist from Taiwan who had a few questions, and waved him inside out of the chill. Russian was the lingua franca of Kazakhstan, but the Usenovs were Oralman—literally “returnees” who had come back to their ethnic roots after living for generations in another country. Kambar and Aisulu Usenov had fled Xinjiang, so their first language was Mandarin—making Yao’s job much easier. His Russian was halting at best, but he spoke Chinese like a native—which at first appeared to put Usenov on edge, until Yao showed him the Taiwanese journalist credentials. Usenov, a bear of a man with a slight limp, gripped Yao’s hand firmly with both of his. He peered into Yao’s eyes for just long enough to make Yao think he might have to pull away.
