In the Company of Killers

by Bryan Christy

  A young woman in the middle of the room raised her hand.

  “The new hottie,” Fox whispered to Klay. “Tanya Something. Grantee. Works on sharks.”

  The shark expert asked why, based on his history, they should trust Krieger to continue The Sovereign’s mission—“Not just your history in Iraq as Raptor Systems,” she said, “but your more recent history, as Perseus Group Media, buying up newspaper and television stations and either closing them down or turning them into platforms for racist, misogynistic demagogues . . .”

  “Ouch.” Fox snapped at the air with his teeth. “Girl bites shark.” He shook his head gloomily. “I loved her, Tom. I really did.”

  “You don’t have to trust me,” Krieger responded. “Trust your own eyes. Trust the communities we’ve already supported. A year from now I’ll be back here on this stage and we can look at our results together.”

  Porfle got to his feet. “Terry, you stated in your presentation that your company is empowering the natural world to protect itself. Beyond teaching drones to flap like hummingbirds, could you provide us further examples?”

  “Certainly, Alex. You’ve just witnessed our drones’ flocking response to crowd movement using transition algorithms inspired by starling murmuration. Does anyone know what proctodeal trophallaxis is?”

  “EAT SHIT!” someone yelled out.

  Sharon scowled.

  “Exactly right,” Krieger said. “Termites exchange food and information anus to mouth, enabling them to move forward relentlessly without asking their queen for directions, inspiring our people to develop an information-exchange algorithm that enables our surveillance devices to respond autonomously while staying on mission. Our drones communicate using these markers, digital pheromones, if you like, and work as a unit.

  “These are just a couple of the nature-based technologies that together offer us a force multiplier and enable us to follow poachers to their homes, study them, and take them down as a network.”

  The screen behind Krieger filled with a final image of armed Perseus Group rangers frisking a row of shirtless black African men, the prisoners’ chests pressed against a concrete block wall, their hands zip-cuffed behind their backs. One of the prisoners had his face turned to the camera.

  Klay raised his hand.

  “That’s all we have time for,” Sharon said. “Let’s give Terry a warm round of applause. I’m sure we can agree we have much to do and many fresh stories to tell as a result of this fabulous new relationship. Thank you!”

  Krieger’s hologram dissolved into the stage.

  “Well, he seems committed,” Fox said. He turned to Klay. “What were you going to ask?”

  Klay turned and made his way up the aisle into the lobby.

  “Tom?” Fox repeated.

  The auditorium emptied around them.

  “Tom Klay,” a voice said.

  Klay turned and Raynor McPhee emerged from the crowd.

  “Raynor,” Klay said.

  The two men shook hands.

  “Sorry about Kenya,” McPhee said. “You doing okay?”

  “Thanks,” Klay said.

  Fox put out his hand. “Mitchell Fox. I respect your work very much, Raynor.”

  McPhee shook Fox’s hand without noticing him. His attention was with Klay. “You know why he’s doing this wildlife shit, right?”

  Klay didn’t answer.

  “Are you leaving the Times?” Fox asked.

  “You think you’re not part of a strategy?” The crowd jostled McPhee, and he had to work to stay in front of Klay. “This glimpse today,” McPhee continued. “You know what he’s doing with these drones. They’re already in western China. The technology they’re using to imprison Uighurs is coming here next. You see that, right?”

  “I see it,” Klay said. “I don’t see what to do about it.”

  Porfle appeared at McPhee’s side and clapped the Times reporter on the shoulder. “Ah. Good. You know Tom already. Excellent.”

  For an uncomfortable moment no one spoke.

  “Well. Raynor,” Porfle said, leading McPhee toward the elevators, “shall we continue our conversation upstairs in my office?”

  McPhee left with Porfle, but after a few steps the Times reporter shrugged off Porfle’s hand and returned to Klay. He pointed toward the auditorium and said, “Our job is to recognize when history is about to repeat itself and sound the alarm. It’s not enough just to expose bad actors among us. We have to force the public to respond. You know what he is.”

