Hostile Takeover

  “That’s because we didn’t give them to you,” I said coldly.

  “Come on, padre, let’s move it along,” Alice said.

  “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to join this couple in holy matrimony . . .”

  Our wedding was a relatively small affair. Like most professional killers, we had no family or friends of any kind, so the guest list was a snap. John. Check. Alice. Check. Nondenominational, guitar-playing ex-convict minister who didn’t ask a lot of questions. Check. Smartly dressed hotel staffer poised to toss Juliet rose petals and pop a bottle of 1907 Heidsieck champagne—recovered from the Swedish freighter Jönköping after it was sunk by a German U-boat in 1916 (something old)—upon completion of the nuptials. Check. All weddings should be like ours was—the bride and groom, solitary as their cake topper doppelgängers, grinning before Yahweh in bespoke couture.

  Even though we spared the guest list, we spared no expense. The ceremony took place in the Ty Warner Penthouse at the Four Seasons in Manhattan. For the price of one night’s lodging in that room, you could feed and clothe several villages in Myanmar for a full year. Alice looked stunning in her handmade jet-black wedding gown (something new) that I had a goth seamstress fashion out of exotic military fabrics. It cost me a small fortune (and nearly my pinky finger) but it was worth it. That dress made me want to cut my own heart out and bleed on the sacrificial stone to show my gratitude to the gods. And after all that, I couldn’t wait to unceremoniously rip it off her.

  I was wearing a tuxedo I stole from a dead MI6 agent (possibly my best-dressed target), and a pair of Vietnam-era jungle combat boots I won in a card game before I killed a roomful of Laotian flesh peddlers with a camp shovel. Alice wasn’t into the boots, but I told her letting me wear them was the least she could do after she had tried several times in the last year to put a bullet in my head but only managed to hit my heel. She one-upped me by wearing a pair of Alexander McQueen Titanic Ballerina Pumps she’d had fitted with a razor sharp titanium stiletto heel that could lacerate Kevlar and punch through concrete. They were wickedly beautiful and I couldn’t help but wonder how they would look pointing at the ceiling.

  “Do you . . . take . . . her to be your lawfully wedded wife—”

  “I do,” Alice said.

  “Seriously?” I said, annoyed. “It’s not your turn.”

  “Why don’t we try that again?” the minister said.

  “No.” Alice glared.

  “Don’t ruin the moment,” I said.

  “I don’t like the rest of those tired, played-out vows,” Alice said.

  “To have and to hold, in sickness and in health, till death do us part. Those?” I inquired casually.

  “Yep,” she snapped, strangling her exquisite saffron crocus bouquet.

  “Fine. What do you suggest?”

  “There’s a very rare bottle of champagne that has waited patiently at the bottom of the ocean off the coast of Finland for nearly one hundred years for us to drink it,” she began. “We have actual Kush fresh off the plane from Islamabad, and the Maine lobsters are going to kill each other if we don’t kill them first. And let’s not forget that I’m so horny I could fuck a mechanical bull. So, with all of these more urgent matters, why do we need to go through with this ritual nonsense?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “We’re not there yet,” the minister said, annoyed.

  “Shhhh,” Alice said, pressing her finger to his lips too hard and slightly cutting him with what I could see was a French-manicured nail with a razor-sharp rose-gold edge—adding an instant upgrade to my shoe fantasy. In the interest of expediting the fulfillment of that fantasy, I kissed the bride.

  The minister scowled and lit a cigarette while we made out like high school prom dates.

  “I now pronounce you man and wife?”

  Hands everywhere. Groping. Outside voices.

  “Okay. I’m out of here,” the minister said. “Congratulations. You two were made for each other.”

  He took leave of us, along with the hotel staffers, and we took leave of our senses. Just think bacchanal meets Masters and Johnson meets Penthouse Letters and you’ve pretty much got the picture. After several hours of “marital consummation” we put our beautiful wedding clothes back on and had a smoke on the terrace.

  “Promise me we’ll have sex like that for the rest of our lives, no matter how old, gray, and foul-smelling we are,” she said.

  “No way,” I said. “Maybe if we were chimpanzees . . . on some kind of experimental military drug. Outside of that, I’d be dead in five years if we kept up this pace.”

  “Maybe that’s my fiendish plan. To fuck you to death.”

  “Okay, I promise.”

  We both laughed, mainly because the irony of the situation was as thick as our Sylvia Weinstock wedding cake and twice as sweet. I married the love of my life and former nemesis. We had the most beautiful wedding two totally disconnected psychopaths could possibly have had. We enjoyed unspeakable pleasures. And then it was time for the pièce de résistance, my wedding present to Alice. I opened the doors to the foyer (yes, the suite was that big) and revealed a massive, beautifully wrapped box about the size of a coffin.

  “What is it?” she said, licking her lips.

  “Open it and find out.”

  She tore off the wrapping paper and lifted the lid off the box. Her jaw dropped.

