Hostile Takeover

  Craig would have been the perfect intern if he weren’t in his midforties already. He had the ideal build and looked to be a world-class wallflower. I was chatting at him a fair bit, trying to get him to open up to me using good old boy small talk. But he was a pro and knew exactly how to say a lot without saying anything. While we waited our turn to tee off, I poked at his Teflon facade a bit more.

  “What kind of work you in, Craig?”

  “Sales.”

  “What’s your product?”

  “Tech sales. Not very exciting,” he whispered, slightly annoyed.

  “I worked in tech for a few years,” I whispered back.

  “What field?”

  “Information systems mostly.”

  “Man, we’re both as boring as we look.” He grinned.

  “You got that right. Sometimes I think watching paint dry would be more exciting than my life,” I said.

  He courtesy laughed and headed up to the tee. After an eternity of warm-up and ceremony, he shanked the damn thing into the woods with a wicked slice. Needless to say, he was not pleased with my arrow-straight 350-yard drive that cut the fairway in half.

  “Nice shot,” he mumbled. “You play a lot?”

  “Hardly ever,” I said, chapping his ass.

  We got into the cart and I could smell the rabid desire to win coming out of Craig’s every pore. Of course, I was playing an amazing game and he couldn’t make a putt to save his life. As we progressed from hole to hole, I began to see that all-too-familiar frustration and angst that come with a poor round of golf. In fact, he was getting downright pissed but keeping his feelings very close to the vest. And he started drinking. That was exactly where I needed him to be. The back nine on that course is notoriously difficult. Fairways are exceedingly narrow and the rough is the forest primeval. By the time we made the turn and finished lunch, Craig was half in the bag, had no confidence, and had his nose buried in his iPhone, pretending that he was too busy to care about his game.

  Around the sixteenth hole, he sliced the ball a country mile into the woods. It’s amazing what a slight adjustment to a five iron will do to your game. Oh yeah, I forgot to say that Sue and I completely reengineered his clubs prior to tee time. Oops! I could hear Craig quietly cursing as he stormed off to retrieve his ball, refusing to accept a ride from me on the cart. He was in the trees awhile, hunting around and stomping like a child having a tantrum. Finally, he gave up and turned to head back to the fairway but ended up turning right into me.

  “What the—” he started to say as I Tased him in the neck. Craigy then dutifully slumped to the ground, out cold. Sue was waiting for us in a grounds-crew cart, so we loaded him into the equipment trailer and covered him with a tarp.

  “Cinderella story,” I said in my best Bill Murray accent, which basically sounded like an Australian leprechaun.

  “What’s that mean?” Sue asked.

  “Bill Murray? Caddyshack?”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “Kids. Jesus. If a movie doesn’t end up on a McDonald’s drink cup, it doesn’t exist.”

  42

  Sue drove the landscaper cart out of the golf course grounds and we dumped it in the weeds. Unconscious Craig assumed the position in the trunk of our rental car and we took him out on a nice little boat ride—on his own 350-foot super yacht. When he came to, Sue and I were drinking his champagne and smoking his $10,000 Cuban cigars.

  “I hope you don’t mind that we made ourselves at home,” I said.

  “I’m on a boat!” Sue sang out.

  Craig’s eyes went wide when he saw Sue. All black people are presumptively angry and murderous to palefaces like Craig, which is why Sue was the perfect cracker interrogator, sitting backward on a chair and staring wide-eyed at the poor bastard. Sue had immersed himself in the persona of a gacked-up crack baby trying to decide if he should waste a bullet on you or just pistol-whip you to death.

  “Who . . . who are you?”

  “I’ll ask the questions,” I answered. I’d always wanted to say that.

  Sue backhanded him to drive the point home.

  “I have money. Whatever you want,” Craig pleaded.

  “We know you have money,” I chimed in with a calm but menacing FM radio voice. “You’ve been selling out our beloved country to the Chinese, you filthy traitor.”