  Klay was only half listening. He was thinking about the final image of Krieger’s presentation, the accused poacher looking toward the camera. The man had been bleeding from the scalp, and he had lost a good deal of weight, but Klay had recognized his face and the raised coffee bean tattoos covering his torso. The man was not a poacher. He was Goodson Ltumbesi, the Green Guardian who’d saved Klay’s life.

  CANDY FOR A WHALE SHARK

  Manila, Philippines, and Cebu Strait

  The day after making his hologram presentation to The Sovereign, Terry Krieger strode into the Champagne Room at the Conquistador Hotel in downtown Manila. Dressed in an open-collar Turnbull & Asser gingham check shirt and blue blazer, Krieger appeared less formal than most of those tucking into the hotel’s famous salad niçoise. The décor of the dining room in the city’s second oldest hotel could not have been less to his taste. French provincial chairs and tufted banquettes, white-clothed tabletops, tasseled chandeliers, gold curtains. Worse, it was very likely, given how many diplomats in Manila favored the Conquistador, that someone would recognize him with his host, the man at the far corner of the room who was now rising to welcome him, wearing a white jacket with gold epaulets, his obese arms spread wide.

  “Terry!” Anthony Gatt beamed.

  Krieger halted before Gatt could embrace him and took a seat with his back to the restaurant. Fat Anthony smoothed his pale blue ascot with his hands before retaking his seat opposite Krieger at the four-person table set for two.

  Krieger looked at Gatt. Half Filipino, half Chinese, and somehow as big as two men, Fat Anthony was president and CEO of the number one in-port ship-servicing company in the South China Sea, the one to go to for everything a visiting warship or submarine might require. His company, Core F Services, operated tugboats, managed port authority and customs fees, sent divers down to demine harbors, provided food and fuel, hauled away trash and sewage, and shuttled crews into town for R&R.

  Fat Anthony was also Krieger’s fixer, a wharf rat who knew every latrine, mess, frayed line, and flag officer in the region. Every whore and every bloodied knife, as well. Port service was a competitive industry. To stay on top, Fat Anthony oversaw a network of moles throughout the world’s armed services that ensured he won the contracts he wanted. A man like that was both useful and dangerous.

  It galled Krieger to be in the same room with Gatt, but Gatt’s message had been urgent, and Krieger had too much riding on him to ignore it.

  Krieger ordered the Dover sole. Waiters brought Gatt’s meal to their table as if they were supplying an expedition. Foie gras terrine . . . black truffle soup . . . goto congee . . . rock lobster salad . . . osetra caviar . . . pan-seared duck liver with pear and sunchoke . . . A5 Kobe Wagyu . . . Krieger watched it all disappear into Gatt.

  “Mindanao City Port,” Gatt said finally, letting the words slip from his mouth syllable by syllable, while chewing the end of a lamb chop he held in his fingers. His extra-long thumbnails were manicured, coated in clear nail polish, and cut to a point. Like cockroach feet, Krieger thought, watching them flash over his food.

  “As I predicted, that one was not easy to acquire. It required many months of negotiations. Many greased palms. But it turns out Moros can be capitalists, too.” Gatt smiled and reached for his napkin. “It surprised even me when suddenly it became possible. Do you remember the
priest I told you about? The one who opposed our offers?”

  Krieger did not respond. “The problem is a priest,” Gatt had said. “A peace negotiator who is trying to expand the Muslims’ territory to include a port, the same one you have your heart set on, I’m afraid . . .

  “Well,” Gatt said, shaking out his napkin, “no matter. He decided to remove himself from our world and join our Father.”

  “So. Why am I here?” Krieger said, and waited.

  Gatt looked up from his pot de crème. “Yes, it is about the money, Terry. You have your deep-sea port now. I have provided you the other services. Now it is about the money.”

  “We have a schedule for that,” Krieger replied.

