In the Company of Killers Read online

  He wasn’t here for the animals, or for the conversation.

  “Doesn’t it get to you?” readers asked him from time to time. “The killing . . . all those poor animals?”

  The question surprised him the first time. “It’s not easy,” he replied, “but I grew up in a funeral home, so I guess I was born for this job.”

  Years later he was still giving the same awkward response, only the truth behind his answer had changed. The truth was the killing had used to bother him a great deal, and he wished it still did. The transformation had happened surprisingly quickly, he realized looking back. One trip he had returned home and discovered that he hadn’t noticed any baboons, though they had surely surrounded his camp. On another, he found himself irritated by a tower of giraffes blocking the road. Eventually, even the elephants became invisible.

  Nature had become his murder book. From A to Z—from the spiral-horned addax to Grevy’s zebra—he exposed crimes against endangered species in the pages of The Sovereign, and then, like a television detective with a season to fill, moved dutifully on to the next victim. One didn’t linger over the dead, in fiction or in life. One moved on.

  Klay was a criminal investigator. He was selective in the stories he took on. Winnable cases only. He was no Don Quixote. He didn’t investigate crashing insect populations or stranded polar bears. He didn’t report on the global warming crisis for the same reason he didn’t investigate Russian money laundering, Mexican drug trafficking, or Wall Street’s financial crimes. Those stories weren’t winnable. He identified traffickers, designed investigations, reported his stories, and hoped the system did the rest. Enough of the time it did. But not always.

  For years Ras Botha had run a continent-wide syndicate that defied categorization: Diamonds from Sierra Leone. Arms to Charles Taylor. Counterfeit pesticides to Kenyan farmers. Fake HIV meds to Nigeria’s poor. Botha controlled crystal meth labs. He trafficked Thai, Czech, and Russian prostitutes through his nightclubs in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Musina. Elephant ivory and rhino horn were sidelines for the South African, holdovers from a trophy-hunting business he ran with his brother.

  Klay had tangled with Botha once before. Prosecutors cited facts from Klay’s story in their indictment, but corruption runs thick in South Africa’s courts, and days later Botha’s case was dismissed.

  That was South Africa. This was Kenya. Kenyans would love to lock up a foreigner trying to kill their most beloved elephant, especially if that foreigner was the notorious Ras Botha.

  And so, by broad agreement, if the Green Guardians captured Botha’s poachers tonight, Klay would be in the room for their interrogation. He would ask a few questions of his own, and then he would follow the trail back to take another bite of Ras Botha.

  “Tuskah!” Lekorere managed to turn in his seat. The politician was looking at Klay, offering him a beer.

  Klay forced a smile and accepted the bottle. When the politician turned forward again, Klay poured the beer out of the door and shoved the empty into the seat seam.

  Bernard pulled to a stop at the edge of a deep ravine and his rangers jumped out. “We’ll go in here,” he said. “Tom, drive the truck up to Mitchener’s Point and we’ll meet you there.” He checked his watch. “Give us three hours.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Four hours later, standing on Mitchener’s Point, Klay studied the terrain below through binoculars.

  “You’re wasting your time.” The Perseus Group engineer held up his iPhone. “I can see exactly where the elephant is.”

  Klay continued to glass the valley, moving his binoculars in a grid, trying to pick out the Green Guardians among the thick cover.

  “See?” said the engineer.

  “Maybe,” Klay said, without looking. “Maybe you’re giving away his exact location.”

  “The signal’s encrypted. It’s Perseus Group encryption, used by the Israeli military.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “He should have let our Askari drones handle this. It’s in our contract.”

  “Why don’t you go sit in the truck with the politician,” Klay said.

  “I have a right to be here,” the engineer protested.

  Klay lowered his binoculars and faced him. “You don’t have a right. None of us does.”

  The engineer shook his head as he walked away. He waved his phone over his head. “This technology might actually save your elephant, you know.”

