Hostile Takeover (9 page)

17

W
e moved quickly down the steps, ready for anything they threw at us. After the first fifteen seconds, we didn't hear anything out of the ordinary outside the stairwell. We also didn't hear any internal building alarms, which they would have definitely deployed to evacuate employees. Alice and I looked at each other, both of us thinking the same thing. It was just too quiet, the kind of quiet that brings about paranoia because you know goddamned well it isn't going to last. The farther down we went into the shaft, the more we could feel the air being sucked away into the vacuum of whatever was about to blow up in our faces. We stopped for a second to listen. And, of course, as soon as we noted the lack of response, that's when it came.

Agents began rapid-firing up the stairwell. Slugs were bouncing all over, lighting us up like a pinball machine. We were two fish, shit out of luck in a barrel. Alice and I started popping smoke grenades like mad and hurling them down at the agents. We heard coughing, cursing, bodies falling. Then we followed that up with high-velocity .40 S&W rounds from our SIG MPX submachine guns. Our random fire patterning, coupled with the smoke grenades, created a lot more confusion and panic than we'd even hoped for. The agents tried to return fire, but our relentless volley sent them scrambling for the exits. This gave us a window to sprint—albeit in total blindness—the final fifteen floors to our target location.

Then we heard Sherman's March coming down the stairs behind us. Bad. Very bad. You never want your opponent above you. They have every advantage and you have dick. It sounded like at least a dozen or so stomping down. We stopped dead, threw our gas masks on, and chucked some CR gas canisters up at them. CR is nonlethal ordnance, but it's still pretty nasty. It causes intense skin irritation, temporary blindness, uncontrollable coughing, gasping for breath, and panic.

We heard the canisters pop and the stairwell immediately filled with thick yellow smoke. The agents started coughing and choking and blind-firing down the stairwell. We hit the deck as a bullet maelstrom pockmarked the walls around us. I got nicked on the side of the neck—nothing serious but an annoying amount of blood. Alice slapped some QuickClot Combat Gauze on the wound, instantly stopping the bleeding, and we kept moving. With the agents yelling and puking and trying to get out of the stairwell, it made it possible for Alice and me to head down our last three flights of stairs unmolested. We slapped in fresh mags and stopped by the door to our target's floor.

“Ready?”

“Let's get some,” she said quietly.

We busted through the stairwell door and sprinted across the office, spraying bullets and pinning agents down in their cubicles before they could even draw their weapons. We were still on schedule, despite the war in the stairwell. In fact, we were about three minutes ahead of schedule, which gave us a little more room for error in accomplishing our objective. As we searched for the target, we addressed all aggression with assault rotation—backs to each other, checking six, nine, three, midnight. Nobody but us got off a clean shot.

First-line responders tried to take out our flanks, but their beer bellies and bad reflexes were no match for our speed. We pinned
them all down in time to pop another couple of CR cans. That made them come to Jesus. They were coughing and gagging so violently they didn't dare try to challenge our hellish cover fire. For a brief moment, I drank in the scene—clouds of burning paper swirling in the yellow smoke. FBI agents on all fours pissing in their pants. I'm sorry, but it was a thing of beauty.

Then we made it to our target's glass-walled office. Alice got eyes on her shoes sticking out from under her desk. Her door was locked and the lights were out.
Amateur hour,
I thought. It was almost killing my buzz that it was going to be so stupid easy to whack her after all that foreplay.

“May I?” Alice asked, chomping at the bit.

“By all means,” I said and laid down more cover fire for her.

Alice advanced to the target's office, blasting through the glass doors. One of the bullets hit the target's shoe, and it flipped out from under the desk. That's when I saw that the shoes had been placed there as bait. The office itself had no windows and only one way in and out. It was a trap. Just before Alice was about to go through the door, I saw agents come out from two cubicles like hunters in a duck blind. They had been waiting for us.

“Get down!” I yelled.

Alice turned and saw the agents and hit the deck just as they opened fire. I returned fire, but they blasted my position until all I could do was crawl, desperately searching for any kind of cover. I found some cubicles and got under one of the desks. I looked for Alice but didn't see her. Then I saw her hand shoot out. An M68 fragmentation grenade was in it.

“Okay, that sucks,” I whispered to myself and tucked into a fetal position with my hands over my ears.

Seconds later, I heard the agents yelling warnings to each other, but then the grenade exploded, rocking the place like an earthquake, and I didn't hear them again. The smoke was so thick it was
impossible to see two feet in front of me. I felt my way to a door and ducked inside. The power went out in the building momentarily and the emergency lights came on in what I realized was a women's bathroom.

