“We missed the staff photo,” Klay said, getting dressed. “No big deal.”
“Look.”
Klay buckled his belt and looked again. Sharon Reif was standing on the third step, in the middle of the photograph, wearing a white safari shirt. Porfle stood below her, grinning feverishly.
“The fuck are they all wearing?”
“Safari Fridays,” Tenchant said.
“Safari what?”
Everyone in the photograph wore a safari shirt complete with epaulets and a blue chest patch. Journalists wore tan, support staff dark green, management brown. Only Reif and two people Klay didn’t recognize wore white. They looked like a troop of Cub Scouts.
“Sharon had the shirts designed by one of her old clients. They wanted your size by the way. I said extra-large. Don’t you read your email?”
“Where’s Erin?” Klay said. “And Fox?” He searched faces. “Where’s Ernst? And Charlie from Archives?”
“They’re all gone.”
“Gone?”
Tenchant read aloud an email from Fox: “‘Well, it fucking happened. For those of you not present, and for my lawyers, I’m writing this down. Last week, as you know, Sharon sent out an email notifying everybody to be available at ten a.m. Friday for a meeting with their department head. No exceptions. Here’s what happened. They lined us up and called us individually into our boss’s office, where we were either fired or handed a fucking safari shirt. Correction. They fired everyone, then those they wanted back, to work for Perseus Group Media, they gave a fucking safari shirt. It took all morning. There were lines all through the building. Then around five that afternoon Sharon called the department heads back into her office, same ones who just did the firing, and she axed them one by one. Some got rehired. Fucking Russian roulette. Bodies everywhere. I’m looking for work. Any ideas, let me know.’”
Klay was not listening. He was searching faces.
“They fired Erin?”
“I don’t know.”
“What a fucking place. Jesus.” Klay stood for a moment, rubbing his forehead with one hand. “What do you want for dinner?”
“I ate already,” Tenchant said.
“What did you have?”
“You didn’t ask about our status.”
“Our status?” Klay was confused. The possibility of being fired took a moment to register. He’d assumed, as he always had, that changes in personnel wouldn’t affect him. But Klay worked for Perseus Group now. “You’re right. What’s our status?” he asked.
Tenchant read another email. “Porfle says decisions on anyone currently in the field will be announced Friday—Fridays are designated kill days apparently. Travel is rebooking us to come home. But he says not to worry.”
“Don’t respond to any travel emails, Tenchant. We’re not available. In fact, don’t respond to anyone. We’re in the field, bad comms.”
“Okay, but Porfle said not to worry.”
“Porfle said that?” Klay said.
“Yeah. So, that’s good, right?”
“Porfle did?”
“Shit,” Tenchant said.
Klay looked at the expectant father. “Don’t worry, Tenchant. I never leave a man behind.”
FLUKE
Pretoria, South Africa
Thanks, bru,” Klay said, handing the room service waiter a tip. “Touch up the minibar, would you?”
Klay sat down on the edge of the hotel room bed. On the cart in front of him was his dinner: a roasted half chicken, French fries, three bottles of Castle Lager, a cup of rice pudding, and a salad. He hadn’t asked for the salad. He poured ketchup on his plate, switched on his laptop, and opened up his email. His screen filled with unread messages, nearly all from Porfle. They began two days ago, he noted, before the office shake-up.
The subject line of the oldest message read, “URGENT!”
He opened it.
“TK. Call me. Porf.”
Then another. “T. Need to speak ASAP! Personnel! Send time. A.P.” Klay looked at the time and date: an hour had passed since the first email.
Then, a third, just hours from the last. “URGENT!!!!!! Tom, I have tried repeatedly to reach you. Urgent personnel matter. Sharon requires response IMMEDIATELY! Pls. provide times for a conference call! Alexander Porfle.”
Klay ate a piece of chicken, dipped a French fry in the ketchup.
He opened an email from Erin. “Hi Tom. Well, they cut me. Legends had to Fall. Hahaha. Don’t worry. I’m happy to go. Grant and I may move to Denver. Thought you’d be interested in the below.”
