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

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Klay didn’t see him again for two days. On the third day, Tenchant knocked on Klay’s hotel room door. Klay was dressed in old gym shorts and a T-shirt. Tenchant was wearing shorts, flip-flops, and a Sovereign T-shirt with the silver globe on the chest. He was holding his laptop.

He let Tenchant in and went back to doing some sit-ups on a bath towel beside the bed. “Did you know every computer in the South African government, every single one, is compromised?” Tenchant asked, taking a seat at Klay’s desk.

“Be done in a minute, Tench.” Klay grunted.

Tenchant opened his laptop. “They used pirated software to save money, and now the entire country is Swiss cheese.”

“Hungry’s office, too?” Klay asked.

Exercise wasn’t pleasant for him anymore. He’d thickened in the years since his time as an amateur boxer. He was less wiry now, he liked to say, more kitchen appliance. Even in his thirties, exercise had been easier. He was pretty sure he used to bend at a different part of his stomach, and he knew push-ups didn’t used to sound like old barn doors on rusted hinges. He remained a powerful man, but his shape varied. Fitness ebbed and flowed from him, improving when he was home, declining in the field. He’d spent most of his professional life abroad.

The Sovereign was famously generous when it came to travel expenses. His colleagues flew business class, stayed in four- and five-star hotels, sought out countries’ premier chefs and unique entertainment. But Klay, who measured himself by his work, secretly feared that failure might lurk around the next corner, and he might not get his story. He used his travel money to buy more field time. He flew coach, unless he had the miles, and slept in his bivy sack or in cheap motel rooms. He ate modestly and relied on Malarone dreams and his own dark thoughts for entertainment. He stayed in the field and reported—allowing his body to soften, his lungs to weaken—focusing his mind ever more firmly on his target.

Klay did some leg raises, then flipped over for more push-ups. When he got home, he’d hit the gym again. This was his last assignment, after all. Last for the Agency, last for The Sovereign, too. Once he nailed Botha, he was going to clean up his life. Eat more vegetables. Get healthy.

“Hungry’s system is a mess,” Tenchant said. “I pentested their internal system. Scanned the machines with Nmap, checked for vulnerabilities. Turns out their general network connects to the Public Protector’s office. They haven’t updated anything in months, so vulnerabilities everywhere. I fired up Metasploit-Framework using auxiliary scanners. First thing I checked for was BlueKeep and instant remote system shell. Bluekeep got leaked from the NSA, but you’d be surprised how—”

“Sorry. You did what?”

“Ah. I forgot. You’re illiterate. Nmap is a port scanner, but people have added a few vulnerability scripts so it can do double duty, at least on the more common problems.” Tenchant looked at Klay. Nothing. He waved his hands above his head. “I used some craaaazzzy computer code to perform a colonoscopy on the office’s general system—I don’t have access to their air-gapped machines—results were cancerous. Polyps everywhere. That help?”

Klay paused his push-ups. “Thanks,” he said dryly.

Tenchant smiled. “Point is, I’m staying off-line as much as I can in case there’s something devious lurking in their system. That’s why I took a cab over to the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission today. Botha has sixty-eight companies registered in his own name in South Africa. Nineteen in his wife’s. There’s a little of everything. Mining. Real estate. IT. Safari camps. Game breeding. Three golf courses. An arms manufacturer of some kind. About thirty companies called Alphan Investments. Alphan Investments 1, Alphan Investments 2 . . . He’s got websites set up for some of these, which will help me. I searched a few and found links to other companies outside of South Africa. Hey, how do you know so much about guns?”

Klay lay on the floor, his forearm over his eyes.

“Tom?”

“What?”

“The other day, with Julius. You knew all about his pistol. I asked him later, and he said you were right about the recall. Something about the early model firing when you dropped it. He said the Vektor’s not a very well-known gun.”

Pride, Klay chided himself, your fucking pride. He had fired a Vektor during his training with Major Thomas, part of his foreign weapons module. “I did a story on guns once,” he said. “Mechanical evolution of firearms. Blunderbuss to AR-15s, I think it was. That one was so futuristic it just stuck up here.” He pointed to his head.

“Yeah,” Tenchant said, “that’s what I figured. But when I searched online for gun stories by you, I didn’t find any . . .”

Relentless fuck.

Klay got to his feet, turned his back to Tenchant, and switched on the television with a remote. “Did you do a search on memory? Because mine’s not as good as it used to be. Must have been back when I freelanced. I did all kinds of stories back then. Happy to forget most of them.”

“Yeah, no doubt. Anyway, tomorrow I’ll start data mining, run transforms on the companies and names I came up with, and generate a link analysis we can look at. It’s going to be a helluva spiderweb, I’ll tell you that.”

Klay wiped his face with his T-shirt. “Do you have anything juicy I can use to surprise Botha? I’d like to disrupt his world tomorrow.”

“Not yet. What time’s your meeting?”

“Eleven.”

“Not enough time. I could hack it.”

Klay looked at him. “Hack what?”

“The Dogs’ air-gapped network. I have the feeling Sehlalo’s not giving me everything, you know? If we go early, you’d just need to have everybody in Hungry’s office for a few minutes with the door closed. Or get them outside somehow . . .”

“No. Out of the question. We’re not hacking Hungry’s internal system.”

“Okay. I was just throwing it out there,” Tenchant said and went back to reading his email.

“Out of curiosity,” Klay said, “could you