wrap them in its cool embrace.
As they were about to get into the car, he said, “Annika, about you and Xhafa.”
“Later, my love. I’ll tell you everything.”
BALTASAR CLOSED his phone and went back to his surveillance of the Dementieva woman.
“Everything all right?” he said to Asu.
“They went into the line of pines.” Asu, the driver, put his field glasses down and pointed.
They were in an armored vehicle similar to the one that had brought Arian Xhafa and the Syrian from the air base to the compound. It was still light enough to see the stand of trees. The pines looked delicate in the gathering twilight, like a Japanese watercolor.
“What are our orders?” Yassin said from behind them.
“The woman is to be taken to the safehouse in the western district of Vlore. The other three are to be killed.”
Baltasar could feel Yassin’s excitement coming off him in waves.
“Now,” he said. “As soon as we determine—”
At that moment, the huge car slid out from behind the trees and headed off to the east.
“Go,” Baltasar said. “Go!”
Asu started up the vehicle and put it into gear. The advantages of the vehicle were many, including its inch- and-a-half-thick armor plate and its two .30 caliber machine guns, mounted fore and aft, its maneuverability over any sort of terrain, and its storehouse of other weaponry, including tear-gas grenades, a handheld rocket launcher, and a flamethrower. On the other hand, it was noisy, relatively slow, and not as maneuverable as a car on normal surfaces. Even so, Baltasar favored it over the other forms of ground transport at the Syrian’s disposal.
The large car ahead had its head- and taillights on, but Baltasar instructed Asu to keep theirs off. They were phenomenally lucky that the 737 had landed at sunset. Now, in the twilight’s uncertain illumination, they could follow without fear of being detected.
The car bumped down country lanes into larger streets and then took the ramp onto the ring road that circumnavigated Vlore. There was no telling where it was headed, and Baltasar was anxious not to lose sight of it.
Yassin leaned forward, body as tense as a drawn bow. “We should drive them off the road,” he said.
“Wait,” Baltasar said without turning around.
“And then, as they come out of the car, use the flamethrower to incinerate them one by one.”
Now Baltasar turned to him. “And what do you think the others will do while the first one is roasting, sit on their thumbs and wait to be set afire?”
Yassin grinned. “There’s always the thirty caliber.
“All good things come to those who wait, Yassin.” He handed Yassin the specially reconfigured U.S. Army M24 SWS sniper rifle. “Check the magazine and get ready.”
FOR THE first forty-five minutes after the 737 took off from Vlore, Dennis Paull reviewed what he himself knew about the multiple murders in D.C., beginning with the torture-killing of Billy Warren. He married that with the new information Jack had given him, including the damning evidence against Peter McKinsey from testimony from both Naomi and Chief Detective Heroe. The news that Naomi had been murdered by her partner had shaken him to the core. The very idea of such a thing was so alien he’d had to spend several minutes trying to get his mind around it. He’d been in the intelligence services long enough to have experienced or heard about various kinds of betrayals. All were heinous by their very nature, but this was in a category by itself. If there were, indeed, levels of hell, he hoped to God that McKinsey was inhabiting the lowest.
He took out a pad and pen and began jotting down notes. He also tried to make a perp tree, as they called it at Metro, of all the principals involved in the multiple-murder case. After some long and hard contemplation, plus some overseas calls, he had to admit that Jack’s instinct was right. Middle Bay Bancorp was the nexus point for everything. Henry Holt Carson’s bank, InterPublic, was in the process of buying Middle Bay—its books were even now being vetted by a team of forensic accountants led by John Pawnhill. If Jack was correct, Pawnhill was Mbreti, the American kingpin of Arian Xhafa’s sex trade empire. He thought a moment, then jotted down the name “Dardan Xhafa” with a question mark after it. If Pawnhill was the kingpin, what had Arian’s brother been? Or had he been there to keep an eye on Mbreti? Blood was thicker than water to these people, he knew.
But how did Middle Bay figure into the equation and what was Carson’s involvement? Alli’s discovery of the take-out menu from First Won Ton, the restaurant below which Xhafa’s slave market auctioned off its cherries, as they were called in slang, meant that her uncle was somehow involved in all this. But how? And, most baffling and frightening of all, why had President Crawford himself fast-tracked the buyout through the federal regulatory process?
Thinking of Alli put him in a depressed mood. He rose and went into the toilet to splash water on his face. He’d acted abysmally toward her all during the mission. He’d made himself believe that it was because her presence on a clandestine wet-work mission was highly inappropriate. He’d made himself believe that he was pissed that a tiny slip of a girl could best him in hand-to-hand combat. And those reasons might have been legit until he’d seen her in action. Both her courage and her prowess under extreme conditions were exemplary. He’d actually been proud of her, but he’d quickly tamped down on the feeling, preferring instead to keep needling her.
Now, staring at himself in the mirror, he was forced to admit his intense jealousy. The close relationship Jack had with her was what he’d always dreamed he’d have with his own daughter. Instead, he had driven her away and the fact that she’d returned, his grandson in tow, only underscored what he hadn’t had with her.
The truth was, Paull didn’t like what he saw in the mirror. He had come to a point in his life when, inevitably, he had begun to look back and rue his mistakes, failings, and failures. It was a bitter time for him, made all the worse by his inability to readapt to field work. The only saving grace was that he’d yanked himself out of the field before Jack could suggest it.
Back in his seat, he lost himself in work and, an hour later, he had the skeleton of a plan he thought would work. He called Chief of Police Alan Fraine, and together they went over iterations of the plan until both of them were satisfied that, though far from perfect, it had the best chance of success. Both of them knew that they were up against powerful enemies bent on keeping the reasons for the murders secret. The murder of Naomi Wilde and subsequent arrest of Chief Heroe was proof of their enemies’ utter ruthlessness.
When at last all his work was, for the moment, done, Paull closed his eyes and slept for an hour. When he awoke, he was ravenously hungry. He rose and went directly to the galley to fix himself a sandwich. On the way, he took the time to confirm that the children were okay.
That was when he realized that Edon Kraja was missing.
EDON HAD chosen her moment carefully. She had slipped out of the 737 while Paull was deep in conversation with Jack, while Alli was talking with Thate. With everyone engaged in their own private dramas, she had grabbed her opportunity to slither away, unnoticed.
Turning her back on the plane, she had jogged through the woods. She knew precisely where she was, knew intimately the cluster of small houses a half mile away. From the backyard of one of them she stole a bicycle, and, bending low over the handlebars, began her journey into Vlore, to search for her sister Liridona.
Her first stop would be her parents’ house. She had no way of knowing whether Liridona was still at home or whether she had also been sold to feed their father’s insatiable gambling lust. Cycling as fast as she could, she prayed to Jesus and the Madonna that her sister was still free, that she’d be able to extricate her from home and take her far away from both their father and Arian Xhafa’s people.
The thought of what had happened to her happening to Liridona was a goad that drove her to pedal faster and faster. Xhafa was a brilliant organizer, she had learned. But he was also a ruthless killer and, even worse in her experience, a world-class sadist. For him, pain and suffering were the aphrodisiacs he needed to satisfy his sexual needs; without them, he was impotent.
From the moment he’d become aware of her, he’d taken an unhealthy interest in her. Weeding her out of the latest bowl of cherries, he had begun her “training,” as he called it. She called it torture. It wasn’t on the order of what the other cherries who’d come in with her suffered through—the gang rapes, the beatings, starvings, and then
