A light came on in one of the apartments above. Someone shouted in Albanian — muffled, distorted. In her stupor, Murphy couldn’t make it out.
“It’s okay!” the man in the hat yelled in English. “My friend has had too much rakia!”
A dark panel van screeched down the alley and they shoved her inside facedown on the metal floor, leaving poor Joey where he lay.
Her face pressed against the cold floor, she tasted blood, smelled puke and urine. So dizzy… Her lungs were heavy.
This was where they’d killed Joey…
She came to slowly at first, willing her eyes to open, then jerking, jolted by the cold chill of the van’s metal floor against her bare skin. She was naked, hog-tied, hands and ankles zip-tied behind and then tied together. Arched backward by the bonds, it put excruciating pressure on her injured knee and shattered wrist.
Whatever they’d given her, Murphy metabolized it quickly. Probably a ketamine dart — straight into her muscle. That would explain why she hadn’t dropped immediately. Her memory of the attack was fraught with gaping holes. She remembered the spiders, though. She’d never forget those. Yeah, it was ketamine, all right.
The van was moving, bouncing over a rough road. That told her nothing. Many of the streets around Tirana were in a constant state of repair. The men spoke among themselves in hushed Mandarin, ignoring her for the time being.
Murphy shut her eyes, struggling not to let her breathing get away from her. She needed to calm her thoughts, no easy task naked and bound in the back of a van with three dudes.
Pain and the drugs had turned her brain to mush. Her thoughts were fuzzy, unhinged and without defined edges. Nothing made sense. Everything hurt.
Was this random? Did they plan to take her somewhere and rape her? Panic bore down, crushing her chest.
They wanted her awake. That meant they wanted to question her. She blinked, trying to remember.
The man in the gray hat sat on an overturned bucket behind the driver. He reached down to pat her cheek, gently at first. Hard enough to rattle her teeth when she clenched her eyes.
He’d cocked his felt hat back, revealing a high forehead and passive eyes, accustomed to hiding their cruelty. “We are going for a drive in the countryside.” He smiled benignly. “How long we drive is up to you.”
She licked her lips, then craned her neck to get a better look at him, trying to speak. He raised a hand to shush her. “I do not want to kill you,” he said. “But it is important that you know I will.”
“Just get to—”
The man in the hat nodded to his companions. The short one, Pukwudgie, flipped her on her side, and then pressed his boot to her injured knee, bearing down hard, slowly, like grinding out a cigarette.
She screamed and kept screaming until the one in the hat kicked her in the face.
He took a folding knife from his pocket. It was small, with a turned-down Wharncliffe blade. The needle-sharp point and scalpel edge allowed him to perform extremely intricate work. “Listen to me carefully. I will now ask you a few questions about your conversation with Urkesh Beg, the Uyghur man you spoke with today. If you lie, I will make a small cut, somewhere on your body. I have not decided where yet. If you refuse to talk, I will do the same.” He gave a long, sad sigh and then leaned back on the bucket, crossing his knees, bouncing the butt of the knife against his thigh, almost as an afterthought. “In my experience, the process works better if it is done slowly, so you have more time to consider your answers between each incision. Unfortunately, I do not have much time. How did you learn of Urkesh Beg?”
Murphy began to sob. “I… I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The man’s hand flashed, like a viper, his blade neatly bisecting the brow over her left eye. It stung, but the pain wasn’t as horrible as she’d anticipated. Blood poured from the wound, burning her eye, a constant reminder that she’d been cut.
He prodded her with the toe of his boot. “I have many questions and little time.” He waved the blade over the top of her body. “It is a shame to ruin such beautiful skin.”
Head lolling, cheek against the cold steel of the floor, Leigh Murphy clenched her eyes shut. Tears pressed from her lashes, mingling with the blood.
Pukwudgie readied another syringe.
Leigh Murphy began to tremble, her entire body wracked with sobs.
“I may have a location,” Fu Bohai said when he telephoned Admiral Zheng four hours later.
