In the Company of Killers

by Bryan Christy

  He looked at the pile of Olympus recorders he had yet to upload and decided his memories, whatever they might be, weren’t that important, either. He snapped a few in half and tossed them into his trash, felt bad about it, plugged in his headphones, and listened some more.

  Suddenly Bernard’s laughter filled his headphones. They were hiking, Klay realized. He heard the crunch of gravel, the swing of his pack, his breathing. On the recorder, he asked Bernard whether he thought the land was a living thing. “You don’t understand at all,” Bernard replied. He heard the scratch of rocks clicking together, his own rough voice saying, “It’s a long way down, brother.” He remembered that moment. Bernard had done a back flip off the cliff edge into a river three stories below. On the tape, Bernard called up to him inaudibly. Klay repeated his words for the recording: “Come. Celebrate the land.” The recording ended. Klay hadn’t jumped.

  He removed his headphones and texted Bernard’s mother, asking about Goodson. Goodson had been roughed up, she responded, but he was safe. The Green Guardians had been disbanded. It was just Perseus Group rangers now, she wrote, “flying drones, rousting up villagers.”

  He got more emails reminding him to set up his Twitter account. He was headed to the gym one afternoon when a rep from Development dropped by and reminded him about the fundraiser that night. She handed him a card with the names of three couples printed on it. “Chat with them. Make them feel welcome. Charlie Peterson is oil. The Merricks, too. Root is that Root. They’ve all been to Africa. They’ll love talking to you . . .”

  It went on like that.

  Meanwhile, each time he asked Porfle for a new assignment, Porfle would shrug and say he hadn’t heard anything. Klay tried to be patient, to follow PGM’s new procedures, but boredom and frustration were closing in on him. He did not do well bored. For the first time since he’d joined The Sovereign, he wondered if it might be time to move on.

  One afternoon, desperate to get out, he decided to visit an animal shelter. His days “on the beach,” which is what the Perseus Group people called their unassigned hours, had him thinking he might get a dog. He would just be looking, he reminded himself as he hailed a cab. If he were actually going to get a dog, he wanted a Chesapeake Bay retriever.

  Still, it wouldn’t hurt to look at the strays. Just the idea of getting a dog made him feel a little better. The taxi pulled away from the curb and a text appeared on his phone.

  “Confession at 11,” it said.

  It had been three months since he’d heard from Eady.

  THE CONFESSION CLUB

  Washington, DC

  Two blocks from the White House there is a large brick townhouse with black shutters, a mansard roof of chipped slate, and a green front door so dark it might be mistaken for black. To the building’s left is a branch office of the General Services Administration, and on its right an office building owned by PEPCO, the electric utility. Countless government employees trudge past the townhouse each day, though few, if asked, could pick it out of a lineup. For more than 130 years, the Confession Club has hidden in plain sight. The tall, ground-floor windows, originally sized to let a dead body out without having to remove the front door, are always curtained. There is no number on the building to confirm its address. The club’s sole intercourse with the outside world is a marble front step, the color of an old tooth, worn in the center so that a doorman must sweep a puddle from the step after each rain.

  Klay felt uncomfortable in his jacket and tie, but he was pleased with what was about to take place. In a few minutes, in a quiet room upstairs, Eady would tell him their Agency relationship was over. He was more than ready to hear it. And if that was not why Eady had invited him tonight, then he had something to tell Eady. He was quitting. And not just the CIA. The Sovereign, too.

  He knew what Terry Krieger was. He had witnessed his work up close, in Congo. It had been the dry season, maybe eight years ago—he could not be sure of the year, only the season and the victims. Klay had been on assignment, doing a story on the environmental impacts of minerals mining. Bernard was his fixer. They stayed in Kisie, a remote mining town in North Kivu. A South African mining company owned the rights to the area’s tin ore.

