In the Company of Killers

by Bryan Christy

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  Publishers since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2021 by Whitewater Falls LLC

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Ebook ISBN 9780593187937

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: David Litman

  Cover images: (city skyline) Wenjie Dong / Getty Images; (Capitol Building) Dominic Labbe / Moment / Getty Images; (giraffes) Verónica Paradinas Duro / Moment / Getty Images; (trees) DanM / Moment / Getty Images; (bird) Thomas Winz / The Image Bank / Getty Images

  pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  For my wife, Jennifer

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Fallen Guardian

  Homecoming

  Assignment

  On the Hunt

  A Surprise Encounter

  The Public Has an Interest

  The Crevice

  Change, Move, or Die

  One Beautiful Battlefield

  Candy for a Whale Shark

  On Ice

  The Confession Club

  Two-Man Team

  Reunion

  Blooding a Krieger

  The Purge

  Fluke

  You Were the Gun

  The Unraveling

  What Have You Done?

  There’s Always a Who

  The New Orange

  Unarmed in the Company of Killers

  A Different Set of Teeth

  Marching Orders

  Mischief Reef

  The Undertaker’s Son

  Here Lies Tom Klay

  A Death in Camelot

  We Bury Them One at a Time

  Home

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion.

  —John Stuart Mill

  Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  FALLEN GUARDIAN

  Samburu County, Kenya

  Captain Bernard Lolosoli looked down at the American journalist. “You were right.”

  Tom Klay, sitting with his back against the tire of a Land Rover, looked up from his notebook. Klay wore a faded safari shirt, brown field pants, and hiking boots. A droplet of sweat rolled off his chin and struck the page at the exact spot where he’d just finished a line, destroying the word and his thought along with it. “It happens,” he replied.

  “Are you ready?” Bernard asked.

  Klay closed his notebook and dropped it into his shirt pocket. “All packed.”

  “Good.” The ranger extended his hand. Klay took it and got to his feet. “Three men entered our east gate two days ago. We located their vehicle this morning. Their plates are stolen, and there is no exit record. Their passports were fakes.”

  “Passports,” Klay said. “Not locals then.”

  “Ugandans. On holiday, they said.”

  Klay caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. A small male dog emerged from behind the Green Guardians’ field station, carrying a feathered chicken wing in its mouth. The dog was scarred head to tail, with that compact build common to developing-world canines. “You get many of those?” he asked.

  Bernard followed Klay’s gaze. “Dogs? Or chickens?”

  “Ugandans.”

  “We do. It was rail workers. Now it’s tourists.” Bernard smiled. “Thanks to your article, everyone wants to see our famous elephant.”

  Klay watched the dog. Every few steps it glanced over its shoulder toward the guardhouse, checking to see if anything was following it. The dog set the chicken wing down in the dirt. It looked back again, expectant. There wasn’t much to see. The concrete field station and next to it the Guardians’ makeshift field armory, a steel shipping container under a thatched roof. Between the two structures, the dirt was stained black with motor oil.

  The little dog yipped, and Klay heard agitated scrabbling on hard ground as a large dog emerged at speed from behind the building and rocketed toward the mutt. The bigger dog was a Belgian Malinois, a shepherd breed with relentless drive, making it a favorite among law enforcement. As the Malinois bore down, the smaller dog snatched up its chicken wing and sprinted across the clearing. It hopped onto an overturned bucket and into the crotch of a large acacia tree.

  The Malinois didn’t need the bucket. It leapt straight into the tree and chased the smaller dog up a thick branch into the tree’s umbrella. The little dog barked as it climbed. Suddenly a third dog—a female as small and scarred as the first, but heavy from nursing—emerged from behind the field station, carrying a whole chicken, minus a wing. The female crossed the open space, dragging the dead bird between her forelegs, and disappeared into the bush. A moment later her mate leapt from the acacia tree onto the field station roof. The Malinois tried to follow, but it was too heavy and crashed to the ground instead. The big dog was about to climb the tree again when Bernard whistled. The dog froze. “Pfui!” Bernard said, and pointed. “Platz.” The Malinois slunk obediently to the outpost’s front door and lay down.

  Klay looked up at the dog on the roof. The skinny male lay with its back legs spread on either side of the roof peak, looking down at Klay, chewing its wing.

  “What do you think?” Klay asked. “You think it’s lost tourists—or something else?”

  Bernard sighed. “We paid one hundred thousand dollars for that animal,” he said, looking at the shepherd. “Our donors insisted we have military dogs. I flew to Berlin to buy him. I had to learn German to speak to him. He has a better education than most of my family, and he still falls for that old dog-and-chicken routine.” Bernard nodded at two vehicles speeding in their direction. “It doesn’t bloody matter what I think, Tom.”

  Klay squinted. Two black SUVs were racing toward them from the south, kicking up clouds of dust. “I’m going to say it again. If Botha is running this operation, you do not want a political ride-along anywhere near it.”

  “I know it and you know it. He knows to stay in the truck,” Bernard said.

