In the Company of Killers

by Bryan Christy

  Klay did not respond. He looked at the age spots on the top of Barrow’s balding head, the wrinkles along the buttons of his yellow dress shirt straining to hold his belly.

  “It’s a helluva picture. Well, I look at what he’s got going, and mine goes off like a ten-year-old boy on the Coney Island Cyclone. Wooot!”

  Klay leaned forward. “I don’t give a shit about you and your little man, Barrow,” he sneered. “Why should I believe a fucking thing you say?”

  Barrow squinted at him for a long moment. “Okay,” he said, and dusted salt from his hands. “I’m going to tell you about it because I need your help, and I believe the best way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him. That’s the only reason I’m telling you any of this by the way”—his jovial tone turned cold—“instead of letting you rot in Gabriel Ncube’s prison.” Barrow took a sip of his bourbon. “Krieger’s focus is China. China’s Ultimate Silk Road Project. Biggest public works project the world has ever known. It began—”

  “I know. Everybody knows about it.”

  “Of course you do. Krieger follows the Chinese around like a cattle bird, providing security for President Ho’s investments, making his own moves. He’s got a thousand men running security for Chinese Development Bank oil interests in Angola. He’s the spear for China’s Djibouti base. He got them the Darwin port. Now he’s got them Mindanao. He’s locking up the coast from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea. If that leads to conflict someplace, he sells one side, or both, the weapons—”

  “I was in the Congo,” Klay interrupted. “I know how he operates.”

  Barrow paused, assessing him again.

  “It’s a modern world, Tom. You ever hear that? I always think what the hell else could it be—every day’s more modern than the one before it—but that’s me. You got High Tech. High Finance. Maybe now we got High Intelligence. I don’t know. I don’t have to know. My job, most of the time, is follow the money. Same as you.” Barrow adjusted in his seat.

  “Krieger didn’t come out of nowhere with this fund idea of his. We’re in a race, Tom. Our spies have to keep up with their spies. But how do you do that? Our in-house engineers aren’t exactly Silicon Valley’s finest. And we can’t buy off the shelf. We need what hasn’t been invented yet. Our people put together a venture capital firm called Maven-Q. The company’s genuine—our people do trade shows, hand out Maven-Q ball caps and ink pens,” Barrow said with a chuckle. “It lets us invest in promising ideas, steer product development, lock up end products.”

  “Let me guess,” Klay speculated. “The CIA with its own investment fund. You wouldn’t leave management of a venture capital firm to intelligence officers. You hired outside?”

  Barrow nodded.

  “Wall Street?”

  Barrow waited.

  “You hired Wall Street bankers, but you couldn’t pay Wall Street–sized bonuses with taxpayer dollars. You told them they had the opportunity to serve and protect, they said screw you, so you . . .” A bitter smile formed on Klay’s lips. “You told them they can eat what they kill, and they took you up on it . . .”

  “Well, they’ve made some very good investments, so they tell me. But they did make one that put our ass in the jackpot.”

  “They invested in Perseus Group.”

  Barrow raised his glass in acknowledgment.

  Klay sat back in his leather seat. The CIA had invested in Perseus Group. “So now Krieger has your money and your secrets,” he said, and laughed. “And now it’s your money funding those port acquisitions. Providing China’s security. Killing Congolese. Anything he does, you’re tied to.”

  “Langley didn’t see that one coming,” Barrow said. “Too excited about the gadgets, I expect. We got out, of course. His fund program started right after. With nobody looking, a few of our people peeled off and went rogue. Sequence isn’t important really. Hell, number one search term our people type into Google these days is ‘Perseus.’ How many skew their work to audition for Terry Krieger I don’t know.”

  Barrow sat back. “So that’s how it started. Those funds are made up of rogue intelligence officers from all over the world, working together, for Terry Krieger. Conspiracy. Bribery. Fraud. Murder. It’s a long list that ends in treason. I am no goody two-shoes. But treason I do not abide. Which brings us back to Vance Eady.” Barrow swallowed the rest of his drink and pressed the call button. “Leave us the bottle, Troy.” He topped off Klay’s drink.

