The Intern's Handbook: A Thriller (31 page)

Marcus shoots Bob in the forehead. Bob stumbles backward with a surprised look on his face and smashes through the bedroom window. When I see him lying there, it’s hard to believe he’s dead. He has always seemed invincible to me, like the steel and glass of the city that he made my prison when I was twelve years old. Now, with his legs twitching on the edge of the jagged, bloody window glass, he’s nothing but a stiff, toppled relic, shaken to his foundation by a better man and left for the rats to judge.

Marcus shows me an exit wound in his back. It’s as big as a coffee cup saucer and oozing dark venous blood.

“I’m hit pretty bad,” Marcus says.

Very bad indeed. Shit.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I say.

“Watch out!” Marcus screams.

I see a flash of Alice’s reflection in the window. She is holding an AK. I hit the deck as she opens fire. The Honduran soldiers open fire on her. She runs toward me, ducking their bullets. The death squad stragglers open up on the soldiers and we’re being pummeled by crossfire.

I take Alice’s legs out with a chair. She falls hard, hitting her head and losing her AK. This barely slows her down. She is off the ground and on her feet as quickly as she went down. I am dragging Marcus into the next room for cover and she follows. We square off. She slams her foot into the side of my face. I fall to my knees. This brings a very predictable front kick from her. Going for the throat, huh? After all we’ve been through?

I kick her right in the crotch. Yes, it hurts them as much as it does us. She doubles over, actually giving me a reprimanding look, and I wipe it off her face with the bottom of my foot. She flips backward and slides across the floor. Bullets explode through the room.

“We have to go now!” Marcus yells.

I turn to him. He’s lying on the floor, pale from blood loss.

I look back at Alice, but she’s gone.

“Wood chute. Behind the fireplace,” Marcus directs.

We both crawl back there and stuff ourselves through the narrow chute that Marissa probably uses to deliver firewood in the cooler, rainy season. This puts us on the side of the house where the coast is reasonably clear. As we creep off into the darkness, Marcus stops and pulls a bloody iPhone from his pocket. He punches in a code and his house EXPLODES, shattering the earth and filling the sky with burning ash. We limp into a thick black cloud of smoke and disappear.

A
fter we make it to the street, I steal a car and take Marcus to a local hospital, which might as well be a butcher shop based on their total disregard for hygiene. We bribe a nurse to take us to a private room and then bribe a doctor that speaks English to help Marcus. The news is not good. The shrapnel destroyed part of his liver and tore a major vein on the way out the back. He has lost a lot of blood. He also has a small, but potentially lethal, brain bleed from the impact with the fireplace stones. The idea of having brain surgery in Honduras makes Marcus laugh out loud. The doctor is not amused. Finally, Marcus’s heart is showing a strange arrhythmia, most likely due to the damaged vein and blood loss. We start doling out the dollars for blood, antibiotics, and pain meds. And more doctors.

While they stabilize him, I go out to the street, looking for people who might be looking for us. If anyone survived the blast at Marcus’s house, they will come here to the only real hospital in a hundred miles. After scanning the streets on each side of the hospital, I see nothing and go back to Marcus’s room. He’s asleep at first but wakes up when I turn on the TV to see if we’re all over the six o’clock news. Nothing. I guess gun battles are considered family entertainment in this part of the world. I can tell Marcus is in a lot of pain, so I try to keep him talking.

“Tell me more about my mother.”

“What, now that you know she was a spy?” He laughs. “Wasn’t good enough when she was a junkie?”

We both laugh.

“What can I say? I’m a fucking snob.”

“Yeah, I hated playing all that junkie crap. I’m just glad, and lucky, that you didn’t go ballistic and tell me to fuck off and die.”

“Who am I to judge?”

We both break up laughing like crazy. Marcus starts coughing, and we need to take it down a notch. I am watching his blood pressure. It’s getting low. I need for him to stay awake a little longer, at least until the transfusion is done.

“She was pretty incredible. No offense, but I never wanted kids. I didn’t think it was the best environment to bring them up in. . . .”

More laughter. You can’t help it.

