Hostile Takeover (2 page)

It was actually a genius concept and the perfect cover for wet work, if you're into that sort of thing. To quote Bob, my former and thoroughly dead boss, “Interns are invisible. You can tell executives
your name a hundred times and they will never remember it because they have no respect for someone at the bottom of the barrel, working for free. The irony is that they will heap important duties on you with total abandon. The more of these duties you voluntarily accept, the more you will get, simultaneously acquiring
trust and access.
Ultimately, your target will trust you with his life and that is when you will take it.”

Kind of makes you think twice about fucking with the little people, right?

I'm sure you're wondering why the hell someone would choose such a vocation. And if you aren't, then you've got serious problems. But I like to say that this is the kind of work that
chooses you
. Just like with money-grubbing religious cults and the Malaysian sex trade, the trolls of the world are always cruising the gutter for disenfranchised youth, such as yours truly. They know you've got no options. They also know you've got no outside support in the form of parents or even a half-assed state-assigned guardian. When you're on your own as a youngster, you're fresh meat and there's a line of cannibals just waiting to fire up the grill. So, instead of becoming a drug mule or getting sold as a chicken dinner for pedophile conventioneers, I got recruited into the highly unglamorous yet hella lucrative world of contract killing. I have half a brain and I'm fairly athletic, so they applied my talents to the job, scrubbed away any pesky human emotions or empathy that might get in the way, and put a gun in my hand before I had even figured out how to find my dick with it. I was twelve years old when HR, Inc. got its hooks in me and I stayed there for thirteen years.

Three years ago, at the ripe old age of twenty-five, I was about to retire. Bob's philosophy was that anyone accepting an internship past that age would be labeled a slacker by established employees and draw the kind of attention that could jeopardize assignments. Which was fine with me. I was happy to wash my hands of the whole
affair, but before I could ride off into the sunset, I had one last job. I should have known not to take it because
one last job
in the movies is always the first step to total annihilation. Always. In the film
Seven,
Morgan Freeman takes
one last case
and ends up in the seventh circle of Hell. Or how about Harrison Ford in
Blade Runner
? Guy comes out of retirement to bag
one last skin job
and finds out
he's a skin job
! Jesus, I should have seen this coming!

Anyway, all I wanted was to move on and try to live something other than a kid-on-a-milk-carton life. I wanted baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and fucking Chevrolet. God knows I earned it! You know the mortality stats for someone in my line of work? Nearly 100 percent. It doesn't matter how deadly you are because, unless you're the Terminator, eventually one of those bullets coming down like cool November rain is going to find you and paint the world with your insides.

It's only a matter of time.

And I had done my time . . . in spades. I should have bounced when I had the chance. Of course I didn't. Instead of getting my gold retirement watch and landing on my feet with a white picket fence and a satellite dish, I ended up base-jumping from the kettle into the fire. All because of
one last job
. But what's done is done. If you're interested, you can read about the whole hot mess in
The Intern's Handbook
. You won't find it at Barnes & Noble, but I hear the feds have a few copies lying around, and I wouldn't be surprised if you could download it for free on Russian iTunes. I'm told it's an excellent beach/airplane/bathroom/killing-time-after-a-motel-tryst read.

But that was then and this is now. I'm twenty-eight years young and I've ripened like nightshade berries or pungent French cheese. Since having my ass handed to me three years ago, I tried valiantly to leave my foul-mouthed, trigger-happy alter ego behind. Greener pastures were my original destination, but there truly is no rest for
the wicked (despite our infectious charms), and I ended up being railroaded into a collision course with, you guessed it, Act Two of my tragic life story. I thought I'd nearly seen it all, but this not only takes the cake, it kidnaps, tortures, and dismembers the pastry chef.

So Kumbaya your asses round the campfire for a little prison bedtime story. If you're already a member of the John Lago fan club, then none of what I'm about to tell you will come as a shock. After
The Intern's Handbook,
you're used to being bound, horsewhipped, and hung from the nearest tree by the prodigious yarns I'm apt to spin. In fact, if this were a movie sequel, it would be
The Godfather, Part II—
better than the original. For all you John Lago virgins, welcome to the party—a raucous affair where they dose your wine cooler with angel dust at the door and you wake up playing a supporting role in a ritual killing somewhere in a swamp outside Tampa.

