In the Company of Killers

by Bryan Christy

  When he was done, he went back downstairs and started removing the tack strips and carpet padding. He’d asked his real estate agent why there was so much carpeting in an otherwise well-decorated house. “They had a dog,” the agent replied, touching his nose with a silk handkerchief.

  Klay doubted they had a dog. The couple who’d owned the house had died of AIDS. He bought the house from the second man’s estate. As he explored their house, he could feel the couple’s terror growing, the world around them alive with invisible enemies, the causes and cures of their illness still largely a mystery. He found unopened boxes of HEPA air purifiers in the attic and dust masks in drawers throughout the house. He spotted expensive filters under the sinks and behind the refrigerator. Blue rubber gloves sprang at him from the bottom drawer of the upstairs vanity. That was life for you: you erect all possible protections against the unknown, and what it looks like afterwards is panic.

  He thought about Eady’s offer as he worked. Even if he could see himself working for the CIA, doing so would certainly compromise journalistic ethics. He sat back on his heels with a snort. Who was he kidding? As a criminal investigator, he had never fretted over journalism’s ethical lines before. Besides, lines implied a system. There was no system to the world. No handrails. What system of equality allowed a drunk behind the wheel of an automobile to go on living, while an innocent boy on his bicycle ended up dead? Life’s only guarantee was that it didn’t last forever, period. Lean on anything else for support and you might well fall forever.

  The foam padding was old and dried and bore a surprising number of staples per square foot. He began his carpet extraction in the afternoon, not considering that his new house had no overhead lighting, so by the time he was on to the carpet tacks, he was operating in darkness. It wasn’t until the next morning that he understood why the previous owners had chosen to carpet so much of their home. Every room’s floor had been patched with raw plywood. Instead of something out of Antique Digest, his exposed floors reminded him of the shuffleboard and hopscotch patterns in the attic of Klay Funeral Home designed to keep Klay and his brother quiet during funerals.

  As he continued through the house on his hands and knees, prying up carpet staples with a screwdriver, he realized that his approach to journalism—his approach to life—was a lot like his approach to this house: he tore things up without regard to what lay underneath. He got to the bottom of things by whatever means necessary and then he moved on. It was the ripping and pulling he was good at. Until now Klay had always used a notebook and pen. Eady was offering him a jackhammer.

  * * *

  • • •

  A week later, sitting in Eady’s Watergate apartment, Klay asked, “How many do you have working for you already, Vance?”

  Eady lit Klay’s cigar. “You’d be my first, Tom.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Truth is, I haven’t ever needed to engage anyone formally before. As editor in chief I’ve been able to satisfy the Agency’s intelligence needs quite effectively, and quietly, sending reporters on assignments of interest without risk to anyone but myself.”

  “My stories, too?”

  “Some.” Eady thought a moment. “Angola. We needed to know how strong the president’s daughter was. She liked you.”

  “So, what are you telling me? Nobody knows? Porfle doesn’t know?”

  “I find the best way to keep a secret is not to tell anyone. But I don’t need to tell you that, do I?”

  “Are you threatening me, Vance?”

  “No, son. I’m trusting you. If you should turn this down, you’d know my secret, you’d know the Agency’s secret. I’m trusting that whatever your choice, you are a patriot.”

  Klay shook his head. “Where I come from, what you’re talking about is a rat.”

  “That’s a perspective you’ll have to reconcile.”

  “So, why me? Why give me this golden opportunity?” Klay felt a sour taste grow in his mouth. He was probing like he hadn’t already made his decision, like he still had a line he would not cross.

