Hostile Takeover (4 page)

5

A
huge cloud of swirling white plaster dust made it difficult to see and breathe on top of making everyone look completely ridiculous. The Israelis are masters at close-quarters urban warfare, probably the best in the world. Knowing this, I pretty much customized our entire ops weapon package as if we were a couple of Mista'arvim soldiers getting dropped into a Hamas bug nest. Of course, we had the element of surprise with the massive pieces of floor and ceiling smashing down directly into the suite's executive conference room.

Seated at the conference table at the time were several suits from an organized crime syndicate in Eastern Europe. Their heavily armed blockhead security thugs were standing against the walls of the conference room behind them, trying to look all badass with their chinstrap beards and cologne-infused pinstripe suits. At the head of the table, flanked by his own army of murderous goons, was our target, the CEO of HR, Inc. And check this out. The guy's name was Bob! Evidently, he was called off the bench to replace the former Bob after that one's untimely death in Honduras at the hands of yours truly.

The new Bob was nothing like the old one. He was a former military contractor who thought he could pack the same steel as the rest of us. He'd obviously been appointed by whatever mystic cabal, alien brain trust, or Wizard of Oz consortium had been running HR from some ivory tower since its inception. Bob II was a flabby suit.
Which is why it shouldn't surprise you to know what he did when that ceiling crashed down and killed five of the guys sitting a few feet away from him at the conference table. He pissed his pants and crawled under the bed.

Alice tried to go after him, but she got lit up by several shooters and had to find cover. I deployed smoke and flash grenades to throw them off her tail. The bosses who hadn't been crushed to death by falling chunks of concrete floor were choking and disoriented, and I thought I could actually hear some of them crying. Which makes sense, since they were completely abandoned by their tough-­fronting velvet rope security apes, who had taken cover all over the suite.

We put a pill in every boss and started looking for a dozen or so of their thugs. The good thing was that they had not only us to worry about, but also each other. There isn't a lot of blood-brother loyalty among clock puncher bodyguards, especially if they're used to getting paid in gristly donkey sausage for doing rusty cleaver jobs in Bulgaria. The bad thing was that this was a recipe for total chaos. Everyone was trampling over one another, trying to find cover. Guess what? There is no cover in a luxury hotel suite! Everything is thin and fragile and expensive. Some realized this and simply made a run for the door. Alice was going to shoot them, but I waved her off. They couldn't ID us and this was probably the only vacation they were going to get before the Boris that was the boss of their Boris boss cut them up for chum.

The brief exodus thinned the herd to eight bearded, Drakkar Noir–pickled human bull's-eyes, and that was more than manageable for the missus and me. The two of us hightailed it to the only
real
cover in the suite—a huge fake Ming vase and a bar cart—both of which had been placed in the room by hotel staff thanks to some very bogus work orders issued by me, and both of which were lined with six inches of titanium and Kevlar composite, impenetrable by anything but a stinger missile. Oh, and they were full of extra mags
too, so we basically had some very stylish urban foxholes with sweet ammo stashes.

“Way to plan ahead, love pumpkin,” Alice said as she slapped in another mag.

“I think your terms of endearment tank is empty, lamb chop.” I grinned.

“This is the best wedding present ever,
sheyne punim
,” she said as she drilled a guy who looked exactly like Count Chocula.

“I thought you'd like it, angel puss,” I said. “But this is only one of your presents.”

“What? John, you shouldn't have!”

“Nothing's too good for my beautiful bride, motherfuckers!” I yelled as I splattered a couple of Borats all over the silk divan.

From that point on it was carny shootin' gallery time. We systematically picked off the remaining thugs, shooting them through walls, decorative partitions, leather club chairs, flat-screen TVs—things that stop bullets in the movies but wouldn't stop a BB gun in real life. Just when we thought it was Miller Time, another problem arose in the form of a .338 Lapua Magnum round that hit the bottle of Grey Goose on top of the bar cart with such force that the vodka inside exploded and incinerated the head of one of our opponents. I quickly found the hole in the window facing Central Park. Sniper. Had to be with Bob II. All the other suits were dead, and there were only two thugs left.

I fired a shot in Bob II's general direction and my position got rattled with a hailstorm of sniper bullets. I did it again so I could judge the angle of trajectory and draw fire on one of the last thugs creeping up on Alice. The thug got his head unzipped by the sniper and I used my green-laser sighting scope to track the powder residue hanging in the air from the kill shot. I followed that until I saw the moonlight delicately reflect off his scope. Son of a bitch was more than a thousand yards away on a rooftop overlooking Central Park.
Then I texted one of my NYPD contacts and gave him the shooter's twenty. City cops
love
bagging a pro, and I handed them a hot snot on a silver platter.