  Klay looked at Barrow, not really seeing him. Instead he pictured Eady in his office that last day. Around them Eady’s artifacts packed up, outside movers hammering shipping crates together. Eady talking about his cancer before explaining the sale to Krieger. “This was not my decision. Krieger pitched the board in Davos. I was brought in after. For appearances, I expect . . .” Klay felt his anger turning to rage, his stomach in knots.

  “So, Tom—”

  Klay spoke through a clenched jaw, “Tenchant.”

  Barrow nodded. He opened the briefcase again, found the file he wanted, and withdrew a photograph. “Hitter. Kicked out of the Marines.” In the photo, Tenchant was loading bags into a Land Rover. There were camera bags at his feet, one bag especially long. The photo was date stamped. In the background was a Kenyan car rental agency.

  Barrow laid out more documents and photos of Tenchant. “Started as a babysitter on you, we think.”

  “You could’ve stopped him. You let my friends die.”

  “Not ‘let.’ We didn’t let anything. And let me make this clear. There is no ‘we’ here, Tom. My God will judge me for my decisions, but anyone I took this up the chain to might have been compromised. Half the people above me are compromised, for Chrissake. I had no idea how far up it went—”

  “Now you do?”

  When Barrow didn’t reply, Klay upended his glass and set it down hard. Barrow reached out to pour him another, but Klay waved it away. He wanted to wave away the voice in his head, the one saying, You could have stopped him, Tom . . . You were the gun . . .

  “Hungry was always going to be sacrificed,” Klay said.

  “We would not have let her proceed, that’s true. We care about predictability, tolerable risks. That part of investing we do understand. Ncube has proven himself to be a reliably corrupt ally, but hanging you out was Eady’s plan from the beginning. Keep that fact firmly in your mind, Tom. Destroying your lady friend was Vance Eady’s idea. But the plan wasn’t moving fast enough. Krieger was impatient, offered to send one of his operators, a woman named Mapes. She and Tenchant crawled out of the same dark hole a long time ago. Kinetics is their specialty.” Barrow shook his head. “So the plan got accelerated.”

  “What about Botha? He’s yours?”

  “That man’s a skeleton key. He who has the cash gets to turn him. Eady turned him for this project. We went along. Your white whale, Eady called him.”

  “Does he have cancer?” Klay asked.

  “Eady? Oh, I expect Vance Eady’s got himself a terminal disease, all right,” Barrow said. “Cancer’s not what they call it. No.”

  Barrow kept talking, but Klay wasn’t listening. He was going back, retracing. That night at the Confession Club, Barrow’s aggressiveness made sense now. Barrow had been hostile to force Eady to state explicitly what he had in mind. Klay had been in Barrow’s shoes plenty of times. You found a good branch, laid out plenty of rope, and waited for your target to hang himself. He wondered if Barrow had recorded the conversation that night. He had no doubt Barrow was recording their conversation now.

  “You said you wanted my help,” Klay said. “You’re going to prosecute Eady?”

  Barrow gathered his photographs into their files and returned the files to his briefcase. He closed the lid, laid his forearms over the top, interlocked his fingers, and looked at Klay. “No, Tom. I don’t expect so, not the way you mean.” He separated his hands and tapped a
fingernail against an incisor. “Different set of teeth.”

  MARCHING ORDERS

  Chadian Airspace

  The plane shivered. The pilot made an announcement. Klay and Barrow fastened their belts. Barrow explained that a look-alike, carrying Klay’s passport, was currently flying on Delta Air Lines flight 9470 from Johannesburg to Washington, DC. The flight had a regular stop at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. “We’re headed there now,” Barrow said. “You’ll pick up your passport and continue on home. We papered it with the embassy. You were never officially arrested—Ms. Khoza helped you there. You’re not a fugitive. You’re a victim. Eady has antennae of his own. He may try to meet you at the airport. He’ll suspect you’ve caught on to him, but he can’t be sure. He’ll want to be sure. Our people will approach you at Dulles Airport, just for show. Refuse to talk with them. Make a scene if you’re up to it.” Barrow touched the skin under his swollen eye. “Nothing permanent.”

  “And then?”

