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

a piece celebrating Germany’s youth movement, those flaxen-haired scouts charging up the Zugspitze in short pants and brown shirts.” Eady sipped his whiskey. “Mind you”—Eady took a square of cheese with a toothpick—“all along the Allies are using our maps to fight the war. We printed half a million for the War Department. Every soldier carried a map with our emblem on it. The Nazis considered it a victory to have the same Sovereign writing such positive things about their country. Goebbels especially loved it, praised The Sovereign publicly. That is when we dropped our bomb.”

Eady opened a drawer, withdrew a magazine wrapped in cellophane, and handed it to Klay. The date on the cover was March 1942. It was the old format. No glossy cover photograph, just a silver atlas on a blue background in the upper left corner, and below it a table of contents. Eady pointed to an article halfway down the list. Klay read the title aloud, “‘Fallacies in Racial Hygiene.’”

Eady nodded. “In-house our people called it ‘Operation Aryan Error.’” He tapped the cover with his finger. “We said German scientists were engaged in a massive cover-up. They knew their Übermenschen theory was poppycock but feared revealing it. Denial played. The important thing was Hitler’s people had to eat crow one way or the other.

“Not a game changer, but a game influencer,” Eady continued, returning the magazine to its drawer. “And I can tell you, Tom, that over the years, over the decades, of reporting hard facts, we have made a difference.”

Eady placed a square of smoked Gouda on a cracker and offered it to Klay. “You’ll be able to do what I did. Get those stories no one in the world is able to get. Prizewinning, world-altering stories because you’ll have the Agency’s reach and resources.” Eady ticked off his long fingers: “Contacts. Intelligence. Access. Technology.”

Growing up in a funeral home, Klay had learned early and better than most how to read behind people’s eyes and words.

“Let me think about it, Vance,” he said, turning to wash his hands in Eady’s sink. He had a lot on his mind, he said. It wasn’t the slight off note he detected beneath Eady’s CIA sales pitch that caused him to pause. Nor was it journalistic ethics.

It was more personal. The FBI had worked its way into Klay Funeral Home, that undercover agent pretending to be an embalmer, standing shoulder to shoulder in the morgue with a teenaged Klay, building his case. “Uncle Patrick,” Klay had called him. Until his father’s criminal RICO trial when “Uncle Patrick” took the witness stand and announced his real name and occupation: “Patrick Mulvaney, Special Agent, Organized Crime Squad, Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Klay had a rule about law enforcement after that: fuck ’em. Didn’t matter the agency, or the country. The CIA might not technically be law enforcement, but it was pretty damn close.

•   •   •

He found his answer to Eady hidden under the carpet of his new home, the redbrick Edwardian townhouse in the Eastern Market section of Capitol Hill. Erin was out of town for the signing, so he left the Prudential office, walked two blocks north, opened the door, and got to work. They had chosen the house for its gourmet kitchen, but the rest of the house needed work. The first thing he and Erin intended to do was to get rid of the ugly brown wall-to-wall carpeting.

He set his backpack down on the vestibule’s slate floor, lifted a corner of the carpet, and pulled. He proceeded down the hallway, pulling up carpet as he went, until he reached the fancy kitchen’s pale gray tile. He turned and continued into the dining room, then the living room. He pulled up brown carpet as he climbed the stairs, ripped and tore brown carpet from the guest room floor. He pulled his way along the upstairs hallway to the doorway of the master bedroom, which alone in the house had its original pine wood flooring exposed.

When he was done, he went back downstairs and started removing the tack strips and carpet padding. He’d asked his real estate agent why there was so much carpeting in an otherwise well-decorated house. “They had a dog,” the agent replied, touching his nose with a silk handkerchief.

Klay doubted they had a dog. The couple who’d owned the house had died of AIDS. He bought the house from the second man’s estate. As he explored their house, he could feel the couple’s terror growing, the world around them alive with invisible enemies, the causes and cures of their illness still largely a mystery. He found unopened boxes of HEPA air purifiers in the attic and dust masks in drawers throughout the house. He spotted expensive filters under the sinks and behind the refrigerator. Blue rubber gloves sprang at him from the bottom drawer of the upstairs vanity. That was life for you: you erect all possible protections against the unknown, and what it looks like afterwards is panic.

He thought about Eady’s offer as he worked. Even if he could see himself working for the CIA, doing so would certainly compromise journalistic ethics. He sat back on his heels with a snort. Who was he kidding? As a criminal investigator, he had never fretted over journalism’s ethical lines before. Besides, lines implied a system. There was no system to the world. No handrails. What system of equality allowed a drunk behind the wheel of an automobile to go on living, while an innocent boy on his bicycle ended up dead? Life’s only guarantee was that it didn’t last forever, period. Lean on anything else for support and you might well fall forever.

The foam padding was old and dried and bore a surprising number of staples per square foot. He began his carpet extraction in the afternoon, not considering that his new house had no overhead lighting, so by the time he was on to the carpet tacks, he was operating in darkness. It wasn’t until