  On the far edge of the clearing, leaning against a tree, the Kenya Wildlife Service ranger smiled. He was a lean older man, his dark face lined from years in the bush. Klay felt bad for him—this was a babysitting assignment. The Green Guardians were permitted to carry automatic weapons as long as KWS had a ranger present. If he stayed out of the way, the seasoned ranger would receive a little cash at the end of the night to salve his pride. The ranger reached two fingers into his shirt pocket, withdrew a loose cigarette, and offered it to Klay.

  “I quit,” Klay said, putting the Sportsman cigarette in his mouth. He leaned forward and the ranger lit it with a match.

  Klay inhaled deeply and blew the smoke out slowly. “Jesus, that’s bad.”

  The ranger nodded in agreement. He drew another cigarette from his pocket, and Klay lit it for him with the tip of his. The two men smoked together in silence.

  Klay heard a clicking sound to his right. He turned as Bernard and his rangers materialized from the bush. There was no other way to describe it. One moment there had been trees and bushes; the next they were there. Bernard first, followed by Goodson and Moses. Bernard looked straight at Klay as he approached, the heads of his subordinates swiveling.

  “I thought you quit,” Bernard said. He took the cigarette from Klay’s fingers and put it to his own lips. “No elephant,” he added, returning Klay’s smoke.

  “No Botha,” Klay replied. His eyes strayed to the darkening ravine. He hadn’t expected the man himself, of course, but his intelligence had been solid: a Botha poaching team was in the area.

  Bernard smiled. “You’d have heard a bit of gunfire.” He patted Klay’s shoulder. “Looks like you were wrong after all.”

  “It happens,” Klay said.

  “Not often. Someday you’ll have to tell me how you come by all that brilliant intelligence sitting at a desk in Washington, DC.”

  Klay drew on his cigarette, then dropped it and stepped on it with his boot. Bernard began walking toward their vehicle. Klay followed. “I hear you’re part of their drone program,” Klay said.

  Bernard checked to see that the engineer was out of earshot, and nodded. “They made us an offer we couldn’t refuse.”

  Klay grunted. “I thought it was just collars.”

  “It was. In the beginning.”

  “Right. Well, makes sense for you.”

  “Are you saying you wouldn’t?”

  “I’m just talking,” Klay said.

  Bernard halted. He turned and faced Klay. “But you are saying something.”

  Klay looked into his friend’s eyes. He forgot sometimes how dedicated Bernard was. “Yeah, all right. Would I take Perseus Group money? Terry Krieger money? If I had your problem? Sure.”

  “No, if you had your problem.”

  “What’s my problem?”

  Bernard smiled. “Imagine you had something you actually cared about.”

  Klay allowed himself a rare laugh. He knew somebody in just about every country on earth, but he needed only half the fingers on one hand to count his true friends, people he respected and trusted no matter what. Bernard was a true friend. If Bernard said he would do something, it was guaranteed. Klay had bet his life on it more than once. He didn’t just trust Bernard; he admired him. Bernard Lolosoli knew as much as Klay did about the world’s complexities, but he maintained a generations-deep connection to his family and to th
e earth. He possessed a joy for life that managed to flourish in spite of all that was happening around him—the poverty, the corruption, the killing. Despite it all, Bernard kept his center. After a few days in Bernard’s company, Klay always felt a little less angry, and a little more human. For a while, he felt peace.

  “Okay,” Klay said. “Yeah, I’d take his money. I’d take his elephant collars. But Askari drones? Those are people trackers.”

  “I know. They wanted facial-recognition cameras at our gate. They’re building a database by tribe, tying it into a cross-agency police cloud. I drew the line at their face harvesting. They weren’t happy. I won’t be able to hold them off forever. We are a Perseus Group laboratory now.” He nodded in the engineer’s direction. “That one is our minder.”

  “Do your donors know?”

  “Our donors care about our animals, Tom. He came out here, you know. Terry Krieger. Very knowledgeable in the bush. Said he’s always loved elephants. Wants to give something back. They all do it. Come to Africa. Wanting to cleanse themselves of something . . .”

  Klay’s jaw muscles knotted.

