Chapter 7: The Albanian Job
[Priya Shah's Flat, Brixton — March 21, 2008, 6:00 PM]
Priya had dark circles under her eyes and three monitors glowing with information that wasn't enough.
James stood behind her desk, arms crossed, scanning the data she'd assembled in thirty hours of near-continuous work. Maps of East London with highlighted zones—Albanian-controlled territory, marked in red. A list of names: Artan Dushku, Besnik Krasniqi, Florian Hoxha. Lieutenants in the Dushku clan. Company registration records for two shipping fronts—Adriatic Express Ltd and Coastal Line Logistics. Bank transfers routed through Tirana.
Solid framework. Impressive for the timeframe. But framework wasn't enough.
"I need shipment schedules," James said. "Routes. Times. Volume."
"I know." Priya pushed her glasses up. Her voice carried the particular brittleness of exhaustion meeting professional pride. "Those aren't sitting in public registries, Jim. They're operational details. You need eyes on the ground or a man inside, and I have neither."
"What about the warehouse addresses?"
"Two confirmed through vehicle registration cross-references. One probable." She pulled up a map. Three pins in East London—Barking, Plaistow, Custom House. "The Barking one matches the most shipping activity. If I had to bet, that's their main distribution hub."
James studied the map. Twelve hours left on Viktor's deadline. What he had was enough to demonstrate effort but not enough to demonstrate value. Viktor didn't want a college presentation. He wanted actionable intelligence—the kind that let him deploy men with specific addresses and specific timetables.
"I need to see the Barking site," James said.
Priya spun her chair around. "You're going to do personal surveillance on an Albanian drug warehouse with twelve hours to spare."
"Kevin and I. Quick pass. Photograph the vehicles, note the license plates, document the security. Combine it with your data and we've got a package."
"And if they spot you?"
"Then I'll have bigger problems than Viktor."
She didn't argue. She'd learned, over the past week, that arguing with this version of Jim Moriarty was an exercise in elegant futility. He listened, he considered, and then he did what he'd already decided to do.
"Take the Sony Ericsson camera," she said. "It's better than the Nokia in low light. And Jim—"
He paused at the door.
"Don't get killed over someone else's debt."
---
[Industrial Estate, Barking — March 21, 2008, 10:30 PM]
Kevin parked the Audi three streets from the target, between a shuttered MOT garage and a skip overflowing with broken pallets. The industrial estate was the kind of place that died at six o'clock—warehouses, storage units, a vehicle depot with chain-link fencing. At half-ten on a Friday night, the only signs of life came from the far end: a warehouse with its loading bay lit up, a white transit van backed against the roller door, and two men smoking near the entrance.
James adjusted the wing mirror to watch the site. Two hundred metres of empty road between the car and the warehouse. No cover except parked lorries and stacked containers.
"How long?" Kevin whispered, though nobody could hear them.
"Twenty minutes. I need plate numbers and a headcount."
"From here?"
"Closer."
Kevin's jaw worked. He wanted to protest. The muscles in his face ran through the whole objection—eyebrows up, mouth open, lips pressed shut. He'd been doing that more often: composing arguments and then swallowing them. Learning, perhaps, that protests were noted and overridden anyway.
James left the car. Moved along the row of parked lorries that lined the estate's central road, keeping their bulk between himself and the warehouse. His shoes crunched on gravel. Every step sounded like a gunshot in the silence. He took the next thirty metres on the grass verge, which was softer but uneven.
The transit van's plate was visible from behind a container stack. He photographed it with the Sony Ericsson—the shutter sound was off, but the screen flash made him flinch. Second photo. Third, wider angle, catching the warehouse number above the loading bay.
Movement inside the warehouse. A third man appeared in the loading bay, dragging a wooden crate. Short, heavy, black jacket. He spoke to the smokers in Albanian—rapid, guttural, a language James couldn't parse.
He needed the second vehicle. A dark BMW parked around the side of the building, partially obscured by a skip. Reaching it meant crossing fifteen metres of open ground between the container stack and the building's north wall.
Fifteen metres. Five seconds at a jog.
He went.
The ground between the containers and the building was rougher than it looked—broken concrete, construction debris, the remnants of some demolished outbuilding. His left foot came down on a chunk of masonry that rolled. His ankle folded sideways. Pain—sharp, immediate, the kind that sent a white flash behind his eyes. He pitched forward, caught himself on the wall, and his palm slapped brick with a sound that echoed off every flat surface in the estate.
The smoking men's conversation stopped.
James pressed himself against the wall. His ankle screamed. He could feel it swelling already, heat blooming through the joint. The BMW was five metres away. The corner of the building was ten metres behind him.
Footsteps on concrete. One of the smokers, walking toward the noise. Torch beam sweeping the ground.
James moved. Limping, using the wall for support, rounding the building's north side away from the light. The torch beam hit the spot where he'd been standing three seconds after he cleared it. He heard Albanian—a question, probably "What was that?" The second man answered. James didn't wait for the conclusion. He hobbled along the north wall, turned the corner, and found himself at the back of the building where darkness was absolute and thick.
Kevin's voice hissed from somewhere ahead. "Jim. Jim, this way."
