Hostile Takeover

  When I saw the office security guy coming down the hall, I had to intervene. I had to improvise . . .

  “Yoko, they’re coming for you.”

  “Who?” he said, instantly terrified.

  “Aliens. They’re dressed as security officers, as the prophecy says.”

  I was really winging it. My own brain was about to spontaneously combust and I was trying not to talk too much because, to me, my voice sounded like a robot trapped in an aluminum can full of angry wasps. Yoko saw the security officer’s head bobbing down the hallway and crouched to the floor.

  “Don’t look,” I poured it on. “He’s carrying the anal probe.”

  “Sweet holy Jesus lizard,” he said. “What do we do?”

  “Follow me,” I said in my best Dora the Explorer voice.

  I took him to the twelfth floor, where they had been doing a lot of construction. It was a bank holiday, so the workers had the day off. The construction was so unfinished that there were many sections cordoned off for safety. I took him by the arm to a construction area that was still more in the framing stage and had no windows.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “Rendezvous point. I called in a rescue ship.”

  “Oh good,” he said, as if that made perfect sense.

  Then he started to gag and dry heave, his system overloaded by the drug and wanting to eject it. The sound of it was unbearable and I started to get sick myself, so I slapped myself hard and then slapped Yoko, nearly knocking him over.

  “It’s time,” I said to him sternly, leading him to the open windows.

  “For what?” he said, rubbing his cheek.

  “If you stay here, they will drag you out of here and give you the anal probe. Do you want that?”

  “No! What can I do?”

  “You have to recon with the rescue ship.”

  “How?”

  “Stargate portal,” I said, pointing at the huge open metal window frames 150 feet above the street.

  “Right,” he said. “Of course.”

  I looked at my wrist, which contained no watch.

  “The ship is here,” I said and patted him on the shoulder.

  “What about you?” he asked, genuinely concerned.

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’ll come through the portal right after you. Only one can go at a time.”

  He went to kiss me on the lips, but I stopped him.

  “Go, young soldier. Your bride awaits.”

  “Oh,” he said, his eyes lighting up.

  And he walked right out of the building. I looked down and saw him land on top of a combination hot dog cart and novelty balloon stand. When he hit it, the explosion of pork, meat water, and multi­colored sodas, followed by the rapid, vertical exodus of balloons, looked like a supernova, and I was so mesmerized I nearly fell out the window myself. It wasn’t pretty, but it was one of my most creative hits, and if I was going to out-Lago Alice, I needed to think outside the box—mainly so I could fill it with high explosives and burning dog shit and leave it on her doorstep.

  35

  The day I left the hospital, as I was walking out, one of the receptionists in the lobby ran up to me, holding an enormous helium balloon bouquet that she could barely herd across the lobby. The balloons were all Disney characters with the words GET WELL! emblazoned in their bursting speech bubbles.

  “Sir, these came for you. Since you requested no visitors or deliveries, we kept them in our gift shop.”

  The way she was smiling at me, you’d think she had found my pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

  “Must be a mistake,” I said.

  “The delivery company listed your specific room,” she said.

  “Was there a name on the card?’

  “No.”

  “Of course not. Thank you, ma’am, but I’m sure they were intended for someone who would appreciate them . . . like a child or circus clown.”

  “Okay,” she said, completely crestfallen.

  Sue . . . guy thought he was hilarious. Balloons. Obnoxious. That morning he texted me and said he needed to meet with me as soon as possible to get me up to speed on Alice. I had him meet me at the Rusty Knot bar on the West Side Highway, a no-questions-asked enclave for professional drunks and the skinny-jean set. When Sue arrived, he looked flustered.

  “Hey, man, you feel better?” he asked.

  “If by better you mean do I feel like I’ve been sucking the tailpipe of a diesel garbage truck in Mexico City, then yeah, I feel aces.”

  He was too distracted to care about my answer.

  “Good, man. Good. Becca just hit me with something we need to handle—”

  “Becca?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re starting to shit where you eat, aren’t you?” I asked. “Rule number five.”

  “No, man—”

  “Never mind. Say what you got to say before you pop and make a terrible mess.”

  “Alice is gonna move on Harold Leung tonight. She didn’t find any good intel in the laptops.”

  “Shocker.”

  “Right? Anyway, she’s going to black bag him tonight and go to work on him at HR with a dental drill and a couple of hungry sewer rats.”

  “With interns like these . . .”

  “Yeah. On the guy’s birthday too. She’s so cold you must’ve got frostbite on your dick, JL.”

  “That’s the funniest thing you’ve said since we met. Nice work.”

  “Thanks. What do you want to do about Leung?”

  One of the things I have always loved and hated about this work is the necessity to improvise. Thinking on one’s feet is a critical skill because nothing ever goes according to plan, especially when you’re dealing with Alice. Obviously, I couldn’t allow her to torture Leung to get intel on Zhen. I was certain Leung didn’t know enough to be of consequence because Zhen wasn’t that stupid, but on the off chance he did know something, I needed to be proactive.