  “So, why’s he coming?”

  “Someone might have told him you want his photograph for your famous magazine.”

  Klay groaned. “I should have brought a camera then.”

  “That would have been nice.”

  Two of Bernard’s rangers waited nearby. The Green Guardians were a privately funded counter-poaching force made up of Samburu warriors. Bernard’s men looked the part. In addition to their desert fatigues and tan boots, they wore their hair in long, ocher-dyed braids pulled back severely from their scalps, adorned with feathers and narrow, brightly beaded headbands. Beneath their uniforms, the men’s lean ribs were tattooed with chains of coffee-bea
n-sized scars representing bravery. Like their Maasai relatives, the Samburu were nomadic pastoralists. When not on duty, Bernard’s men—Goodson Ltumbesi and Moses Lelesar—tended their animals, lived on milk and blood drained from the necks of their cattle, and warred over livestock with neighboring tribes. With their hair tied back, their dark eyes, and their cheekbones as sharp as cracked shale, they resembled a pair of young eagles swiveling for prey, with well-oiled and well-used HK G3 battle rifles for talons.

  Bernard was a contrast. The Samburu warrior had gone to boarding school in England. He wore his hair short, sported a closely trimmed goatee, and carried a baby’s arm of fat around his middle. When Klay had first met him, years ago, Bernard was working as a fixer, taking journalists to difficult locations throughout East Africa. He emerged shirtless from his hut wearing an orange-and-black-checked shuka over one shoulder, multicolored bead necklaces that wrapped his neck from chin to chest, tire-rubber sandals, and a gold belt adorned with tiny dime-shaped metal circles dangling on gold chains. A thin chain stretched from one ear, under his lower lip, and over the other ear. He jingled when he walked, like a child’s toy.

  “You always dress up like this?” Klay had asked.

  “Like what?” Bernard had replied.

  Bernard took Klay up in a rented Cessna 172 to look for elephants. It was the first time Klay saw Kenya’s largest living elephant, a local tourist attraction named Voi. The super-tusker was standing among a group of five males on the west side of a low hill. All six were big elephants, but Voi was mammoth, with tusks so long they rubbed the ground. Bernard pointed him out, then banked the plane to take a second look. “Watch!” As the plane came around, the five male elephants looked up, then quickly encircled Voi. Brandishing their tusks, they shook their heads violently, while Voi turned his back to the plane and lowered his head.

  Klay was astonished. “Like they know,” he said. Bernard tapped the earcup of his headset to indicate he couldn’t hear. Klay bent the mic closer to his lips and shouted again. “Like they know,” he repeated, “it’s because of his tusks . . .”

  “Of course they know!” Bernard had replied. “We say, ‘An elephant is born carrying two gravestones: One for himself. One for his species.’” Klay had included the line in his article. “The Last Great Tusker,” he’d called it.

  Klay’s cover story had come at a cost. The big elephant was now world famous. Voi’s enormous tusks, revered by Kenyans, were now priceless to Asian ivory collectors. To protect him from poachers, Kenya’s president had declared the animal a national treasure, and had deputized the Green Guardians to protect him.

  Only a few criminals had the connections and the wherewithal to kill the well-protected Voi and smuggle his tusks to China whole. Klay’s information was that Ras Botha, a man known all too well to Klay, was about to try.

  Klay watched the politician’s vehicles approach. “Long haul from Nairobi.”

  “We flew him in,” Bernard said. “Same as you. He’s trouble for us, Tom. Ras Botha may be our immediate threat, but if we’re not careful, Simon Lekorere will become our long-term problem. The Chinese completed the Uganda rail line since you were last here. They have built another line from Addis to their military base in Djibouti.”

  “The Ultimate Silk Road Project,” Klay said. “I know.”

  “Do you know they want to connect them?”

  Klay whistled. He imagined a gigantic Roman numeral I burned into the side of East Africa. The Kenya-to-Uganda rail line would be the numeral’s base; Addis, Ethiopia, to the port of Djibouti would be its cap. China had built the southern line for economic reasons. The northern line was strategic: Djibouti was a gatekeeper to the Suez Canal.

  Klay looked up at the small dog still crunching its chicken wing. “Oil,” he said.

  Bernard nodded in the direction of the politician’s incoming vehicle. “He extorts payment from us to keep his voters from poaching our elephants. That’s nothing new. Our donors pay him off. But he will get more money than we can afford by selling our land to the Chinese. Connect those two rail lines and everything we have here will vanish.”

  Klay looked out over Kenya’s idyllic landscape. Bernard was right. Whatever China’s ultimate plan, if a third rail line was built through here, everything he was seeing would be lost. “No protests?”

  Bernard laughed. “The Chinese hired Perseus Group.”

  Klay cocked his head toward the other American in their group, a lanky blond software engineer wearing a pale blue Perseus Group polo shirt. The engineer leaned against the Guardians’ outpost, rapidly typing something into his iPhone. “I thought you hired Perseus Group?”

