Hostile Takeover (18 page)

38

W
hen I showed up to work at CIS on a Monday morning, Alice had gone AWOL. I did my rounds, looking for her in the usual places, but she was nowhere to be found. I had Sue track down her phone and it was somewhere on the twentieth floor. That was the floor just below the penthouse level, where Zhen worked. I didn't think it was possible that she was going to attempt to break through the ceiling or scale the glass outside, but I wasn't taking any chances. I had put her in a desperate position and Alice never thought twice about resorting to desperate measures.

Getting to the twentieth floor was no joke. I was in the Donkey Kong world of Draconian corporate hierarchies and CIS was the pinnacle of that ethos. Everyone had a key card that contained the secrets to their status and the keys to their relative kingdoms. As I was a lowly intern, my key card had limited access to the building, but it was slightly better than most because I was in the Human Resources department.

My supervisor had the ability to swipe it and give me temporary access for special circumstances. Rhonda-Pat was a chunky soccer mom with a cubicle full of kid and pet photos and the persistent smell of canned tuna. She loved coffee and she especially loved the coffee I made for her, which was a rare Peruvian bean that, unbeknownst to her, had been cured in a vat of goat cud for six
weeks before being bagged and shipped to market. The fermented ruminant (basically goat puke) gave the coffee a peppery aroma and flavor, much like a complex rye whiskey.

I deliberately didn't bring her a cup at the usual time so I could get her jones going. Then I got to work running around the office looking busy. She finally intercepted me in the hallway with that smile people give you when they are either going to change your life with horrible news or they want something petty and are afraid to ask. I preempted her question, relieving her of the embarrassment while ensuring her cube stayed vacated for a while.

“Hey, Rhonda-Pat. Sorry. I have a pot brewing in the kitchen right now.”

I looked at my watch.

“Ten minutes tops.”

“Oh, John. That's wonderful. Maybe I'll just—”

“You should go wait for it. A couple of guys from Risk Management were milling around in there—”

“Thanks!”

And she took off like a shot. I had set the coffeemaker to start just prior to seeing her, so I knew it was going to be more like fifteen minutes. I went straight to her cube, typed her cat's name in the password field, and authorized my card for the twentieth floor.

When I finally made it up there, Sue vectored me into Alice's location. Based on the coordinates, she was smack-dab in the middle of the men's executive washroom. I crept up to the door and put my ear against it. I heard something but I wasn't sure what at first. Then it got louder and I realized it was Alice. She wasn't speaking, just making odd sounds. They got louder and then I knew what I was hearing.

It was the sound of Alice having sex.

In the throes of passion, she would coo, almost like a dove or a baby dolphin. It would get louder and louder until . . . well, you know the rest. It was getting louder and louder and in about ten seconds flat I went from cool, calculating assassin to raging, jealous husband. Next thing I knew, I had barged into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. As soon as I entered the absurdly luxurious bathroom—complete with espresso machine, bar cart, and leather furniture—the noise stopped. The stall door was closed. I looked under the door and saw nothing. But there was no place else for them to hide, so I figured they must have had their feet up and out of sight.

“Alice?”

No answer. I gently nudged the thick stall door. It was locked.

“Banging our way to the bottom, are we? You make me sick.”

Still no answer. Not a sound.

“I know you're in here. You and your mark. I'll bet his name is Mark. That would be perfect. Fuck you too, Mark.”

Total silence.

“I'm actually glad it's going to end this way. I wasn't sure if I could go through with it, killing you, but now I know it won't be a problem at all. A pleasure, in fact. I'll even enjoy killing you, Mark. She may have led you in here by your angry inch, but she's still my wife, mother—”

“—fucker,” Alice said,
behind me.

I turned and the barrel of a Kimber Tactical Pro II .45 with a barrel suppressor was in my face. Alice grinned at me triumphantly.

“Let me guess. No funny stuff?” I said.

39

Y
ou were actually jealous, John.” She laughed.

I was so enraged I could feel my fingernails cutting into my palms as I clenched my fists.

“On your knees.”

“Nope,” I replied casually.

She cocked back the hammer.

“Okay, that's your final ‘I mean business' move,” I said. “Looks like all you have left is to shoot.”