  Sue slapped him like the bitch he was becoming before our very eyes.

  “I don’t know what—”

  “Don’t!” I bellowed in his face.

  “Let’s smoke this fool!” Sue said in his best Shaft voice and shoved the barrel of a .45 into the side of his head.

  Sue never spoke like that and it sounded funny, so I had to stifle laughter. When he saw I was trying not to lose it, he made it worse by turning the gun gangsta sideways.

  I sat across from Craig and looked at him with the piercing X-ray vision of a police detective.

  “We’re going to kill you, Craig. You know that, don’t you?”

  Craig nodded, his shoulders slumping.

  “You know you deserve it, right?”

  He hesitated to react.

  I reached out and took hold of his chin, pulling it up and down in a nodding fashion.

  “You sold radar tech to the Chinese. They sold it to a bunch of scumbags in Afghanistan. The scumbags used it to target three, count ’em, three American troop choppers. All three were shot down. Thirty-two American soldiers smashed into the mountains and burned to death in a coffin of twisted metal and glass—on foreign soil, thousands of miles from home. Their families buried an empty box, Craig.”

  He looked at me like he’d seen a ghost. That’s because he had. What I had told him was true.

  I laughed at his shocked look.

  “Craig. Seriously, don’t insult me with that look. Did you actually think your crimes were victimless?”

  No reply. Sue walloped him in the balls with the butt of his gun. He screamed in pain and tried to double over but I backhanded him and his chair fell over. I picked him up by his hair and set his chair up again.

  “Linda. That’s your wife, right?”

  “Oh God . . .”

  “I’ll take that as a yes. You don’t want anything to happen to Linda, do you? Although, she is fucking most of your friends.”

  “No. What? Please. Whatever you want to know. Anything.”

  Craigy was having a hard time processing the thing I said about his wife, which was also true.

  “Good. I want you, and her future second husband, Ronnie the pool boy, to know that you can trust us with her safety. As long as you give us what we want.”

  He nodded.

  “Do you trust me, Craig?”

  He looked at Sue like you would look at a pit pull on a choke chain.

  “Look at me, Craig. I need to know you trust what I’m telling you.”

  He looked at me. The fear on his face gave way to surrender and he nodded. Craig knew exactly what he’d been doing. I smiled, acknowledging what was now a constructive rapport unclouded by emotion or false expectations.

  “When I leave here,” I continued, “I’m going to have to be you. I have to replace you as a source for your buyer, Mr. Zhen. So, I need you to tell me absolutely everything I need to know. And . . . this is important . . . I need you to help me set up a meeting with Zhen.”

  “If I’m dead or missing, he’ll run for cover,” Craig said blankly.

  “You’ll be neither to them because you decided to take your boat out fishing. You needed some alone time to relax after your pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Zhen will understand.”

  “I don’t have—”

  “According to your medical records, you do. So, I’ve taken care of Zhen. Now you need to take care of me.”

  For the next twelve hours, Craig spilled his guts to us. I
kept him “inspired” by peppering in more of his personal information—where his kids go to prep school, the name of his invalid father and his nursing home, the kind of knowledge that froze the blood in his veins. Like all educated white boys with no street smarts, Craig didn’t even try to be vague or deceitful. When I knew he was completely tapped out on information, we put him out of his misery (in a nice way) and gave him a moving burial at sea. Then we set his GPS headings for Cuba—they can always use a decent boat—and went back to shore on his diving Zodiac. And I had the keys to the kingdom, as it were.

  Zhen’s people were understandably skeptical, but when they saw Craig’s medical records, Zhen sent him best wishes and accepted a meeting with me, Craigy’s new wunderkind protégé. I was told the meeting would not be scheduled in advance and I would be summoned when they needed me.

  Then Sue and I agreed to part ways for a while. Alice was wondering where the hell he’d been for twenty-four hours and his story about being laid up with the swine flu was starting to wear thin. He no longer needed to risk his ass hanging around with me anyway and he served a better purpose getting back to Manhattan to keep an eye on her for me.

