Hostile Takeover (5 page)

7

P
retty much everyone at HR, Inc. had a case of the Mondays the first Monday after we had disposed of Bob II and his crew. I think the recruits were simultaneously relieved and terrified to find out that (a) John Lago, author of their banned bible, was now running the show, and (b) he was running it with Alice, his former-arch-nemesis-turned-wife-slash-Chinese-acrobat-Kama-Sutra-sex-panther. Needless to say, we had some serious 'splainin' to do. But after the initial shock, we kept things under control. The nice thing is that no one was demanding to leave HR as a result of the recent
management reshuffle.
Bob II was reviled among the recruits and no tears were shed over his demotion.

“He was a paper-shuffling pantywaist,” one of the recruits casually chimed in, “soft church lady hands and a nipple on his bottle of gin. Rest in piss, Number Two.”

I instantly liked this guy—first for knowing what the hell he was talking about and second for having the balls to say it. He was a seventeen-year-old black kid with the meanest tattoos I've ever seen and an odd hillbilly way of speaking. He had the squinty, leathery charm of country rearing, but his look was all Bronx torture squad. In his eyes, there was the glint of street wisdom far beyond his years but they were lively and didn't have any of the numbed menace you often see in kids who, like me, were washing
blood from their hands before they were old enough to see an R-rated movie.

“What's your name, sunshine?” I asked.

“Sue.”

“A boy named Sue,” I said, grinning.

“Go ahead, have your fun,” he said, grinning right back.

“I take it your parents were Johnny Cash fans,” Alice said, audibly rolling her eyes.

“West Virginia cracker variety, if you know the type. Fostered me like the family mutt with a leather strap and table scraps till I was five and then Granny exiled me for running out of cuddle.”

“Did you understand a word of what he just said?” Alice asked.

“Did it work?” I asked him.

“What?” he asked.

“The name. Did it work?”

“Here I am, JL. You tell me.”

“Contracts?”

“Baker's dozen.”

“At seventeen? Bullshit.”

“Shortest distance between truth and bullshit is six feet straight down, JL,” he said, quoting the handbook.

“A fanboy, John. How charming.”

“He knows great writing when he sees it.”

“Normally I go for fiction, but the handbook sort of spoke to me.”

“Trust me,” Alice said, “a lot of it is fiction.”

Many of the other recruits murmured their disagreement with her on this particular topic, and I knew immediately I was among friends.

“I think I can speak for most of us here when I say thank you for giving a damn,” Sue said.

I could feel Alice bristling, like when ozone lifts your hair off your head just before you get struck by lightning.

“Yeah, well, I can't cut loose of you all. I thought I could but I'm back and this time I brought a secret weapon.”

I looked at Alice. All eyes were watching pensively, waiting for her head to explode and fill the room with poisonous snakes. They had no idea how to process her presence, the femme fatale from my masterpiece of murder and intrigue, walking right off the page and into their conference room.

“I know what all of you must be thinking,” Alice said warmly. “And you're right. Me being here, in this scenario, is probably the most fucked-up thing you've ever seen. But as you know, John is very persuasive. And if he hadn't had the balls to do what he did, none of us would be standing here right now.”

Alice of course had to put an exclamation point on her little speech by firmly grabbing the balls she was referring to—just in case anyone was under the impression I might actually be in charge.

After we gave our pep talk, a lot of the recruits talked to me one-on-one. They
were
actual fans, thanking me up and down for writing the handbook and for coming to their rescue now after the death of the Bobs had left the place in a total shambles. I shared one of the first Bob's hidden bourbon bottles with Sue, and we talked a bit more as the night wore on. Even though we might as well have been from different planets, he was the only recruit in the ranks who reminded me of myself. He had the kind of honesty that only comes from people who've shed a lot of blood walking the razor's edge.

“Never thought you'd be back here, JL.”

“Me neither. Old habits.”

“Seeing you with her is . . . I don't know, man. Hard to believe.”

“Tell me about it.”

Sue paused. I could tell he was struggling with something.

“Spit it out before you swallow it, Sue.”

He laughed.

“I know I don't know you, JL. I mean . . . I feel like I do, so . . . can we talk man-to-man?”

“Yeah, kid. What's on your mind?”

“Don't get me wrong. I know you're committed to the cause, which is us. You just don't seem like the ambitious type. And Alice, she's got some serious stars in her eyes.”

