The Intern's Handbook: A Thriller (3 page)

“His ‘clients’ are what you might expect,” Bob adds. “Mafia families, gangbangers, foreign drug cartels.”

“All the best people.”

“Your cynicism concerns me, John.”

“How so?”

“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

“Oscar Wilde. You’re waxing poetic, Bob.”

“At least we’ve given you culture here, if not sophistication.”

“How does he get the names?”

“The same way anyone gets anything they want. Money, privilege, and the right golf partners.”

“
That
sounds a bit cynical to me, Bob.”

“You start Monday. Address and contact names are in the file, along with your cover dossier.”

“Hmm. Who am I this time?”

I read a bit, pretending to give a shit.

“Michigan Law School. Top ten in the country but not very flashy. Nice touch.”

“You’ll be surrounded by Ivies. They know their own kind.”

“They all had ‘fathers’ but instead I had a ‘dad.’ ” I sigh.

“Interesting quote. Twain?”

“Kurt Cobain.”

“Get out, John.”

I
’m going over my identity dossier, spending the weekend with my new self. They gave me a new surname, but as always, I get to go by “John.” Quite frankly, there is no other name that’s more perfectly anonymous, and I’m always glad I don’t have to learn how to answer to some new name like a fucking rescue dog or Chinese exchange student. My new self went to public high school (self-starter), college at Notre Dame (salt of the earth), and then Michigan Law (smart but not connected). I was the perfect equal opportunity quota candidate without being ethnic—a white Catholic without a drop of blue blood. Firms like Bendini, Lambert & Locke want to appear progressive, but let’s not get carried away.

Thanks to Bob, my soda cracker profile is the perfect cover. I’ll be ignored and considered socially irrelevant by my wealthy Ivy League peers but not despised. I’ll be tolerated by my superiors, who will wait for me to make some obscure error that
they
make regularly, at great peril to their clients, so they can summarily shit-can me and, in their words, “Send me back to Peoria with the rest of the hicks.” This will enable them to maintain their bullshit PR front without having to worry about me being around long enough to kick the Lilly Pulitzer out of all these paunchy drips on the squash court. But they don’t have to worry. I’ll be gone soon enough.

After studying the file and burning it, I quietly thank Bob as I watch my final assignment go down in flames. Killing a guy that
wears tasseled loafers and eats Steak Diane for lunch is a cupcake of a gig, and I might actually have some fun for a change. Sure it might have been nice of him to give me a bit of a challenge as a proper send-off, but that’s Bob for you. He’s already written me off and put me on some low-priority rodent hunt so he doesn’t tie up any of the new talent. Fine with me. I’ll put this pin-striped bass on my stringer and be eating a cheeseburger in paradise by the end of the month.

The only rock in my flip-flop is that I don’t even know who the fucking target is. I’m not a detective. I don’t sit on stakeouts in beige sedans with empty coffee cups and burger wrappers on the dash. And I sure as shit don’t stick my nose where it doesn’t belong. In other words, I’m not a dog, trotting around sniffing crotches, trying to separate good guys from bad guys. I see ALL people as threats, even the ones that become assets and help me, unwittingly mind you, to accomplish my objective. It’s just cleaner that way. And growing up in foster homes, as I’m sure most of you have, you learn to think that way in order to survive. Everyone is guilty until proven innocent but still perfectly capable of being guilty at any given moment.

None of that matters though. The job is the job, and I have no choice but to get it done. Bitching about it will only distract me, and let’s be honest, has bitching about
anything
ever helped
anybody
? This job is about action without judgment, and I advise you to remain focused on that at all times. Failure is not an option. I’ve seen recruits walk away from jobs for a number of reasons, many of them very good, only to end up taking a bullet before cocktail hour. It sounds harsh, but I have actually learned to like this kind of clarity. Until I started working at HR, Inc., everything about my life had been maddeningly uncertain. Now it’s very clear. I have to either kill the target or die trying. Clarity equals victory. Look at successful people. Do you really think they have seven effective habits? Fuck no. Who’s got time for that? They have one effective habit: DOING. When you are a “doer” you lap the rest of the rats in the race.