  A smile wriggled loose from the corners of Eady’s mouth. “Why you? Okay, Tom.” He set his cigar in an ashtray. “Let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we? Here’s why you make sense: You are a loner. You make acquaintances easily, but you can’t form lasting relationships. You’re emotionally damaged, owing to a tragic incident involving your mother that we needn’t recount, but some people—like you—know how to use the wounded parts of themselves to recognize wounds in others, and turn them to advantage. You drink too much, but you’re not a drunk. Your father, Jack, ended up a senior member of the Scalise Mob, even though he’s not Italian. He remains in prison, though he could certainly cut himself a deal. Nicky Scalise offered to bring you into the family. You didn’t accept, but you could have. The underworld is in your DNA. You break rules frequently, but you have a sense of justice. You have, I believe, the need to do some real good, atone, correct the past. We all make mistakes, but rarely do we have the opportunity to counter their weight so profoundly. Thanks to the work I’ve given you, you’re well traveled now, and reasonably well connected. You’re a superb writer, and that’s cover I need. You’re a good criminal investigator, instinctively. I can make you better. You handle”—he paused—“unexpected adversity.” Eady began relighting his cigar. “That do?”

  Klay’s pulse pounded above his left ear. His heart raced. In his mind, he pictured the old newspaper articles describing his mother’s death. He’d read them a thousand times; now he saw Eady reading them, the old man studying the black-and-white photographs of his mother’s mangled car. All of the articles had ended more or less the same way: “Two sons, age seven and nine, were thrown clear.”

  Klay locked eyes with Eady. “Don’t ever mention my mother again.”

  Eady raised his snowy eyebrows. “We’re thorough,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Klay let the moment settle. “Then I should tell you there was an accident. In Indonesia,” he said, watching Eady’s eyes. “It will come up.”

  If killing the boy in Jakarta was what Eady had meant by “unexpected adversity,” Klay couldn’t tell. The old man listened to Klay’s confession without judgment. “I want all of my Agency pay to go anonymously to the boy’s family.”

  “I will see to it,” Eady said.

  Klay put out his hand. No one on earth had better intelligence than the CIA. He would use what they gave him to rip and tear his way to the bottom of better stories.

  “Nothing you wouldn’t otherwise do, Tom,” Eady said, gripping Klay’s hand. “That’s my commitment to you. You’ll be able to stand by every story. Every action.” He refilled Klay’s glass. “You have my word.”

  Klay had a different notion. The CIA worked for him now.

  * * *

  • • •

  Like a rottweiler at the Palm Beach Kennel Club,” Major Thomas said as Klay huffed to a stop his first day of training. The retired Marine checked his stopwatch. “If you ever gotta run for it, start early.”

  Klay was panting, hands on knees, sweating his blue T-shirt purple in the crisp mountain air. “I don’t make a habit of running,” he managed to say.

  Morning workouts were designed to help focus his mind rather than to get him into any kind of shape. To his boxing skills, Major Thomas added close quarters techniques, reciting “Surprise, speed, violence of action” over and over as they worked hand-to-hand, blade and no blade, Filipino-style. Thomas chiding him for wanting to hit a man’s skull with a closed fist when he could be just as effective using his palm, and still pick up a fork the next day. “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast,” he coached. “Good.”

  Klay would be an agent, Eady explained, but not an employee. An asset, “like the many brave men and women the Agency relies on around the world.”

  Eady insisted Klay be schooled in the same basic techniques a career intellige
nce officer would receive. “As much to give you a vocabulary for this world as to help with any specific skills,” Eady said. “Besides, maybe one day you’ll join us full-time.”

  Much of his CIA training mirrored what he did as an investigative journalist. For instance, showing up unannounced on a target bearing an extra cup of coffee and maybe some doughnuts—or a six of Carlsberg and a pack of smokes—was, in Agency-speak, “Always provide amenities.” Klay laughed when his instructor wrote the rule on the whiteboard for him.

  “What?” the man asked.

  “Nothing,” Klay said. “I’m from Philly. It’s called not being a jerk-off.”