She had included a link to a New York Times article. Klay clicked on the link and read the headline: “Times Journalist Struck in Hit-and-Run.”
He scanned the story. Raynor McPhee had been returning to his apartment around one a.m., crossing Berry Street in Brooklyn, when a car struck him from behind. No witnesses. Nothing caught on neighborhood surveillance cameras. Raynor suffered two broken legs, a concussion, and a broken wrist. Police were investigating.
Beneath the article was a box with links to three of Raynor’s most recent articles. The latest was “The World’s New OK Corral.” Klay clicked on it.
The story opened with an anecdote about the widow of a slain Mexican investigative journalist whose phones had been tapped by the Mexican government. The source for the surveillance technology was not Mexican, however. It was Perseus Group. Raynor’s story described a battle for supremacy for global strategic services taking place between Perseus Group and a Russian company called Amur Tactical Resources. The article suggested a personal rivalry between the companies’ CEOs. Klay had heard Dmitri Yurchenko’s name but knew him only as an oligarch tied to Putin. Yurchenko, Raynor wrote, was a traditional mercenary, interested in winning government and rebel group military contracts. Perseus Group was more sophisticated. “It’s not just about selling instruments of war for him [Krieger] anymore. It’s about risk attendant to conflict and the return he can get from manipulating both,” a former Perseus Group executive was quoted saying in the story. There was only brief mention of The Sovereign, listed as one of several recent high-profile media acquisitions, “. . . moves industry analysts consider part of an effort by Perseus to control its image by acquiring targeted media and entertainment properties.”
Klay logged in to Signal and sent Raynor a quick message. “Sorry to hear about your accident. These boys play rough. Overseas at moment. Let’s chat on return. Meantime, get well. You’re needed. Tom K.”
He drank a beer and finished his chicken. His fries had gone cold. When he first started traveling for The Sovereign, he’d eaten fearlessly, the more exotic the better. Late stage balut—duck embryo—the beak and feathers filling his mouth. Pig’s blood soup. Decomposed sardines recovered from a buried pot, served by a grinning ex-headhunter on Sarawak. Sometimes, he ate foods he abhorred in order to get into his targets: Tiger blood with a Siberian trader. Raw whale meat with a trafficker in Shizuoka. The hands of a Cameroonian gorilla he’d known by name. He vomited that last meal afterwards. It felt worse than cannibalism.
His favorite among his weird meals, not for the taste but for what it signified, was koi pla—raw fish mixed with live red ants—first enjoyed from a rusting hubcap while motoring up the Mekong River on the border of Laos in northeastern Thailand. That trip—the distance he traveled to get there, the smells he encountered—the sweetness of lemongrass and coriander, the pungency of dried fish and durian. The soft, melodic rhythms he overheard in markets and on buses. Heat so damp and thick you could swim in it. All of it evoked images of his father’s generation off to a land many would not return from, to a war that would forever change those who came back. Mourning veterans of the Korean and Vietnam Wars passed through Klay Funeral Home so often during Klay’s childhood that he came subconsciously to consider travel to Asia to be an important passage on the way to be
coming a man. Thailand was his first Asian trip, and though he would later travel the world, that trip marked a break for him, a flag planted in the dirt of his life that said, I am no longer in Philadelphia. I am not Jack Klay’s son. I am free.
He opened another beer. Years later, he no longer experimented when it came to food overseas. No still water. No unskinned fruit. No raw vegetables. Nothing washed. He ordered the same meal every place he went anywhere in the world.
Fluke. That’s why he’d stopped eating exotic local meals, why he insisted on the same reliable chicken and fries no matter where he went. Years after that first trip, he went back to Thailand and reprised that first meal right down to the hubcap. He ended up in the hospital. It turned out, koi pla carries a parasite, a fluke that causes liver cancer and kills tens of thousands of people every year. You are very lucky, the nurse in Chiang Rai told him. His ailment was merely food poisoning. It wasn’t the risk of liver cancer that made him change his diet, though. It was the day and a half he spent kneeling in a tiled bathroom. He vomited through an appointment with a government official and nearly lost his story. Joyriding street food wasn’t worth it.