  “Thanks for your help, kid.”

  “You know how you can thank me, JL? Kill that witch and pry my nuts out of her claws. Think you can do that for me?”

  “With pleasure,” I promised.

  A couple of days later Sue told me Alice was waiting for me to make a move so she could whack Zhen and me together. I told him they had contacted me to set up a meeting and she would have her chance in less than twenty-four hours.

  43

  Zhen’s people communicated with me via a series of highly encrypted electronic messages. I had been told to provide a P.O. Box number, where they mailed me an ancient pager for this purpose. The messages traveled from Zhen’s mobile device to a Chinese spy satellite and down to me in the form of a numeric page. The page had to be processed through three different cipher programs before I could read it. They sent me to several locations for bogus meetings just to see if I would show up and also to get a decent look at me. I made that almost impossible because I always wore a baseball cap and sunglasses and never looked up to provide any eyes in the sky with a positive ID.

  Meantime, I managed to put together a weapons package that was highly portable and that I could deploy at a moment’s notice. All of it fit into a large metal briefcase that I schlepped at all times. I was pretty impressed with it. Alice had all the money in the world but I had to get creative, and I totally nailed it. Although, I shuddered a bit to think that I might have to actually use it. I’d been in the shit, as they say, but never actual combat. Alice had obviously assembled some kind of WMD arsenal that she was waiting to uncork, and God only knew what it was. I had some ideas, which helped me decide how to put my own arsenal together, but I wasn’t looking forward to being right.

  The morning of my meeting with Zhen, I spoke to Sue one last time and told him to stand by and be ready.

  “What’s she been up to?” I asked.

  “No idea. Keeping her movements very close to the vest. Bec . . . Rebecca doesn’t even know.”

  “Then Becca has outlived her usefulness,” I said. “You need to kill her and dump the body, Sue.”

  “What?” he asked defensively.

  “Just kidding.”

  “Ha-ha. You got the goodies for Zhen?”

  “Yeah, I have an encrypted data drive with data on all the new weapons Craigy had promised him for Christmas.”

  “Outstanding. Wait, what if something happens to you and Zhen gets his hands on all that intel? He might start World War Three,” Sue said, legitimately concerned.

  “Don’t get your panties in a bunch. The drive contains a virus designed to wipe the data in seventy-two hours. And it can’t be copied.”

  “Sounds like you got it dialed in, JL.”

  “We’ll see.”

  The day of my meeting with Zhen, he sent me no fewer than a dozen false times and locations, so I spent hours going to different parts of the city to meet with him, only to get a new location. I finally ended up at South Street Seaport. I waited there for two hours and heard nothing. So, I walked back to my apartment and when I got there, a Rolls-Royce Phantom limousine was waiting by the curb. Not good. Somehow he knew where I lived. Really not good.

  At first glance, the Rolls looked like the usual rich-asshole-mobile. But closer examination revealed it to be heavily armored against a sophisticated attack with military ordnance. Windows were narrowed and thickened and it was rolling heavy on the tires—which were no doubt Kevlar lined and built to function even when riddled with bullets. The vehicle weight was due to the two-inch thick bulletproof-glass windows, the ballistic steel covering the engine, gas tank, and battery, and, more important, the thick layers of composite armor beneath the vehicle’s original body design. Based on what I could see, the entire vehicle was impervious to handgun and submachine gun rounds and maybe even small explosives. Again, not good.

  The rear, impenetrably black tinted window slid down a crack. I sat there for a beat, waiting for a bullet to spray my brains all over my stoop.

  “Get in,” a voice inside whispered.

  The back door opened with a pressure-releasing hiss and I slid inside. The limo cabin looked like a well-appointed private jet. Zhen was sitting farthest from me, near the driver partition. His men occupied the seats on the side. One of them was casually pointing a QBZ-95 Chinese military assault rifle at my face.

