Hostile Takeover (13 page)

26

A
few days later I was a stowaway in the back of a cargo plane loaded with counterfeit cartoon character tchotchkes bound for New York, drinking a bottle of Griner's Scorpion moonshine. I wanted my entry back into Manhattan to have no electronic footprint, so I avoided commercial planes, trains, and automobiles. I was still a ghost and planned to keep it that way until it was time for my resurrection. And I was ready for a fight. Because of Griner, I was no longer afraid of hell, let alone Alice.

To me, she was simply a traitor, and the fact that she tried to kill me twice wasn't her highest crime. She killed what could have been an epic love affair, the antithesis of emasculating Match.com culture. We could have cashed out and raised a couple of young maniacs of our own. We could have gone to fucking Disneyland. As the landing gear doors opened and the first whispers of morning light surrounded me in a funereal haze, the wheels touched down and the empty moonshine bottle spun on the floor near my feet, threatening to come to rest and point itself at me, the kiss of death in its whirling promise.
Now it begins,
I thought, excited to make the first move in what was going to be an epic chess game.

When I was back in Manhattan the first thing I did, after kissing the ground and grabbing a slice, was procure myself a villainous lair to use as my base of operations. It had to be big and sinister and I
spent most of the night indulging in one of my favorite pastimes—roof-hopping—which led me to an enormous SoHo loft, the home of a German deconstructionist sculptor named Osgood Kurtz. You may have seen his work if deeply obscure contemporary drivel sold to bourgeois art hoarders is your passion.

Osgood was recently deceased and had no next of kin. Don't worry. He died of self-inflicted natural causes. I could smell his exit fumes from several blocks away as I leapt over the urban canyons. Eventually I saw a cloud of bottle flies, my old pals, lollygagging around Osgood's window. Unmistakable. The sweet stench of rot was cutting through the hot garbage and Chinatown animal-market reek. Home sweet home.

I climbed down the fire escapes until I reached his kitchen window. I could see him slumped over a work-in-progress bronze of Hitler's head on the end of a six-foot, angry metal cock. Pedestrian concept, but I must admit, flawless execution. Osgood's heroin gear lay on the table next to his bloated still life of a body. Overdose. From the look of the amber-colored resin on the spoon, our boy wrecked himself on some musky skag that had probably been cut with fiberglass particles. The Afghan mullahs running the opium drug trade love to throw a bit of that into a random bail as a nice
screw you
to American junkies.
Surprise, white devil! We just shut down your heart with a massive arterial embolism and drove a chemical ice pick into your brain!
I bagged up old Ozzie and trucked him off to an acid bath in Jersey—in his Maserati, of course—where his final and most brilliant installation consisted of him turning from a solid to a liquid to a gas in twenty minutes.

Then his casa was
mi casa
. As long as I kept paying the bills, no one would ask questions, and I was pretty sure there was no way he had any friends. I filled the place with blue curls of cigarette smoke and deadened my aching wounds with the mellow twenty-five-year-old Scotch Herr Kurtz left in his otherwise bare cupboard. With
each smoky, peaty sip, I came to the happy realization that Alice was finally out of my system. She had been a cancer that had spread to every cell. And as with most cancers, it took nearly killing me, in Mexico of all places, to be cured. It felt nice to be free to return to my old militantly egocentric self with no emotional ties to anyone or anything. Even my desire to find my real family had evaporated with the simplest of axioms: If they didn't want me, why would I want them? This newfound clarity enabled me to focus purely on finishing the job I had come to New York to do—execute the Alice contract quickly, cleanly, and with extreme prejudice.

But I needed assistance. I needed Sue. And I had to contact him in a way that wouldn't tip off Alice about my presence. Of course, the whole proposition was risky. Time had passed and there was always the chance that his fear of Alice had fostered some kind of Stockholm syndrome false loyalty. But I had no other choice. Without him there was no way I could get any reliable intel on her movements. One thing I knew about Sue is he
does
love the strip clubs. And, like all connoisseurs, he had his favorite, a dank skeez pit in the Bronx called Papa Cherry's. For all you haters, Sue wasn't proud of being a thong stuffer. He would have liked to have a steady girl, but like the rest of us, he learned early on (the hard way) that relationships were potentially lethal to significant others. So he burned his hard-earned cash on the ladies of the pole, often ending up in the sucker's paradise known as the champagne room, which is where we were reunited.