  “Perseus’s drones have knocked the hell out of our poachers. Herd stress has declined. Birth rates are rising. Mothers are producing again.” Bernard kicked a rock with his boot.

  Klay waited.

  “After our latest annual report came out, Nairobi said to us: ‘Right. Done and dusted. Wildlife sorted. Let’s approve the north-south rail line.’”

  “That’s the play?”

  “Krieger supports us. Anything we need, he says. But I hear otherwise from Nairobi. His interest is the Chinese and they want the railroad.” Bernard turned to him. “A north-south rail line would run straight through our land, Tom. Destroy our way of life. My family would have to leave here. My mother . . .” Bernard paused. “Why don’t you write about that?”

  Klay looked away. A troop of baboons had emerged from the trees and was crossing a field of dry grass, led by a very large male. A baby sat on the big male’s head, its tiny hind foot causing the adult to squint and swat it away.

  “A story on Perseus Group?” Klay shook his head. “That’s outside of scope. I’m here for Botha.”

  “You do remember Congo, right?”

  Klay ground his back teeth, still looking in the direction of the baboons. “I remember,” he said.

  “All that great intelligence you’re able to pick up in Washington. I thought maybe . . .”

  “Maybe what?”

  “Maybe you could get someone important to listen.”

  Klay turned and studied Bernard, wondering what his friend knew. “Look,” he said, finally. “I’m just a hack. I’d have to spend, what? Three years to get into Perseus Group? Two at a minimum. Even then. Even if they gave me the pages, even if I didn’t mind spending the rest of my life buried in lawsuits—because they’d definitely sue me—even then, there’s no one to act. Who would prosecute Perseus Group—world’s biggest private military company? No one. Not here. Not in Congo. Not in the US. Nowhere. And that’s just the corporation. There’s no way I could get close to Terry Krieger. Even if I wanted to.”

  “Even if you wanted to?”

  “I take on fights I can win. I’m not—” Klay struggled to find a word to convey his meaning. He looked down. An ant crawled across his boot. “I am not a fucking safari ant.”

  Bernard smiled.

  “What?” Klay demanded.

  Bernard nodded toward Klay’s foot. “The ant never works alone, Tom. Didn’t you know that?”

  Klay looked down again. Ants were swarming his boot. Several had their jaws locked into the leather. Klay knocked them loose with the toe of his other boot and stepped away. “Scale matters,” he said. “Look, take his money. Set some boundaries for him, like you have,” he added, quickly.

  “If you say so.” Bernard increased his pace, opening the distance between the two men.

  Klay had to jog to catch up. “Botha is our meat,” he said. “If we get him, maybe I can do a little good for you here.”

  “Sure, Tom.”

  After a moment, Bernard paused and turned to him. “‘Hack.’”

  Klay shrugged.

  “No. You said ‘hack.’ What if Botha hacked Voi’s collar?”

  “It’s encrypted.” Klay saw intensity in Bernard’s eyes. “You don’t mean the transmission. You mean the access?”

  Bernard nodded.

  Klay considered the possibility. Voi’s collar was part of the TIPP program. TIPP was the Total Information Project for Pachyderms software designed by Perseus Group. It recorded the movements of all collared elephants across the conservancy. Someone with access to the TIPP app might be able to manipulate Voi’s given location.

  Klay thought of an even simpler explanation. Technically, they weren’t tracking an elephant; they were tracking an elephant’s collar. “Move the collar, move the elephant,” Klay said.

  “Move a dot on his app and you move them both,” Bernard agreed.

  Klay puffed his cheeks, squinting in thought as he blew out the air. “Who has access?”

  “To the software? Just Greg and whoever he works with at Perseus. Maybe some of the biologists. To the physical collar? Anyone, really.”

  Either option was a hack of the Green Guardians’ system.

  “If Voi is not here, but his signal says he is, maybe it’s because Botha wants us—”

  “—where the elephant isn’t.”