  Perseus Group had a training camp nearby. The camp was supposed to be training Congo’s military to fight the rebel groups that popped up around every mine, taxing commerce in and out. In reality, Perseus Group was security for the mines. He and Bernard had been in Kisie two days when rebels attacked, butchering their way through the town before seizing control of the country’s most profitable tin and cobalt operations. More than three hundred people—men, women, children—were slaughtered. Klay got a good look at the rebels’ weapons. They were PG-15s, Perseus Group’s version of the AR-15.

  Six weeks later, Krieger’s people rode in on big South African armored personnel carriers called Mambas, firing PK machine guns, and wiped the rebels out. Two hundred more people died. As payment, Perseus Group took a half share in Kisie’s mining operations, which Klay was sure had been Krieger’s strategy from the beginning. No one reported either of the massacres. He had not reported them. Kisie was just another African insurgency put down. Perseus Group was outside of scope. And now he worked for the man.

  Ever since Krieger’s hologram event, Klay’s nightmares had become more frequent and more intense. He had been reliving the accident in Indonesia on and off for more than a decade. Bernard’s murder had twisted itself into that nightmare. And both of these deaths were threads woven into the formative tragedy in his life, which had shaped him and his dreams since he was a child. A child who had witnessed his mother’s murder.

  No. He would not work for Terry Krieger. His work for the CIA was over, too.

  He pressed the small black doorbell.

  By the time he left this building, he’d be free to press the reset button on his life. What that meant, he didn’t yet know. He could always become an embalmer, lay people out in a box again instead of on the page. He could write obits—charming little tales about men and women who’d led surprising, underappreciated lives. Buy a house “down the shore,” as they said back home, finally get that Chesapeake Bay retriever, find a lover, lead a charming, underappreciated life of his own.

  The door opened. An older black man in a waiter’s uniform greeted him.

  “Hello, Arno,” Klay said.

  “Good evening, Mr. Klay. Mr. Eady’s expecting you upstairs.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The club’s charter hung just inside the door.

  To foster mutual improvement, education, and enlightenment, convivial men the world over find pleasure and recreation in association with others like minded to relieve the spirit of what some call the monotony of domestic life and the routine and toil of business. The Club provides its members with a place to confess what they would not share with wives or family . . .

  “No women then,” Klay said, reading it on his first visit to Eady’s club.

  “They say Pamela Harriman made herself an exception, but no,” Eady said. “No women.” The lower hall and stairwell were lined with portraits of the club’s past members. Eady pointed some out as they walked. “Theodore, not Franklin,” he said of the Roosevelts. “The man himself,” introduced Major General William J. Donovan. Brown Brothers Harriman, the Goldman Sachs of its day, was well represented over the years. “Some of the Wise Men,” Eady continued, indicating Harriman, Acheson, Kennan, Bohlen, and John J. McCloy—“another Philadelphia man and a friend.” Eady winked. “Ford—no, by the way,” he said of Nixon.

  “A lot of old white men,” Klay said.

  “That’s true,” Eady said, “but we’re changing. That’s all I can say. I can’t talk about living members.”

  Klay scanned the gallery. The portraits were not only all white men, he realized, they were all dead white men.

  On his next visit Klay arrived early, so
Arno Tyne had directed him upstairs to wait. As he climbed the stairs, he heard the local NPR station blaring Bill Clinton’s scratchy drawl. Upon reaching the second floor he was surprised to find the ex-president sitting forward in a wingback chair, that big red nose, puffy white hair, and confident smile working cheerily on a dour William Rehnquist. Clinton was taller than he’d expected; Rehnquist was frailer. “If you like those Hush Puppies,” Clinton was saying, patting the chief justice’s bony forearm, “the chukkas with arch support will completely change your life.”

  The second floor was dark and empty tonight, so Klay continued up the stairs to the top floor. He heard voices as he climbed and recognized the cadence of Eady’s low murmur set against loud, unfamiliar bursts. Klay hesitated. He had thought he’d have Eady to himself tonight. He stepped quietly, and arrived at the doorway without drawing attention.