  “Holy shit, John.”

  “That’s only the beginning.”

  “Excuse me?” she said, incredulous.

  “This is a two-part present.”

  “What’s part two?”

  “Are you sure you’re ready?” I asked coyly.

  “Don’t make me shoot you in your other foot.”

  I looked at my watch.

  “Twenty minutes and all will be revealed. Enough time for champagne.”

  We popped the shipwrecked Heidsieck and toasted. It tasted like unbridled optimism, with a gunpowder nose and a burnt lemon and kerosene finish. After we practically sucked the last drop out of the bottle, we kissed, tasting victory on each other’s malevolent lips.

  “Ready?” I said.

  She nodded, smiling.

  I opened her wedding present box and pulled out five shaped charges made to look like little wedding cakes and positioned them in a large circle on the floor.

  “John. What are you doing?”

  “Sweeping you off your feet.”

  “Seriously. What are you doing?”

  I stopped and grinned.

  “This is your present.”

  I pulled two Israeli Special Forces X95 SMGs with silencers (something borrowed) out of the wedding box, slapped 32-round 9-mm mags into each, and handed one to her.

  “It’s beautiful, honey, but have you lost your mind?”

  “No. You’re going to love this. Trust me.”

  I pulled her close to me and started strapping weaponry to her body with a custom leather holstering harness.

  “Okay, now you’re making me hot.”

  “That dress is bulletproof.”

  “Keep talking . . .”

  “My tuxedo is impervious to flamethrowers and chemical weapons.”

  She jumped up and wrapped her legs around me.

  “Save it for later. We need to focus.”

  “Tease,” she said, sliding off.

  We busily geared ourselves up.

  “How many?” she asked.

  “At least a dozen. Maybe more,” I said, smiling.

  “Who are they?”

  “Do you want to ruin the surprise?” I asked.

  “No, darling.”

  “Good. Now, stand next to me here.”

  I pulled her close to me in the middle of the circle created by the wedding cake–shaped charges.

 
“You’re a sick man, John.”

  “I know. Isn’t it great?”

  “Yes.”

  “Close your eyes.”

  She did and we kissed. Then she opened them again.

  “Can I have a little hint about the target?” she asked, batting her eyelashes.

  “The CEO of Human Resources, Incorporated,” I answered casually and blew the shaped charges.

  The circular piece of floor we had been standing on broke away and we dropped through the ceiling into another palatial suite directly below us. As we smashed into the floor and rolled to cover, bullets were already flying. It turned out I had slightly miscalculated. There weren’t a dozen armed men in there. There were two dozen.

  Till death do us part.

  5

  A huge cloud of swirling white plaster dust made it difficult to see and breathe on top of making everyone look completely ridiculous. The Israelis are masters at close-quarters urban warfare, probably the best in the world. Knowing this, I pretty much customized our entire ops weapon package as if we were a couple of Mista’arvim soldiers getting dropped into a Hamas bug nest. Of course, we had the element of surprise with the massive pieces of floor and ceiling smashing down directly into the suite’s executive conference room.

  Seated at the conference table at the time were several suits from an organized crime syndicate in Eastern Europe. Their heavily armed blockhead security thugs were standing against the walls of the conference room behind them, trying to look all badass with their chinstrap beards and cologne-infused pinstripe suits. At the head of the table, flanked by his own army of murderous goons, was our target, the CEO of HR, Inc. And check this out. The guy’s name was Bob! Evidently, he was called off the bench to replace the former Bob after that one’s untimely death in Honduras at the hands of yours truly.

  The new Bob was nothing like the old one. He was a former military contractor who thought he could pack the same steel as the rest of us. He’d obviously been appointed by whatever mystic cabal, alien brain trust, or Wizard of Oz consortium had been running HR from some ivory tower since its inception. Bob II was a flabby suit. Which is why it shouldn’t surprise you to know what he did when that ceiling crashed down and killed five of the guys sitting a few feet away from him at the conference table. He pissed his pants and crawled under the bed.

  Alice tried to go after him, but she got lit up by several shooters and had to find cover. I deployed smoke and flash grenades to throw them off her tail. The bosses who hadn’t been crushed to death by falling chunks of concrete floor were choking and disoriented, and I thought I could actually hear some of them crying. Which makes sense, since they were completely abandoned by their tough-­fronting velvet rope security apes, who had taken cover all over the suite.

  We put a pill in every boss and started looking for a dozen or so of their thugs. The good thing was that they had not only us to worry about, but also each other. There isn’t a lot of blood-brother loyalty among clock puncher bodyguards, especially if they’re used to getting paid in gristly donkey sausage for doing rusty cleaver jobs in Bulgaria. The bad thing was that this was a recipe for total chaos. Everyone was trampling over one another, trying to find cover. Guess what? There is no cover in a luxury hotel suite! Everything is thin and fragile and expensive. Some realized this and simply made a run for the door. Alice was going to shoot them, but I waved her off. They couldn’t ID us and this was probably the only vacation they were going to get before the Boris that was the boss of their Boris boss cut them up for chum.