While we tried to lay low, the final thug, of course, had found a way to weasel behind the Sub-Zero refrigerator. Those are heavy, well-made fridges with a ton of metal, so he won the award for smartest meat helmet. We couldn't get a good shot at him and he had Alice pinned down in the twelve inches of space that his bullets and the sniper's bullets couldn't reach. So, I did what any good husband would have done in my position. I shot one of Bob II's toes off. He screamed in agony as the blood poured out of his tasseled loafer. Served him right. Who the hell wears tassels anymore?

“Call him off, Bob Deuce!”

“What?” he yelled. “Who?”

I shot off another toe. He started blubbering.

“The sniper, you asshole!”

“Fuck you!”

Toes 2, 3, and 4. Agony. Large animal wailing.

“Your balls are next!”

“I said fuck you!”

Ball #1. Blasted back to the Flintstone age.

The wet spot on his trousers made for better targeting. At first, he could barely breathe from the pain, and then he started wailing again.

“That's gotta hurt!” I said.

“Just kill him!” Alice said. “I can't take his whining anymore!”

She blasted in his general direction, but the sniper lit her up and hit the end of her gun, destroying the barrel.

“Alice!” I yelled. “You know how much that thing cost?”

“Sorry! Just put that little bitch out of my misery!”

“I'm going to! But first I'm gonna clip his Johnson!”

“No!” Bob II screamed. “I'll call him off.”

I heard him fumbling for his phone. Then I heard him whimper something in Russian. I fired a few rounds in his direction to test his truthfulness. He yelped in fear, but no sniper rounds came through.

“Now tell him to shoot that asshole behind the fridge!” Alice yelled.

The asshole behind the fridge took that opportunity to come out, guns blazing. He went straight for Alice, probably thinking a woman was going to be an easier mark. I had a shot but didn't take him out, just so I could see him eat his arrogance. He did when she broke his nose and split his scalp with the heavy vase. When his eyes were drenched in blood, she heart-punched him so hard I heard his sternum snap before he face-planted in the tropical fish tank.

Then we heard Bob II ordering the sniper to reengage.

Since we had abandoned our cover, we were dangerously exposed. When the sniper rounds started whipping through the room, shredding everything, Alice was able to jump back behind her vase, but I was ass in the wind. So I ran into the master, threw the mattress off the bed, and jumped on top of Bob II. Those .338 rounds packed enough powder to go through both of us twice and still plug six inches into the concrete floor. Sniper knew it, and he wasn't about to put a permanent blowhole in his cash cow. Bob II was sucking wind, struggling like mad to get out from under me. Wrangling the fat son of a bitch was like trying to cinch into eight seconds with a pissed-off Brahma. So, I stuck a knife in his subclavian vein and he passed out from shock. I held the blade in place so he wouldn't bleed out. My NYPD contact acknowledged my text but said it would take them at least three minutes to get there because of traffic. That was an eternity we didn't have.

Then my beautiful wife did something brilliant. The windows in the suite had SPD glass—suspended particle devices. These are nano-scale particles suspended in a liquid layer between two panes of glass. When voltage is applied, the particles align and let light
pass through. Thus, the glass is nice and clear when it's a cloudy day or if it's night. When the sun is bright, a breaker is tripped and the voltage is removed, causing the particles to move randomly, darken the windows, and block excess UV rays. It's kind of like the bigger, more expensive version of those bowling alley manager glasses that darken in sun and lighten inside. Alice fired a single round into one of the electrical outlets, causing a surge and flipping the breaker for the entire room. Out went the lights and black went the windows.

Then Bob II regained consciousness. Perfect timing.

“What do you want?” he asked weakly.

Blood was starting to pool on the carpet. The sniper was taking blind potshots at us. My plan was going sideways.

“We need to get out of here!” Alice said. “Is he dead?”

“Not yet!”

“What? Why?”

“I need something from him!”

I turned to Bob II.

“You're going to give me your access codes for HR, Bob Deuce, or I'm going to pull out this knife and let you bleed to death.”

Everything was exploding all around us. And the sniper had shot out most of the darkened glass, so if he had infrared he'd see movement and that's all those guys need to put a hot tamale right up your ass.