Sue pimp-rolled into the room with two girls. I was sitting in a dark corner, and as soon as they settled into lap dance mode, scored by the Johnny Cash song that was his namesake, I aimed the cork on the $10 bottle of champagne that was about to cost him $200 and popped it right into the side of his head. Sue jumped out of the chair and the girls went sprawling. Legs, hair, and curses were flying and Sue was frantically searching for his gun, which I could see was on the floor, covered by an electric-blue feather boa.

“It can happen that fast, Sue,” I said, laughing my ass off. “One minute you're shellacking the canoe and the next your brains are all over the salad bar.”

Sue whipped around, ready to fight, and saw me standing there. His instant smile and attitude change told me I had made the right decision finding him.

“Johnny fucking Lago!”

I looked down at the flag flying at half-mast in his trousers.

“I guess you're glad to see me?”

He laughed and went to hug me.

“I think a handshake will do,” I said, but he hugged me anyway.

The girls were confused, so I spoke their primitive lipstick language by handing them a stack of hundreds.

“Thank you for a lovely evening, ladies,” I said.

They exited, eager to hide the money from the house, and I took a good look at the boy named Sue. He looked strung out.

“Let's bounce,” I said. “We need to talk and I need to keep a low profile. You know a place near here?”

“We can go to my old hood a few blocks down. That's as low pro as it gets.”

27

S
ue took me to a massive block of housing projects near Fort Apache in the South Bronx. This is a place abandoned by police and emergency responders. It's literally a lawless island on the end of an island and it's the least likely place to be under any kind of surveillance by the authorities. 911 doesn't exist there and even professionals like us stand the chance of being dusted by any number of gangs with ominous names and blank-staring youth soldiers. We drank beer in a burned-out apartment in the projects that used to be one of Sue's foster homes.

“You look like shit,” I said to Sue.

“The dragon lady's added years to my life, JL. HR is a clusterfuck and I'm ready to tie a noose at the end of my rope. Good to see you too.”

“What's been going on?”

“Alice is . . . man, she's a mess. Angry. Damn. Everybody on eggshells. And paranoid. Got a dozen mercs, armed to the teeth, always at her side. Surveillance everywhere. She's watching us all the time, even at home, like that dumbass show
Big Brother
.”

“Any heat from the FBI?”

“Nah. None that I can see. I have seen a few ghosts, though.”

“What kind of ghosts? Christmas past?”

“Spotters. Probably why Alice is freaking out.”

“Think she's been greenlit?” I asked.

This would not have been outside the realm of possibilities. The FBI has a long history of using contract guns to do its dirty work. The long arm of the law is often attached to a big briefcase full of cash.

“If she has, they're taking their sweet time.”

“We have to assume, at least, that whoever it is has her on twenty-four/seven surveillance rotations.”

“Definitely. She opened the juice can this time.”

“Yeah. More competition for me. Makes it interesting. How's business otherwise?”

“Popping. We always got gigs, but they feel like B-list marks. Come with a lot of low-life clients, which makes her paranoia even worse.”

“What about Alice? What's she working on?”

“She's kept it pretty close to the vest, but I dug into it just to make sure she wasn't driving the bus off the edge of a cliff again, you know?”

“I don't blame you. I should have never agreed to the FBI job. I did it to placate her and ignored my instincts. Love . . . guaranteed to transform you into a complete dumbass by the second date.”

“Won't argue with you there.”

“What's she got cooking that's so top secret?”

“Looks like a cupcake. Chinese guy named Zhen. He's the CEO of some company I've never heard of called CIS, Inc. HQ is in Midtown.”

“When's she going to initiate?”

“I think she already has. I haven't seen her as much in the office lately, thank God. Before, she was up our asses daily. I figure she's got to be working.”

“How long you think?” I asked.

“Maybe a couple of weeks. I'll look into it some more, if you want.”

“I want.”

“Whatever you need, JL. I'm with you.”

“Are you?”

“Hell yeah—”

“This is my fight, Sue. And it's going to get ugly. You can stand on the sidelines and feed me some intel and stay out of the fray. I don't expect you to take any bullets for me.”

“You're my ticket out of this, JL. As long as Alice is taking up space, this gig is nothing but a black bag. Like you with Bob. Fuck that, man. Nobody owns me. Especially not some uptight white bitch with a loose screw. Whatever you got going, put me in the game.”