“Don't move, asshole.”

A woman's voice, behind me. I heard the sound of a safety being disengaged on a Beretta 92. I turned slowly. She was standing in the shadows near the stalls but stepped out into the light. At first, she looked like she was going to shoot me, but then her face changed to the shock of recognition.

“John?”

Jesus, what are the odds?
I thought, and she stepped closer so I could see her face. She looked like she expected me to recognize her, but I didn't. At least not at first. Then it dawned on me.

“Juno?” I whispered, my blood running cold.

She looked somewhat familiar, but barely. When I knew Juno before, she was nineteen. She worked at HR and Bob put me in charge of babysitting her on a job. When we got to the job, Bob told me to whack her. At the time, I thought it was because she was inept and becoming a liability. So, I showed her some mercy and put her on a slow boat to China. Literally. Our target was a shipping exec slash human trafficker whose office was in a commercial port. She got into a shipping container and I never saw her again until that moment at the FBI field office. The reason I hadn't recognized her in the dossier was because many of the important features I remembered about her—hair color and length, eye color, weight—had changed dramatically. Her overall style now was “Bureau Bland.” Then it dawned on me.

Juno was the mole.

That's why Bob had wanted her dead in the first place. And I saved her ass, just so I'd have to come back someday and shoot it off. I guess it's true that no good deed goes unpunished.

“Don't you remember me, John?”

“Yeah, I'm just surprised to see you.”

“Me too. What are you doing here?”

“Selling magazine subscriptions.”

More gunfire outside.

We ducked at the sound of machine-gun fire, which was followed by another explosion.

“We need to get out of here,” I said to her.

“Come with me,” she said.

“Where? If they see me out there, I'm a dead man.”

“I can show you how to get out.”

She grabbed my arm.

“Why the hell would you do that?”

“Returning the favor.” She smiled.

I should have put a bullet in her head right then and there, but the idea of saving someone just to kill them years later was ludicrous. Alice would never know I let her live because Alice was either dead or hightailing it to our exit strategy. Juno led the way out the bathroom door. The building power had been cut and the faint yellow glow of emergency lighting created a bizarre theater of chaos all around us. The cozy corporate FBI field office had become a blackened, burning war zone. Juno pulled me behind a wall. She pointed to the far end of the office.

“The elevators are straight that way. If you can get into the shaft, there's a parking garage at the bottom.”

“Thanks for the tip,” Alice said behind me.

And then she shot Juno in the head.

18

I
turned and Alice was standing beside me, smoke pouring out of the barrel of her SIG MPX. She didn't look at me, only at Juno. She put a few more rounds into Juno for good measure.

“Check that one off my bucket list,” she said. “Let's go.”

We ran to the elevator shafts.

A dozen or so G-men in full strike gear were doing formation sweeps of the hallways. We stayed out of sight until they passed.
Ding.
The elevator door slid open like a gleaming android mouth. The elevator car wasn't there, just a dark hole waiting to swallow mankind and take it to the basement for mandatory euthanasia. We slipped past the clueless storm troopers and into the elevator shaft. The doors closed behind us, making it as dark as a tomb. We put on our night vision goggles. One of the elevator cars was four floors up and moving down toward us. Just after it passed, we jumped on top of it. We rode it down for two floors, but then it stopped suddenly when it lost power.

“Fuck,” Alice hissed.

“They shut down the elevators, which means they won't come looking in here anytime soon,” I whispered.

“That's great, but we're still five floors up,” she said.

It was a solid seventy feet to the bottom of the elevator shaft. The vertical lift cable for the opposite car, caked with decades of grease, was in sight and gave me an idea.

“The lift cable,” I said. “We can jump over and slide down.”

“There has to be a better way,” she said and radioed Sue.

“Sue,” Alice said. “We need you to look at the elevator shaft schematics and get us out of here.”

Static on the radio.

“Great,” she said.

“The concrete walls in here are too thick,” I said.

She pulled out her phone. She was about to call Sue when she stopped short and stared at the bright screen.

“What is it? No bars?” I asked.

“No. I just received a message from our client.”

“What's it say? We're fired?”

She was silent, still staring at the screen, her eyes dancing back and forth as she read something.

“Alice, what's wrong? What does the message say?”

She turned to me, a grave look on her face.

“ ‘Kill John,' ” she whispered.

I waited for her wry smile to appear, or any kind of sign that said she was joking.

“Let me—”

I reached for the phone, but she put her gun in my face instead.