I spit in her face and used the half second afforded me by her knee-jerk repulsion to grab the suppressor on the gun. She managed to fire a round that whipped past my face and punched a hole in the brass paper towel dispenser. I then tore the gun out of her hand and threw it through the window in one motion. Alice's trigger finger was bleeding as the Kimber sailed to the street below.

We stared each other down in a Mexican standoff scored by a hideous Muzak version of “You Light Up My Life.” In moments like that, it's important to have a strategy well before first strike. It's not a time for improvisation. So, we did the same thing—faced off, clicked into a premeditated plan we hoped would give us each a slight advantage, and waited for the other to make the first move.

“You first,” I said.

“Age before beauty,” she said.

Then she kicked me in the chest with such force, I flew back into the wall and shattered the ceramic tile. I countered with a savage front kick to her stomach. She gasped and retched as her mouth filled with blood. But this didn't slow her down. Instead, she spat the blood in my eyes and started beating my head and neck with the marble towel rod she tore off the wall. I snatched the rod in midstrike and twisted it with all of my strength, ripping it out of her hand and burying it in her kneecaps. She went down hard on the floor. I went to body slam her and she rolled, causing me to hit the ground with my full weight on my elbow. Then she jumped on top of me and circled her arm around my neck.

She applied a choke hold called Silkworm
.
Its origin is unknown, although many speculate that it comes from Naban wrestling, which originated in ancient Burma. The choke arm encircles the neck and is locked into place by the other arm, which twists through it like a pretzel and holds fast on the back of the attacker's neck. It's so tight initially that the inexperienced fighter will black out instantly. I was able to get my chin in the way just before she locked it off, so she was only cutting off blood flow in my right side carotid and subclavian arteries and I could still barely draw breath.

At first, I thought about trying to flip her over my head. But then I remembered that would have been a very bad idea. If I had flipped her and she had maintained her grasp, she would have rotated in midair like a gymnast and used what's called axial loading to break my neck. So, instead, I started lifting her off the ground, duping her into thinking I was going for the flip. She tightened her hold but then had to reposition her arms to maintain her balance when I quickly brought her back down on the floor. That shift was all I needed to rotate my body into a position wherein we were chest to chest. Before Alice could unlock her arms, I had already encircled them with mine in another famous hold—the Bear Hug. At that point, I just needed to hold her still enough to deliver a deathblow
from my forehead, driving her nasal bones into her brain. She closed her eyes, seemingly waiting for death, but then pulled the one move I wasn't expecting.

She kissed me.

I'm not ashamed to admit it was the hottest kiss I've ever had. I kissed her back and we switched gears so hard from homicidal rage to carnal fury that I thought we might spontaneously conceive a love child right there in the executive washroom.

Then someone started knocking on the door.

We heard urgent voices calling for whoever was in the bathroom to unlock the door. They were concerned someone might be dying in a stall and said they had called 911. Then we heard the heavy boots of the facilities maintenance crew pounding down the hallway and the telltale sound of master keys jangling from a belt holster. With the sound of the key in the lock, I threw my jacket over the window and Alice kicked out the glass. When they opened the door and started jabbering in Chinese about the damage to the bathroom, we were already outside, standing on the window ledge. By the time the hoary janitor poked his head out the window, we had both jumped to a construction scaffold attached to the building next door and gone our separate ways.

Just another day at the office.

I must admit, part of me was excited by our one-round knockout lavatory tryst. Clearly, the fire between us was still lit. But the next time I saw Alice, I found out the hard way that it was burning out of control.

40

FBI-NCAVC, Quantico, Virginia

Present day

I
'm beginning to understand why you want to see Alice again,” Fletch says smugly.

“Why is that?”

“You're still in love with her.”

“Whatever you're smoking, have some sent to my cell.”

Fletch seems almost touched by the idea that my motivation to see Alice one last time is strictly romantic. This is a good thing in his mind because the holy grail of interrogation is finding that one personal hook that strikes the right chord on the subject's heartstrings. Every terrorist has a soft spot for someone or something. Every serial killer has a favorite teddy bear. Fletch wants me to have my teddy bear to keep me cozy at night in my cold, dank cell. In this way he is a father figure and a savior all in one, bearing loaves and fishes to save my soul.

