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

“Coffee, Admiral?”

“Does a bear shit in the woods?” Tighe replied.

Krieger smiled. Does a bear shit in the woods?

“My grandfather used to say that,” Krieger said.

“That right?”

Gerhardt Krieger used to say a lot of things: “Never burn a bridge.” “Never trust a man with a mustache.” “Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine.” “Clean your fuckin’ rifle, boy.” His grandfather had been a gem, the multimillionaire inventor of the Krieger Strip. “God gave me the idea while I sitting on the can,” he liked to say. “I guess he knew he couldn’t trust me with much, but it was a good one.” The Krieger Strip was about as simple an idea as a person could come up with, except no one ever had: aluminum trim to protect the edge of a car door. It was enough to make the Krieger family rich for generations. “Because Detroit produces a lot of cars with doors on them,” his grandfather said.

Krieger’s father, the Colonel, had been an entrepreneur, too. He invented a synthetic shoe sole that was lighter and lasted longer than Vibram. Madison Avenue hated the material, but the US Army loved it and the Krieger Boot Company further compounded the family’s considerable wealth. “Because,” as the Colonel said, “the Army produces a lot of soldiers with two feet.”

Krieger was not invited to work for either of his family’s businesses. It was a family rule, started by his puritanical grandfather and passed down: Kriegers accept no charity. You make your own way or you get nothing. After the Academy and the Marines, Krieger’s first invention was Raptor Systems, a privatized army to fill the gap between what Washington politicians promise and what they do. Raptor Systems had been an extraordinary success. “Because,” as Krieger liked to say, “Washington produces a lot of politicians with two moving lips.”

Then came Iraq.

“I said, beautiful ship you have here, Terry . . .” Tighe held up a cigar. “You mind?”

“You’re my guest,” Krieger said.

Mapes returned with a silver pot on a tray and poured Tighe’s coffee. Krieger watched, expressionless, as Tighe cut his cigar.

“Here you are.” Tighe dropped his cigar cap into Mapes’s open palm. She accepted it, but glanced at Krieger deliberately. Krieger smiled, knowing what she could do to Tighe with that open palm.

“Let’s get down to business, shall we, Admiral?”

Tighe chuckled and considered his cigar. “This is just a passex, Terry. A courtesy call out of respect for all you’ve done for the services.”

Krieger caught the condescension in Tighe’s voice. It was brass like Tighe who’d torpedoed Raptor Systems. Raptor Systems had gone in when the US military wouldn’t, protected Americans when the government couldn’t, given diplomatic cover to their military and military cover to their diplomats, and had gotten them out alive. Not some of them out. All of them. Not a single American client was lost on Raptor Systems’ watch.

Instead of awarding him a medal, they crucified him. Dragged him to Washington and strung him up before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, where that overfed hedgehog called him a war profiteer . . . a mercenary . . . a paid assassin. The secular libtards wanted to make America safe again—no more 9/11s—but they didn’t want to pay for that retasking. They wanted it done, but they didn’t want to know how it was done, he told the committee.

“The battle for America was won by mercenaries—like me,” he argued, and recited the names of the Revolutionary War heroes whose statues filled Lafayette Park directly across the street from the White House: “Von Steuben, Kosciusko, Rochambeau, Lafayette—German, Polish, French—each a foreigner hired by General Washington to fight for America’s freedom.” He concluded his congressional testimony with a single question. “In Baghdad, on your CODELs outside the wire, when your delegations ventured out into that violent unknown, who did you ask to protect you? Was it an overworked soldier on his third deployment? Or was it Raptor Systems?”

The answer they gave him was Never Again. Never Again would Raptor Systems be awarded a US government security contract. Terry Krieger would have to go elsewhere for his supper.

Thrown into the briar patch by men and women like Tighe, Krieger had emerged with an idea that made him more powerful than ever.

He called it Perseus Group.

Blackballed by the world’s biggest military and its government, stripped of his access, Krieger had needed a new business model. His years operating in conflict zones taught him that when it came to combat there was one resource that was more important than personnel, plant, or even firepower.

Fifteen years later, peel back the complex network of Perseus Group enterprises—security services firms; high-tech and military design companies; surveillance systems providers; media and entertainment properties; logistics, insurance, and transport enterprises; even Krieger’s conservation and community stabilization efforts—and you would find one powerful idea. It was an idea as simple as car-door edging and as necessary as army boots: intelligence.

Strategically useful information has one significant shortcoming when it comes to the individuals who possess it: intelligence is very difficult to trade. An individual with secrets to sell has to engage in a very risky process: identify a buyer; secure an audience; negotiate a price; arrange payment; make the handoff; and conceal sudden, unexplainable wealth. At each node, the seller is exposed, and the cost of a mistake could mean one’s life.

Krieger established a series of funds to compensate an elite group of people for the secrets they carried. Membership in a fund was by invitation only. The minimum buy-in was 20 million dollars’ worth of intelligence, valued by Krieger alone. In exchange, an investor received a percentage of their fund’s performance.

His fund system was more art than science, he told his investors. Often the Fund, as he referred to the collective, identified value where none had seemed to exist. Pakistani salt has little to do with Sri Lankan life insurance, until you look at the shipping lane that runs from Gwadar Port directly past Colombo, Sri Lanka, and take into account which families control the salt and insurance industries