  His assistant, Mapes, had suggested this as a likely reason for Gatt’s urgent message, but Krieger had resisted accepting it. Gatt knew better. Or should have. He wasn’t just a fixer. Gatt was an investor. Krieger got to his feet. That was the problem with wharf rats: you had to either get used to them or kill them.

  * * *

  • • •

  Later that week Krieger sat in his office on board his superyacht, Raptor. He closed his laptop and looked through the ship’s sliding glass doors onto the Sulu Sea. The Philippine sky was crystal clear. A light breeze caressed the curtains. If things went as planned, he could have his meeting this morning and still join his family, who were on nearby Cebu Island, diving with whale sharks.

  To Raptor’s west was Palawan Island, and beyond that was the strategic heart of the maritime Orient: the South China Sea. Unless he was wrong, man’s next civilization-altering conflict would take place not in the deserts of the Middle East, or in the skies over North Korea, but out there on Asia’s most strategically important body of water. When the great conflict would kick off was very much up in the air. Maybe it would start tomorrow. Maybe it would not begin until after Krieger was dead. Tomorrow was too soon, and dead was too late. It was coming, and if it was coming, he wanted it to happen on his watch. History, he decided, needed scheduling.

  In some ways he had already accomplished the hardest part. He had secured China as a client. “China can build overseas, Terry. But she cannot yet put her boots or weapons there,” China’s general secretary, Ho Jianming, had confided during a visit to Krieger’s hunting property in Africa.

  “The longer your reach, Mr. President,” Krieger had replied, “the more vulnerable are your fingers.” Perseus Group was now China’s overseas security firm, the billion-dollar glove to protect China’s trillion-dollar fist.

  Both men agreed on the importance of the South China Sea to China’s future. Beneath its waters lay more oil and natural gas than was possessed by any single nation on earth, as well as important deep-sea channels for China’s ballistic missile submarines. Unfortunately for China, above those resources rumbled the second most trafficked military and commercial sea-lane in the world. Day and night, half the world’s merchant tonnage and a third of its sea traffic, including tankers, freighters, warships, and fishing vessels, traversed the sea’s waters. The South China Sea was a marginal sea, surrounded by seven other countries so that it was more of a lake, each of which claimed rights to exploit the waters. Extracting wealth from such an active sea was like hunting for a lost contact lens in Tiananmen Square.

  China was not a friendly neighbor. It claimed nearly the entire South China Sea and all that lay beneath it. To enforce its claims, China deployed its maritime forces to sail the waters, seizing most any visible rock or reef, onto which it promptly dumped tons of old concrete and debris, transforming maritime features into artificial islands it then fortified and armed. Rock by rock, reef by reef, China was adversely possessing the South China Sea. It was an approach that invited conflict.

  Krieger had competition for the waters, too. A Russian, Dmitri Yurchenko. Yurchenko’s paramilitary company was lobbying the Vietnamese to let Russian state oil giant Rosprom drill Vietnam’s oil claims, forcing China to either relinquish its claims to Vietnamese waters or take on Russia. Yurchenko was courting Malaysia with a similar deal, both arrangements bait awaiting a switch. For the right price, Krieger knew, Yurchenko would reverse his arrangements with Vietnam and Malaysia in favor of China. Once Beijing stepped in, Yurchenko’s Amur Tactical Resources would have a direct pipeline to Chinese leadership, and the most valuable military-services contract on earth. Krieger could not allow that, of course.

  The Americans had their own interests to protect. The US Navy’s Seventh Fleet was sending destroyers, fighter jets, and surveillance aircraft through waters and airspace claimed by China, reasserting claims of the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, and others while demonstrating its own freedom to navigate the South China Sea—all the while bringing the world closer to war.

  Krieger wasn’t ready for war yet. He offered China a businessman’s solution to its growing South China Sea problem.

  “Don’t seize islands,” he told Ho. “Buy the far shore.”

  Krieger presented Ho with a plan to acquire the region’s strategic ports, bury the ownership, and take control of the entire South China Sea without conflict. They started with Orviston Wharf in Darwin, Australia, a simple purchase in Australia’s forgotten north. For China, buying up foreign ports meant improved access to resources in the South China Sea without increased friction. For Krieger, it meant laying a snare around the world’s most valuable body of water.