  The Agency’s training, more tactical than academic, validated many of his methods, and gave new perspective to others. Still, more than once as he listened to the lectures, he felt the Agency’s technique lacked an important second beat. Yes, you showed up unannounced on a target, but you were also quick to say you had to go. You had someplace else to be. That was the special sauce to getting something out of a bad guy. By signaling right out of the box that you were short on time, you put your target at ease. Maybe you even got them to expand on something from a prior meeting. But far more valuable was to get them curious about you. To get your target wondering, Why aren’t you asking me what I’m worried you’ll ask me? Who are you to leave me! Those were the questions you wanted your target to be asking. If you could accomplish that, you got invited back. Which was everything. Getting invited back was all you wanted. More interaction, more meetings, more Facebook messages, more WhatsApp texts. It didn’t matter if the additional communications were porn shots (too often they were) or notes about a kid’s football performance. More was everything. It meant you were getting in.

  Klay kept his ideas to himself. It wasn’t his job to give the CIA feedback.

  His favorite class was weapons.

  He’d touched his first pistol when he was five years old, standing on his tiptoes, feeling his way blindly through his father’s sock drawer in search of Christmas presents. Over the years he got to know all of his father’s hiding places for the handguns he kept stashed throughout the funeral home. His top desk drawer, the electric organ bench. Behind bottles of embalming fluid in the morgue. A pocket sewn into one of the curtains. His nightstand.

  Major Thomas introduced him to a few weapons he wasn’t familiar with, and it turned out Klay was still a good shot. His first time at the firing range, Klay put two in the silhouette target’s body, one in the edge of its head. Thomas turned to him and said, “The Mozambique, right?” Klay nodded, pleased he could still pull off what he and his pals used to practice in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Thomas raised his own weapon and delivered ten X-ring shots to the target’s chest. After his third shot his bullets had no paper to hit. He holstered his Sig Sauer and looked at Klay. “You put your man down, son. Fire all you have at center mass, then fire some more. After that I don’t care what you do. Got it?”

  Six weeks later Klay was back at his desk, Porfle asking him how his hernia operation had gone.

  Assignments followed. A drink with a Gabonese security minister. A quick sketch of a Malaysian politician’s desk, dates read upside down from her appointment book. A visit with the chairman of the Djibouti Ports and Free Zones Authority to request dive permission. “Skimming the cream,” Eady called it.

  Their method for communicating was simple and effective. When “the public had an interest,” Klay’s early drafts, copied to Eady and more fulsome than normal, became his Agency reports. He and Eady communicated through the Comments and Track Changes features in Microsoft Word, just like any far-flung magazine writer and his editor. No need for a throwaway encryption system; no risk to the Agency’s covert platform.

  Eady’s edits and comments were Klay’s instructions: “Could use more detail here.” “Get contact address for fact-checkers.” “Do you have supporting documentation?” “Photos?”

  Above all, nothing he wouldn’t otherwise do.

  THE CREVICE

  Sovereign Headquarters

  Washington, DC

  The elevator door opened onto the tenth floor, and before Klay could exit, a long wooden tribal mask with grassy yellow hair and bulging eyes lurched into the gap. Klay stepped back.

  “Hey, Charlie,” Klay said, and held the elevator’s door.

  Charles Hawthorne, chief archivist at The Sovereign, peeked his soft face out from behind the Dan mask he held with both hands. “Oh. Hey, Tom. Sorry about that.”

  Hawthorne slid his generous belly and the tribal mask past Klay onto the elevator and set the chin of the mask on the toe of his shoe. “Didn’t expect to see anyone up here on a Sunday,” he said, holding the door. “Where you been this time?”

  “Bangkok,” Klay said. He always said Bangkok. No one ever noticed.

  “Must be nice.”

  “He in?”

  “Much as he can be.” Charlie hit the button for basement. It was a strange answer, but Charlie was an unusual guy. As the elevator’s door closed, he stuck out his tongue and bugged his eyes, his impression of a tribal mask. Klay laughed. He heard hammering coming from the next room. Eady was updating the floor’s exhibits. It was about time.

