In the Company of Killers by Bryan Christy (ebook reader for pc and android .txt) 📕

Eady insisted Klay be schooled in the same basic techniques a career intelligence 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