  * * *

  • • •

  His laptop buzzed. Krieger looked down at an image of his daughter, Blaze, in a corner of his screen. She was on board a dive boat, in her bathing suit, scowling. He hit accept. “How are the whale sharks?” he asked.

  “They feed them whale shark candy on Cebu,” she said. “It makes them forget to migrate.”

  “What’s whale shark candy?” he asked.

  “Shrimp.”

  “Isn’t that what they eat?”

  “That’s not the point and you know it,” she said. “I’m not going back in the water.”

  “Stand by.” He muted their conversation and turned to his assistant.

  “Donsol,” Mapes said. “We can fly them there in about an hour.”

  He returned to Blaze. “Pack up. You’re going to Donsol. They don’t bait them there.”

  “Can you still meet us?”

  “Before dinner,” he said.

  “I’ll take that as a promise,” Blaze replied.

  He had to laugh. Fortune called him “the world’s richest security guard”—but the real boss in his family was his seventeen-year-old daughter. He closed his laptop and moved it to the corner of his desk. He checked his watch, leaned back in his chair, and interlocked his fingers.

  “Okay. Bring him in.”

  Mapes shut down her digital tablet and headed for the door. She was tall and lean, half Thai, half African-American, with a shaved head, dressed today in black pants and black jacket over a high-collared white blouse.

  “And Mapes,” he added, “have the chopper ready by noon.”

  Mapes closed the door behind her, conversation not her strong suit—but then conversation was not why he’d hired her. Sex was not the reason, either. Truth was he was afraid of what Mapes might come up with in bed. Chances were a bed would have nothing to do with it.

  Mapes returned to his office, and Krieger got to his feet.

  “Admiral,” he said, rounding his desk and putting out his hand. “Thank you for making time for me.”

  Admiral Everett Tighe, commander of the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet, wore his service dress whites. “Any friend of the Navy, Terry,” he said, surveying Krieger’s office with barely disguised contempt. It was the same with all these old salts, Krieger thought. He could practically hear the adding machine spinning inside Tighe’s head, the old man calculating Raptor’s cost, taking it all personally, as if every dollar Krieger spent over the price of a Boston Whaler were an act of treason.
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  As treason went, Raptor possessed some Benedict Arnold–level amenities. The 190-foot Abeking & Rasmussen superyacht included dual helipads, belowdecks hangar, drive-in tender bay, and a custom submersible. Her zero-speed stabilizers allowed Krieger to slip into a ripple-free lap pool at speed or deliver his signature backhand drop on the midships squash court. All of the important areas, including this office, were armored and containable. His supervillain yacht, Blaze called it.

  Tighe added, predictably, “It’s your dime.”

  “Indeed,” Krieger said. “Please.”

  The admiral glanced toward the sumptuous white leather lounge chairs in the room’s aft section. By contrast, the single wooden chair in front of Krieger’s desk had the look of a dunce seat. Krieger circled his desk and sat down behind it. He had plans for this meeting, and they did not involve the admiral’s comfort.

  “Coffee, Admiral?”

  “Does a bear shit in the woods?” Tighe replied.

  Krieger smiled. Does a bear shit in the woods?

  “My grandfather used to say that,” Krieger said.

  “That right?”

  Gerhardt Krieger used to say a lot of things: “Never burn a bridge.” “Never trust a man with a mustache.” “Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine.” “Clean your fuckin’ rifle, boy.” His grandfather had been a gem, the multimillionaire inventor of the Krieger Strip. “God gave me the idea while I sitting on the can,” he liked to say. “I guess he knew he couldn’t trust me with much, but it was a good one.” The Krieger Strip was about as simple an idea as a person could come up with, except no one ever had: aluminum trim to protect the edge of a car door. It was enough to make the Krieger family rich for generations. “Because Detroit produces a lot of cars with doors on them,” his grandfather said.