I guess the best place to begin is with Alice—the beautiful and charming love of my life who deceived me in every conceivable way, beat me senseless, shot me, ripped my heart out and stomped it to bits, and burned everything important to me to the ground. Some of you know about her and can't wait to get your fingers in the dirt, of which there is a veritable truckload. For those who don't, she's just like me—a killer who thought she was heartless but found out the hard way she wasn't when Cupid, that fat, cheeky bastard, shot a 600-grain carbon fiber arrow with a bone-splitting broadhead right through her love muscle, and life as she knew it bled out onto the floor.

When Bukowski said, “If there are junk yards in hell, love is the dog that guards the gates,” he wasn't kidding.

1

E
veryone knows that the best part of any great love story is the beginning. The middle is like driving across the United States—flat, predictable, and offering little more than fast-food culture and rest stop romance. In what other context do men and women live under the same roof and go weeks without sex? The end of a love story is either a catastrophic tragedy or an anticlimactic whimper. And it's the end, so unless it's Jerry Springer–worthy, who even cares? But the bliss of ignorance that comes in the beginning is a drug we all wish we could cook, shoot, and ride till the wheels come off.

When people ask about relationships, they always say, “How did you guys meet?” Not, “OMG, tell me all about your third year!” And when a relationship is in trouble, the desperate couple is always trying to
recapture the magic
of when they first met. The real tragedy is that, without time travel or amnesia, it's impossible to ever get back there. Which is why, to most people, marriage is about as magical as watching David Copperfield make Claudia Schiffer disappear.

The beginning of the love story between Alice and me was a bit more complicated than most. When we first met three years ago, we were mortal enemies, predators lurking in the woodwork of a prestigious Manhattan law firm. I had been sent there as an “intern” to exterminate one of the partners. And Alice, well let's just say she'd been sent there to exterminate me. Hilarity ensued! Despite our
impossible circumstances, and the fact that we were interacting with each other using cover identities, we still managed to fall in love in our own twisted way. Predictably, the whole thing ended badly, mainly due to the fact that Alice had been paid to have it end that way. But I was smitten nonetheless, almost literally, and have never been able to shake it.

What's interesting is that our relationship was the perfect metaphor for all relationships. Love is the stepchild of pain and suffering, born of conflict and genetically predisposed to failure. Animals don't love anything but their next meal, and guess what we are and have been for millions of years? Basically, this whole love thing is like a new ingredient added to the primordial soup. So, while we are wining and dining that special someone, buying them flowers and performing feats of strength and wonder in the orgasm circus, we are fighting back our inherently violent opposition to the opposite sex.

A lifetime of living in an emotional black hole, observing people from the outside looking in, made me realize all of this. Knowing I could never have what normal people had allowed me to disconnect from the world and see it through the microscope of reason, unmolested by emotion. But guess what?
Eventually, I wanted what they had
. I wanted it so bad I was like a wolf stalking a blood trail. The way I saw it at the time was that I needed to find love so that I could exist. Relativity is about context. I had no context other than HR, Inc., and that came to an end. Everything else in the normal world seemed like it would drive me to continue killing, but love . . . that was the only thing in life that seemed worth dying for. I felt it with Alice. And I got what I wanted. Ish.

But love is filled with conflict and volatility—especially new love. Of course, when you're dealing with two “normal” people, the result of this conflict and volatility is what you might expect in a burgeoning relationship. You're hot, then cold, fucking, then fighting, making plans, then burning bridges, and so on. Alice and I are about
as far from normal as you can get. In fact, she and I are like the two compounds your chemistry teacher told you
never
to mix. We're professional killers! That's taking conflict and volatility to a whole new level. With normal couples, someone might get thrown out of the house after a fight. With us, someone is liable to get thrown out a window.

2

F
lashback three years. It was Valentine's Day, for those who enjoy irony with a side of psychosis. I was in Nowhere, New Hampshire, driving through one of the worst blizzards on record, feeling like Dustin Hoffman in
Marathon Man
as my car slid all over the road. I couldn't trust anyone. I knew that death was around every corner, the smiling friend who would invite me in for a hot cup of coffee to get out of the cold. But that was the least of my concerns. Finding Alice was all I cared about. The last time we had laid eyes on each other was in Honduras, through machine-gun sights. She had just finished fucking me over so royally that she made Judas look like Job. In fact, she and my old boss Bob had been in cahoots on the betrayal (long story), so I smoked his traitor ass, and Alice and I lost each other in the chaos that comes with Honduran death squads, a hail of bullets, and high explosives.

