In the Company of Killers

by Bryan Christy

  HERE LIES TOM KLAY

  Greenwood Cemetery

  Alexandria, Virginia

  He had killed before. That was his thought. A boy riding a bicycle. It was raining now, too, a soft rain, nearly a mist. Klay stood out of view on a rise far above the grave site, near the grave digger’s utility shed, watching Tenchant’s mourners arrive. He reminded himself that what he was seeing was their reality, not his. Tenchant was the victim of a terrible crime. Klay was in mourning for Tenchant, not because of him.

  “My husband,” Maggie had cried into the phone. “You promised,” she wept. “You promised me.”

  “Wife has no idea,” Barrow had said with a firmness suggesting he had gone to some length to be sure.

  “I’m so sorry, Maggie,” Klay said, and recited a version of what he knew she’d already been told. They went after the prosecutor’s task force, and Tenchant was there . . . It happened in seconds . . . He felt no pain . . .

  The hearse arrived. The funeral home’s staff opened umbrellas. Klay did not recognize the pallbearers. Three looked to be ex-military. The pallbearers lifted a blue steel casket, and the minister led them across the wet grass to a grave under a canvas tent. He wondered how many plots Maggie had purchased. Neither of them was from the area, he knew. He hoped life would carry Maggie and her unborn child too far away to ever come back to Tenchant’s side. Tenchant’s mother looked frail and older than Klay would have guessed. He found himself trying to imagine what had happened in that home to create Tenchant. What had happened in Krieger’s home, or in Eady’s? He knew what had happened in his.

  Fox and Snaps arrived in Fox’s Mazda. They waited for Erin and Grant before approaching the grave site. Erin’s heels stuck in the soft earth as she walked, and she took her fiancé’s arm for balance. Klay’s eyes lingered on the couple. Porfle showed up in an old brown MGB roadster he was restoring. A tear in the soft top had been patched with silver duct tape. He opened a pocket umbrella and joined the staff.

  Sharon stepped out of a white Range Rover, popped an umbrella, and waited for her husband. She nodded hello as she passed Porfle and the journalists. She paid her respects to Maggie. Porfle broke off from the journalists and walked toward her. A gust of wind caught his umbrella, and he paused to fix it. Then he appeared unsure which way to go. He looked expectantly from Sharon and her people back to Snaps, Fox, and the others. In the end he stood alone.

  “She’ll be taken care of,” a gravelly voice said. Klay stiffened. Eady took Klay’s elbow in his gloved fingers. “It was an Agency assignment, technically,” Eady said, looking down the hill at the mourners. “She and the baby will be taken care of. I will see to it.”

  The boy’s family will be taken care of. I will see to it.

  “Good,” Klay said. It was all he could manage.

  Eady stepped into Klay’s view. He wore an Irish driving cap and a gray trench coat. “I thought I might see you sooner,” Eady said, studying Klay.

  “I needed some time,” Klay said.

  “It will be difficult,” Barrow had advised. “You’ll need to maintain your self-control. Give him no indication that you know. You’ll have talked to me. He’ll want to confirm that. Be honest. Make him curious.”

  “Barrow reached out to you, I presume,” Eady said.

  “He did.”

  When Klay didn’t say more, Eady said, “We do what we do to protect them, Tom. The people here. This nation of ours. Sometimes we fail. Tenchant respected you. He was grateful to have had a chance to work with you.”

  Klay knew if he didn’t access genuine grief he would lose Eady. He forced himself to remember his mother’s casket lying above its grave. He recalled his grandfather standing beside him and his brother, Sean. His father standing alone. It was the only time he would ever see his father cry. Sadness sparked on the flint, then caught. Klay wiped a tear from his eye. “You spoke to him?”

  Klay wanted to take Eady’s throat in his hands.

  “I did. Just before the attack, I expect,” Eady replied. “He was happy, excited. He said you found something . . . ?”

  “I did. Did he tell you?”

  “I didn’t want him to use the unsecure line. I told him to have you call me back . . .”

  Eady waited, but Klay did not respond. “He told me he was doing good work, Tom. That’s what each of us hopes for in the end, isn’t it? To say, ‘I did a good job with the time God gave me.’”