“She told me if we didn’t have children our lives would be totally meaningless. Otherwise, why would she want to be married to such a disagreeable old bastard?”

“She makes a good point.”

“Yeah. As soon as she got pregnant, it all just clicked in my head. And in my . . . heart.”

He fights back the tears and wins but not before I see the depth of emotion he has always felt for her and, as weird as it is to say,
for me
.

“Had you picked a name?”

Here come the tears again.

“We can talk about something else. It’s okay.”

“No. Give me a minute.”

He takes a beat to gather himself. Then he laughs.

“We didn’t start well. Your mom suggested Homer.”

“What? Good Lord.”

“Then I made it worse and suggested Titus.”

“Jesus, humanities nerds.”

“Yeah. We met at Yale. So I guess we were a couple of nerds.”

“Yale, huh? Think they would take me as legacy?”

“Sure, if my identity hadn’t been erased by the NSA.”

Laughter again.

“Then we finally settled. We both agreed that we were not creative types and naming a person for the rest of his or her life was fairly important. So, we decided to use a family name.”

Pause for Marcus to collect himself again.

“Marcus?”

He nods.

“That’s not a cover name?”

“No. It’s my real name. The irony is that after I was disavowed, I realized the best possible identity for me to hide under was my given name. Marcus Hunter had been deleted from all government databases when they gave me my cover name, so it was totally clean.”

“It’s a good name.”

“Damn right. My great-grandfather—your great-great-grandfather—was a World War I hero, and his name was Marcus. He was a blood-and-guts son of a bitch, and that’s why my dad gave me the name.”

“I like it. John is officially dead. Nice to meet you. My name is Marcus.”

I offer him my hand. We shake. I can see that this makes him proud and very happy.

“It’s a good name. You wear it well,” he says, beaming.

“I look just like you. Got gypped on the height though.”

“Being tall in your line of work is not such a good thing anyway.”

“My line of work. That’s all over now.”

“You got money?”

“Lots.”

“Then you can do whatever you want. The world is your oyster.”

“True. I just don’t know what I want
,
you know?”

“You’ll figure it out. Shit, compared to what you’ve been doing, the outside world is a piece of cake. It’s like Keith David says to Charlie Sheen in
Platoon
, ‘All you got to do is make it out of here. It’s all gravy, every day the rest of your life, gravy.’ ”

“You like movies?”

“Obsessed with them.”

“Sounds familiar.”

We both laugh.

“What about
her
?” he asks.

“Who?”

“You know who I’m talking about. The blond nightmare with the machine gun. She couldn’t decide if she came all this way to kill you or have your kids.”

“Alice? She’s dead. At least to me.”

“Seems like a loose end for you, then. Might want to snip it.”

“Yeah. Now that Bob’s gone, she might go dark.”

“You never know. Better safe than sorry.”

I don’t want to talk about her. Not now. Not ever. I choose to remember her as the bloated murder doll I grieved in New York.

“Tell me more about Mom.”

We talk for a few hours about my mother, Penny. Like Marcus, she was a classic overachiever with many degrees and a very high IQ. But what strikes me most about her is her empathy, the exact thing I was lacking to the point where I became a good candidate to be a cold-blooded assassin. Whenever they were stationed in some godforsaken shit hole somewhere in the world, she would always take the time to help out its poverty-stricken people. Marcus thought it was ironic that the more she saw disadvantaged children and the horrors they endured, the more she wanted children of her own. I wonder if she would think it was ironic that I became one of those disadvantaged children. Marcus says it would have broken her heart. He gives me a photo of her, stained with blood, of course. She’s
standing by the ocean with a bump in her belly, looking like she doesn’t have a care in the world. She’s holding someone’s hand, but that person is covered in blood. It’s the photo the social worker had told me about years ago. And, of course, the person holding her hand is Marcus.

I
doze off midsentence sometime around 3:00
A.M.
and dream about my mother. The beach photo animates to life, and she and Marcus are walking, talking to her belly, telling me how good it’s going to be, and calling me Marcus. When I wake up, Marcus is sitting up in bed, staring intently at the full moon outside. He looks very pale but his heart monitor looks good and his pulse is strong. Then I notice that he has put his pulse and pressure monitors on
my
fingers.