He opened ProtonMail and composed an update to Eady. There wasn’t much to say. He and Tenchant were in place. He would be interviewing Botha in the morning. He hit send.
A response appeared immediately, surprising him.
“Investigation window closing,” Eady replied.
Closing? He’d just arrived.
Klay replied with a question mark.
Eady wrote: “She’s got a leak. Botha secondary. SECURE HER FILES.”
Eady had sent him to investigate Botha. “A gift,” he’d said. “My last act as your handler.” Now his number one priority was Hungry’s files?
Klay stared at his computer screen. Eady had spelled it out in an email. Encrypted or not, Eady would never include such sensitive details in his correspondence. Something was wrong. Flukes happened in raw seafood. They did not happen with Vance Eady.
YOU WERE THE GUN
Kgosi Mampuru II Management Area
Pretoria, South Africa
The woman with short auburn hair and deeply lined skin tore the cellophane off another pack of Camel cigarettes, unwrapped the foil, and dumped the contents onto a pile she had created on the wooden bench beside her. Between her feet was a large woven polypropylene bag filled with bulk packages, including toilet paper and Dial soap.
“They get nothing here,” she explained, not looking up.
“It’s unbelievable,” Klay agreed.
He was sitting opposite her in the waiting room at the notorious Kgosi Mampuru II prison, formerly Pretoria Central Prison, renamed for the nineteenth-century king (kgosi) who fought colonial domination and was hanged on the prison site—twice. The benches had welded rebar for legs, screws in the wood soldered tight, everything smoothed to a gloss by generations of visitors.
The woman got out a box of plastic baggies and began filling them with loose cigarettes. She worked steadily, taking each baggie to its limit, two rows wide, stretching the plastic to near breaking before sealing it. She set each filled bag aside and started on another.
“You’re getting faster,” Klay said.
She looked up. “What’re you, some kind of packing engineer, timing me?”
“I’m looking to enter you in the cigarette Olympics, if you’re interested,” Klay replied.
“Yeah, right.”
She kept at it. The hard part, he saw, was sealing a full baggie without crushing its contents.
“You want some help?”
“Wouldn’t say no.”
They worked together. Camels. Peter Stuyvesants. Marlboros. More visitors arrived, taking seats on benches around them. The newcomers each with their own items they’d brought, their own rituals. The smell of home cooking filled the room. A man tapped his foot. A woman began to knit.
“They get nothing,” the woman said again. “The noise is awful. There’s no sleeping at night. He can only sleep in the daytime when the doors are open. But they’re always looking in at you, you don’t know what they want, so you can’t sleep then, either.”
Klay thought of his father. Jack Klay was currently at USP Coleman in Sumterville, Florida. He wondered how he slept at night.
After an hour they called everyone up to a window and handed each of them a large blue card sheathed in plastic bearing a prisoner’s name, date of birth, and two fingerprints. At the bottom of each card was a list of charges and court dates.
“When I was a girl, they gave me a card to check out library books,” the woman said. “Now it’s my husband.” She lit a cigarette. “Maybe mine knows him,” she added, and stole a glance at Klay’s card. She drew a quick breath. Without looking at Klay again, she gathered her things and hurried away. Klay looked down at his blue card. Ras Botha’s charges filled the card front and back and were scrawled vertically along the card’s edges in print too small to read.
Klay followed the other visitors and got in a long line for a metal detector and body search. The cigarette woman was three people ahead of him. When their line turned a corner Klay looked up, intending to catch her eye again, but she stared out a small window instead.
A hand touched Klay’s shoulder. “You don’t have to wait in line, Mr. Klay,” a guard said. “He’s expecting you.”
The cigarette woman shot him a last, appraising look as he walked past her, around the metal detector, and into the prison. The guard, whose name was Jacob, was about Klay’s size, dressed in a brown uniform, olive web belt, and black laced boots, but he was in poor condition and breathed heavily on the long walk, which took them up and down poorly lit stairwells and through long hallways whose walls were painted lemon yellow.