  Klay watched the undertaker hand each of Tenchant’s mourners a carnation. One by one they stepped forward and laid a flower on Tenchant’s casket.

  “Come see me. My apartment,” Eady said. “We’ll talk.”

  Klay shook his head no.

  “We need to talk, Tom.”

  “Don’t be eager, but don’t play too hard to get,” Barrow had counseled.

  “I don’t want to see anyone, Vance.”

  “Come out to the farm then. Ruth is visiting her sister. We’ll catch a trout for supper. Just the two of us. I have something, Tom. Something you need to see.”

  “Did you know?” Klay said.

  “Did I know?”

  Don’t tell him you suspect anything. Too risky.

  “Barrow didn’t send me to help Hungry. He sent me to discredit her.”

  Eady lowered his umbrella. His eyes narrowed. Raindrops hurried along his face and dripped off his chin. “Why on earth would he do that?”

  Klay wiped the rain from his own face. “Barrow’s got something going with Terry Krieger.”

  Eady was fully alert now. “Barrow does?”

  Klay nodded. “He’s got to be stopped.”

  A DEATH IN CAMELOT

  Fauquier County, Virginia

  Klay drove his Land Cruiser west toward Eady’s Virginia horse farm. The Toyota was more than thirty years old with two hundred thousand miles on it, but it was in good condition. He took the Warrenton exit and headed south on 29, then west again, horse farms of Virginia’s wealthy galloping up beside him. He wound his way through the narrowing country roads, wondering as he always did if he’d missed his turn, when a white three-board fence appeared, the Eadys’ front pasture.

  Klay’s most recent visit had been Fourth of July. Eady and his guests had shot skeet from the back hill. Vance, not surprisingly, an excellent shot.

  The property had been purchased by Eady’s banker father, a dollar-a-year man under McNamara. “His brothers and sister haven’t set foot here since the funeral,” Eady’s wife Ruth confided once. “Haven’t looked at a bill, either, though they’re happy enough to question our expenses. Hyenas waiting for Vance to stumble . . .”

  Klay wondered if it could be that simple. He guessed Eady earned about a million dollars a year as head of The Sovereign. Then there was his Agency pay.

  Klay followed the paved driveway nearly a half mile up toward the main house. The house had been an inn originally. It had nine fireplaces, four upstairs and a big walk-in that filled the dining room. There was a flagstone patio in the back. Most of the horse stables had been converted to a kennel, where Eady kept his prizewinning Jack Russell terriers. Two seldom-used guest cottages lay south of the stables. The spring-fed pond was stocked with rainbows, blue catfish, and triploid grass carp to keep it clean.

  Klay pulled into the drive’s final horseshoe and parked behind Eady’s Grand Cherokee. Anyone who knew Eady well enough to visit knew he kept a key under the mat outside the summer kitchen door. No one who visited twice ever bent to look for it. The Eadys never locked the house.

  Klay stepped from his vehicle, and a dog shot toward him from beneath a row of boxwoods. A screen door slammed. “Goddamn it!” Eady yelled as he strode briskly across the driveway, flanked by a pack of Jack Russells. “Off!” he yelled.

  The jumping dog was big for a Jack Russell. Klay didn’t know whether to pet it or catch it. He was trying to do both when
Eady kicked at it, nearly losing his loafer.

  “Off!” Eady repeated. “Sorry, Tom. Hankins down the hill lets his goddamn heeler roam free. Got on Integrity’s Desire. I drowned ’em all but this one got away. Off!”

  Klay looked down at the energetic mutt. It had the head of a Jack Russell, but its tall body was thicker and spotted the color of newspaper. There was a black bull’s-eye above its right hind leg.

  “Anyway, thanks for coming, Tom,” Eady said in his phlegmy bass, offering his hand.

  Klay’s mind flashed to Barrow’s words. Bring him into the light, he had said. We’ll take care of the rest. Meaning: find a way to make Eady vulnerable.

  Klay turned and reached for something inside his vehicle.

  “Did you bring an overnight bag?”

  Klay looked up to see Eady moving toward the back of his Land Cruiser, talking, trying to see inside.