“Marcus. What’s going on?”

“That’s my last moon, kid. It’s a good one.”

“No. Let me get the doctors.”

I start to get up, but he puts his hand gently on my arm.

“I’ll be gone by the time you get back.”

“I’m not going to let you die.”

“You’re not letting me die, son. I’m just dying. And it’s okay.”

“No.”

I can’t speak. The words won’t come. It’s like I’m still in the dream and I’m walking underwater. I can barely see, my eyes are so swollen with tears and agony. I am back in that moment when I killed Mickey and Mallory. I am the jumper, falling but wanting to stop myself, to defy gravity, to go back to the ledge, run home, and tell my father, whom I have never known, that I love him.

“I know.”

“What?” I choke.

“I know how you feel about me. You don’t have to say it. From the first time I saw you yesterday, as the man you are, I knew that nothing, not even time, ever really came between us.”

“This was the only thing I’ve ever wanted. I’ve waited . . .”

“And it was worth the wait.”

“But now I have nothing.”

“That isn’t true. I want you to know something. Everything you’ve done. None of it is you. You did what was necessary to survive. Not just to save your body, but to save your mind.”

He lies down on his pillow, the full moon still reflected in his tear-filled eyes, a smile on his kind, paternal face. Seeing that smile brings about the first feeling of peace I have ever known. He takes my hand.

“Everything that came with that survival, the violence and ultimately the betrayal, it all brought you right here. It brought you to me. Even Bob and all of his bullshit brought you to me. And now you can be who you really are.”

“I won’t . . . let go.”

“Never. We will never . . .”

He is gone. His last breath sounds like a gentle sigh. The full moon outside is shrouded in clouds, and his room goes dark.

F
ive weeks later. This is my last entry. I am not in Europe, basking in the glow of my retirement. I was there for a month. I had settled on Prague and was about to go under for my facial reconstruction surgery when I pulled the IVs out of my arm and walked out of the hospital with my ass sticking out of the back of my gown. As I walked, feeling the smooth cobblestones on my feet, my mind never felt clearer. Over and over again, I could hear my own voice saying, out loud and in my head—

“I am Marcus.”

Not John. Not the man that playing-it-safe was about to make me become. I am Marcus. And I will not destroy the only thing that reminds me of where I came from. I want to look at it in the mirror every day.

Now I am in New Hampshire in the middle of winter, driving through one of the worst blizzards on record. I feel like Dustin Hoffman in
Marathon Man
as my car slides all over the road. I know that I can trust no one. I know that death is around every corner, the smiling friend that invites me in for a hot cup of coffee to get out of the cold.

Is it safe?

The answer to that question doesn’t matter to me. Not anymore. In fact, there is only one thing left in this world that matters to me and I am looking for it in a whiteout, a frozen landscape that is waiting
to devour me if it can get its icy fingers under my skin. In the distance, through the four-inch circle on my windshield that is not covered in frost, I see it. It’s a cabin in the middle of nowhere. The perfect place to disappear.

When I get close, I hide the car in a grove of trees and walk up. I make certain not to make any fresh footprints in the snow in the front of the cabin. Instead I approach from the back, concealing my tracks in the powdery snow with a pine bough. It’s so cold I can feel the moisture in my nose and eyes freeze every time the wind blows.

I enter through the back door. It’s dark and bitter cold inside. I sit in a chair, cover myself with a blanket, and wait. After an hour or so, I hear tires crunching in the snow out front, followed by the tread of boots coming up the steps. The door opens.

Alice walks in.

She’s carrying a bag of groceries. I say hello by shooting her in the shoulder with my Walther P22. The groceries go flying and she falls back onto her butt, clutching the wound. She goes for her gun but then sees it’s me and thinks better of it. Now I have her full attention.

“John? What the fuck are you doing here?”

“It’s Marcus now. After my father. Actually he suggested I come. Take care of a loose end.”