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

could see that—but he had accused Sehlalo of betraying her, and the absurdity of that distracted her.

She stood. “He’s a kind man, Tom. A good man. And an excellent detective.”

“Good enough to know about us?”

Her eyes narrowed to knife edges. “Good enough to know we all come with baggage. Smart enough not to open mine without asking.”

“And if he asks?”

“‘Tom Klay and I were close once, just never close enough.’”

Klay nodded. That seemed about right. He reflected on Sehlalo. The hostility he’d perceived scanned differently now. “He seems like a solid guy,” he said.

“You have a lot in common actually. It might surprise you to know he also had misgivings about Botha’s arrest. He said it was too easy the way we picked him up.” She shook her head. “Botha mentioned files? What did he say?”

“He said it at the end. He started out bragging about smuggling diamonds and sable antelope. When I asked him about Kenya, he told me some story about Terry Krieger. Then he said you’d gotten your hands on a cache of files. He said the files were dangerous. He told me to ask you where you got them.” Klay paused, but she did not respond. Instead, Hungry’s inscrutable expression had hardened. “He said you were on the wrong branch of the tree,” Klay continued.

“What story?”

“What do you mean?” Klay asked.

“What story did he tell you about Terry Krieger?”

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

Pretoria, South Africa

Tell me exactly what he said about Krieger,” Hungry demanded.

Klay sat on the edge of the hotel bed and looked up at her. “He said Terry Krieger took his daughter hunting in Zimbabwe. A place called the Kimber.”

“It’s a hunting property,” Hungry said. “We think Botha transferred it to Krieger in advance of one of his trials.”

“That makes sense. Botha said he sold it, but he talked about the property like it was still his. He said Krieger was angry because his daughter wouldn’t shoot the lion, she wanted to dart it instead. Krieger hit her, shot the lion himself, and sent her home. The next day Krieger missed a shot on a buffalo, then shot a boy to distract its charge.”

“Murdered him?”

“That’s what Botha said.”

“And you didn’t think to tell me this? Just another dead African child . . .” She rubbed her temples. “Julius said it couldn’t be coincidence, your coming here.”

“I don’t understand.”

She pulled a chair toward the bed, her voice was nearly a whisper. “I will share details with you because I think Julius was right. But this is not for your magazine and this is not because I trust you. We—Julius and I—must bring Ncube to justice. It’s the only way to stop this country’s cycle. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” he said flatly.

“No one, Tom, can know.”

“You can trust me, Hungry.” His words were just sounds in the air.

She responded with the sigh of a prosecutor who was long past hoping for the truth. She took a deep breath and began. “Okay. A year ago we received a tip on our corruption hotline. Go to a certain spaza shop. We went and we found a row of thumb drives taped beneath a shelf. The drives contained over a terabyte of documents. At first we assumed it was simply evidence of corrupt business deals. It turned out to be much larger. Each of the individual deals was a leg, a segment of a leg. There were multiple legs. We don’t know how many. They all connect to a single body.”

“Who?”

She waited. “No one, Tom, can know.”

“I won’t tell anyone, Hungry.”

“It’s an investment fund of some kind run by Terry Krieger. The partners are intelligence agencies from around the world. There’s MI6, Mossad, the Australians, our people. The CIA is an investor, Tom.”

Klay stood and started to pace, grinding a palm into his forehead. “CIA and Krieger.”

She continued, “Ncube is one of their . . . I don’t even know what to call it . . . one of their facilitators.”

Klay faced Hungry. “How do you know this?”

“We broke the code on one of the projects. A tin mine in Congo. There was an insurrection, Krieger’s people took it over. We identified the South African intelligence officer involved. That was our Rosetta stone. We’ve been slowly deciphering their operations ever since.”

“Kisie,” Klay interrupted.

“Kisie. Yes, that was the name of the mining town. How did you know?”

Had the Agency used him? Had Eady used him?

“I need to meet the intelligence officer you identified,” he said.

“Not possible.”

“You questioned him directly?”

“We did,” she said uneasily.

“Hungry, I need to see him. What’s his name?”

“His name was Mo Rademeyer. State Security Agency. And he’s dead.”

“Tied to this?”

“It presented like a home robbery, but he’d been tortured, beyond the usual.”

Klay processed the geometry of what she was telling him.

Hungry continued, “Your CIA and Terry Krieger are colluding with Ncube to prey on my country. Ncube holds the door open for them.”

Klay crossed to the window. He edged the curtain away from the wall and looked outside. Across the street was a Wimpy Burger and a KFC. Below the street was lined with cars; pedestrians going places like insects, leading normal lives. “When was it?”

“When was what?”

“When did they kill Rademeyer?”

“It was November. They put his death at November 12.”

His meeting with Eady and Barrow at the Confession Club had taken place a week later.

“I need to get you out of here, Hungry.”

She gave a short laugh.

“What’s funny?”

She pressed her thumbs to her temples. “It’s not funny, it’s just . . . When I told Julius The Sovereign was offering us two journalists to help with our investigation, he said, ‘That’s it! That’s the CIA’s plan!’”

Klay’s mind reeled. If Eady was part of this, he surely would have anticipated Klay would find out what Hungry knew about Krieger. But if the Agency, Krieger, and Ncube were in bed together, why send him to help her? In his mind, Klay heard the voice of his father’s defense attorney, Saul Kane, the famous Philadelphia mafia attorney who dispensed advice from behind a desk in his