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.
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.