Hands grabbed his jacket. Kevin, moving fast, half-dragging James between two parked trailers and down a service road that ran behind the industrial units. James's ankle buckled with every other step. His teeth locked together. He breathed through his nose in sharp bursts, each exhale a controlled hiss.
They reached the Audi. Kevin shoved him into the passenger seat, ran around to the driver's side, and pulled away without turning on the headlights. Two blocks. Three. The headlights came on. Kevin's hands gripped the wheel hard enough to creak the leather.
"Did you get it?" Kevin asked.
James checked the Sony Ericsson. Three photos. The transit van's plate. The warehouse number. The partial angle of the BMW's rear.
"Enough," he said. His ankle throbbed in time with his heartbeat, a dull bass note of pain beneath everything else. "Drive to Priya's."
---
[Priya Shah's Flat, Brixton — March 22, 2008, 1:00 AM]
Priya ran the plates in fourteen minutes. The transit van was registered to a company called Tirana Holdings—not on any public watchlist, but linked through two shell companies to an address in Plaistow that matched one of her other pins. The BMW belonged to Artan Dushku himself.
"That confirms Barking as the hub," Priya said. She was cross-referencing shipping records against the photos, building a timeline. "And if Dushku's car is there at ten-thirty on a Friday, they're receiving or distributing. Either way, it's operational."
James sat on her sofa with a bag of frozen peas wrapped around his ankle. The joint had swollen to the size of a tennis ball. The pain had settled into a constant, grinding ache, manageable only because he refused to acknowledge any alternative.
He thought about the first night in this body—the burner phone buzzing on the dresser, the passport with the wrong face, the kettle boiling in a stranger's kitchen. Six days ago. Six days and he'd graduated from identity crisis to Russian mob deadlines.
"The package," he said. "Assemble everything. Names, photos, vehicle registrations, confirmed addresses, shipping company fronts. Format it clean—headings, dates, sources where we can cite them without exposing methodology."
Priya typed. James dictated. Kevin, who'd driven back to Southwark to collect the laptop, returned with it and a kebab James hadn't asked for but consumed entirely while reviewing the final document.
By 4 AM, the package was complete. Twelve pages. Tight. Professional. Not everything Viktor wanted, but enough to demonstrate capability and buy future goodwill.
At 6 AM, James called Tommy. "Set the meeting. Same warehouse. This afternoon."
---
[Docklands Warehouse — March 22, 2008, 3:00 PM]
Viktor Kozlov sat in the same folding chair, reading the same Russian paperback. His flanking men stood in the same positions. The warehouse smelled the same—oil, cold concrete, the Thames.
James limped in. He didn't try to hide it. Hiding weakness from a man trained by the FSB was a waste of energy that could be better spent elsewhere. He placed the document folder on a metal table that hadn't been there last time—Viktor had brought it specifically for this exchange.
Viktor set down his book. Opened the folder. Read.
The warehouse was silent except for the occasional clang from the docks outside and the rhythmic tap of Viktor's index finger against the table as he turned pages. James stood. His ankle pulsed. He breathed.
Five minutes.
Viktor closed the folder.
"The Barking warehouse," he said. "You confirmed this personally?"
"Last night."
Viktor's gaze dropped to James's ankle. Back up. Something moved across his face—not amusement, not respect, something adjacent to both.
"This is acceptable." He placed his palm flat on the folder. "The debt is settled."
James's chest loosened by a degree he hadn't known it was tight. "Good."
"Perhaps we do business again, Moriarty. When you have more to sell."
"I will."
Viktor didn't offer vodka this time. The meeting was over. Professional. Clean. The transaction complete, the ledger balanced.
---
[Moriarty's Flat, Southwark — March 22, 2008, 6:00 PM]
Priya brought tea. The good kind—loose leaf, something she'd brought from home, steeped properly in a pot rather than dunked in a mug. James sat on the sofa with his ankle elevated on a stack of pillows, the frozen peas replaced by an actual ice pack Kevin had sourced from a chemist.
"We did it," Priya said. She sat cross-legged on the floor, cradling her own mug. Her voice carried the particular flatness of someone who'd been awake for forty hours and was running on fumes and stubbornness.
"Barely," James said.
"Barely still counts."
He drank his tea. It was perfect—hot, strong, the tannins cutting through the fog of exhaustion. Outside, London's evening traffic hummed through the walls, that constant electric murmur he was beginning to recognise as the sound of home.
His ankle would need a week. His pride would need longer. He'd been clumsy, amateurish, nearly blown the entire operation because he'd stepped on a piece of broken masonry like a tourist stumbling through a construction site.
But Viktor's debt was cleared. The Bratva cell was a potential ally instead of a creditor with violent collection methods. And the Albanian intelligence files—Priya had copied everything before handing over the package—were retained for future use. Leverage. Currency. The building blocks of a network that didn't exist yet but was beginning to take shape in his mind.
Priya finished her tea. Set down the mug. "What's next?"
James pulled the notebook from his jacket—the same notebook he'd asked Kevin to bring that first morning, now half-filled with plans and diagrams and questions that multiplied faster than answers. He opened it to a fresh page.
"Something new," he said. "Something that doesn't depend on chasing other people's problems. We need our own model."
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