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
He was impressed that she spoke Kiswahili, but she admitted that it was written on the Tusker bottle—
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.
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.