So, I fully accept the gig without reservation or judgment and go about the tedious business of navigating the Internet circus to read up on the partners. Let’s start with Bendini. His grandfather was a wealthy Sicilian that built most of Bensonhurst. His father went to Princeton and carried on with the family business until he got into some bad spec housing deals with the mob and blew his own brains out. Bendini’s grandfather sent him to prep school and he went on to Yale and Harvard Law. The rest of it is about his legal career, which would put you to sleep faster than a bottle of Ambien. I do like Bendini for his dad’s mob connection, but it’s thin at best.

If you thought Bendini was boring, Lambert makes him look like P. T. Barnum. Lambert moved to the United States from Germany with his parents when he was an infant. Evidently he’s quite the supernerd because MIT accepted him after middle school. He went on to get a PhD, an MD, and a JD. After working as house counsel for a big pharma company, Bendini poached him and made him the youngest partner in the history of the firm. He brings them millions in revenue from drug companies and biotech. It’s unlikely he’s the target, but that’s what makes me like him so much. Getting your hands on witness protection program data is the kind of caper a smart bastard like Lambert could pull off. Unlike his partners, he flies way below the public radar, which means he could make a lot of moves without drawing attention to himself. It’s always the quiet ones that invite you in for an iced tea and end up stacking your body parts like cordwood in the crawl space.

Finally, I do a rundown on Locke. Ex-military, two tours in Vietnam, awarded the Purple Heart, honorably discharged in 1975. Went on to Penn, like his father, and then Harvard Law, like his mother. Became one of the most successful defense attorneys in New York history. Definitely the firm’s biggest PR hook but almost never grants interviews. The press calls him “the man in black.” I leaf through all of the clippings from his cases—movie stars, pro athletes, rock stars.
Seems weird that he would take the time to rat out informers hiding out in Iowa, but I like the defense attorney angle. Witnesses for the prosecution are like cockroaches to a defense attorney. They can’t get them under their heels fast enough.

What’s fucked-up is that these guys are all wildly rich and powerful and definitely knocking on the door of a sweet retirement. I can’t believe any of them would be so terminally stupid as to get involved in such a dirty business. Whoever it may be is risking generations of future wealth, his life, and the lives of his family when you think about the vermin he has to get in bed with to make these sales. But greed and power could turn Gandhi into a Kardashian, and we’re talking about lawyers here, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

I
n some ways, getting into character is the most difficult part of the process. Your whole life, you have been one person. In this life, you will have to be many people. If that sounds fun to you, then you’ll do just fine. The secret is to immerse yourself so well into your new persona that even
you
believe you are this person. If you believe it, then you will never feel like you are lying and you will never exhibit any “tells.”

The Look
is one of your greatest weapons and it’s critical that you nail it. You might be thinking,
How hard can it be to look like an office nerd?
Answer: really fucking hard. And you can’t be perceived as a nerd anyway. Nerds are noticeable. They are the subjects of ridicule, despite the fact that Hollywood and TV Land try to tell you otherwise. I remember the faces of each and every nerd I beat to a pulp in my three glorious years of public school because I was angry about my shitty life and wanted to take it out on someone I knew would not fight back. The point is that you have to be more of a wallflower than anything else. You have to blend into your surroundings and be ultimately forgettable.

To quote Bob: “Interns do not have a face. They may occupy the same space with you for years, but for the life of you, you can never remember their names.”

If you want proof, go to any high school reunion. The popular
people will be approached multiple times by wallflowers. These inconsequential nobodies actually believe they might, as an adult, have the equal opportunity to become friends with someone who still can’t pick them out of a lineup. “What was your name again?”

There is a simple reason for this approach. Wallflowers have zero traits that stimulate the brains of other people and string together enough synapses to make memories. You always remember the things that rub you the right way or the wrong way. The positive and negative are both powerful memory reinforcement tools. Negative is more powerful than positive, which is based on your survival instincts. But you can’t remember something that doesn’t touch you in a positive or negative way. And this is our ultimate goal. We must learn from the wallflowers, life’s most perfect unintentional losers.

Rule #1: Act neutral.

