“Hello, yes, it’s me. The plan we talked about, we need to execute it tomorrow. But the timing is crucial. I’ll call you later with the exact schedule.”
CHAPTER 63
Burim showed the color Xerox of the photograph of Pia to yet another young girl who was living on the streets. By now he must have shown that picture to ten thousand strays and runaways. He had been offered girls like that, if such was his fancy, or perhaps a younger girl? He had been told many times that he could have the address of the girl in the picture for twenty or fifty or a hundred pounds. But no one had seen Pia. Burim knew it was useless, but he pressed on. It was better than sitting around doing nothing, and he felt progressively desperate. In reality he knew that the only way he would ever hear anything was if the London Albanian crime network picked up some word. Burim took the cell phone that Harry had lent him the day before, and called the house in Tottenham. No, Harry hadn’t heard anything. And what was Burim thinking, calling at this time of the morning?
Burim ended the call. He wondered if George was having any luck or if Burim had just replicated his own futility in bringing him here. Of course part of the reason for getting him to London was just for Burim to give vent to his anger at George for getting him involved in such a futile wild-goose chase.
The man who had been following Burim for the past three hours noted the time of Burim’s call, and emailed what he had observed to his boss. This was what he had been asked to look for, and finally, he had witnessed it.
George had found Burim late on Thursday morning. Burim had decided even before he got there that it was probably smart not to let the local Albanians know he had brought the kid over, so he had told George to find himself a room in a different part of town from him. He had handed George a sheaf of banknotes and told him to get himself a cell phone. Then he gave George a few copies of the picture of Pia and told him to keep his cell phone on. He never knew when the call might be coming. George was dutifully doing as Burim asked, visiting the major Underground, train, and bus stations with the pictures of Pia, and like Burim, he was seeing a different side to London than most American visitors ever saw.
Jimmy Yan had been asleep only two hours when his alarm woke him on Friday morning. Still, he wasn’t tempted to try to grab another few minutes — it was not his habit to do so, and today it was important that everything run on time. Jimmy had stayed up most of the night to finalize the elaborate preparations, finishing with a long call on the secure line to his superior in Beijing, going over every detail of the plan, especially the piece that catered to their unexpected houseguest.
He knew Zach Berman and Whitney Jones had been woken early, and he called his associate to gather the party in front of the vicarage after a light breakfast.
“Good morning, Whitney, I haven’t seen you in a while,” said Berman when he came out of the house.
“I’ve been busy,” said Whitney Jones, irritably, looking at her boss. “It’s hard to run a business in Colorado from rural England.”
The barb went over Berman’s head. He expected Whitney to do her job whether there was a seven-hour time difference or not.
Jimmy then joined Berman and Whitney. He motioned for them to join him in the second of two cars.
“We are taking the scenic route to Windsor,” said Jimmy. He was in a buoyant mood as usual. He had learned early in life that it was best not to play one’s hand. “Little Chalfont… Amersham… Beaconsfield.”
Jimmy was an enthusiastic tour guide. As they drove up a steep hill out of the small town of Amersham, Jimmy said this was called Gore Hill, named for an ancient battle with Vikings, after which blood ran down the incline and back into the town.
Berman and Whitney had dutifully looked out and nodded. Neither was all that interested.
“That way is John Milton’s house, in Chalfont St. Giles,” said Jimmy, indicating a road even smaller than the one they were on. “But it is too far out of our way. Perhaps we’ll check it out next time we’re in the countryside.”
Thirty minutes later they were aboard a speedy riverboat, headed east down the Thames. Whitney Jones was enjoying her freedom from the confines of the dingy room she had been working in for days; Berman looked completely distracted. Jimmy checked his smartphone every couple of minutes. A flurry of texts kept him apprised of developments. Everything was running according to plan.
As Pia lay in bed in the still of the morning, she had heard the doors of two or three cars close and the sound of tires on gravel as they had driven away. She had assumed this was Berman and Whitney Jones leaving with the Chinese man she had met last night. Who was that man? Pia wondered. In the last few days she had looked forward to her walks around the garden, and she doubted she was going to be allowed out in Berman’s absence. These recent days had been more bearable, with the food, the bathroom. Even the ridiculous dinner the night before had, in reality, been a welcome diversion from her general boredom.
Just as she had that thought, the door opened and the Chinese doctor entered the room, followed by a guard; a different man, for once. The doctor walked straight over to Pia and grabbed her good arm.
“Hey, what’s this?” she demanded, trying to pull away.
The doctor was avoiding her gaze, and Pia knew that was a bad sign.
“What are you doing to me?” she demanded, as the guard put his hands on her shoulders and forced her back supine on the bed.
In the next instant, she felt a stab in her arm, followed by a stinging sensation, and then a kind of spinning blackness settle over her like the slow-motion closing of an old-fashioned camera’s shutter.
Burim’s borrowed cell phone rang once, and before it could sound again, he answered the call.
“Yes?”
“It’s Harry. We heard something, from a reliable contact. She’s in the Pipeline.”
“The pipeline? What’s that, for God’s sake? Where is she?”
“We don’t know where she is. Listen carefully! Remember these peoples’ names, and go to a library and look them up on a computer. You’ll find out what the Pipeline is.”
Harry mentioned two Albanian names to Burim. Burim wrote them down.
“Do you have everything we gave you?”
Harry had given Burim the cell phone he was talking on, and a SIG Sauer automatic pistol with a spare ammunition clip, which Burim had stuffed in a small backpack at the house in Tottenham. He carried it over his shoulder
“Yes, I have everything.”
“Okay. Be ready. We may not hear anything more for hours. But you will have to respond quickly if there is any chance of success so stay alert.”
Burim looked at his watch. It was two o’clock. He was at King’s Cross railway station, a busy terminus, and within a couple of minutes he was on his way to the St. Pancras Library nearby.
Zachary Berman was bemused to learn that the evening’s athletics events did not begin until seven P.M. at the Olympic Stadium. Why had they left so early? Why did they have to sit around in this corporate suite hobnobbing with Chinese officials? In contrast Whitney Jones was seemingly having a fine time, or so Berman gathered from looking over at her.
Whitney was enjoying herself. This was the first time she had been able to relax since they’d come to England almost two weeks before. Even though the future of Nano was being decided at these championships, something she knew about intimately, there were still humdrum details to deal with. There were numerous experiments running in Boulder, as well as the day-to-day operation of the facilities. Staff had to be managed, along with all the other mundane tasks, and her boss had shown little interest in any of them, since he had Pia to worry about. So everything had all fallen on Whitney’s capable shoulders.