  They strode quickly through the trees to the Land Rover. Standing beside the vehicle, the Perseus Group engineer was typing on his phone again. Lekorere, the politician, wearing headphones, was also reading his phone. Lekorere smiled and raised a bottle of Tusker to salute their return. Bernard shook his head.

  “Did you find Voi?” the engineer asked.

  “No,” Bernard said.

  “I told you we should have used the Askari drones.”

  “He’s not here,” Klay said.

  The engineer tapped his phone and opened Voi’s tracking app. “Look at his TIPP.” He handed Klay his phone. A small green dot in the shape of an elephant blinked on the program’s map. “Red means stopped. Yellow is streaking. Green moving normally. He’s right there.” The engineer pointed at Bernard. “You missed him.”

  Klay backhanded the engineer with a withering look. He had seen Bernard glance—glance—at a clean stretch of granite and then describe in detail the poacher who had crossed the rock hours earlier, including his age, weight, how fast he was moving, and what he was carrying. Then, calculating how much of the poacher’s load was likely water, and where the area’s water sources lay, Bernard had driven ahead of his quarry, set up camp, and was having tea when the poacher arrived. “I’ll be having those,” Bernard had said, taking a sack of bloody tusks from the surprised man. “Good tracking follows a trail,” Klay wrote of the incident. “Great tracking leads it.”

  “Voi’s not here, Greg,” Klay repeated.

  Looking at Bernard, the software engineer scoffed, “I’m not talking dowsing sticks.”

  The blinking-green elephant on the engineer’s phone suddenly jumped. Klay pushed the phone hard into the engineer’s chest. “What’s that?”

  The engineer looked down. “Oh,” he said.

  “Oh, what?”

  “Must be the satellite.” Greg tapped at his phone. “There may be a lag. It happens sometimes.” He turned and pointed west to a single mountain that rose above the plain. “It says he’s up there.”

  The KWS ranger shook his head and dropped his cigarette.

  * * *

  • • •

  I don’t like it,” Bernard said after they had parked and surveyed a portion of the mountain’s base. “No spoor.”

  Klay, too, had seen no tracks—neither human nor elephant—and it was getting late. “Okay,” he said.
“But if my intel’s right, and Greg is right, and we don’t follow?”

  “Then we’ve said goodbye to a national treasure.”

  Bernard spoke to the KWS ranger and returned to Klay. “There’s a plateau just before the top. Our cattle end up there sometimes. That’s where he’ll be. Follow the trail. We’ll clear the area and meet you at the plateau.”

  “What about those two?” Klay asked.

  “The MP stays in the car.”

  When Bernard didn’t continue, Klay shook his head. “No.”

  “Babysit him, would you?”

  Klay looked at Greg again and sighed. “Beer’s on you.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Bernard gave a few hand signals, and then he and his rangers vanished up the steep slope, dancing over rocks and among trees, like ghosts.

  The climb was steeper than Klay had expected. After an hour he was using vines and roots to pull himself upwards. After two hours, he was struggling to silence his breathing. It came out of him in deep, cave-emptying gasps. His thighs burned. At each step he ordered his foot to clear the next rock, then watched as his boot kicked the rock loose and sent it tumbling down the mountain. Behind him, Greg climbed easily.

  Klay wiped a damp forearm over his muddy face. Sweat burned his eyes. It was a poacher’s moon, nearly as full and bright as daylight. Tracking is easiest at dawn and dusk, when angled sunlight casts a shadow in each footprint, enabling even an average tracker like Klay to read the ground. In the moon’s bright light animals and men stood out, but the earth for Klay was illegible.

  Finally, he reached the edge of the plateau where the elephant was supposed to be. He wiped his eyes with a dry corner of his shirttail and raised his binoculars. The clearing was empty. Klay grabbed the engineer’s phone from him. According to the TIPP app, the biggest elephant in Africa was standing right in front of them.

  Bernard appeared at Klay’s side. He put a finger to his lips. “No elephant,” he mouthed, gesturing to indicate a trunk. He scissored his fingers to indicate a man walking, and pointed. Klay understood: someone was on the plateau with them.