The Intern's Handbook: A Thriller (28 page)

He’s piloting the plane
.

“Hello, asshole,” he says cordially over the intercom.

I say nothing, my head buzzing from near total exhaustion.

“The intern. Very clever. Who do you work for?”

“Judge Judy.”

He smiles.

“Have you ever heard of the vomit comet? It’s an airplane that they use to simulate antigravity environments for shows about space, et cetera. People get into what is essentially an empty fuselage and the plane does steep climbs with zero gravity stalls. Basically, they let the engines stall and the plane just plummets.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“Fasten your seat belt in case we encounter some turbulence.”

He guns the throttle and we start rocketing straight vertical. I fall back into the galley wall and it cracks under my weight.

“Oops. That looked like it hurt.”

Then he stalls out and the jet drops like a stone. I am instantly floating weightless in the cabin. I try to grab on to whatever I can and make my way to the cockpit door. Then he hits the gas again and climbs. I lose my grip and fly through the main cabin like a bullet, hitting every sharp or hard object along the way. I protect my head with my arms as I slam into the little cocktail bar and obliterate it. Glass shards explode in all directions.

“This is what you get when you fuck with someone like me.”

Bam!
Back to the plummet, but this time he is doing rolling turns at the same time, so I am like a fucking extra sock in the spin cycle. I don’t know what is up or down but I do know I can’t take much more of this. I feel the blood coming out of my nose and ears and know I have a very bad concussion and maybe even a burst eardrum.

I pull two knives from the dead guards and stick them into the floor. I use them as metal talons so I can claw my way to the cockpit. If Locke pulls more moves, I can quickly sink one or both of the blades into other surfaces. I am like a spider, inching my way along, so dedicated that my hands are bleeding.

“That door you’re thinking about breaking down is quadruple reinforced titanium with a thick Kevlar sheath in the middle. Good luck opening it.”

“I don’t need to open it because you’re going to open it for me.”

He laughs and tries to shake me but I am dug in like a tic and getting closer to the cockpit door.

“Why would I open it for you?”

“Because your daughter is locked in the fucking bathroom and if you don’t open it, I’ll think up another carnival game.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You really are an asshole, Locke. I saw her take cover in there when I dropped your first goon.”

“How do you know she’s my daughter?”

“Really? That’s how you’re going to play it? She was on your passenger manifest, tough guy.”

“That’s my admin. And don’t bet on me giving a fuck about her.”

I claw my way back to the lavatory and kick the door open. Locke’s little rich girl daughter is strapped to the jump seat inside. I pull her out of there and sit her down in a chair.

“Okay, I’ll bet on this.”

I take up one of the guns from the dead goon squad and point it at the back of her head.

“Daddy!” she screams.

“Looks like we have a winner!” I yell.

Silence from the cockpit.

“I think she has something on her mind. Let’s see what it is.”

I cock the hammer back for effect, and the cockpit door opens. Locke stands there looking at me, a gun in his hand.

“Lay the fucking gun down. Now.”

“Fuck you.”

He fires at me but misses and puts a hole in the fuselage floor, a few feet behind the left wing. Alarms go off. The autopilot drops the oxygen masks and dives down in a very steep descent. I roll down the aisle and into the wall near the cockpit door. Locke is waiting for me, his gun pointed at my face.

“Stupid motherfucker,” I spit.

“Sometimes doing what’s necessary seems crazy but it’s the highest form of sanity.”

“Tell that to your daughter over there, asshole.”

When he looks at her sobbing in the chair, screaming and unable to breathe, he’s struck by his actions. Then he’s struck in the balls by
my foot. He goes down, holding his crotch and gasping. I pull him up by his collar and drag him into the cockpit.

“Now you are going to land this fucking plane and I am going to kill you. But if you fuck with me, I’ll kill her too, right in front of you. Understood?”

He nods and takes the controls. The plane is shaking like a motherfucker as he attempts to stabilize our descent. After fifteen or so harrowing minutes, we settle into an altitude of around 18,000 feet.

“Where are we?”

He looks at his satellite positioning system.

“About a hundred miles south of Miami. Looking for a private airport in Grand Cayman or maybe Barbados.”