My fifth job was one of my hardest. It was a big fashion house, and you can imagine how everyone dressed. I asked Bob for a sizable clothing allowance so I could fit in once I started my internship, and he flat out refused. He said that no matter how hard I tried to be on the same level as my coworkers, they would still never see me as one of their own. In fact, I would become subject to the circle of brutal judgment that goes on every day as employees whisper evil shit about their so-called friends. In short, I would no longer be invisible.

So I watched the employees whose names the fashion insects could never remember, and Bob’s advice started to click. Eventually I discovered the most invisible guy in the place—the one that everyone in the office would see and interact with every day, but whose name they could not recall even if they had a gun to their heads: The UPS guy.

I bought a few books on color theory, and sure enough, brown sparks the smallest neurological response of any color in the spectrum. It also elicits feelings of reliability and security, traits that are critical to gaining access and trust. So I built my wardrobe around this pillar of blandness, never straying too far. Brownish gray, brownish green, brownish black, etc. All of these colors are easily found in the sale rack of every department store because people do not intentionally buy clothing that will erase them from the universe. And when you put an entire outfit together with these colors, it’s like you are a chameleon wearing the perfect camouflage for every background in existence.

For hair, go to Supercuts. That cut-by-numbers place is the Mecca of ordinary. And I highly recommend getting glasses, because people tend to make more of a connection to you when they can clearly see your eyes. What you need are nondescript, ubiquitous frames—thin, dull metallic finishes and clear glass. Go to LensCrafters—
totally forgettable glasses in about an hour
.

Back to the fashionistas. They had a CEO who was producing and trafficking child pornography out of his textile factory in Thailand. Did I mention that killing this piece of shit was my favorite job? Getting to work on his floor was easy because everyone in that business is lazier and more entitled than usual, and it’s amazing that anything gets done. The hard part was figuring out an enemy profile. Bob is big on killing folks in a manner befitting the target’s enemies. Bombs, guns, bludgeoning, poison, electrocution, knives, fire, drowning, etc. Assassins just have their preferences. The IRA would rather blow you to bits than stab you and have to smell the bangers and mash on your last breath. The cartels like beheading. Goodfellas like piano wire, ice picks, and the occasional live burial. Bob studies these things ad nauseam, no pun intended. But this case was different. Creepy pedophile fashion magnates with deformed pinky fingers are hated and reviled by many, but they don’t typically
have high-profile enemies—at least no enemies with the balls or the money to put out a contract on someone . . . until now.

So I got creative. I asked him if I could bring my eleven-year-old “nephew” Andy visiting from the Midwest to work so that I could show him around. I’ll be damned if he didn’t drool a little into his espresso cup. Of course, Andy was part of our crew. Guy had some kind of disease that stunted his growth. Looked just like a kid. Bob only used him for specialty jobs like this because eleven-year-old interns are most definitely going to be noticed anywhere outside a NASA think tank.

When I brought him in, the CEO had arranged a “private tour.” Told me I could just leave the boy with him and he would take care of everything. He even had pink frosted elephant cookies and pineapple punch set out. Sick bastard must have been raped by clowns on a circus train at some point in his sorry life. Fifteen minutes into his Willy Wonka routine, our sawed-off operative injected him with enough Adrenalin and Viagra to blow up his cocaine-scarred heart and leave him with an erection that the coroner would have to get a logging crew to cut down. Now, that’s what I call a triumph in improvisational warfare. We put Uncle Plooker in front of his computer, fired up his private stock of kiddie porn, and slipped out with root beer Dum Dum suckers in our teeth.

I
’m spending the day boning up on all the law clerk nonsense I learned at different legal intern jobs. It’s not difficult. Mostly you’re there to make sure the actual lawyers are not fucking things up royally with poorly written language, utterly incorrect language, language copied from other contracts but never customized for the new contract, etc. And let me tell you, you are
always
busy. Being around lawyers is like being in a classroom full of kids with severe ADHD and low blood sugar. They have learned to despise detail so much that they subconsciously, or consciously, ignore it. For the most part, they are gunslingers, painting the town red with broad strokes, and they rely on the help to make sure the ship doesn’t sink and take their house in Montauk with it.