  “Just this.” Klay showed Eady his backpack.

  “Good.” Eady turned. “Good. Okay. Come on in, Tom.”

  Klay followed Eady and his tide of Jack Russells through a door into the summer kitchen. Eady continued through the room and stepped into the main house, causing the dogs to surge ahead of him. “Good dogs,” he called, and shut the door.

  Klay and Eady stood alone in the summer kitchen with its thick whitewashed stone walls, deep-set windows, and cool Mexican-tile floor. It was appropriate that it would happen here, Klay thought. This had always been his favorite room in the house. It smelled of woodsmoke, fresh fish on newspaper, and cloves. Klay’s father used to say that smell was the most powerful of man’s senses. The smell of this room was what Klay conjured when he thought of home. Not lilies or embalming fluid.

  This was the room where Eady and Ruth shared morning coffee sitting at the round maple table. A bottle of Lagavulin and two glasses were on the table now. One of the glasses, with liquor already in it, was in front of the spindle-back chair Eady favored. Klay took the chair opposite. Eady’s fishing hat lay in the seat of a third chair on top of the day’s Washington Post, folded to the crosswords.

  Eady filled two glasses of water from the sink, served Klay, and sat down. His hair didn’t look as if he’d recently worn a hat.

  “Could use this,” he growled, pouring Klay a whiskey. He raised his glass, hesitated when Klay didn’t join him, then drained his scotch in a swallow. He set his glass down on the table in front of the third chair, but did not release it. Klay looked at Eady’s hand. It was too close to the table edge, too close to the hat in the third chair. “That the way you want to play this, Vance?”

  Eady tilted the glass to look into it, tapped it hard on the table, and refilled it. He folded his hands in front of him and turned to look out the small window.

  It was a bright, clear day. Klay knew the view without taking his eyes off of Eady. Below the window was a flower garden with a bird bath held up by a concrete cherub whose arm had broken off. Farther on, down the hill, was Eady’s trout pond.

  “Do you remember how you started, Tom?”

  “You are a murderer,” Klay said.

  Eady unfolded his hands. “Not at the magazine,” he continued. “How you and I started. Your training . . .”

  Klay wanted to smash Eady’s head into the table, lean on his skull until his temples caved and his blue eyes leaked. But that was outside of scope, he told himself. “We were down there,” Klay said flatly, nodding out the window. “You looked at my fingers and said if I learned to tie a Parachute Adams and could catch a rainbow on a double-haul cast in a good wind, I’d know everything I needed to know about espionage. Wouldn’t need the Farm.”

  “And you never did. Need it, I mean,” Eady said, adding, as he had those many years ago, “Make the fish see what you want them to see . . .”

  “Well, you did that,” Klay said.

  “We’re all the fish. Tom.”

  “I’m counting on that,” Klay replied. He was done humoring this remorseless bastard.

  Eady nodded, poured himself another, and looked across the kitchen at a framed photograph of himself standing beside Nelson Mandela. Eady had covered Mandela’s release from Robben Island for The Sovereign. In the photo Mandela, gray haired, dressed in a gold and brown silk Madiba shirt smiled fondly while Eady, still on assignment, cameras slung over both shoulders, beamed admiration.

  “Both of my brothers are Wall Street bankers, did I ever tell you that, Tom?” Eady said, still looking at the photograph. “Eight figures a year. My sister, a heart surgeon. You know what they’ve got?”

  Klay didn’t trust himself to respond. Rage was coursing through his body.

  Eady tapped his glass, nodding at something on his mind, and looked at Klay. “Satisfaction,” he said, drawing out the word. “They’ve been rewarded for their dedication. Their children respect them . . .” Eady held an imaginary camera and moved the tip of his index finger. “I took photographs. Snapshots of extinction on four legs.” He laughed. “On two legs,” he said with a bitter glance toward Mandela. “I thought I could make a difference. Were they grateful? Did they change? I was a fool. A naïve fool.”

  He drank. “There’s always a who, you like to say. Who am I? That’s what you want to know. Well, I’m a man who stopped pretending things would get better, that the cream always rises, that we’ll see more enlightened times. I stepped off that two-bit amusement ride and invested in the amusement park instead.”