“Go to hell,” he said.

“Such bravado. Could it be that it's all done with a fingerprint scan now?”

The look on his face was my answer.

“Adios, asshole,” I said and pulled the knife out.

In the distance, we heard gunfire erupt (something blue).

“Sounds like Manhattan's finest!” I said.

I peeked out the edge of the window and saw blue muzzle flashes on our sniper's rooftop. The cops were in a full-on firefight with
him. He kept trying to send a few pills our way, but the heat got to be too much for him and he had to concentrate on saving his own nuts. So, when the coast was even slightly clear, we army-crawled out of there and bolted, leaving our weapons and any professional gear behind.

“Well, this dress is definitely ruined,” Alice said as we ran down the stairwell and she examined the splattered blood and powder burns on Vera's fine beadwork.

“I think as the new co-CEO of HR, Inc., you can probably afford to get another one.”

She slammed me up against the wall and kissed me. I could tell she was deliriously happy.

“Like your wedding present?” I asked proudly.

“Are you kidding me? A hostile takeover is what every girl dreams of on her wedding day.”

She kissed me again, so hard it bloodied my lip.

“Can't believe we're going to run HR,” she said excitedly.

“Promise me we'll play nice from now on, honey-bunny,” I said, wiping the blood off my lips.

“You have my word, schnooky lumps,” she said.

“Wow, that's the worst one,” I said. “Anyway, let's shake on it,” I said and held out Bob II's severed hand.

“Oh, now that's just gross.”

6

FBI-NCAVC, Quantico, Virginia

Present day

F
letch is clicking his pen, staring at the notes he just furiously scribbled about my wedding night. He looks like a man attempting to decipher an encrypted message, reading between the lines for threads that might unravel the increasingly complicated cat's cradle of answers to all of his banal questions. The clicking pen is clearly a thinking mechanism for Fletch, a dissonant metronome that focuses his busy hamster-wheel brain. I am acutely aware that he is eager for more information but he is attempting to conceal these motivations with his usual stoic look. He glances at me to see if I am on to him and recoils from my knowing smile, which tells him the answer is a resounding “Yes.”

“I've killed no fewer than six people with pens of varying types. They make excellent weapons, Fletch.”

He smiles at me to show me he isn't impressed or intimidated . . . and continues to click that fucking pen.

“Nervous habit?” I ask dryly.

He finds that question disagreeable and the smile disappears.

“Does it bother you?” he asks, pausing with his thumb hovering above the pen like a finger teasing a trigger.

“Very much.”

He looks down at his notebook and continues clicking, wanting me to know he is unwilling to compromise anything about his process for my sake. It may seem petty, and it is, but it's also a game. Fletch is trying to engage me in this game, hoping I will do something angry and reactive as a result of him ignoring me—attempt to shove the pen into his eye socket perhaps? Instead I return his serve by whistling out loud. And yes, in case you were wondering, I am whistling “Dixie.”
The only thing he can do to silence me is play his hand and ask the questions he's been trying to suppress.

“John, how did you know they were in that hotel room, Bob's successor and the other men?”

A softball question, motivated by fear or, even worse, a loss of confidence.

“I have my vays,” I reply in my best Dr. Strangelove
accent.

“Which are?” he asks.

“That hardly seems relevant.”

“It's relevant to me. I'm sure that meeting was top secret. Seeing as how you were no longer a part of HR, Inc., I'm wondering how you could have possibly known the exact location and time.”

“Or even where to blow a hole in the floor in order to inflict the largest number of casualties,” I add helpfully.

“Precisely. So, how did you know?”

“Fletch, I'm not writing a tell-all book here.”

“What difference does it make now if you tell me or not, John?”

“It makes a difference because you believe I had help and you want to send out the cavalry to round up the whole James Gang. You got
me
, Fletch. And if you play your cards right, you might get Alice too. Don't be so fucking greedy and let's stay on topic, shall we?”

He is livid—mainly because I just embarrassed him in front of his two-way-mirror drinking buddies. He takes a breath, pointedly rips
out the notepad page that might have contained the names of some juicy accessories to murder, and starts a fresh one.

“Fine. If not how, then why?” He touches
The Intern's Handbook
for emphasis. “For someone who seemed quite motivated to exit HR, Inc., you certainly went to a lot of trouble to not only return, but to actually run it.”

“Good question, Fletch. You're becoming a regular Charlie Rose.”