  “Be yourself. That move Ms. Khoza pulled with her press release was clever. He doesn’t know you were there. It’s not foolproof, and Eady’s no fool, but it opened us some space.”

  “Space for what?”

  “Get some rest, Tom. We’ll discuss it.”

  Troy brought Klay a blanket and a pillow. He put his seat back and closed his eyes. He fought it but the movie in his head began to play: Sehlalo’s ankle pistol . . . surprise on Tenchant’s face . . . Hungry adjusting the bodies. The scenes speeding up, spiraling. Bernard’s smile . . . shots fired . . . brakes squealing . . . her red wool coat . . . “Wait for me” . . .

  Klay sat up.

  Barrow looked up from his paperwork. After a moment, he removed his reading glasses, set them on top of his papers, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You know what keeps me up at night?” He poured himself another drink. “It was that day in September. Whole city had a smell to it. Smell of what we used to call the ash can.” He tapped his pen on the table. His voice softened. “It was the people in the streets, you know? Not just that morning, with the dust on their shoes, but for weeks. Complete strangers saying hello to one another. ‘Are you okay? May I help you with that?’” He chuckled. “Russians called me at home. ‘You okay, comrade? Anything I can do for you?’”

  “You were there?”

  “I had a lunch date that day. Took the Amtrak up. It’s a habit, I show up early. Not early enough . . .” He coughed and cleared his throat. “It was my daughter, Julia. She loved her work, yessir,” Barrow said. His voice trailed off.

  “She was there?”

  “She was,” Barrow said.

  “I’m sorry, Will,” Klay said.

  “We looked at all sides of that date. Krieger, he’d opened up a small logistics company, registered in Cyprus. Called it Executive Prospects. Moved highly placed individuals out of harm’s way. A valuable service in a world gone mad. Invisible exfils. No fingerprints.”

  “You mean for the Saudis who got out. Right afterwards.”

  “Oh, the Saudis, sure. That prince with the embassy, the cousins. I’m talking about timing. Krieger registered that exfil company a month before the Towers.”

  Klay stared at Barrow. “I never heard any 9/11 reference to Krieger . . .”

  “No, I expect you didn’t. It’s not in those twenty-eight pages, either. Had to go to the FBI to get that information. Agent who gave it to me was working for Raptor Systems when I got a hold of him.” Barrow shook his head.

  As the plane flew north toward Europe, Klay slipped back into his own thoughts. How many innocent people have died because of your lies . . . ?

  “What happens to Krieger?” Klay asked grimly.

  Barrow cleared his throat. “We’ll block his export applications, bar him from government work. Work with our allies to make his life difficult, but unofficially, he’s got what you might call spousal privilege. He’s outside of scope, son. I’m sorry.”

  Klay felt his stomach turn. “Outside of scope” was what he’d said to Bernard. Part of his “I’m no safari ant” speech. He’d been wrong to say that, wrong to stand by, wrong to not speak out about Congo and so many things he’d seen, even if his voice was unlikely to be heard. He’d been wrong for so long, confining himself to the page, the deadline, the script.

  Hungry said he was afraid to take on the unwinnable case, and he had laughed. He was a mortician’s son, he said. They were all unwinnable cases. Life was an unwinnable case. But now he realized the unwinnable was the only thing worth fighting for.

  His father had stood up to Nicky Scalise—and the cost had been immeasurable. But the cost to stand by—to not enter the fight, regardless of the odds—was to let darkness win. Taking a risk to help someone—knowing you might lose—was not folly; it was the test of a man. Without sacrifice, all the world was darkness. His father’s voice: You are a light, Tom.

  “Your focus needs to be Vance Eady,” Barrow continued. “He’s a flight risk and he’s a suicide risk. We’re counting on you to keep him alive for us. He won’t make any decisions until he finds out what you know. So we need you to string him along a bit. Not long.”

  “And then?” Klay asked.

  Barrow shrugged.

  Klay looked at Barrow. “I want to talk to my father.”

  Barrow sighed deeply. He pressed the call button.

