Clark rolled up on his side, resting his elbow on the ground as he peered through the dusty darkness at the lump of blankets. He swallowed again, working very hard to smooth the gravel in his voice. Many years of being John Clark had given his personality more jagged edges than he liked to admit.
“Of course,” he said.
“Am I…” Now she sat up, looking back at him. “Am I your prisoner?”
“Oh, no, no,” Clark said. “Not at all. I am going to get you to safety.”
“That is what you told me at my aunt’s house,” the girl said, breathless, like she might get up and run at any moment. “But one can never be sure with men. They give you cake and tell you lies.”
“That is true about many men,” Clark said. “But not me. I am running, too.” He gave a soft chuckle, hoping it would help to calm her. “And I have no cake.”
“And no lies?” Stone sober now.
“No lies,” Clark said. “We’re in this together.”
She sighed and lay back down. “The Bingtuan have eyes everywhere. How will we get away?”
“Truthfully,” Clark said, “I’m not sure. But we’ll meet my friend tomorrow. We can decide what to do then. You should get some rest if you can.”
“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.
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.