“Alice, honey, what the hell are you doing?”

“You set me up, John. Our client tried to warn me about you.”

Her eyes were welling with tears of rage and sadness. I felt like the floor was giving way below me.

“No. Alice, what—?”

“You knew the target. I heard you talking before I shot her.”

“I can explain that.”

“Shut up!”

Then the tears were streaming down her face.

“You were working with her before. When Bob was alive.”

“That's ridiculous! Who is saying that?”

“Didn't you help her leave the country when Bob wanted you to kill her?”

“I felt sorry for her. How could you possibly know that?”

“Bob knew you let her go. The only reason he didn't kill you for it was because he was short-staffed at the time.”

“I let her go because she was pathetic and I thought Bob was having me waste her because of that . . . or to test me. So, I did the only good thing I've ever done in my life and I let her go. Tell me, what would you have done, Alice? Would you have chopped her to pieces with a rusty meat cleaver? Are you that cold-blooded?”

Alice had stopped listening. Her animal brain was demanding a quick, instinct-driven decision. I was quickly becoming just another option to be weighed and potentially discarded for a better one.

“Maybe your silence is my answer.”

Then I could feel tears of my own. Our eyes met, and that's when I could see she had turned the corner. I was on trial and the situation warranted speedy sentencing.

“No wonder you were resisting me when I wanted to take her out.”

She was in a full rage, feeling vindicated for what must have been many hidden suspicions, ready to throw everything away to feed her belief that none of what we had could have been possible or real. I tried to remove my own anger and disbelief from the moment and attempted to deal with her in a more passive and empathetic way. I was nowhere near ready to throw any bit of our relationship away.

“Alice, please. I love you. I'm here with you. Why would I ever—”

“Good-bye, John.”

And just liked that she pulled the trigger. Being completely bewildered, my reflexes were not as sharp, but I managed to slap her gun out of my face and she fired a round into my shoulder. I kicked her legs out and we fell to the roof of the elevator shaft. She lost her gun in the fall, so she was punching, kicking, and gouging at me with
everything she had. My arm was bleeding and weak and I tried to hold her off, but her anger had reached a fever pitch and she kicked me in the chest with both legs. I slid across the roof of the elevator car, my hands grabbing for anything to keep me from falling to my death. I looped my good arm around one of the electrical cables, and it caught me briefly, but my momentum partially jerked it out of its coupling. Sparks cascaded into the shaft as I pitched over the side.

Alice gathered herself and found me hanging on the side of the elevator car by the arcing, fire-spitting electrical cable.

“Marrying you was easily the stupidest fucking thing I've ever done,” she said coldly.

My hands were slipping and I barely had a grip on the cable as I tried to shake the cobwebs out of my head.

“So I guess you could call this a divorce,” she said quietly.

“Thank you,” I said.

“For what?”

“For making it easy to stop loving you.”

I jerked the cable out of the motor and fell into the darkness. Above me, an explosion of sparks ignited the grease on the lift cable and flames spread up and down it like a giant fuse. The fire was a deep orange with white tips that birthed long demonic snakes of black smoke, transforming the elevator shaft into a brightly lit tunnel to hell.

As I waited for impact, memories of my wedding night with Alice flooded my mind and I was thinking,
If this is my life passing before my eyes, then God is an even bigger asshole than I thought.
Turns out I was the asshole because God or Buddha or Steve Jobs actually had my back in that elevator shaft in a big way. I figured I was just going to plummet to the bottom and bounce. The feds would scrape me up with an overpriced defense contractor spatula and bag me like roadkill. But wouldn't you know it? Lucky for me, there was another
elevator car two floors below that broke my fall. Don't get me wrong, that was a solid twenty-footer and I didn't know the elevator car was there, so I hit full force on my back and the impact turned my heart off like a switch. It's called commotio cordis and it's a V-fib cardiac arrest caused by a violent blow to the heart.

I immediately stopped breathing and everything went black. As I was lying there on top of the elevator car, twitching the death tango, I suddenly had the sensation that I was on fire. In fact, my body felt so hot I thought I might explode. I figured I was one more lipstick-smeared butt in the devil's ashtray, but it turned out the live electrical wire I jerked out of the other elevator car that was spitting and twisting like a snake followed me down the shaft and whipped against the car where I was laid out.
BOOM!
The live wire juiced the car and defibrillated me right back to the land of the living before it landed on the bottom of the shaft and shorted itself out in a pool of petroleum muck. Roll away the stone, motherfuckers. Thanks to Jesus and a few thousand volts, I was back from the dead.