“Are you denying it?” he asks, sounding oddly adolescent.

“I'm denying you the satisfaction of familiarity, Fletch. Seeing as you've taken everything else from me, I think I'll keep that to myself.”

“That's fine, but our only concern about you seeing Alice has
been one of safety. You can imagine the kind of shit storm that would roll in if you managed to harm or even kill her in our custody.”

“Not to mention the paperwork.”

He ignores my bad joke and glances at the two-way mirror.

“But if I knew your intentions for seeing her were . . . more innocuous—”

“I get it, Fletch. Does admitting that I love Alice help my cause?”

He shrugs a “maybe” and waits to be right again.

“Fine. I love her. I've never stopped loving her. Happy?”

He smiles. I think he really is happy. But clearly he's not aware of the “thin line between love and hate”
the Persuaders so elegantly exposed.

“Can we move on or do you want me to show you the Alice tattoo on my d—”

“Let's move on. Tell me more about Craig Davison.”

41

I
hate golf. It's an impossibly difficult game or sport or whatever you want to call it, but it's played by the fattest, drunkest brain-dead honkies on the planet. And I hate Florida. For all the same reasons. But there I was, John Lago, a highly trained killing machine, fresh off the red-eye wearing yellow pants and taking practice swings at Ben Hogan's favorite course, the Seminole Golf Club in Juno Beach. While I obsessively washed my ball and tried to wrap my head around “the kiss,” my new foursome partner Craig Davison joined me in the tee box. The other two players had not yet shown up yet. Hmm . . . I wonder why.

Craig would have been the perfect intern if he weren't in his midforties already. He had the ideal build and looked to be a world-class wallflower. I was chatting at him a fair bit, trying to get him to open up to me using good old boy small talk. But he was a pro and knew exactly how to say a lot without saying anything. While we waited our turn to tee off, I poked at his Teflon facade a bit more.

“What kind of work you in, Craig?”

“Sales.”

“What's your product?”

“Tech sales. Not very exciting,” he whispered, slightly annoyed.

“I worked in tech for a few years,” I whispered back.

“What field?”

“Information systems mostly.”

“Man, we're both as boring as we look.” He grinned.

“You got that right. Sometimes I think watching paint dry would be more exciting than my life,” I said.

He courtesy laughed and headed up to the tee. After an eternity of warm-up and ceremony, he shanked the damn thing into the woods with a wicked slice. Needless to say, he was not pleased with my arrow-straight 350-yard drive that cut the fairway in half.

“Nice shot,” he mumbled. “You play a lot?”

“Hardly ever,” I said, chapping his ass.

We got into the cart and I could smell the rabid desire to win coming out of Craig's every pore. Of course, I was playing an amazing game and he couldn't make a putt to save his life. As we progressed from hole to hole, I began to see that all-too-familiar frustration and angst that come with a poor round of golf. In fact, he was getting downright pissed but keeping his feelings very close to the vest. And he started drinking. That was exactly where I needed him to be. The back nine on that course is notoriously difficult. Fairways are exceedingly narrow and the rough is the forest primeval. By the time we made the turn and finished lunch, Craig was half in the bag, had no confidence, and had his nose buried in his iPhone, pretending that he was too busy to care about his game.

Around the sixteenth hole, he sliced the ball a country mile into the woods. It's amazing what a slight adjustment to a five iron will do to your game. Oh yeah, I forgot to say that Sue and I completely reengineered his clubs prior to tee time. Oops! I could hear Craig quietly cursing as he stormed off to retrieve his ball, refusing to accept a ride from me on the cart. He was in the trees awhile, hunting around and stomping like a child having a tantrum. Finally, he gave up and turned to head back to the fairway but ended up turning right into me.

“What the—” he started to say as I Tased him in the neck. Craigy
then dutifully slumped to the ground, out cold. Sue was waiting for us in a grounds-crew cart, so we loaded him into the equipment trailer and covered him with a tarp.

“Cinderella story,” I said in my best Bill Murray accent, which basically sounded like an Australian leprechaun.

“What's that mean?” Sue asked.

“Bill Murray?
Caddyshack
?”

“Doesn't ring a bell.”

“Kids. Jesus. If a movie doesn't end up on a McDonald's drink cup, it doesn't exist.”