The Intern's Handbook: A Thriller (4 page)

In addition to my crash course in wills and torts, I am also immersing myself in the warm bath of my new persona. Let’s recap on why orphans make great assassins. All of our lives we’ve never been given the opportunity to develop our own identities. Many of us never had a real name and we certainly never had real parents or any kind of connection to our genealogies or cultures of origin. We never even had a room of our own—the great diorama of developing personalities festooned with posters, photos, tchotchkes, and all of the icons and totems that represent our every feeling, hope, and dream. We are the blank slate. Aristotle’s tabula rasa. And we are the masters of being a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Becoming someone else is one of my favorite parts of the job. It puts a silencer on my inhibitions and allows me to do and say things I would never say to people as my real self. That can be an extremely amusing exercise with the opposite sex. And it gives me a sense, although fleeting, of what a normal life might be like. It’s weird, but just having a taste of that has saved me from the rubber room on more than one occasion. As an added bonus, this well-developed skill will come in very handy when I finally molt out of my John Lago skin and slither into the real world of retirement.

Tonight I’ll be taking a ride on the Bullshit Express. It’s one of my rituals when I prep for a job, and I strongly suggest you adopt it. I’ll go to a bar, buy anyone a drink, and start talking. When you buy someone a drink, they will almost always chat you up and ask you all about yourself, mainly because they want you to ask about them in return. People love to talk about themselves, especially white people. The Bullshit Express is how you field-test your knowledge of your cover dossier. You’ll be surprised at how well you do this when you have a real context. The more drinks you buy, the more practice you will get
and
the more you will find yourself adding to the story. This is a strong memorization technique that I like to call “owning it.” When you own it, you get to a point where you actually think it’s true, and then you are golden. Lies are, after all, the only things we tell ourselves that we truly believe.

I spend a few hours casing the law firm building, a venerable, old money fortress holding court in the storied enclave of Central Park South. I pop into a local bar around quitting time. The dark wood paneling, $15 Heinekens, and $1,500 call girls lead me to believe there’s a good chance this is a Bendini, Lambert & Locke watering hole. This would be the best possible scenario for me to put my cover through the paces, so I roll in, looking for an ear to chew.

Sitting at the bar, my favorite hunting ground, is a woman in her mid to late twenties with blond hair and brown eyes that make her
beautiful in a
Roman Holiday
meets
True Romance
kind of way. Her features are somewhat conventional, but there is something exotic underneath it all, something dark and sexy that reminds me of a young Liz Taylor. Her expensive shoes and pocketbook, at odds with her underwhelming suit and briefcase, tell me that she is a working stiff with the right priorities. Not to mention she is a woman sitting at a bar alone. This is a baller move in any town, and only girls with serious chops even attempt it. I like her immediately. All aboard.

United States Department of Justice

Federal Bureau of Investigation

Washington, D.C. 20535

Location: Bull on Thames Pub, Central Park South, Manhattan

Subjects: John Lago and Alice (censored).

M
onday morning. It’s a brisk autumn day, my favorite time of the year. New York is spectacular. The summer garbage smell has finally drifted off to Europe via the Gulf Stream, replaced by the smell of wet leaves decomposing in the gutter. Sounds nasty, but it’s one of the best smells I can imagine. It’s musty, earthy, and it reminds me of the first time I felt okay knowing I was alone in the world and would be that way for the rest of my life.

I was six years old and I was languishing in some home for wayward youth outside Reno, Nevada. The changing leaves would float down from the Sierras and land outside my window. I remember thinking that the leaves were more beautiful dead than they were alive. And I stopped crying about the things I would never have, because I knew they meant nothing.

First day of my last job and it feels a little strange. I’m trying not to get sentimental about a life that has been defined by the size of its body count, but I can’t help it. It’s what I know. But I also know that the sooner I can just get this job done, the sooner I can get out of this business and get on with my new life.

Now, let’s go kill someone, shall we?

I show up for work at Bendini, Lambert & Locke in my grayish greenish brown suit, matte black cap toe shoes, and LensCrafters specs.
The building is your typical titans of industry monolith that burns old money in the two-hundred-year-old boiler. That reddish hue in the tap water is the blood of the Irish laborers that broke their backs to build the place.

I’m waiting in the marble and platinum lobby, making detailed mental notes about every aspect of the main building security system, when I notice the receptionist looking at me—over and over again. She looks the way you would expect a receptionist to look at an office run by old, pasty white men who count their money more often than Ebenezer Scrooge. Pretty but severe. Double Z’s up top but with rail thin hips that just don’t anatomically match. Christmas bonus? Despite my petty judgments, I am, after all, just a man, and she’s checking me out, occasionally smoothing her dress or hair—preening like a tropical bird. Even though I would like to offer her the shagging I know she desperately wants, I don’t like it when people are focused on me, especially when I’m in character on the first day of a gig.

But then she does me a big favor. She speaks. With a voice so annoying that dead men would rise up just to silence it. And I’m relieved, because that voice might as well be a can of ugly spray, emptying itself all over her.

“So . . .”

Sweet Jesus it’s awful, like a cartoon child after a round of hormone treatments. I note that she’s a smoker too with the witchy grit that rattles across her larynx.

“ . . . You got into the internship program, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Impressive.”

“Thank you.”

I need to throw her off the scent, so I do the rudest thing I can imagine in the company of an attractive woman vying for my attention—I pull out my phone. And I bury my face in its colorful screen,
like a crow mesmerized by Christmas tinsel. You know that face. It’s the social networking sneer you see on every app junkie getting a fix. It’s one of the most loathsome cultural phenomena in contemporary society and I can see that she has gone from digging me to wanting to dig her nails into my eyeballs.