Hostile Takeover (3 page)

3

S
he fired all ten rounds from her Beretta Px4 SubCompact. They zipped past my head, missing by millimeters, and punched holes in the solid log walls behind me. The sulfur smell of gunpowder hung in the air, burning my nostrils and throat. A flurry of wood splinters blanketed the top of my head like snow. I opened my eyes. Alice was gone. Her gun was on the floor, a cynical wisp of smoke curling out of the barrel. I wasn't exactly sure what to do. I was half-deaf from the gunshots and dumbstruck by the fact that I was still breathing.

The sound of a faucet running jerked me back into lucidity and I followed it into the bathroom. Alice had taken off her top and was examining her shoulder wound in the mirror. A combat grade first aid kit laid open on the counter. She didn't look at me. She just handed me a scalpel, a Magill forceps, and a packet of surgical gloves. I took them and tried unsuccessfully to make eye contact with her.

“What are you waiting for?” she asked, her eyes fixed on the mirror.

I pulled on the surgical gloves.

Alice gripped the bathroom counter and braced herself as I took a good look at the bullet hole I'd put in her shoulder. I didn't feel bad. She deserved a hell of a lot worse. I pulled a syringe from the kit.

“Let me hit you with a local first—”

“No.”

“Alice, you—”

“I said no. You going to do this or do I have to do it myself?”

“I'll do it,” I said quietly.

She closed her eyes and her light, rhythmic breathing was indicative of a deep, almost sensual meditative state. I gently palpated the powder-burned flesh around the two-inch star-shaped entry wound. She flinched briefly, but then I felt her wounded arm soften, as if she had just mentally separated it from her body. My fingers found the bullet, a hard, jagged lump buried in muscle and soft tissue.

“Got it.”

No reply.

I gently inserted my finger into the wound. She didn't move despite what had to be searing pain. I probed deeper, making mental notes on the proximity of larger blood vessels and nerves, clearing a path for scalpel and forceps. Still no reaction. I'd seen breath and focus-induced pain management before but never to this degree. Even if there is no facial affect or muscle tension, there is always increased heart rate and breathing. Not with Alice. By my count her pulse was hovering at around sixty beats or fewer per minute, and her breathing was shallow and relaxed. If warm blood hadn't been dripping down my hand, I would have been convinced that her veins were filled with ice water.

I widened the opening to the wound with my index and middle finger, half hoping I'd get even the slightest wince. Nothing. I put a flashlight in my mouth and looked for the bullet. A slight glint of light told me it was trapped in a web of cauterized flesh that had burned and adhered to it. I slid the scalpel in and gently cut the little blackened tendrils away, freeing the lead mushroom. Then I carefully pulled it out with the forceps, sliding its sharp, superheated edges past the blood vessels I'd noted before. The bullet fell with a wet
clatter
in the bathroom sink. And there was still no movement
from her, even when I proceeded to fill and rinse the gaping hole with saline and antibiotic wash and sutured it with more than thirty stitches. It was not until the final piece of gauze was taped over the seeping gash that she opened her eyes.

“How does it feel?” I asked.

She turned and kissed me—not with gratitude, but with the hungry aggression of an animal that has gone for days without food or water. There was surrender in the way she embraced me. Her hold on me was firm, but she wasn't pulling me in. She was hanging on to me, as if she knew that letting go meant falling to her certain death.

I know the feeling,
I thought as we fell into bed.

As we methodically consumed one another, I was struck by the newness of it all. I'd been with Alice, but the unfamiliarity of what I was feeling
while occupying familiar territory
inexplicably filled me with mortal terror. And I realized it was vulnerability that ran through both of us like an electric current, powering our desire but threatening to burn us alive.

The point I'm trying to make is that, until that moment, I had never trusted a soul in my life. Instead I manipulated people in order to ensure I had leverage over them. No one has ever had the power to hurt me . . . or love me for that matter. I made sure of that. Mostly because my life depended on it. However, stepping away from the illusion of survival and lying next to a woman who was once my enemy—without a gun under the pillow and with both eyes closed—filled me with a feeling of power that being a predator never gave me. That night, I slept the deep, dreamless sleep of the dead, my resurrection coming in the form of the rising sun and a delicate kiss.