They passed men in orange prison uniforms stamped with “corrections” in circles, like leopard spots, working brooms and mop buckets. Several, he noticed, had the number twenty-six tattooed on their right hands. The prisoners paused as Klay approached, checked out his shoes, his watch, and his size. Some gave him chin juts and eye fucks. Others looked right through him.
“Anyone famous in here?” Klay asked as they walked.
“Some.”
Jacob named a few prisoners. Klay looked them up later. An Apartheid-era assassin. A billionaire mob boss from the Czech Republic. A pair of murdering twin brothers.
“All his friends,” Jacob said.
Jacob led Klay into an office marked “Warden.” The warden was not in, a receptionist declared. Jacob looked at Klay. “Botha flu,” he said, and opened the warden’s door.
Inside, Ras Botha was seated at a small conference table. Jacob indicated for Klay to sit at one end, across from Botha. Then he pulled a chair out for himself, took it across the room, and sat down behind Klay, against the wall.
“So, you do have some balls of your own,” Botha said. “I’m glad to see it.”
Botha wore blue jeans and a black golf shirt, a dive watch, and a gold wedding ring. On the table in front of him were two oranges loosely wrapped in a paper towel. He’s lost weight, was Klay’s first thought. Lines in Botha’s forehead had grown deeper than Klay remembered, and there was a cut over his left eye.
“I’m here to get your side of things,” Klay said.
“That right?” Botha licked his lower lip in a way that drew his cheeks in so far Klay wondered if he was missing his bottom teeth. Maybe he was. Klay hadn’t noticed before.
“I’m a big man in here. Privileges,” Botha said and nodded toward his feet. He wore hiking boots. “No prison shoes.” He gestured to his clothes. “No fucking jumpsuit.” He looked over Klay’s shoulder at Jacob in case Jacob was thinking of making him wear a fucking jumpsuit. Klay turned, too. Jacob didn’t appear to be thinking about Botha’s clothing. He was studying a magazine.
Botha rolled an orange across the table. “For you,” he
said.
Klay watched the orange roll toward him. It stopped beside his notebook.
Botha waited, but Klay did not touch the fruit. “You want to know about me? Okay. I made good money mining. Did you know that? Not really mining, but stealing from diamond mines. I like animals,” he said, “which is what gave me the idea for it.” He sucked his lower lip and launched into his story. “I met a black boy on the gravel ramp. He sees some big diamonds coming through. Big as this.” Botha indicated the end of his thumb. “So, I asked him, what do the gates look like? The building? How many guards? Where do they stand? Does he know any of the guards? Tell me the schedules . . . what . . . what . . . what . . .
“The boy says it’s wrapped tight. They x-ray coming out and they metal-detect both ways. He tells me he can’t even get out a window. They’re little windows in the hallway, like on a ship, too small to climb out. I been on some big yachts. Big. Adnan Khashoggi hunted with me on the Kimber, did you know that?”
“Didn’t know that,” Klay said and tapped his pen. His notebook was open in front of him. At the top of the page he’d written Botha’s name, the date, and the interview location. The page was blank.
“That’s right, counselor. Russians. Putin. Some big Americans. Names you would know.”
“Like who?”
Botha studied Klay. “Yeah, but I was telling a story. I told the boy, open one of the hallway windows. Not open it, just unlatch it. That’s all he had to do.” Botha began peeling his orange. He did it slowly, chipping off pieces while he talked. “I’m telling you so you know how my mind works.”
Klay gestured with his hands. “Please.”
Botha continued. He said he drove out to the young mineworker’s house with some men and some lumber and had them build a pigeon coop behind the mineworker’s house. Then he bought a flock of homing pigeons.
“You’re a pigeon racer now,” he told the young man. He pointed to the pigeon trainer he’d brought. “He’s going to be living with you.” Botha eyed Klay. “You ever raised pigeons? Birds only fly so far at a time and come back, like eight kilometers a week. We didn’t want any mishaps, so we took our time.” He tapped his temple with a finger. “Six months later, the birds were ready. I gave the boy a four-inch section of PVC pipe, sealed on one end, and told him to put a bird in the pipe and take it to work in his lunch pail.
In the Company of Killers Page 18