“That's her nature, Sue. But you're wrong about my ambition. I had a few burning bush epiphanies recently that made me believe it's my nature too.”

“That bush tell you Alice is someone you can trust?”

“In a way. But it's not really
about
trust, is it?”

“No, sir.” He laughed. “I guess we gave that up a long time ago.”

“Exactly. I figure I'm with the woman I love, doing what I was born to do and keeping my eyes on you train wrecks. That's enough for me. At least for now.”

“Sounds like happiness,” Sue said.

“Let's not get carried away.”

8

I
have to admit it was more than a little weird spending all my time and energy to rebuild a place that I had fantasized about burning to the ground on hundreds of occasions. I had, in fact, planted demolition charges in the subbasement years ago when Bob's goons whacked Eva, the only bona fide girlfriend I'd ever had. I was dead serious about taking that place down like a mothballed Vegas casino. Must have wired it up with over three hundred pounds of C4, enough to blow it up twice.

On Christmas Eve I was all ready to send HR to the moon, but I couldn't do it. It's funny but I was mainly afraid I would kill some poor bastard who was running home after the late shift at some dead-end job so he could play Santa for his kids. Jesus, I'm so Disney sometimes! Anyway, to this day the charges are probably still down there. I took out all the blasting caps and wires, so there's pretty much no way the C4 will pop . . . I don't think.

What was even weirder than me running HR is how much I loved it. I went totally overboard and decided to make whacking someone an artisanal pursuit. Let's face it, there's a right way of doing things and a dumbass way. And it's not really up for debate, because in this business dumbasses always end up dead. So, I focused on putting my money where my mouth is, and instead of just writing some DIY manual, I designed a training regimen that could turn a snot-nosed
kid into Billy the Kid in less than twelve weeks. Now I sound like one of those tools on late-night TV. “You too can learn to shoot, stab, strangle, and bludgeon someone to death in twelve short weeks at Human Resources, Inc. And if you act now, you'll get this beautiful Colt Anaconda .44 Magnum with hollow-point rounds absolutely free!”

Seriously, though, I was good at my job. Really good. First thing I did when Alice and I raided the formidable financial treasure chests of HR was build a state-of-the-art training facility in a secluded forest upstate. It was only an hour from Manhattan but provided a profound and much-needed change of pace. I designed the entire facility and most of the training areas inside. It was incredible. There were several interior and exterior
urban combat simulators
inside and on the grounds. The interiors looked like just about any kind of office environment you could think of. Have to kill a guy in an elevator? We had a working elevator shaft and car. From conference rooms to cube farms to executive washrooms and supply closets, there was a simulation zone built to create complete authenticity for every scenario. Oorah.

But then there was my favorite. The
noncombat office skill enhancement zones
. These were rigorous stations designed to teach our recruits—people who might not have finished sixth grade, mind you—how to make copies, file, type, collate, assemble office furniture, operate a watercooler, ship, mass mail, work in multiple computer operating systems, and, of course, make coffee. Again, authenticity was the rule of the day. Interns who show up with zero skills are quickly jettisoned from the workforce in the real world. Our interns had to be excellent at both being an office asset and being a wet-work asset, and our training facility provided them with a serious leg up.

Recruitment was also my area of focus. In addition to finding the brightest and the best—and the most ruthless—in the U.S., our
global expansion plans had me hiring in Asia and Europe, two markets with massive upside potential. In Europe, we found recruits from a diverse array of countries, but the young upstarts who impressed me the most were the Norwegians. They were all scary intelligent, perfect physical specimens with the right temperamental mix of methodical rationalism and repressed homicidal rage—both of which they could switch on and off at will. They also spoke many useful European languages and their English carried very little accent. The only problem was that they were too good-looking, but I figured it was worth spending some time to ugly them up in order to take advantage of their considerable talents.

While I was building a pantheon of death and molding impressionable youngsters into killing machines, someone had to maintain client relationships. You can lose relevance in this business overnight, and we continued to send the more experienced recruits out on very selective assignments in order to keep them sharp and maintain our presence. That was Alice's area of expertise. I just didn't have the stomach to deal with clients—power-mongering bloodsuckers who would grind our recruits' bones to make their bread if we were in the beanstalk business. Alice, on the other hand, was acutely aware of the financial merits of befriending power-mongering bloodsuckers and enjoyed wining and dining them until they were pregnant with the HR seed.