I win,
I thought as we made love again.
I saved myself by giving myself up
. Happiness? I felt it. I knew it because I had never felt it before. Not really. Of course I had a hard time trusting it, but when
I looked into Alice's eyes and felt the playful warmth of her smile, I had no choice but to surrender to it. Then her smile faded and her eyes welled with tears.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“I feel so . . . awful . . . about everything.”

“And this is the kind of apology that makes it all irrelevant.”

“You're either completely psychotic or you really do love me,” she said.

“Probably a little bit of both,” I said, pulling her close.

“There's so much I want to tell you,” she said. “I want to come clean so we can move on.”

“About what?” I asked.

“About what happened. New York, Honduras, me, Bob. You must have
so many
questions. I don't blame you really. I mean, if I were you—”

“Actually, I do have a question, Alice,” I said, feigning concern.

“Good. Ask me anything.”

“Will you marry me?”

4

D
early beloved, we are gathered here today to join . . . I'm sorry, I never got your names.”

“That's because we didn't give them to you,” I said coldly.

“Come on, padre, let's move it along,” Alice said.

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to join this couple in holy matrimony . . .”

Our wedding was a relatively small affair. Like most professional killers, we had no family or friends of any kind, so the guest list was a snap. John. Check. Alice. Check. Nondenominational, guitar-playing ex-convict minister who didn't ask a lot of questions. Check. Smartly dressed hotel staffer poised to toss Juliet rose petals and pop a bottle of 1907 Heidsieck champagne—recovered from the Swedish freighter
Jönköping
after it was sunk by a German U-boat in 1916 (something old)—upon completion of the nuptials. Check. All weddings should be like ours was—the bride and groom, solitary as their cake topper doppelgängers, grinning before Yahweh in bespoke couture.

Even though we spared the guest list, we spared no expense. The ceremony took place in the Ty Warner Penthouse at the Four Seasons in Manhattan. For the price of one night's lodging in that room, you could feed and clothe several villages in Myanmar for a full year. Alice looked stunning in her handmade jet-black wedding
gown (something new) that I had a goth seamstress fashion out of exotic military fabrics. It cost me a small fortune (and nearly my pinky finger) but it was worth it. That dress made me want to cut my own heart out and bleed on the sacrificial stone to show my gratitude to the gods. And after all that, I couldn't wait to unceremoniously rip it off her.

I was wearing a tuxedo I stole from a dead MI6 agent (possibly my best-dressed target), and a pair of Vietnam-era jungle combat boots I won in a card game before I killed a roomful of Laotian flesh peddlers with a camp shovel. Alice wasn't into the boots, but I told her letting me wear them was the least she could do after she had tried several times in the last year to put a bullet in my head but only managed to hit my heel. She one-upped me by wearing a pair of Alexander McQueen Titanic Ballerina Pumps she'd had fitted with a razor sharp titanium stiletto heel that could lacerate Kevlar and punch through concrete. They were wickedly beautiful and I couldn't help but wonder how they would look pointing at the ceiling.

“Do you . . . take . . . her to be your lawfully wedded wife—”

“I do,” Alice said.

“Seriously?” I said, annoyed. “It's not your turn.”

“Why don't we try that again?” the minister said.

“No.” Alice glared.

“Don't ruin the moment,” I said.

“I don't like the rest of those tired, played-out vows,” Alice said.

“To have and to hold, in sickness and in health, till death do us part. Those?” I inquired casually.

“Yep,” she snapped, strangling her exquisite saffron crocus bouquet.

“Fine. What do you suggest?”

“There's a very rare bottle of champagne that has waited patiently at the bottom of the ocean off the coast of Finland for nearly one
hundred years for us to drink it,” she began. “We have actual Kush fresh off the plane from Islamabad, and the Maine lobsters are going to kill each other if we don't kill them first. And let's not forget that I'm so horny I could fuck a mechanical bull. So, with all of these more urgent matters, why do we need to go through with this ritual nonsense?”

“I do,” I said.

“We're not there yet,” the minister said, annoyed.