“Change course for Honduras. There’s an airfield outside Puerto Cortés.”

“Honduras? We may not make it with that hole in the fuselage.”

“Just do it.”

T
wo hours later, we’re landing in Honduras. Locke taxis to the single building on the airfield and sees that it is empty.

“Stop here.”

He stops the plane. I shove him out into the passenger cabin and sit him next to his daughter. I put the gun to his forehead and cock back the hammer.

“No! Daddy!”

“Quiet,” I tell her.

“Please don’t kill my dad.”

“Do you know who your dad really is? Do you?”

She whimpers.

“He’s been selling the names of people in witness protection to the highest bidders—mob, cartels, Aryan Nations, you name it.”

She shakes her head and sobs.

“Leave her alone and get it over with!”

“Shut up!” I yell.

I pistol-whip him across the face, cutting a deep gash across his cheeks and nose. I turn to his daughter, who is sobbing.

“I’m sorry that you had to see this, but you need to know what kind of man raised you. You need to know he is a lowlife piece of shit and he has innocent blood on his hands. You need to know that he deserves to die.”

I press the gun to his forehead.

“I was sent here to kill him. It’s my job. . . .”

I press harder for a beat . . . then I take the gun away from his head.

“But I’m not going to do it.”

Locke and his daughter look up at me, stunned.

“Because I just retired.”

I grab what ammo and weapons I can from the corpses of the thugs and pop the passenger door.

“You have enough fuel to get you to Mexico. I suggest you get the fuck out of here now before the cartel army finds out an $80 million private jet is parked on their airfield.”

Both of them are completely speechless as I lower the airstairs and walk out of the plane into the hot, humid morning. I am speechless too, just trying to navigate my way into uncharted territory. You’re probably speechless because I allowed Locke to live. Don’t worry. It wasn’t because I found Jesus or saw the light or anything. It was because of the first commandment in my own personal bible: survival. With Locke alive, Bob will most certainly end up dead, cashed out by his clients.

Bottom line is: by leaving Locke alive, Bob is out of my hair for good and I am now officially retired. Disappointed? I’m sorry if I didn’t deliver the Disney/Pixar ending you were expecting. It’s like I’ve been telling you, you have to be prepared for anything. You never know where the bottle will spin and you’ve got to kiss the princes and the frogs no matter what. Those are the rules. If you don’t respect them, then you have less than nothing and that’s a lot of nothing for people like us. I may not be walking away from HR, Inc. with my gold watch and pension, but I am walking away. And the closer I got to this moment, the more I realized the unlikelihood of that happening. Why would I trust someone like Bob? That’s just plain stupid.

As for you, my advice is to formulate an exit strategy quickly. The shit is about to hit the fan, and you don’t want to get hit by the spray.

Rule #14: Know the fine art of the exit strategy.

On my tenth job, I was working a global shipping CEO who was big into human trafficking. He was bringing cargo ships into the ports of Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and Oakland filled with exports from Asia: rubber dog shit, back scratchers, and indentured servants. You’ve heard the stories before, so I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that this motherfucker was supplying 90 percent of the sweatshops in the U.S. with cheap labor and making
a lot of money.
Butt fucking the American dream so you can buy cheap T-shirts at Old Navy. Isn’t life beautiful?

So I weaseled my way into this guy’s inner circle as an intern at his New York port. Then Bob threw a wrinkle into the equation. He told me he wanted to give a new recruit some “on-the-job training.” He also blew sugar up my ass and told me that I was his protégé and he wanted the greenies to learn from the best. At first, I enjoyed the ego boost. But that faded quickly when I started spending time with a young woman I will call
Juno
. Oh, you’ve
seen
that movie, huh? Well, then you know that Juno is an annoying twerp who never shuts the fuck up. That’s what I was dealing with. Bob got her into the gig as an intern too, and I showed her the ropes. She was probably nineteen at the time. In addition to making me want to strangle her, she had all of the office workers wanting to join me in a gang-strangle. But the thing was, this chick was a star when it came to combat. I’ve never seen anyone shoot, slash, or fight better than she did. So I instantly became paranoid that Bob was going to have her whack me.