  Klay reclined his seat and closed his eyes. An hour later Barrow woke him and handed him a phone. Barrow walked to the back of the plane, a symbolic gesture of privacy. The call would certainly be monitored and recorded. Klay and his father spoke for ten minutes. When he was through, Klay set the phone down on the table and waited for Barrow to return to his seat.

  “I want him out of prison.”

  “Can’t do it,” Barrow said.

  “You lost your daughter. I lost my mother. He lost his wife. What would you do to have your daughter back? To protect her from that day? My father did what it took to protect his children.”

  The two men evaluated each other. A father and a son. Mist and rock.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Barrow said. “After you deliver.”

  “Fair enough,” Klay said. He would keep Eady alive until Barrow’s men arrived.

  As the plane made its descent into Schiphol, Barrow went over it all again. “Eady can’t feel threatened. But don’t be a pushover. You’re angry. Get angry. Channel your anger in a way that makes sense to him.”

  “I got it,” Klay said.

  “You’ll have the Tenchant funeral and then—”

  “I got it,” Klay said.

  MISCHIEF REEF

  Dangerous Ground

  South China Sea

  Terry Krieger stood in the stern of the Raptor, a mile off Mischief Reef in the South China Sea, an area aptly known as Dangerous Ground. The area is poorly charted. Accurate information on ocean currents is not available for Dangerous Ground. Charted depths are unreliable, soundings give no warning, radar is of little value. Low islands, sheer drops, and sunken reefs abound in these blue-green waters. The US military’s chief geospatial intelligence agency, which offers guidance to Navy vessels, minces no words when it comes to the area: “Vessels in Dangerous Ground must rely heavily on seaman’s eye navigation and should not normally enter the area other than in daylight. Avoidance of Dangerous Ground is the mariner’s only assurance of safety.”

  A brisk morning breeze blew Krieger’s hair. He wore a blue Perseus Group windbreaker and khakis. Beside him, a wall of five flat-screen computer monitors had been set up, served by a single brushed-aluminum keyboard on a white table, all of it secured against the area’s sudden winds and unpredictable currents.

  Standing before Krieger was Vice Admiral Meng Jingchen of the People’s Liberation Army Navy, commander of China’s South Fleet, accompanied by his two most trusted men. The three officers wore their service dress whites.

>   When he described the capability he intended to offer China’s military, President Ho had replied simply, “Convince Meng.”

  If he failed to get Meng to think outside the box this morning, Krieger knew he would suffer more than just the loss of a business deal. He’d be gored. Yurchenko would see to it.

  “A small gift,” Krieger said. Using both hands, he presented Meng with a book. Mapes, fluent in Mandarin, acted as his interpreter. Meng nodded curtly and accepted the gift. The book was The Sovereign Field Guide to Hawks of North America.

  Meng smiled. “Raptor!” he said, and nodded to indicate the yacht, which brought light laughter from his team. Meng admired the book’s cover and turned the first few pages, lingering over the author’s signature and Krieger’s inscription: “Tempus fugit, memento mori. —Terry Krieger.” He turned at random and lingered over a photograph of a bird power-diving. Meng did not look at the bird’s description. “Falco peregrinus,” he said, and told his men it was the world’s fastest raptor. Mapes translated for Krieger.

  “Yes,” Krieger said. “Not everyone approaches the world’s challenges in the same way. After this morning, I hope that you and your country will join me in looking at the world from a raptor’s perspective.

  “Admiral Meng, before our demonstration, I’d like to recount a story,” Krieger said. “It is a story you are no doubt familiar with, but it will take us to a place from which we might all become raptors. In 1996, the US Navy announced it would develop a new, technologically superior battleship designed to ensure American naval dominance into the twenty-first century. It called the program Smart Ship. Instead of reconceiving the idea of a warship, however, the Navy hired Griffon Industries to backfit an old one. Griffon retrofitted the Yorktown with a new bridge, automated her navigation and propulsion systems, fused her SAMs and torpedoes to operate in sync with Aegis. To make it all work, Griffon laid four miles of cable and fiber optics through the ship, then they installed twenty-seven desktop PCs and ran the ship’s entire system on Microsoft Windows. Let me repeat that: the American Navy ran the most technologically sophisticated warship in history on the same business software used by my children’s school.