“Shhhh,” Alice said, pressing her finger to his lips too hard and slightly cutting him with what I could see was a French-manicured nail with a razor-sharp rose-gold edge—adding an instant upgrade to my shoe fantasy. In the interest of expediting the fulfillment of that fantasy, I kissed the bride.

The minister scowled and lit a cigarette while we made out like high school prom dates.

“I now pronounce you man and wife?”

Hands everywhere. Groping. Outside voices.

“Okay. I'm out of here,” the minister said. “Congratulations. You two were made for each other.”

He took leave of us, along with the hotel staffers, and we took leave of our senses. Just think bacchanal meets Masters and Johnson meets
Penthouse Letters
and you've pretty much got the picture. After several hours of “marital consummation” we put our beautiful wedding clothes back on and had a smoke on the terrace.

“Promise me we'll have sex like that for the rest of our lives, no matter how old, gray, and foul-smelling we are,” she said.

“No way,” I said. “Maybe if we were chimpanzees . . . on some kind of experimental military drug. Outside of that, I'd be dead in five years if we kept up this pace.”

“Maybe that's my fiendish plan. To fuck you to death.”

“Okay, I promise.”

We both laughed, mainly because the irony of the situation
was as thick as our Sylvia Weinstock wedding cake and twice as sweet. I married the love of my life and former nemesis. We had the most beautiful wedding two totally disconnected psychopaths could possibly have had. We enjoyed unspeakable pleasures. And then it was time for the pièce de résistance, my wedding present to Alice. I opened the doors to the foyer (yes, the suite was that big) and revealed a massive, beautifully wrapped box about the size of a coffin.

“What is it?” she said, licking her lips.

“Open it and find out.”

She tore off the wrapping paper and lifted the lid off the box. Her jaw dropped.

“Holy shit, John.”

“That's only the beginning.”

“Excuse me?” she said, incredulous.

“This is a two-part present.”

“What's part two?”

“Are you sure you're ready?” I asked coyly.

“Don't make me shoot you in your other foot.”

I looked at my watch.

“Twenty minutes and all will be revealed. Enough time for champagne.”

We popped the shipwrecked Heidsieck and toasted. It tasted like unbridled optimism, with a gunpowder nose and a burnt lemon and kerosene finish. After we practically sucked the last drop out of the bottle, we kissed, tasting victory on each other's malevolent lips.

“Ready?” I said.

She nodded, smiling.

I opened her wedding present box and pulled out five shaped charges made to look like little wedding cakes and positioned them in a large circle on the floor.

“John. What are you doing?”

“Sweeping you off your feet.”

“Seriously. What are you doing?”

I stopped and grinned.

“This is your present.”

I pulled two Israeli Special Forces X95 SMGs with silencers (something borrowed) out of the wedding box, slapped 32-round 9-mm mags into each, and handed one to her.

“It's beautiful, honey, but have you lost your mind?”

“No. You're going to love this. Trust me.”

I pulled her close to me and started strapping weaponry to her body with a custom leather holstering harness.

“Okay, now you're making me hot.”

“That dress is bulletproof.”

“Keep talking . . .”

“My tuxedo is impervious to flamethrowers and chemical weapons.”

She jumped up and wrapped her legs around me.

“Save it for later. We need to focus.”

“Tease,” she said, sliding off.

We busily geared ourselves up.

“How many?” she asked.

“At least a dozen. Maybe more,” I said, smiling.

“Who are they?”

“Do you want to ruin the surprise?” I asked.

“No, darling.”

“Good. Now, stand next to me here.”

I pulled her close to me in the middle of the circle created by the wedding cake–shaped charges.

“You're a sick man, John.”

“I know. Isn't it great?”

“Yes.”

“Close your eyes.”

She did and we kissed. Then she opened them again.

“Can I have a little hint about the target?” she asked, batting her eyelashes.

“The CEO of Human Resources, Incorporated,” I answered casually and blew the shaped charges.

The circular piece of floor we had been standing on broke away and we dropped through the ceiling into another palatial suite directly below us. As we smashed into the floor and rolled to cover, bullets were already flying. It turned out I had slightly miscalculated. There weren't a dozen armed men in there. There were two dozen.

Till death do us part.