Keep in mind that many of them were booze-addled, sun-­damaged white men with money to burn and a list of enemies longer than the guest lists for their spoiled daughters' million-dollar weddings. Alice had them eating out of her hand and writing retainer checks of the seven-figure variety in no time. When we were fully operational, we had double the client list and twice the revenue that Bob and Bob II had in their most successful quarters combined. We were, in my white boy hip-hop parlance,
paper'd up.

9

W
hen it came to the business of running HR, we had a great one-two punch, Alice and me. She was the slick, seductive, consummate schmoozer who could convince the devil to hand over the pennies on a dead man's eyes if she wore the right shoes. Meanwhile, I was running what was basically a chain gang of hardening killers whose ability to execute clean, untraceable hits was as accomplished as their ability to identify over a hundred varieties of coffee based purely on smell. They were also learning to be cool under pressure. I wanted them to be able, like fighter pilots, to laser-focus on the task at hand, even if all hell was breaking loose around them.

But all work and no play makes John a dull (and cranky) boy, so Alice and I made sure we enjoyed the honeymoon phase of our marriage—especially since we never really had time for an actual honeymoon. We bought a killer loft in Chinatown and decorated it like wealthy rock stars from the early 1970s—lots of gold, burled wood, frosted glass, and cocaine. Alice had a fetish for, well, almost all fetishes, so we had a lot of equipment that informed this pastime and transformed our walk-in closet into a dungeon master's armory. I've done a fair bit of shagging in my life, but nothing could have prepared me for cohabitation with a woman who is basically Caligula with a French manicure. I'm amazed I had anything left for
work each day, but there was something very empowering about it all. For the most part, we were living like wild animals with no rules and frequent, albeit minor, bloodshed. Someday I may write another handbook for married couples based on this experience, because purely primordial interaction with mercifully little talking is the true meaning of domestic bliss.

“John?” Alice asked me one night after we broke in our vintage Eero Aarnio floating bubble chair.

“Yes, my sweet boudoir contortionist?”

“Are you okay?”

“I will be when I regain feeling in my lower extremities. What's on your mind?”

“I'm . . . this is so hard to say. Not hard, but weird.”

“How weird could it be? We're naked in an acrylic bubble chair. We just drank half a bottle of absinthe and we're listening to Jimmy Page play banjo on a super-rare Japanese import eight-track—”

“I don't mean
that kind
of weird. I mean . . . I'll just say it. I'm scared. Okay, happy?”

She punched me in the shoulder. It
really hurt.

“Not anymore.”

She kissed it to make it all better.

“I'm sorry. This is going to sound arrogant and idiotic but I have never really felt this way.”

“Scared?”

“Yeah, scared.”

“It does sound a bit suspect, but that's neither here nor there. What are you afraid of?”

“This. All of this. Going away. I never cared about a damn thing and now . . .”

“How do you think I feel? Why do you think I would have let you put a bullet in my head? I couldn't bear not having this with you. The idea of that made me want to blow my brains out.”

“Stop it. You're gushing.” She smiled. “Seriously, though, now that we have this, aren't you terrified of losing it?”

I kissed her, hard and deep. I don't know why, but I was obsessed with communicating with Alice this way. I hated words because they just didn't cut it. There is no way to tell someone that when you're inside them you feel like you've been cut from neck to nuts and hollowed out by the hand of God without it sounding totally mental. It's a feeling, an electric current from the heart to the brain that carries a million words and images like a fast pipe-data stream. And I was trying to zap her senseless with it because I loved her so much it hurt.

“What was that?” she asked, feeling the buzzing on her lips.

“That was my answer.”

The next few months were the happiest of my life. Every day I woke up, I faced the day with anticipation instead of dread. Every night I collapsed on my pillow, usually from coital exhaustion, and welcomed sleep with warm resolve instead of paralyzing fear. And even though I knew that having children was both completely insane and out of the question, I could feel that urge, that familial drive to, in a godlike fashion, create two bright, pure eyes to look at us both and remind us of who we really are versus what we'd been made to be. And then one morning, while we drank espresso and cleaned our guns on the terrace, the honeymoon was over.

Just like that.