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

Then, a third, just hours from the last. “URGENT!!!!!! Tom, I have tried repeatedly to reach you. Urgent personnel matter. Sharon requires response IMMEDIATELY! Pls. provide times for a conference call! Alexander Porfle.”

Klay ate a piece of chicken, dipped a French fry in the ketchup.

He opened an email from Erin. “Hi Tom. Well, they cut me. Legends had to Fall. Hahaha. Don’t worry. I’m happy to go. Grant and I may move to Denver. Thought you’d be interested in the below.”

She had included a link to a New York Times article. Klay clicked on the link and read the headline: “Times Journalist Struck in Hit-and-Run.”

He scanned the story. Raynor McPhee had been returning to his apartment around one a.m., crossing Berry Street in Brooklyn, when a car struck him from behind. No witnesses. Nothing caught on neighborhood surveillance cameras. Raynor suffered two broken legs, a concussion, and a broken wrist. Police were investigating.

Beneath the article was a box with links to three of Raynor’s most recent articles. The latest was “The World’s New OK Corral.” Klay clicked on it.

The story opened with an anecdote about the widow of a slain Mexican investigative journalist whose phones had been tapped by the Mexican government. The source for the surveillance technology was not Mexican, however. It was Perseus Group. Raynor’s story described a battle for supremacy for global strategic services taking place between Perseus Group and a Russian company called Amur Tactical Resources. The article suggested a personal rivalry between the companies’ CEOs. Klay had heard Dmitri Yurchenko’s name but knew him only as an oligarch tied to Putin. Yurchenko, Raynor wrote, was a traditional mercenary, interested in winning government and rebel group military contracts. Perseus Group was more sophisticated. “It’s not just about selling instruments of war for him [Krieger] anymore. It’s about risk attendant to conflict and the return he can get from manipulating both,” a former Perseus Group executive was quoted saying in the story. There was only brief mention of The Sovereign, listed as one of several recent high-profile media acquisitions, “. . . moves industry analysts consider part of an effort by Perseus to control its image by acquiring targeted media and entertainment properties.”

Klay logged in to Signal and sent Raynor a quick message. “Sorry to hear about your accident. These boys play rough. Overseas at moment. Let’s chat on return. Meantime, get well. You’re needed. Tom K.”

He drank a beer and finished his chicken. His fries had gone cold. When he first started traveling for The Sovereign, he’d eaten fearlessly, the more exotic the better. Late stage balut—duck embryo—the beak and feathers filling his mouth. Pig’s blood soup. Decomposed sardines recovered from a buried pot, served by a grinning ex-headhunter on Sarawak. Sometimes, he ate foods he abhorred in order to get into his targets: Tiger blood with a Siberian trader. Raw whale meat with a trafficker in Shizuoka. The hands of a Cameroonian gorilla he’d known by name. He vomited that last meal afterwards. It felt worse than cannibalism.

His favorite among his weird meals, not for the taste but for what it signified, was koi pla—raw fish mixed with live red ants—first enjoyed from a rusting hubcap while motoring up the Mekong River on the border of Laos in northeastern Thailand. That trip—the distance he traveled to get there, the smells he encountered—the sweetness of lemongrass and coriander, the pungency of dried fish and durian. The soft, melodic rhythms he overheard in markets and on buses. Heat so damp and thick you could swim in it. All of it evoked images of his father’s generation off to a land many would not return from, to a war that would forever change those who came back. Mourning veterans of the Korean and Vietnam Wars passed through Klay Funeral Home so often during Klay’s childhood that he came subconsciously to consider travel to Asia to be an important passage on the way to becoming a man. Thailand was his first Asian trip, and though he would later travel the world, that trip marked a break for him, a flag planted in the dirt of his life that said, I am no longer in Philadelphia. I am not Jack Klay’s son. I am free.

He opened another beer. Years later, he no longer experimented when it came to food overseas. No still water. No unskinned fruit. No raw vegetables. Nothing washed. He ordered the same meal every place he went anywhere in the world.

Fluke. That’s why he’d stopped eating exotic local meals, why he insisted on the same reliable chicken and fries no matter where he went. Years after that first trip, he went back to Thailand and reprised that first meal right down to the hubcap. He ended up in the hospital. It turned out, koi pla carries a parasite, a fluke that causes liver cancer and kills tens of thousands of people every year. You are very lucky, the nurse in Chiang Rai told him. His ailment was merely food poisoning. It wasn’t the risk of liver cancer that made him change his diet, though. It was the day and a half he spent kneeling in a tiled bathroom. He vomited through an appointment with a government official and nearly lost his story. Joyriding street food wasn’t worth it.

He opened ProtonMail and composed an update to Eady. There wasn’t much to say. He and Tenchant were in place. He would be interviewing Botha in the morning. He hit send.

A response appeared immediately, surprising him.

“Investigation window closing,” Eady replied.

Closing? He’d just arrived.

Klay replied with a question mark.

Eady wrote: “She’s got a leak. Botha secondary. SECURE HER FILES.”

Eady had sent him to investigate Botha. “A gift,” he’d said. “My last act as your handler.” Now his number one priority was Hungry’s files?

Klay stared at his computer screen. Eady had spelled it out in an email. Encrypted or not, Eady would never include such sensitive details in his correspondence. Something was wrong. Flukes happened in raw seafood. They