Buda ended the call and summoned Prek Vllasi and Genti Hajdini to his office in a trailer parked inside a low-ceilinged warehouse. Buda dressed his senior lieutenants down severely in Albanian.

“You were useless last night. She wasn’t put off at all. Didn’t you do anything to her?”

“You see,” Genti said to Prek, “we should have done her when we had the chance. Like I said last night, knocking her around wasn’t going to be enough.” He turned to Buda. “She’s a tough bitch.”

“I can see that,” Buda said. Genti had been nursing a black eye all day. “Now this whole thing is about to go down the drain because of her. She knows what happened, God knows how. You gotta get back over there right now and take out her boyfriend and grab her off the street.”

“Boyfriend?” Prek said. “What boyfriend? You mean the kid she was hanging around with last night? Unless he’s with her when we grab her, I don’t know if we’d recognize him.”

“He’s the guy with his tongue in her ear!” Buda snapped. He was steaming, but he quickly realized Prek was right to be cautious. Killing the wrong man would be counterproductive.

“I’ll get a picture of him from the medical school database and send it to your phones. His name is . . . George Wilson,” he said, referring to a note.

“And remember, pick up the Grazdani woman,” Buda said. “And don’t touch her, you animal, unless she’s not related to anyone important, in which case she’s all yours. Understand, Genti? Word is she was in Rothman’s lab just a few minutes ago, poking around. Take her to the summer house and call me when you get there. And take Neri Krasnigi with you. It seems like the two of you can’t handle her.”

Krasnigi was relatively new to the crew, younger, inexperienced, and more vicious than either Genti or Prek. The two men were affronted by the order but didn’t show it.

As the men exited the trailer, Buda shouted after them, “Use the white van for the pickup and then dump it. Take the blue one to the house.”

Prek gave a thumbs-up sign and walked away.

Prek and Genti found Neri Krasnigi sitting in a battered old armchair at the back of the warehouse reading a German Playboy. Prek told him to follow, and the three men got into the white van. The plates were obscured with what appeared to be dried mud but which was actually cleverly painted plaster.