  “You fucking smug . . .” Klay fought to control himself. He checked his watch. Almost time.

  Eady ignored him. He continued his monologue, drinking and looking toward the window. “At the Agency, we did exactly what Terry Krieger is doing. Or tried to. And who benefited? No one! We fucked it up, over and over. Say what you will, but Terry Krieger has vision. War is octagonal now. A multidimensional puzzle. Krieger versus Krieger versus Krieger. What value do I have in a world like that? What legacy do I leave?” Eady smiled. “But then I found one. I gave the puzzle master a piece he didn’t have.”

  “You sit here on your gentleman’s farm ordering the murder of innocent people to pad your fucking bank account? To feel meaningful? You recruited me with that song and dance about taking on Hitler, doing good in this twisted world. You are one of them, no better than the leg breakers I grew up with. Worse. You deserve what’s coming to you.”

  Eady leaned forward in his chair and peered out the window. “You came alone?”

  “Nobody’s in my truck, Vance.”

  “But I haven’t much time?”

  Klay stared at him.

  Eady got to his feet, then bent over slowly and picked up his fishing hat. Beneath it a Browning Hi-Power pistol lay coiled like a rattlesnake.

  Eady looked down at the pistol.

  He put the hat on and crossed to the sink, leaving the pistol on the chair. He picked up a bottle of orange juice from beside the sink and returned it to the refrigerator. He put a loaf of bread back in the bread box. “You could have your Pulitzer for this, Tom, if you play it right. It’s not too late. This story could have a different ending. Nobody would need to know. I’d support you, and Barrow would find a way to make it disappear. PGM will make you a hero. We can celebrate Hungry . . . her sacrifice. You’re a damn good journalist,” he said, with a question in his face.

  Klay picked up his backpack. “It’s over.”

  Eady sighed. The old man walked into an alcove beside the refrigerator, sat down on a bench, and began removing his loafers and socks. He reached for his waterproof boots. His hands were trembling.

  “You didn’t kill him,” Eady said, getting to his feet.

  “I know that. You did.”

  “Not the Kenyan,” Eady said. “The boy.”

  “The boy?”

  “The woman in Jakarta was one of ours. She drugged you. We found a body at the morgue, tossed it under your car.”

  K
lay felt life rush from his body like a tide. His heart dropped, his stomach fell, his legs turned as flaccid as seaweed. He saw the broken body of a dead boy lying on a damp street. The loss was real but it had not been Klay’s fault. In place of darkness, Klay felt a sublime emptiness. He had not killed that child.

  Klay looked into Eady’s eyes as he considered what Eady had done and why. The old man had staged the boy’s homicide to destabilize Klay, opening him to his CIA offer, ensuring that either way Klay would keep it quiet, leveraging Klay’s guilt over his mother’s murder to manipulate and control him for years.

  Klay struck Eady then, connecting just below the older man’s cheekbone. Eady went down, taking a net and fishing rods to the floor with him. He could have killed Eady with one punch, but he didn’t have to.

  “You become what you kill,” Bernard had warned him once. “So choose wisely.”

  Klay lifted Mandela’s photo off its nail and threw it across the room.

  Outside, he started his Toyota. In his rearview mirror he watched Eady emerge from his house wearing a fisherman’s vest and make his way unsteadily down the grassy slope, a fly rod in one hand, trailed by a pack of dogs.

  Klay adjusted his rearview. On the opposite slope two men descended toward the pond.

  He put the Land Cruiser in drive. After a few yards he stomped on the brake. The mutt with the bull’s-eye on its leg was sitting at the edge of the driveway, watching him with an expression that reminded him of a little chicken-stealing Kenyan dog he’d seen looking down at him from a rooftop.

  Klay opened his door and gave a short whistle.

  The dog didn’t jump in. It flew.

  WE BURY THEM ONE AT A TIME

  Kimber Conservancy, Zimbabwe

  Krieger’s G650 made another low pass to scare off a few stubborn waterbuck before circling wide and touching down on the Kimber’s airstrip. Pete Zoeller waited beside a freshly washed dark green Land Rover, his big sleeveless arms crossed over his thick chest.