In the Company of Killers, Bryan Christy [love story books to read .txt] 📗

But he was not an honest man.

•   •   •

The DC lunch crowd was heading back to their offices when Klay stepped out of his taxi in front of The Sovereign’s headquarters. Klay looked up at the wedge-shaped brick building and felt a twinge of pride. The Sovereign was about to celebrate its 150th anniversary. In a world of media bankruptcies, buyouts, mergers, and takeovers, The Sovereign had endured, protected against time by a gift from a railroad baron named Hiram Prendergast, and his cousin, a botany-loving inventor named Thomas Edison, who together had endowed the nonprofit institution in perpetuity. For the next 141 years, including the moment Klay stepped onto the sidewalk, a Prendergast had controlled The Sovereign.

Meanwhile the Sovereign Society had evolved from a producer of survey maps and expedition journals into the most widely recognized science-and-exploration media platform in the world—producer of four glossy magazines, two television channels, an Oscar-winning documentary film studio, a research institution, a website, travel services, licensed adventure products, and the planet’s most viewed social media. All of it collectively known as The Sovereign, voted the world’s most trusted media brand.

Klay climbed the marble steps. He walked rapidly, with his head down, shoulders stiff and rolled forward, as if he were wading into a brawl. He winced as he pushed the building’s heavy revolving door.

“Hi, Tonya,” he said to the guard behind her desk.

“Good afternoon, Tom. I’m glad you’re home safe,” she said, looking at his sling. “Mr. Eady?”

“Yes, please.”

Klay entered a small, oak-paneled elevator set slightly apart from the building’s four main lifts and pressed its only button. After a slow, rumbling ascent, Klay stepped off the elevator into a modern gallery of photographic images and exhibits arranged in a labyrinth. The photographs were eight feet tall and suspended from the ceiling on black wires. Several had been taken by Eady himself back when he was a staff photographer. Ahead Howard Carter stepped forward into Tutankhamen’s funerary chamber. A left turn and Dian Fossey bottle-fed a baby mountain gorilla at Karisoke. A right turn introduced Tsavo’s red elephants. In the labyrinth’s center squatted an original bathysphere, that one-eyed Volkswagen-on-a-rope that Beebe and Barton rode deeper into the ocean than any human had gone before.

Officially, the maze was designed to force visitors to reflect on their place in history and the potential each of us has to be an explorer. But Klay knew better. The top floor of The Sovereign was Vance Eady’s aerie. The labyrinth existed to remind people just who they were about to meet.

Eady stood in his secretary’s doorway, hands on hips, dressed as always—dark wool slacks, V-neck sweater over a white shirt, shined John Lobb shoes—like an Anglican minister relaxing between sermons on a perpetually autumn day. “Well,” the Society’s president and magazine’s editor in chief said as Klay approached. “That’s fine. Very fine, indeed. Welcome home.” He patted Klay’s shoulder gently and ushered him toward his office.

“Hello, Sally,” Klay said, nodding to Eady’s secretary as they passed.

The Sovereign’s beloved caretaker shook her gray head. “You boys,” she scolded. “Welcome home, Tom.”

“Hold my calls please, Sally,” Eady said. He led Klay into his office and closed the door. “I’m paying for a party at your place, aren’t I?” Eady said, and without waiting for Klay’s reply, asked, “Drink?”

Klay nodded. He tossed a Mongolian eagle hunter’s cap out of his way and took a seat on Eady’s worn leather sofa.

Eady crossed to a large standing globe beside his Resolute desk, split the globe in half, and withdrew two crystal whiskey glasses and a bottle of scotch, while Klay absently read for the hundredth time the lines from Kipling framed on the end table beside him.

NOW this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky,

And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.

As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back;

For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack . . .

Eady was indeed leader of a pack of journalists, photographers, and explorers who circled the world and brought their discoveries home. Every wall and flat surface in Eady’s office held some exotic treasure of Sovereign men and women returned: A blue-green dinosaur egg fossil, five curare-tipped poison darts in a jaguar-skin quiver. Unidentified teeth, disconnected bones, pieces of gnarled fur. A stuffed zebra head hung opposite Klay with its Well, what’s your excuse? expression. Next to the Kipling, a gold-ringed Kayan necklace had been turned into a table lamp. On one corner of Eady’s desk, an inverted hawksbill sea turtle shell held Eady’s car keys.

Klay’s gift to Eady hung on the wall behind the old man’s desk, a wooden loom strung with Indonesian double ikat cloth, purchased for Eady the day before Klay struck the boy. On receiving it, Eady quoted Henry Ward Beecher. “‘. . . the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up tomorrow . . .’”

It took Klay a few years to find his place at The Sovereign. He had thick wrists and fingers too broad for the Macs the staff used, so they bought him a PC and somebody dug up an old IBM keyboard from the basement as a joke, but the older design turned out to be easier for him to use, and the joke was on his colleagues. The keyboard clacked so loudly anyone on the east end of the third floor knew when he had an idea. He ignored the company dress code. Maybe it was the suits he’d worn as a boy, or the images of the bodies he’d dressed, but he couldn’t bring himself to wear khakis or a dress shirt. He dressed the way he did in the field.

No one asked him about his past directly. They scattered hints. “Did you see the piece 60 did on the Russian mafia last night?” Porfle might ask. Klay said no, whether he