After crawling back to the U.S., I spent every waking moment tracking her down. Finally, I got a bead on her in New Hampshire and there I was, a jackass in a snow globe, making my way to Point A. After plowing through half the state, I saw the cabin where she was holed up through the four-inch circle on my windshield that wasn't covered by a sheet of ice. I drove past, hid my car in a grove of trees a mile up the road, and backtracked to the cabin. I approached from the rear, concealing my tracks in the powdery snow with a
pine bough. The day was so cold it was like Flannery O'Connor's last breath—raw and as hard as the hammer of divine retribution. I entered through the back door. It was dark inside. I sat in a chair, covered myself with a blanket, and waited like some film noir detective. After an hour or so, I heard tires crunching in the snow out front, followed by the tread of boots coming up the steps. The door opened.

Alice walked in.

Sweet Alice. She looked amazing in her full-length Burberry black leather biker trench coat with a fox fur collar, carrying a bag of groceries. I reveled in her beauty, then greeted her by shooting her in the shoulder with my Walther P22. The groceries went flying and she fell back onto her butt, clutching the wound, a look of shock and confusion on her face. She reached for her gun but saw it was me and reconsidered.

“Hi, honey. I'm home.” I laughed.

“John? What the fuck are you doing here?” Alice asked as blood gushed through the fingers wrapped around her shoulder wound.

“Taking care of a loose end,” I said.

“Do you think I'd be up here if I was still after you?”

“You're up here because you're working a target. Based on the surroundings, my guess is it's someone in intelligence. CIA. Rogue. About five-foot-ten, a hundred and forty-five pounds. Am I getting warmer?”

“What have you done?”

“I told him to get the fuck out of Dodge before he gets his brains splattered all over Robert Frost country. I told him that his lovely intern is really a cold-blooded killer who is using him to get close to his boss so that she can cut his throat with a tant
ō
knife—­yakuza-­style, of course.”

“Congratulations. Now that you've destroyed my career, please say something hokey about tying up loose ends again and put me out of my misery.”

“You're not a loose end. I am.”

“Now you're making no sense,” she said.

“Maybe this will help.”

I set my gun on the floor.

“I love you,” I said.

I kicked my gun across the floor, well out of my reach and well within hers.

“All I need to know is if you love me.”

I rolled the box with a Harry Winston engagement ring I had given her when I proposed to her months ago across the floor. Ironically, at that time the ring had only been a ploy to emotionally manipulate her in order to gain information about my target. Now it was a symbol of my complete rejection of that part of me, and my complete acceptance of her. Alice just looked at me, waiting for the punch line. Then it was her turn to smile. Even though she had triple-crossed me and left me for dead, there were four carats of flawless clarity in that box that said “I forgive you.”

“You're fucking crazy. You know that?”

“Not anymore.”

She pulled her own gun and leveled it at me.

“I don't love you,” she said defiantly. “And I don't see how you could possibly love me.”

“Believe me, if I could walk away from this, or better yet, put a bullet in your head, I would. But I know who I am now. And I know that you're part of that,” I said with conviction.

“No, John. I'm not.”

“Then pull the trigger,” I said, ready for anything. “And I'll have my answer.”

“I can't do it,” she said quietly.

“Just squeeze.”

“I'm not talking about killing you. I'm talking about what happens if I don't kill you. What you want. I can't do it.”

She fought the tears that were rolling down her cheeks, mocking her bravado.

“Neither can I,” I said. “But I'm willing to die trying. Are you?”

We sat there staring at each other for a long time, both of us wondering what would happen next. Alice answered that question when I saw the muscles in the forearm of her gun hand flex and I heard the faint click of the trigger engaging the hammer.

“I'll take that as a no,” I said calmly.

My heart sank and I closed my eyes, waiting for two bullets to double tap into my chest. Then I visualized the coup de grâce, the headshot—a blood, brain, and bone fragment masterpiece adorning the wall behind me—the
Guernica
of my life sliding to the floor in crimson chunks. But nothing came and I opened my eyes, hopeful that Alice was so overwhelmed by her love for me that she couldn't kill me.

Then she pulled the trigger.