Anyway, D-day comes for our white slaver and Bob planned a Triad-type hit as our revenge scenario. Party line on the street would be that the Triads wanted white slaver to pay hefty tribute money for operating in Asia. White slaver stupidly refuses. White slaver gets butchered instead so Triads can just take his business. Pretty clean. Unfortunately, an authentic Triad killing is about as far from clean
as you can get. Let’s just say it involves the use of heavy, rusty meat cleavers, the Triad signature weapon of choice.

The plan was to do the deed in the early morning when the white slaver arrived for work. He always came in at around 4:00
A.M.
to deal with calls from Asia. Staff usually arrived at 8:00
A.M.
So we would have a solid four hours to make a jigsaw puzzle out of him. I picked up Juno at 3:00
A.M.
For the first time ever, she was
quiet.
Now my paranoia was reaching a fever pitch and I was fully prepared to kill her if she even looked at me the wrong way. And I had an exit strategy. With the rest of the gear, I had brought with me a bugout bag that would enable me to survive for up to four weeks at sea. After killing her, I could stow away in one of the cargo containers, like my human trafficking brethren, and go dark in Asia. A little chop-sockey plastic surgery and I’d be golden.

Juno and I slipped into the white slaver’s office and waited for him to arrive. He was a little early, so we made our move inside. I won’t bore you with the gory details (literally) of white slaver’s demise. Let’s just say I can see why the Triads have done hits like this for hundreds of years. The prospect of being horribly mutilated is an excellent deterrent against ever fucking with them. First off, it is not a quick, painless death by any stretch of the imagination. Second, you don’t want your loved ones to have to bury pieces of you. That’s just a bummer for everyone. Speaking of loved ones, Triads usually chop up your whole family too. Bob never entertained going that far for “authenticity” or he and I would have reached a moral impasse.

Somewhat surprisingly, Juno froze up when it came time to do the deed. I was pissed as hell at her and made her pick up all the body parts and bag them. After we were done, we were preparing to leave when I got a text message from Bob.

“Kill her.”

Okay, so maybe my paranoia was not as based in rationality as I
thought. I completely misread this situation and should have seen the signs, like the fact that Juno was nineteen and had not yet completed an assignment. I had completed seven by the time I was seventeen. Turns out it was because she was an annoying idiot whose endless mundane banter was getting her shit-canned from her intern gigs. Seen and not heard never really sunk in with old Juno.

So I was looking at her, covered in blood, gathering up gear, and I did something that, to this day, sort of escapes me. I showed her the text. She blanched and I could see her mind racing, thinking of what she would need to grab to defend herself. I held my hands in the air and told her that I wasn’t going to kill her. She was confused. If I didn’t kill her, Bob would kill us both. Bingo! Not as dumb as you look, Juno. Then I handed her my bugout bag and told her I thought Asia was nice that time of year. She started crying, hugging the pack much in the same way I’m sure she wanted to hug me. She told me no one had ever done anything this nice for her, ever. I told her I wasn’t doing it because I’m nice. I told her I did it because she’s one of us, and even though Bob does not have honor, we do.

Rule #15: We kill others, but we do not kill each other.

The fact that Bob asked me to do that should tell you everything you need to know about him. There are ways to deal with people like Juno among the ranks, but that is
not
our problem. It’s Bob’s problem. And as much as I wanted her to shut up, I had no desire to shut her up for good. We found her a nice empty container on a boat bound for Hong Kong and I bid her adieu. But before I saw her off, she asked how she could ever repay me. I told her she would have plenty of time to think of something. When I got back to the office, Bob never even asked how it went. Now, that’s trust.

J
ust as Juno’s brief tenure at HR, Inc. came to an abrupt, yet inevitable, end, we have now reached the end of
The Intern’s Handbook
. I’ve told you
almost
everything I know. One of you might be assigned to take me out, so I need to keep a few tricks up my sleeve. You have to make your own way. That’s the only way you’ll survive. Things that work for me may not work for you, and you can’t allow your flexible mind to become rigid to someone else’s dogma. I’ve tried to teach you that you are an exotic weapon all on your own. Like the swordsmiths of Japan, you need to temper that weapon with great patience and a mind that is open like the sky.