  Before Bernard could respond, the two SUVs braked to a hard stop, covering Klay and Bernard in their dust. Klay ran his tongue over his teeth and spat. Two bulky Kenyans wearing sunglasses and business suits emerged from the lead vehicle. They hurried across the clearing, inspected the Guardians’ Land Rover, gave a nod, and a third bodyguard opened the main car’s back door. Inside sat Simon Lekorere talking on a mobile phone. The heavyset politician wore a dark brown cowboy hat, gold-framed Gucci sunglasses, and an orange kitenge shirt.

  “Jesus,” Klay muttered.

  “He’s Samburu,” Bernard said.

  The politician sipped a bottle of beer.

  “Deep down,” Bernard added.

  Bernard whistled, and his rangers swung themselves into the open Land Rover. The Perseus Group engineer did not move.

  “Let’s go,” Klay yelled to him.

  The engineer glanced momentarily in Klay’s direction, then returned to his phone. He spent a few more moments typing before finally crossing the clearing to join them.

  “I sent my report to Tysons Corner,” he said to Bernard.

  “That’s your prerogative, Greg,” Bernard replied.

  “Our contract is very clear with respect to all anti-poaching operations.”

  “So you said. We’ll be leaving in a moment. You’ll have the second row to yourself.”

  The engineer climbed into the truck.

  “Welcome to Kenya, Mr. Sovereign,” Simon Lekorere boomed, extending his hand. The politician’s hand was small in Klay’s, but surprisingly calloused. The portly man laughed, as if he knew what Klay was thinking.

  “Come,” he said, climbing into the Rover’s passenger seat. “Let us see if we can save some of our elephants today.”

  A bodyguard placed a small cooler between Lekorere’s feet. Bernard walked Klay to the back of the vehicle.

  “What’s your play to hold him?” Klay asked quietly.

  “Pride,” Bernard said.

  “Pride?”

  “Samburu understand the importance of land. We have to remind him that he is Samburu first and a greedy politician second. He’s wily. He’s been playing the Chinese for us, getting us a new school and a clinic.” Bernard reached into the back of the vehicle and withdrew a rifle. “Take this.”

  “No, thanks,” Klay said.

  “You said it yourself,” Bernard said. “If this is a Botha operation, we should be ready.” He nodded toward the politician. “Let’s give him the idea we’ve got something worth protecting, shall we?”

  Klay accepted the rifle, a battle-scarred, bolt-action Mauser, no doubt confiscated from a poacher. He shouldered it. Checked the action. “Make a better club,” he said, working the ragged bolt.

  “Good.” Bernard smiled. “We are out of those.” He handed Klay a five-round stripper clip. Klay pressed the cartridges into the magazine, pushed the bolt forward, and let the clip fall to the ground.

  Bernard bent down and picked it up. “We recycle these.”

  “Sorry,” Klay said.

  Bernard tapped him on the shoulder with the piece of metal and nodded toward the politician. “We need him. So try not to shoot him.”

  “That only happened once,” Klay
said. “And it was an accident.”

  Bernard was still chuckling as he started the vehicle.

  * * *

  • • •

  Bernard drove fast, the Land Rover shuddering over a dry and broken landscape. In the truck were the three rangers, the politician, the software engineer, a monitor from the Kenya Wildlife Service, and Klay. Their route traced the Ewaso Nyiro River. The river’s seasonal ebb and flow had lately been accelerated by the earth’s rapidly changing climate, floods in dry season, droughts in wet. It was late November, time for the short rains, but none had come. They crisscrossed the river’s desiccated bed, plunging down and then up its steep banks, dodging fallen trees, spinning in deep sand, crashing through thornbush.

  Standing behind Klay, Bernard’s rangers scanned the landscape for threats, barely touching the truck’s roll bar despite the vehicle’s bucking. Klay did not ride as easily. At each jolt his thick knees punched the back of the politician’s canvas seat.

  Klay didn’t fit well into the truck’s second row. He didn’t fit well into most places. He was a large, broad-shouldered man. With his amber eyes and graying brown hair, he was still handsome enough, but etched now, salt overtaking pepper. The same applied to his personality. More than one grade school teacher had described young Tom Klay as troubled. Now, in middle age, he was a hardened brooder. He ground his molars. He spoke sparingly, in a voice so low it often sounded as if he were talking to himself. He carried himself in a way that suggested any number of past careers, not one of them journalist. If you were a boxer, you might recognize the forward roll in his shoulders and the slight tuck of his chin. If you had law enforcement experience, you might notice his tendency to stand with one hip forward, the other canted away. He was best appreciated in geologic terms, a cairn of irregular boulders stacked above a very active fault line.

  “Tuskah!” the politician shouted over his shoulder, too fat to turn. He held a bottle of beer above his head. “You like it, right?” he called to Klay. “Tuskah?”

  Klay ignored Lekorere and looked out over the savannah, two fingers balancing the Mauser’s barrel against his thigh. A male lion dozed beneath a tree in the late-afternoon sun.