In the Company of Killers Bryan Christy (good books to read for beginners .txt) 📖

Klay wanted to watch through the door’s keyhole the way he often did, but Scalise’s men stood beside it. So he opened a box of prayer cards and began inserting them in the slits in the oak holder. He rearranged flower baskets in the chapel, pulled flower sprays off one rack and stuck them onto another. He wiped the casket down with a chamois cloth. An hour passed. He repositioned more flower sprays. He spilled a box of prayer cards and knelt down to pick them up. He tacked photographs of people who weren’t related to the body in the chapel onto the memory board.

Finally, his father’s door opened and Scalise emerged.

“I’m sorry, Nick,” his father said.

Scalise didn’t respond. He adjusted his French cuffs. He nodded curtly to his driver, who went outside to start the car. The other man crossed the lobby and took a position beside the front door with his hand on the latch. When Scalise reached the door, the man opened it. But Scalise paused. He turned and looked directly at Klay. Tom had never encountered eyes like Scalise’s. They were small and the deepest black he had ever seen. “This your boy?”

“That’s my son,” Jack Klay answered.

Scalise put on his hat and left.

•   •   •

It was Christmastime now, still 1977. The kitchen smelled like sugar cookies. His mother asked if he and Sean wanted to help her pick out a tree. Klay ran into the front room to get his coat and mittens from the closet under the stairs. Sean ran upstairs to get their mother’s purse. Klay’s shoe had come untied. “We do not have untied shoes, uncombed hair, or shirttails out” was one of his father’s rules. Klay sat on a bench in front of the living room’s faux fireplace to tie his shoe. He was bent over, fumbling with his laces, when his mother walked past. She wore a red wool coat and black shoes.

“Wait for me,” he said, his outsized fingers fumbling the laces.

She kept walking.

He called to her again.

Finally he got his shoe tied. He was racing Sean down the morgue ramp to the driveway when his mother turned the key in the ignition. The explosion tore the doors off the garage. Klay and his brother were thrown into the street.

Nicky Scalise sent white Asiatic lilies to the funeral. “My condolences to you and your remaining family,” the card read.

•   •   •

Klay lay on the bed in Botha’s damp prison cell. He wept until he had nothing left. Then he got to his feet. He was calm. He could see beyond this room, beyond the cage he’d put himself in. He had been the boy on Krieger’s buffalo hunt. Naïve to the danger standing next to him. Unarmed in the company of killers.

•   •   •

Eliminating him was the CIA’s next logical move. Botha believed it. Why else move him to solitary, with Thabo posted outside his cell? Klay didn’t look at Botha’s laptop. He didn’t need to do research. He knew what was coming.

He poured a glass of Botha’s cognac and waited. He did not have to wait long.

A DIFFERENT SET OF TEETH

Zambian Airspace

Klay woke bound in dual shoulder restraints. Barrow sat in an oversized leather recliner across a table from him. They were in the air. Behind Barrow the private jet’s interior looked like a well-appointed home theater. The plane appeared to be empty.

“Mistakes were made,” Barrow said, dabbing his cheek. “Possibly we should have involved you from the beginning. Hard to know. These things can go so many ways.”

Klay had a pounding headache, a sore neck, and pain in the middle of his back. He didn’t remember anything. The swelling under Barrow’s left eye might explain his restraints.

“We’re not renditioning you here.” Barrow chuckled, running his eyes over the jet’s zebrawood paneling. “Wanted to get that out of the way straight off. Ketamine does pack a punch, though.”

“Fuck yourself, Barrow. If that’s even your name.”

“It is.”

“Good. I’ll want that for my story.”

“Oh, I don’t think there’ll be a story here.” Barrow reached beside his seat and set a briefcase on the table. It was an old barrister-style leather bag that opened from the top. Barrow removed a thick accordion folder. He found the file he wanted, opened it, and laid a large color photograph on the table in front of Klay.

It was Bernard’s body on an army cot. A white plastic sheet had been pulled back to make the photograph. Barrow tapped the photo with his pen. “This gentleman, not wanting all those Perseus bells and whistles on his elephants, had to go.”

He removed another photograph. It was Simon Lekorere, the politician, dressed as he’d been in the passenger seat of Bernard’s Land Rover. His throat was sliced wide open. “Like a vacuum cleaner hose,” Barrow observed. “Collateral.”

Another photograph. A fat man hung by a rope, eyes bulging. It was the purple Croc on the floor beneath the body’s bare foot that brought it around for Klay. The Filipino priest. Martelino.

“Suicide. Or the look of it. Maybe he hung himself. Maybe he got hung. Your story made it a question with an answer.”

“The priest’s dead?”

“Very,” Barrow said. He tapped the photo. “Krieger was pleased with this one, yessir. His troublesome priest. Some lovely stuff you’ve done.”

Klay gritted his teeth with fatigue and frustration. “What’s the point of this?”

“Then there’s Mr. Gatt. Found him washed up on Cebu, Bobby Maxwell–style. We’re not sure how he fits in yet. Did you know him?”

Klay looked. An obese man’s body was pale and swollen to sea-creature proportions. “I have no idea who that is. What are you telling me?”

Barrow continued, talking as much to himself as to Klay. “Krieger dismissed your Mr. Eady at first. Called him a lackey. But Eady kept at it, didn’t he?” Barrow tapped each of the photographs. “Desperate to find his way in. Drove him crazy. Tried a couple of PR stories. ‘Angola’s New Hope.’ ‘Congo’s