The Intern's Handbook: A Thriller (19 page)

T
he next two weeks are surreal. I am so inundated with work that I almost forget why I am really there. Or I would rather not remember. At any rate, I am reveling in my new social stratum. The other junior associates, my coworkers, are all highly educated, interesting people. They like me because they think I’m some kind of roughneck genius coming from total obscurity. Bob said it best. They know their own kind—the prep school, Ivy League, summering in Southampton circus. But they want to accept me as a convert. They want to adopt and care for me like a stray puppy. So they invite me to their parties and squash games. They ask my advice about cases and bring me their grandmother’s homemade fudge. They tell me I must come skiing with them in Beaver Creek this year and ask me to join their crew club. And I drink it all in. I mainly do this because they may be valuable assets when it comes to gathering intel on Locke. But I also do it because these are really the first friends I’ve ever had. Growing up, I was lucky if a three-legged alley cat would be friendly to me, let alone the well-bred master builders of Manhattan’s power elite.

Alice likes some of them, but they don’t all like her. The women are especially reluctant to embrace Alice because she is everything they will never be: quick witted, fiercely independent, physically strong, and beautiful in a way only mutts can be beautiful—a total original without the whole Reese Witherspoon vibe put out by every member of what I like to call the Barbie Cabal.

As I sit in my humble, yet well-appointed office and admire my partial, yet spectacular view, I begin to wish that things could just stay this way forever. Maybe Bob will decide I’ve earned this and send someone else to kill Locke. After all, I’m hardly the subtle breeze anymore that used to blow into hits as easily as I would blow out of them. It’s a nice fantasy. I could just transition into my new career right now. Because of my “killer” instinct, I would kick down the corporate ladder and trample everyone ahead of me. I could take this fucking place over. Being a lawyer is not that different from being an assassin. Both require a predator mentality. Both leave unholy destruction in their path. In fact, I only kill people. Lawyers
destroy
people, like briefcase mercenaries with godlike powers at their disposal. Hey, if lawyers could get someone like O. J. Simpson acquitted, they can fucking walk on water and open the gates of hell. This career is perfect for me in every way.

But I know all of this is just a bullshit pipe dream fueled by wishful thinking. Fantasy is a luxury I can’t afford, and that’s confirmed when Bob wakes me up by lighting a fire under my ass. He tells me the people that ordered this hit are getting very impatient. In fact, they have demanded results and given us two weeks to execute or they will send someone else
and
they will send a team to retire
us
. This is not the first time we have been pushed to expedite the process. However, this
is
the first time we’ve been threatened. I promise to ratchet up my efforts and then he kind of reads my mind and tells me that I shouldn’t get any ideas about dragging it out so he will get fragged and I can be free to play lawyer the rest of my life. He’s kind of joking when he says it, but the thought
had
crossed my mind.

United States Department of Justice

Federal Bureau of Investigation

Washington, D.C. 20535

Location: Wireless phone call intercept—IMSI catcher/Roving bug

Subjects: John Lago and Alice (censored).

A
fter a squash match with one of my new office buddies, I get in cab to go meet Alice for dinner, but she calls me and cancels. One of her uncles has died and she has to take a flight to D.C. tonight for the funeral. D.C.? Could that be her
Uncle Sam
per chance? Like me, she probably has to have a sit-down with her superiors to discuss her lack of progress. At least she won’t have to listen to threats. Or, at least, not life-threatening threats. I tell her I’m sorry for her loss and make it sound like I mean it. She makes it sound like she is all broken up about her uncle. I don’t ask his name out of professional courtesy. I hate it when I hear a lie, and I know this would be a lie, so I spare both of us the agony.

I decide to pay a visit to Alice’s apartment and try to ramp up my intel. The mountain of raw data that’s been dumping to my computer each day from the device I planted inside her laptop is massive, overwhelming, and will take way too much fucking time to sift through without the help of Bob’s drone corps. She left the office and went straight to the airport, so I know her laptop is still at home. She doesn’t bring it into the office because the feds probably don’t want their data just lying around the biggest, most powerful law firm in Manhattan. This could be my best shot.

I decide to do it by stealth. Her neighbors know me well and they would surely mention having seen me alone in her building while
she was gone. She lives in one of those wildly annoying co-ops where everyone feels they have purchased the right to your personal business along with their one-bedroom, half-bath, cold-water walk-up shoe box. Also, I’m not sure if it’s paranoia or my jungle cat senses, but after the Bendini shit show I feel like someone is watching me. Mind you, I’ve been under surveillance before and I actually kind of like the exhibitionist thrill I get from it. But in this case, we could be talking about Bendini’s goombahs or Alice’s FBI support crew, so I need to take extra precautions to keep them from tracking my movements. Aside from that, stealth is a lot of fun. You get to strap on some cool ninja gear and traverse the city on rooftops—like Batman or Robert De Niro in the second
Godfather
.

So I take a taxi with my gear in a duffel bag over to the YMCA that is four buildings away from Alice’s. I am a member, which I highly recommend, because it’s like having storage units all over Manhattan. You can rent a private locker at each location and keep it as long as you want. And they only require your YMCA card—which has your fake identity on it, along with a credit card—which is also an untraceable Bob special. No driver’s license or passport bullshit to give his forgers the night sweats. I stroll into the Y, looking at no one, and head for my locker.

Rule #12: Embrace your inner shadow warrior.

You’ve heard of ninjas. I’m sure you’re laughing to even hear that word. That’s because you’re a stupid American who thinks everything from foreign cultures can be reduced to a late-night talk show bit. And yes, I am aware of the Chris Farley movie
Beverly Hills Ninja.
There is something that people find funny about ninjutsu, but if you know
anything,
then you know that there is
absolutely nothing funny about it.

First off, they’ve been around since the twelfth century. Like us, the functions of the ninja include espionage, sabotage, infiltration, and assassination. In fact, Bob created the entire intern program based on four of the eighteen principles of ninjutsu: Hensōjutsu (disguise and impersonation), Shinobi-iri (silent infiltration), Bōryaku (unorthodox battle tactics), and Intonjutsu (escaping and concealment). You might call these the four pillars of HR, Inc.

One of my most shining moments was an assignment wherein I first executed all of these pillars flawlessly. Ironically, my target was a Japanese businessman named Raiden Sanjuro, and his great-great-grandfather had been a ninja in the service of the emperor. He had practiced ninjutsu as a boy but had dishonored his family by rejecting it and embracing Western culture—something he loved more than his own. Nonetheless, it had been ingrained in his psyche starting in his formative years, making it impossible to forget.

He was operating a very successful manufacturing outsourcing company in Manhattan, but it was actually a front for his real business—a network of industrial espionage cells gathering sensitive data from Silicon Valley to the Hudson Valley and selling it to the Chinese government. The Chinese are the best copycats in the world, and they decided a long time ago that it is better to simply take the intellectual property and achievements of others and perfect the process of reverse engineering, finding cheaper, more efficient ways of mass production and distribution. This way, they pay a fraction of what others pay in research and development, while remaining on the leading edge of technological advances and destroying the creators of the original products by selling those products for pennies on the dollar. Sanjuro was one of China’s biggest suppliers of sensitive business data, and they paid him handsomely for his services.