  “We need to take him out. Right now.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “A few. None—”

  “—of them good. I know. You say that about all your great ideas, dummy. Speaking of bad ideas, thanks for sending me the FTD ‘I heart blowing my cover’ balloon bouquet.”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t send me balloons at the hospital?”

  “Hell no. Balloons? What do I look like, a—”

  Before he could finish, I got up and sprinted out of the bar.

  “Hey!” Sue yelled and followed me.

  We got into the lobby of the hospital and I nearly jerked the poor receptionist out of her chair.

  “Where’d you put my balloons?!”

  “I thought you didn’t want—”

  “I want them now, goddamnit.”

  I was trying my best to keep my voice down. Sue was clocking the security guys, getting ready to sweep some legs.

  “Okay. Okay. We took them to the maternity ward,” the lady said.

  “You what?” I said, sweat pouring down my face.

  “I’ll go get them, sir. Please calm down.”

  But I was already sprinting away. I scanned the directory while Sue stabbed the elevator buttons. It was taking forever, so Sue and I hoofed it as fast as we could up the stairs to the tenth floor. My lungs felt like they were going to explode in my mouth.

  “What’s up, JL? What’s with the balloons?”

  “If you didn’t send them—”

  “Oh shit,” Sue said.

  * * *

  We made it to the maternity ward and saw the balloons gently bumping against the viewing glass outside the nursery.

  “Mother of God,” I said under my breath.

  “Can I
help you?” said an old crotchety nurse, standing between the balloons and us.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Sue said, making himself sound mentally slow.

  The nurse thought he was adorable.

  “I work for the florist and I delivered them balloons to the wrong hospital. This is my boss. We got to get them to the right place or my boss will take away my Lego money.”

  “Okay, son, you may take them. But please be quiet. We have a lot of sleeping babies.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, nodding his head vigorously.

  We pretended we were just trying to be quiet when we carefully removed the balloon bouquet like guys from the bomb squad.

  When we got outside, I breathed a sigh of relief. There’s one gas that is lighter than helium, could easily be used to blow up balloons, and is readily available: hydrogen. The difference is that helium makes you talk funny and hydrogen—in high enough concentration­—is highly flammable, even explosive. Just ask the thirty-six passengers who were incinerated onboard the Hindenburg, the first lead zeppelin. Since Sue hadn’t sent me the balloons, I had to assume Alice had, and she wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble for helium. I gave Sue the balloon bouquet while I took one from it and poked a small hole in the bottom. I let most of the gas out and when the balloon was the size of my fist, I lit my lighter next to the hole. A five-inch flame shot out and melted the balloon in half a second.

  “Damn,” Sue said.

  “Dirty pool,” I said, disgusted. “And these are Mylar. She could have blown up half the hospital.”

  “We sure she did it?” Sue asked.

  I looked at him like he was insane.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I think we better do something about Harold Leung,” Sue said.

  36

  The office cake ritual is well documented in corporate lore, most pointedly by Mike Judge in the modern cinema classic Office Space. It is an unwritten rule that, in order for morale to be maintained, cake must be served at least once a week. The occasion for the cake is far less important to those standing in the chow line than a guarantee that everyone will get a piece. And the best part is that there is never, ever enough cake. Blame it on portioning or surreptitious seconds, but it is an axiom—some Milton will always be left standing with an empty paper plate and a full cup of bitterness.

  Being in Human Resources came in handy again when I returned to the office that day, with some fanfare, and was asked to help plan an impromptu conference room birthday party for Harold Leung. I love a good party, so I really put my back into the work. Like docile livestock, everyone gathered in the break room and sang “Happy birthday to you” to Harold in English and Cantonese, which sounded more like a call to arms than a birthday tune. And, as is the custom, Harold was given the first slice of cake. I know what you’re thinking: He’s going to kill Harold with his own birthday cake. As cruel as that sounds, the thought did cross my mind.

  And, of course, I’ve been there, done that, and bought a T-shirt. I had to whack a dirty CFO once and couldn’t use poison because I would risk killing the whole office—or at least those who got cake—and that’s just not very professional, is it? So, I had to do a little bit of medical history research on my mark prior to his big office celebration.

  At sixty-five, he was a fairly healthy man. However, a quick perusal of his medical records yielded an exotic diagnosis: myasthenia gravis. This is a neuromuscular disease that, in layman’s terms, causes intermittent muscle fatigue and weakness. Severity ranges from mild symptoms like droopy eyelids and slurred speech to life-threatening conditions like poorly functioning breathing muscles. Obviously, this guy fell into the mild category because it was not noticeable and he smartly used up all of his sick days to avoid being seen at the office during attacks.

  The interesting thing is that, for ER docs, it’s one of a few “boogeyman” conditions that keeps them up at night. If someone with myasthenia gravis needs to be intubated, just like everyone else they receive a neuromuscular blocking agent, which is used so docs can feed a tube down someone’s throat without having the gag reflex cock block their whole procedure. Unlike for everyone else, these drugs can be potentially lethal to someone with myasthenia gravis because they can cause profound muscle paralysis for extended periods of time, resulting in respiratory and cardiac arrest.