  Eady sat in an oxblood leather wingback, on the opposite side of the room, beneath a small painting. He held a pipe in one hand, and had one leg crossed over the other. He was talking to a stranger who looked to be about Eady’s age, but instead of sporting thick white hair like Eady, the man’s head was bald and dotted with liver spots. The man wore a brown suit, white dress shirt, and cowboy boots. He had a big, hard gut that looked like it could take a punch. Something about the man told Klay it had.

  Still unobserved, Klay tried and failed to get a bead on the men’s relationship. Eady wore his enigmatic smile, and there was something slightly off in his companion’s loud laugh. The stranger grabbed a fistful of mixed nuts from a dish on a table between them. He raised a hand in the air and called out, “Alfred!”

  Which is when they noticed Klay.

  “Well, here he is,” the stranger said, dusting salt from his hands.

  Klay shook Eady’s hand, reflexively making his mortician’s assessment. It was something that happened, growing up in a funeral home, working as a door greeter. Most people die of old age, and their mourners tend to be elderly also. Shake enough elderly hands and you develop an ability to intuit a person’s state of health. The grip and musculature of a handshake could give you an idea of how many years a person had left.

  Klay felt a reasonable hump of muscle between Eady’s thumb and index finger, and solid musculature among his metacarpals. The creping in the skin on the back of Eady’s hand was normal, too. Things must have been going well with his treatments, Klay thought. Or maybe it was still early. He’d never asked Eady what form of cancer he had or its stage. If he didn’t hear the details tonight, he promised himself he would call Ruth later in the week.

  The stranger’s grip, by contrast, was firm and calloused, the hand of someone who did more than he appeared to do.

  “Have a seat, son,” the stranger said. Klay didn’t like it. He didn’t like sitting with his back to the room, and he didn’t like this stranger. Most unsettling of all, he didn’t know why. His father used to have a saying for people who rubbed him the wrong way, “I don’t like that guy. I got to get to know him better.” Klay sat down.

  “Sir?” Arno said to Klay.

  “Wonder what he’ll have,” the stranger said.

  “Sorry,” Klay said. “Who are you?”

  The man raised a glass to his lips, chuckling, and sipped his drink.

  Eady put a hand on Klay’s sleeve. “We’ll get to that in a minute, Tom.” He arched an eyebrow. Arno was waiting.

  “I’ll have a bourbon.”

  “Vance and I are sampling a fine Japanese single malt,” the stranger said.

  “Bourbon works for me,” Klay said. “Booker’s if you have it.”

  The stranger looked at Klay over the rim of his glass. “This Yamazaki’s worth twice that Kentucky mash, and I’m footing the bill.”

  “Double then,” Klay said.

  Arno nodded.

  Klay waited.

  It was nearly midnight. They were the club’s only guests. The room’s silence was broken only by the sound of scratching clocks. There were clocks throughout the club, on walls, on top of tables and shelves. More than one corner held a grandfather clock. Eady’s fingers strummed the armrest of his leather wingback chair. The stranger leaned forward, took two olives from a dish, and popped them into his mouth. Wedding ring, single-button cuffs, Bulova watch. He fished the pits from his mouth and added them to a small pile on a cocktail napkin. Agency, Klay concluded.

  “Ah! Here we are,” the stranger said, accepting two scotches and Klay’s bourbon from a silver tray Arno held.

  “Thank you, Arno,” Eady said. “We’ll be about an hour.”

  The guest shook his head. “Less,” he said, and tossed a cocktail stick onto Arno’s tray.

  Less? Nothing took less to say than what Klay wanted to hear: “It’s over.” “We’re done.” Klay looked the man over. Maybe he should get to know this guy better after all.

  Arno scooped up the olive pits with a napkin. “Yes, Mr. Eady.”

  “You got any real food, Arno?” the stranger said. “Some wings or something?”

  Eady closed his eyes and pursed his lips in both apology and permission for Arno to exit.

  “Okay, okay,” the man said. “No food then.”

