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

by Gatt, who then compensated Tighe in sex. Not millions of dollars and sex. Not hundreds of thousands of dollars and kilos of coke and sex. Just quality girls any creative petty officer could have secured for his commanding officer, no strings attached. The George Washington to Phuket when she should have been in Singapore. The Blue Ridge to Kota Kinabalu instead of Kuala Lumpur. Tighe moved the entire Seventh Fleet, including submarines, around the triangle that was the South China Sea all for a slice of high-end trim.

Being a man was about learning to channel one’s drives, Krieger thought. Sure, he’d done the Four Floors of Whores in his day. But he’d been young then. Business was his woman now. To spread the world’s legs and assert himself was his objective. When he needed to blow off extra steam, he didn’t whore; he picked up his rifle and hunted.

Tighe was wounded—Krieger could see that—but wounded was not enough. “I don’t judge your reasons, Admiral. Men have appetites. But when your business conflicts with mine, yours must end. And so, beginning today, you will cancel all outstanding contracts with Core F. You will control your appetites.”

“You little punk. You think you can jerk my chain?” Tighe gestured toward the screen. “A little fucking R&R. There is not a single—”

“Anthony Gatt,” Krieger interrupted, “was selling your ship movements to the Russians. To the Chinese! Don’t tell me you didn’t know. That’s treason, Admiral.”

Mapes laid a sheaf of papers in front of Tighe. “Comms between you and Gatt,” she said.

Tighe glanced coolly at the top document, recognized something, and began thumbing pages, increasingly unnerved. Krieger knew it wasn’t the content of the emails that shook him. It was the emails themselves. Tighe had communicated with Gatt using CAINA, the Pentagon’s network for communications among leaders in times of war. No one but the intended recipient could read comms sent in this way—or so they had no doubt told him. But Krieger had his Gatt emails. Tighe’s eyes moved through the pages. He had internal NCIS reports, too.

Krieger watched comprehension dawn on Tighe’s horizon: Perseus Group had hacked the top secret communications channel of the head of the Seventh Fleet.

“Treason, Admiral. So, starting today, this little sex ring of yours is over. Tell everyone involved you’ve found religion. Understood?”

“What about . . . ?” Tighe pointed his cigar at the screen.

“Taken care of.”

“How do you know? If Gatt has copies—”

“He doesn’t.”

Gatt’s task had been to reserve the hotel rooms, select the girls, order the foie gras and Cristal. Mapes oversaw the cameras.

Gatt had been a valued Fund investor. He had delivered critical intel on Australia’s finance minister in advance of the Darwin deal; on a Pakistani salt baron in secret control of Gwadar port; on the wife of a Malaysian sultan who would now be happy to allow arms through his state. But Gatt had been double-dealing. While gathering compromising information for Krieger, he had been simultaneously selling that same intelligence to the Russians. Not to the Russian government. Worse. To Krieger’s rival, Dmitri Yurchenko. Krieger wasn’t sure how much Yurchenko knew yet, but that was a separate issue.

Mapes touched a button, and the screen filled with the image of Anthony Gatt, all 409 pounds of him, naked on a morgue table, his gigantic body swollen and pale after three days at sea. The commander of the Seventh Fleet ran his eyes over Gatt’s corpse. Fish had started on him. His eyes, fingertips, and most of his nose and lips were missing, a chunk of his thigh. His thickened tongue filled his mouth.

Appetites, Krieger thought. The Fund depended on them. But the Fund had rules.

Tighe glanced at the cigar ash that soiled his pant leg, but did not seem to see it. His eyes roamed the room, unfocused, calculating his exposure. Krieger gave him time, waiting for two words that took some men longer to come to than others.

“And me?” Tighe said finally.

Krieger got to his feet. He circled his desk and waited for Tighe to stand. “You, Admiral,” he said, walking Tighe to the door, “are exactly where I want you to be.”

Moments later a helicopter lifted clear of Raptor and flew Tighe back to the Blue Ridge. A second chopper, bearing Krieger, took off in the direction of Donsol and Krieger’s family.

ON ICE

Sovereign Headquarters

Washington, DC

Sharon didn’t send Klay into the field. She put him on ice. He spent his days reorganizing his office, attending conferences, reading. He labeled and filed the hundreds of documents that overwhelmed his tiny office. He wiped off his whiteboard, though some of the ink had bled in and refused to go. He opened a desk drawer and exhumed the pile of voice recorders that had accumulated over the years. They were nearly all Olympus brand, little black or silver jobs that ran on two AAA batteries. At fifty bucks, it was easier to buy another one than to upload, label, and file what was on them. He smiled as he spilled two dozen recorders across his desk.

It had started as a grade school English project, going out with a cassette recorder the size of a schoolbook and recording family and neighbors’ oral histories. Klay began recording people the way a photographer might snap shots of strangers. He loved the rhythm of people communicating across geographic or ethnic space, between social classes, over generations of time. Funerals were a time of gathering. A dead person’s diaspora returned. He met mourners from Paris, Sicily, Nigeria, Staten Island. He took snapshots of their voices and studied them. He was writing short stories then. Ear was good, but not enough. To get sound onto the page, you had to be perfect.

He continued the practice as a journalist, well aware that secretly recording a subject carried risks, not admitting he had recordings unless Legal pushed back on something in one of his stories. In those cases he might say, “You know, my phone might have been on during that