  That it was Sunday made little difference for Eady. Sally would be at her desk until noon. Vance would be in his office well beyond that.

  Klay rounded the vestibule into Eady’s gallery and was nearly run over by two men carrying a zebra head.

  “Coming through,” said a workman.

  Eady’s great photographic collection lay stacked along the room’s perimeter. In the middle of the room workers hammered a crate around the bathysphere. Like the belly of a gigantic housefly, Klay thought, wending his way among dozens of empty black support wires as he crossed to Eady’s corner office.

  Sally and her desk were gone. Her office was empty. Inside his office, Eady was talking to a workman with his back to Klay. On his walls were dark circles and rectangles where his artwork had hung. Bubble Wrap spilled from half-filled cardboard boxes. His desk was bare. Lamps and end tables were gone.

  Klay knocked on the door jam. “Spring cleaning, Vance?”

  Eady looked haggard. He wore blue jeans, moccasins, and a plaid shirt. “Oh, Tom. Have a seat. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

  Instead Klay walked to Eady’s window. It was raining. A cold winter rain. Eady dismissed the worker and closed his office door. His globe bar had not yet been packed up. “Five o’clock somewhere,” he sighed, and fixed them a pair of drinks. Klay crossed the room and sat on the old leather sofa. Eady’s wingback chair was gone. He wheeled his desk chair to the couch, handed Klay a scotch, and took a seat across from him.

  “I have good news and bad news.”

  “I like my good news first.”

  “I have cancer.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Treatable.” Eady waved a dismissive hand. “I’ll get through it. We’re survivors, you and me.” He leaned forward and clinked Klay’s glass with his. “Lemonade of it is I finally get to retire. Always promised Ruth I would, then one of my wolves would bring home another terrific story, and round it would go again. Now the doctors tell me it’s this place or my wife.” He took a drink. “So, no contest at all.”

  “I’m sorry, Vance.”

  “It’s been a good life, Tom.”

  “That bad?”

  “No. It’s not over for me yet. Not by a long shot. Just time for the more important things now.” He sighed again.

  They sat silently for a while. Klay assessing Eady’s appearance, taking in the idea of The Sovereign without him at its helm.

  “So, what’s worse than cancer?” he said. A copy of the magazine’s current issue lay on the floor beside Klay’s boot.

  Eady swallowed his whiskey and got up to retrieve the bottle.

  “It’s The Sovereign that’s dying, Tom.” H
e poured them another round. “It’s been hemorrhaging for years while I was focused on other things. You know that, and the board has finally decided. We need to make a change, get a transfusion—”

  “You’re not the reason this place is in trouble, Vance.” Everyone knew The Sovereign couldn’t manage its finances. The institution delivered the exceptional. And paid for it. At every level.

  On the cover of the magazine at Klay’s feet was a photograph of a red bird of paradise perched on a tree branch taken in West Papua, Indonesia. To get that photo, Snaps had hired a fixer-translator, a 4x4 and driver, a boat and pilot, forest guides, porters, a cook, and a float plane and pilot. He’d paid consulting fees to ornithologists in Indonesia, England, and the United States. He’d set up camera traps. He’d lived most of the year suspended 180 feet off the ground in a hammock blind specially built for his project holding a camera custom-designed by engineers in The Sovereign’s basement, waiting for the elusive bird to dangle its two tail wires just so. Three times during the year, he’d interrupted his work and flown back to DC to meet with a particular photo editor who insisted on reviewing his progress in person. All to get one exceptional photograph.

  Start with the cost of publishing a hardcopy magazine in a digital age; throw in common excesses (print editors who characterized family vacations as fieldwork, staff scientists who approved research grants to themselves); toss in the odd whims of the Prendergast family (“Find me a giant squid!” “Locate Endurance!”); add to these the cost of such legitimate explorations as sending a custom-built titanium submersible to navigate Challenger Deep, the earth’s deepest point; and you had a recipe for epic bankruptcy.