  “So,” Eady began.

  The man’s left hand shot up, and Eady fell silent. The man held it in the air and together they listened to the hiss of Arno’s hand descending the stair rail. When the hiss stopped and what sounded like the bottom step creaked, the stranger lowered his hand, picked up his drink, and offered a toast. “Name is Will Barrow. Joke if you like. Cheers!”

  Klay sat without touching his drink.

  “What’s the matter?” Barrow said, raising an eyebrow.

  “I like to know what I’m toasting,” Klay said.

  “Not what I hear.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “From what I understand you’ll drink to your breakfast.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you don’t always meet your deadline because a story’s gone cold. It means I can smell it on your breath, Mr. Klay, and you haven’t had your first sip. It makes you vulnerable. Same way sending money to a family of stick-poor Indonesians makes you vulnerable.”

  Klay resisted the urge to turn to Eady. His payments to Adri’s family had been the secret within his secret. Eady had shared it with this man.

  “Logistics, Tom,” Eady interjected. “Necessary. Now that I’m gone, I wanted you to meet Mr. Barrow. Mr. Barrow is—”

  “I know who he is.”

  “Maybe,” Barrow said. “Maybe not. Are you going to drink that?”

  Klay looked at the brown liquid in his glass. “A drink’s about the company.”

  “The company,” Barrow echoed. He leaned back, pulled an ankle onto his knee, then laced his fingers behind his head, and stared at Klay.

  “Tom,” Eady said. “I’d have preferred to introduce this proposal to you myself, one-on-one, the way we’ve always communicated. But . . . well . . . my situation has forced me to accelerate things. Sitting behind a camera most of my life made me a patient man. Too patient it turns out. I’m having to learn to change that. What I have to say is something I hope you will accept and understand and, whatever your decision, that you will keep it confidential. Among us. Here.”

  Eady was babbling. Eady didn’t babble.

  Klay studied the painting above Eady’s chair. It was a Monet, it turned out. The simple painting consisted of a large black rock shrouded in mist. What made it powerful was Monet’s decision to emphasize the mist, not the rock. The curtain, not the stage.

  “I won’t beat around the bush, Tom. The Sovereign has a long-standing, symbiotic relationship with the Agency because of the work we do as—”

  “For Chrissake.” Barrow turned to Klay. “It’s simple. With Vance out, we’re out.”

  “I understand,” Klay said.


  “No,” Barrow said. “You don’t.”

  “I’m fine with it,” Klay said.

  “We’re not. We don’t care to be out.”

  “We can’t, Tom. Not now,” Eady agreed. “I’ve been in place most of my career. So long I don’t know which came first. I’m proud of my service, and I want—”

  “Not interested,” Klay said. “It would be inappropriate for me, for the work, to continue given this material change in circumstance, without you in place, Vance.”

  Jesus, Klay thought. It came out sounding like Luca Brasi’s wedding speech.

  “Tom—”

  Barrow laughed. “Would it be inappropriate? Because I would hate to be goddamn inappropriate when it comes to the work.” Barrow raised his fingers and put air quotes around the word “work.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Barrow tossed another handful of nuts into his mouth.

  Eady said, “Tom, we have a mission for you. It’s more than you’ve done for us in the past. You’d be in a complicated and potentially—”

  “Vance,” Barrow interrupted, chewing, “why don’t you and I go around on this again. I’m not sold on this horse.”

  “We are out of time, Will. I said I’ll handle this.”

  “And I said we have another way into it,” Barrow challenged.

  “We have no one positioned the way Tom is, and you know it.”

  “You want to go on the record with him, then?” Barrow asked.

  Eady looked at Klay. “I do.”

  “With this man here?”

  “He is our best chance. Tom, this is about Ras Botha. A chance to take down Botha for good.”

  Klay sat back in his chair and waited.

  “A South African prosecutor has gotten her hands on a cache of documents which,” Eady explained, “could unseat South Africa’s president. We want the prosecutor to succeed.”