“Thanks, Sue. I'm glad to hear you say that because, to tell you the truth, there's no way I could do it without you.” I laughed.

We shook on it. Sue passed me another beer.

“So, where the hell you been anyway?” he asked.

“Church camp. I've seen the light.”

“You look like you've been rode hard, put away wet, and burned up in the barn. Your damn hands look like beef jerky. Where the hell've you been? I thought you were dead for sure.”

“I
am
.”

“Why you got to lay all this cryptic nonsense on me?”

“The less you know about it, the better. I made some fairly serious enemies in my recent travels, people that will be looking to put my head on a spike at the town gates. I figure it's a matter of time before they track me down. Plus, I don't want you to know anything Alice could beat out of you.”

“You'll buy me a shot and beer and regale me with your adventures when all this is under our belts?”

“Kid, when this is under our belts, you can have front-row tickets to John Lago, the Mexicali fucking musical.”

“Let's do this. What do you need from me?” Sue asked.

“Just keep me fat on Alice intel until I can get her into a corner and give her a proper divorce.”

“I'm on it.”

While Sue worked on getting under Alice's skin, I gathered intel on her assignment, Fang Zhen. Definitely not a cupcake. Not even close. CIS, Inc., or Chinese Industrial Solutions, was a front for a global corporate and industrial espionage ring with ties to the Chinese government. Zhen was the CEO, but his real job was as a Ministry of State Security operative. The MSS is the arm of Chinese intelligence with an expanding global network of ­“nonprofessional” operatives. These operatives are businesspeople, intellectuals, teachers, doctors, engineers, and other field experts assigned to blend into foreign societies for the purpose of gathering information in those fields. Because of their legitimate qualifications, and because they aren't associated with anything political, they are rarely scrutinized as potential spies and can go for years gathering intel completely undetected.

Even though an MSS operative is not necessarily a professional, it's prudent to assume they are surrounded by them. Beijing tends to go to great lengths to protect their investments because, like with Zhen, the intel that MSS operatives provide is worth billions. Which is why it didn't surprise me that security at CIS headquarters was as tight as any modern military installation. Zhen rarely left the building, and when he did, an armored Chinese military helicopter disguised as a private helicopter service picked him up from the roof and transferred him to secret ground pickup locations that were part of an intricate network of commercial vehicles, including NYPD squad cars.

Sue and I met to compare notes, and he was already hitting it out of the park. He had put a tracking device on Alice's mobile phone, along with a wireless mic and transmitter like the NSA uses to turn our iPhones into 24/ 7 surveillance devices. As it turned out, Alice had already initiated her infiltration of CIS about a week before I arrived back in Manhattan. The more I found out about it, the more the whole thing seemed almost too good to be true. Because
of the heavy security at Zhen's building, Alice would not have her usual doom squad there to protect her. They wouldn't even be able to monitor her with visual surveillance. And forget about weapons. Every employee was subject to a millimeter wave scan—just like at the airport—so she would be hard-pressed to get a nail clipper past the lobby. It was the exact scenario I needed to get to her. She was completely exposed. The only problem was, I would be too.

Sue and I got to work immediately on the difficult task of getting me access to the building. I no longer had HR behind me, so I couldn't gain placement through the usual back channels. There was really no other course of action than to go completely analog on their asses. So, I put on my best bright eyes and bushy tail and marched right into CIS, résumé firmly in hand. It took nearly two weeks of calling, dropping by, and general ass kissing before they decided to give me a shot. I'm sure the way they saw it was, here's this Harvard kid (hey, I went big) wanting to come get coffee and do grunt work for free. Guy won't take no for an answer, so he's a real go-getter. And his father has been part of the diplomatic corps in China for over a decade (nice touch). The bottom line is I got a foot in the door the old-fashioned way: I bullshitted my way in.

As I walked to the CIS building in Midtown Manhattan—a part of New York that could disappear tomorrow and only the tourists would miss it—I was invigorated by the fact that Alice and I would be on an even playing field. The prospect of having to mow down layers of security in order to get to her, like some geek playing a first-person shooter game, was not appealing. Also, that would have ruined all the fun. In my mind, meeting her face-to-face in our natural corporate habitat was the only honorable way to end our relationship. So, like the knights of old, I suited up in my trusty intern armor—brownish-green suit, sensible cap-toed oxfords, white button-down, and omnipresent LensCrafters glasses. If I wasn't able to shoot her, I could probably bore her to death.