  “Just so you know, Marshal Dillon,” I said to him, “that rifle has an effective range of four hundred meters and firing it point-blank into my face would not only turn my head into a grenade with razor-sharp bone shrapnel, but also the slug would most likely ricochet throughout this heavily armored vehicle and could, depending on what the oddsmakers in Vegas say, end up in your boss’s face.”

  Feathers ruffled all around and a collective scowl was aimed in my direction by Zhen’s men. Zhen laughed. Then he said something reproachful in Chinese to the man holding the assault rifle. The man lowered his head, and when the car began to speed up the West Side Highway, he opened the door and ejected himself. Behind us, I saw him rag doll under the wheels of a semi. The only pink slip you get from the MSS is a thirty-foot blood smear on the asphalt.

  “Pleasure to finally meet you, Mr. Lago,” Zhen said quietly.

  Motherfucker.

  44

  I guess I wasn’t completely surprised that someone in Zhen’s position had figured out my identity. It was just a pisser because I figured next they were going to take me somewhere to pull my skin off with a cheese grater and make me eat my severed balls before burying me alive in a pine box full of starved badgers.

  “You are either very brave, Mr. Lago, or very stupid.”

  “What kind of stupid ever got himself into this seat?” I inquired.

  “Excellent point. Which is why I’m not going to kill you. At least not right away.”

  “That’s mighty white of you.”

  He laughed.

  “You are a capable man, indeed. Most men shake in their boots at the sight of me. But you, you just tell jokes like we are old friends. I like this. The English had a saying when I was in school: You can be cordial at the gates of hell. I couldn’t agree more.”

  “So, what happens next?” I said.

  “I am aware that I have been targeted by your former organization. My security forces are robust but, as we both know, there is no substitute for someone with your training. So now you work for me.”

  Great minds think alike.

  The door to the Rolls-Royce hissed open and the roaring eighty-mile-per-hour wind outside was nearly deafening.

  “Or we can always hold you by your feet until the pavement grinds away your face,” he said with the same ease someone might suggest going to brunch.

  “Th
at won’t be necessary. When do I start?”

  He nodded slightly and the door to the Rolls closed and left us again in the hermetic silence of luxury. He shook my hand and then examined it closely.

  “Iron Palm,” he said with great interest, like a wine connoisseur examining a particularly good vintage.

  He showed my hand to his men. They Tonto-grunted their approval.

  “Gentlemen, take a good look. John is a man with no worldly price and no instinct for self-preservation. All he wants is revenge so that he can make right an imbalance that has destroyed everything dear to him. In many ways, he is the most dangerous man you will ever encounter.”

  They all bowed gracefully. I’m pretty sure I blushed.

  “Do you know how I knew your name, Mr. Lago? How I knew where you lived and about your history?”

  “You read my book and you’re a fan?”

  Zhen laughed so hard the Beretta in his shoulder holster almost went off.

  “I don’t read books like that, Mr. Lago. The reason I know you is because of the man who hired Alice to kill me.”

  The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

  “And who might that be?” I asked.

  “I am not at liberty to say and you are not at liberty to ask.”

  I changed my tack.

  “May I ask why he wants you dead?”

  “He doesn’t. He wants you dead. You and your lovely wife.”

  I felt the blood drain out of my face. The whole thing was a setup—the FBI mole, the mystery client . . . I knew the what but the why was what I was trying to Scooby-Doo as we hurtled to an uncertain fate in the back of Zhen’s limo. It must have been a play for HR, revenge for our hostile takeover. The FBI gig was meant to get us both smoked. When he realized we were going to make it out, he went for the divide-and-conquer package. After all, who better to kill us than, well, us? He played us with our own dissonant chords of paranoia, lack of trust, and homicidal rage. He made us mortal enemies, and I had no way of telling Alice the truth. She was coming for us with everything she had and the only thing I could do to stop her was kill her.