  So, guess what the secret ingredient in the buttercream icing on my target’s cake was? With the addition of a minimal amount of a neuromuscular blocking agent, the rest of the folks who ate the cake were probably more affected by the sugar crash than the drug itself. But it proved fatal for my target. They found him that afternoon, stone dead in the bathroom stall, still wearing his SpongeBob party hat.

  As for Harold Leung, I had not delved into his medical history, so a cake gag was out. But lucky for him, there was a surprise that was sure to put a smile on his face waiting in his car when he left the building: a beautiful bouquet of balloons! When he saw them, he stood in the parking garage, staring like an awestruck child at all of his favorite Disney characters, whose maniacally cheerful faces were pressed up against the windshield of his car. But instead of inviting him to join them on an enchanting trip to the Magic Kingdom, they detonated somewhere in Queens, and by the time they got the fire out, all that was left of Harold and his car could fit in a Folgers family-size coffee can.

  My ad hoc execution scenario was the car itself. Harold drove a 2002 Pontiac Grand Prix. Righteous wheels, I know. The beauty, or beast, of this car was that it contained the GM 3800 Series II V6 engine. About 1.2 million GM vehicles with this engine were recalled by 2009 because it was prone to oil leaks, which would cause the car to burst into flames if the oil hit the engine manifold. Once it got lit up, all the petroleum-based plastic was highly combustible and the car would burn down to the frame. If you’ve ever seen one of these smoking ruins on the side of the road, you would have questioned the driver’s chances of survival. So, when they found Harold’s smoking ruin, it was assumed the car was the cause of the blaze, as only a demented freak would blame it on a friendly bouquet of birthday balloons.

  Rising higher than the noxious odor of burning plastic and melted aluminum was the smell of Alice’s desperation, which Sue said was palpable back at HR. According to him, I had not only pushed Alice’s panic button by killing Leung, but I had also broken it in the “on” position. Morale was taking a nosedive, and because of Alice’s focus on Zhen, other clients were breathing down her neck. I knew time had become a luxury she could no longer afford and I wasn’t surprised to hear that she was considering trying to hit Zhen head-on, old-school, with no foreplay.

  So Sue and I started running scenarios. Doing him at CIS was a nonstarter. He was always traveling, so if I were Alice, I would have tried to exploit a weakness when he was on the road with a smaller security detail. Of course, Zhen didn’t travel light. No matter what was transporting him by land, air, and sea, it would be heavily armored and well guarded. She was going to need some serious military hardware if she wanted to try to get him with a full-court press.

  Where does one go when one needs modern weapons of mass destruction on short notice? The Russians of course! In an attempt to keep me from picking up her trail, she dug deep and chose the dirtiest, most obscure Russian mobsters she could find. But she and Rebecca actually took Sue with them when they traveled to a ten-thousand-acre compound in some godforsaken part of Wyoming and he gave me the play-by-play when he got back. Those chain-smoking creeps had everything, including helicopters and an ancient, but fully functional, Soviet MiG-25 fighter jet. The place was like the Walmart of wildly outdated weapons of mass destruction and it was run by one of the shadiest Russian mobsters in the business.

  Yuri, as he referred to himself, was wearing knee-high English riding boots, a scarf, and no shirt. His boys, also cut from the same tick, were hustling buyers, passing around Cuban cigars and absinthe in Boy Scou
t canteens. Shirtless Yuri was a former colonel in the army, even served with Putin. The other guys were some kind of Special Forces types. They spoke very little English, but that didn’t matter because Alice let her suitcases full of cash do the talking.

  With her paranoia at an all-time high, she had refused to tell Rebecca and Sue exactly what she purchased until the day she planned to use it. When they got back to New York, Alice put Rebecca and Sue to work trying to find any information they could on Zhen’s travel plans. They also spent days going through surveillance footage captured outside the CIS office building. Anytime a car left the garage, a helicopter landed and took off from the pad, and delivery trucks came to the loading docks, they recorded it. They were attempting to analyze for patterns and identify any anomalies that might indicate Zhen’s movements. It was a long shot, but it’s all Alice had. And, thanks to Sue, I had it too.

  37

  Alice’s plan wasn’t exactly good news. The fact that she was prepared to go completely off the reservation with a hit that might make the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre look like a purse snatching meant she wasn’t thinking clearly, and that could be a very dangerous thing indeed. When someone like Alice is backed into a corner, the outcome can be very difficult to predict and the potential for collateral damage is massive. Whatever she was planning would have to be countered with superior strategy and firepower if I had any hope of taking her out. Knowing what Alice is capable of made this a profoundly daunting task for someone like me with limited resources.

  On the other hand, I could see some logic, albeit reckless, in her desire to cut to the chase. The traditional work-your-way-up-the-ladder-to-access-intern gambit was simply not going to work and time was of the essence. Alice and I had reached a stalemate in our intern chess match, and even if someone had weeks to try to get close to Zhen in the conventional HR way, it would still be dicey. The Chinese MSS have mastered the art of avoiding any type of routine that could be captured and time-logged by even the most sophisticated surveillance rotations. That’s why they are able to stay embedded for decades without rousing suspicion.