Cameron, Marc - Tom Clancy's Shadow of the Dragon

“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 particular 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.