The girl was in motion.
Shaban received the first text at 8:45 PM, forwarded automatically from Jay Sanderling’s account. Kyle Ridley’s vehicle had been spotted in the northbound lane of Highway 35, leaving Point Clement in Millstone County.
The south-central part of the state. An hour away from Hoboken if he obeyed the speed limit. He wouldn’t. His Porsche Cayman was built to move.
He settled behind the wheel, his cell phone in his breast pocket. There would be more texts. Thanks to Mr. Sanderling, he had electronic eyes on every highway, parkway, turnpike, tollbooth, and major intersection in the state.
Sanderling worked for the Turnpike Authority in Woodbridge, in an analysis hub of the E-ZPass system. Scanners installed in tollbooths recorded the signals of transponders attached to vehicles, debiting their accounts for each toll. As a secondary system, automatic license plate readers—ALPRs—took digital photos of the vehicles as they passed through the tollbooths.
All this information was available in real time. The system threw up an alert whenever a vehicle with an expired E-ZPass account went through a toll booth.
That was all well and good, but it was only the beginning. As Shaban had learned, few people truly understood the extent of technological monitoring in this country. E-ZPass was part of the story, but the ALPRs played a much larger role. While E-ZPass was deployed only at tollbooths and a handful of other locations, the license plate readers were everywhere. They dotted highways, bridges, tunnels, and surface streets in the form of traffic enforcement cameras that snapped thousands of images per hour, converting each photo to an electronic text document and comparing it to databases of missing persons, suspected terrorists, wanted criminals, immigration violators, sex offenders, and more. Even high-risk drivers could be flagged. That was probably the list Sanderling had used when adding Kyle Ridley’s plate number to the system. And yes, she had an E-ZPass transponder on her four-door Hyundai Accent, a fact Sanderling had confirmed via text after looking up her name and address in the accounts database.
By tomorrow, the police would be tracking her also. It was standard procedure to download the latest version of the ALPR database to a patrol car’s computer before heading out. How many police cars cruised the roadways of New Jersey? What chance was there to escape their notice?
Kyle Ridley could be driving down a city street in Newark or Camden or Trenton—or anywhere—and eventually one of the ubiquitous cameras would snap her plate and run it through the system. And Sanderling’s computers would know about it. The alerts pinging Shaban’s phone included the exact geographical coordinates of each sighting, allowing him to track the girl while she was on the move.
As he pulled out of his condo building’s underground garage, the phone rang. He checked the screen. Ahmeti again. Third time today. Shaban let the call go to voicemail. He knew what it was about. Ahmeti was his immediate superior, and he wanted to know where the shipment was.
Shaban was not yet ready to share that problem with anyone in the organization. The situation was one he was fully capable of handling on his own. And he was Arian Dragusha’s grandson; Ahmeti would, as the saying went, cut him some slack.
He had been part of his grandfather’s organization for a little more than a year now. It was not quite what he had expected. At times he reflected on the wisdom of his mother in trying to keep him away from this life.
Of course, he had known there would be bloodshed. What he had not counted on was the arbitrariness of it, the pointlessness, the sheer insanity.
That night at Hajdari’s, for instance. He and a few other men had gone there for a drink. Tariq Dushku had consumed too much raki. He was loud and rude and when he started singing Himni i Flamurit in an off-key yowl, a baldheaded stranger at the bar made a comment.
“Freakin’ guy thinks he’s Pavarotti.”
That was all. Just those words. A joke. Even Shaban, whose command of English had not been so good back then, knew it was a joke.
But Tariq Dushku, stupid with drink and, well, just stupid in general, didn’t take it that way. He wheeled on the stranger. “Fuck you call me? Fuck you call me?”
The bald man forced a smile, trying to look friendly and apologetic. The tactic backfired.
“You laughing at me, you hairless fuck?”
Dushku’s gun was out, and he was firing, and the bald man wasn’t smiling anymore, because he had no face.
There was chaos then. The bartender reaching for the shotgun mounted behind the bar, and Cela and Berisha jumping him before he could use it on Dushku, and both of them beating the hell out of him, first with their fists and then with liquor bottles from the shelves, and Dushku still shooting up the place, spraying rounds as the other patrons hit the floor, bullets punching out the windows and setting off car alarms along the street, and in the midst of it, sitting shell-shocked, his drink still in his hand, was Shaban Dragusha. He was too amazed even to dive for cover. It was sheer good luck—or the protection of the blessed saints—that he wasn’t shot.
They had all cleared out before the law arrived, and somehow his grandfather had arranged matters so that the police investigation came up empty. The Wolf hadn’t even been angry. He had seemed to take it for granted that his men would get out of control once in a while. High spirits—that was how he seemed to think of it.
That wasn’t the only such incident. Shaban had been present at other episodes of spontaneous violence, and had heard of many more. There was the time Adnan Bogdani conveyed his disappointment with a shopkeeper who was late with his monthly gjoba by nailing the man’s hands to his cash register. There was the time Gjon Mehmeti and his crew thought a kid on the turnpike had flipped them off and answered the insult with a volley of small arms fire that left the kid’s vehicle a smoking wreck. There was the time Fitim Zaharia, whom everybody called Timmy, came home from a trip to find his canary dead in its cage, a victim of starvation. He swore he’d told Leka Prifti to feed the bird, and Leka swore with equal ferocity that the conversation had never taken place. The dispute was settled only when Leka threw Fitim out of a second-story window, breaking both his ankles. It was said that Leka yelled down at his moaning victim, “Timmy, you like birds so much, I thought you could fly.”
Over time, Shaban had learned why the Dragusha clan had a reputation for craziness, even among other criminal gangs. This was not entirely an undesirable state of affairs. It meant that Arian’s people were largely untouched by the intimidation tactics practiced by their rivals. No one wanted to mess with them. Even the police—the few who hadn’t been blackmailed or bribed—were unwilling to push them hard. It was understood that the Dragushas drew no line at killing a cop, or a cop’s family. They drew no lines, period.
All this troubled Shaban. It was not the life he had hoped for, a life he had naïvely imagined to be grounded in besa, honor. A violent, hot-blooded life, sure, yes, but one structured by rules and discipline. The life of a mercenary or a crusader, not of a feral animal tearing out the throats of its competitors in squabbles over scraps.
He was not alone in this. Other men—mainly young men like himself, men of the new generation—felt likewise. Occasionally the issue was raised obliquely in conversation. More often it was expressed by other means. Much could be communicated with a nod of the head or secret smile.
On that morning in the back room of the bakery, Arian had intimated that one day his grandson might sit on the throne of power. Such an idea had never occurred to Shaban before. Since that day, it had occurred to him many times.
No longer did it seem outlandish. He was in the direct line of descent, and his murdered father was a martyr and a hero to the clan. The Wolf had sired no other sons. New leadership was needed, and a new vision. Order in place of chaos; honor in place of madness. With the right man in command, it could be done.
All that lay in the future. It was by no means certain. The next few hours might make the difference. There was far more at stake than one shipment of heroin. To be taken in by his own courier, outplayed by a mere girl—it would be unforgivable. Even Arian Dragusha’s grandson might not recover from such a humiliation.
He steered the Porsche onto Route 9, aiming for the turnpike. Kyle Ridley had a head start, but he would catch up.
Soon.