  The brief exodus thinned the herd to eight bearded, Drakkar Noir–pickled human bull’s-eyes, and that was more than manageable for the missus and me. The two of us hightailed it to the only real cover in the suite—a huge fake Ming vase and a bar cart—both of which had been placed in the room by hotel staff thanks to some very bogus work orders issued by me, and both of which were lined with six inches of titanium and Kevlar composite, impenetrable by anything but a stinger missile. Oh, and they were full of extra mags too, so we basically had some very stylish urban foxholes with sweet ammo stashes.

  “Way to plan ahead, love pumpkin,” Alice said as she slapped in another mag.

  “I think your terms of endearment tank is empty, lamb chop.” I grinned.

  “This is the best wedding present ever, sheyne punim,” she said as she drilled a guy who looked exactly like Count Chocula.

  “I thought you’d like it, angel puss,” I said. “But this is only one of your presents.”

  “What? John, you shouldn’t have!”

  “Nothing’s too good for my beautiful bride, motherfuckers!” I yelled as I splattered a couple of Borats all over the silk divan.

  From that point on it was carny shootin’ gallery time. We systematically picked off the remaining thugs, shooting them through walls, decorative partitions, leather club chairs, flat-screen TVs—things that stop bullets in the movies but wouldn’t stop a BB gun in real life. Just when we thought it was Miller Time, another problem arose in the form of a .338 Lapua Magnum round that hit the bottle of Grey Goose on top of the bar cart with such force that the vodka inside exploded and incinerated the head of one of our opponents. I quickly found the hole in the window facing Central Park. Sniper. Had to be with Bob II. All the other suits were dead, and there were only two thugs left.

  I fired a shot in Bob II’s general direction and my position got rattled with a hailstorm of sniper bullets. I did it again so I could judge the angle of trajectory and draw fire on one of the last thugs creeping up on Alice. The thug got his head unzipped by the sniper and I used my green-laser sighting scope to track the powder residue hanging in the air from the kill shot. I followed that until I saw the moonlight delicately reflect off his scope. Son of a bitch was more than a thousand yards away on a rooftop overlooking Central Park. Then I texted one of my NYPD contacts and gave him the shooter’s twenty. City cops love bagging a pro, and I handed them a hot snot on a silver platter.

  While we tried to lay low, the final thug, of course, had found a way to weasel behind the Sub-Zero refrigerator. Those are heavy, well-made fridges with a ton of metal, so he won the award for smartest meat helmet. We couldn’t get a good shot at him and he had Alice pinned down in the twelve inches of space that his bullets and the sniper’s bullets couldn’t reach. So, I did what any good husband would have done in my position. I shot one of Bob II’s toes off. He screamed in agony as the blood poured out of his tasseled loafer. Served him right. Who the hell wears tassels anymore?

  “Call him off, Bob Deuce!”

  “What?” he yelled. “Who?”

  I shot off another toe. He started blubbering.

  “The sniper, you asshole!”

  “Fuck you!”

  Toes 2, 3, and 4. Agony. Large animal wailing.

  “Your balls are next!”

  “I said fuck you!”

  Ball #1. Blasted back to the Flintstone age.

  The wet spot on his trousers made for better targeting. At first, he could barely breathe from the pain, and then he started wailing again.

  “That’s gotta hurt!” I said.

  “Just kill him!” Alice said. “I can’t take his whining anymore!”

  She blasted in his general direction, but the sniper lit her up and hit the end of her gun, destroying the barrel.

  “Alice!” I yelled. “You know how much that thing cost?”

  “Sorry! Just put that little bitch out of my misery!”

  “I’m going to! But first I’m gonna clip his Johnson!”

  “No!” Bob II screamed. “I’ll call him off.”

  I heard him fumbling for his phone. Then I heard him whimper something in Russian. I fired a few rounds in his direction to test his truthfulness. He yelped in fear, but no sniper rounds came through.

  “Now tell him to shoot that asshole behind the fridge!” Alice yelled.


  The asshole behind the fridge took that opportunity to come out, guns blazing. He went straight for Alice, probably thinking a woman was going to be an easier mark. I had a shot but didn’t take him out, just so I could see him eat his arrogance. He did when she broke his nose and split his scalp with the heavy vase. When his eyes were drenched in blood, she heart-punched him so hard I heard his sternum snap before he face-planted in the tropical fish tank.

  Then we heard Bob II ordering the sniper to reengage.

  Since we had abandoned our cover, we were dangerously exposed. When the sniper rounds started whipping through the room, shredding everything, Alice was able to jump back behind her vase, but I was ass in the wind. So I ran into the master, threw the mattress off the bed, and jumped on top of Bob II. Those .338 rounds packed enough powder to go through both of us twice and still plug six inches into the concrete floor. Sniper knew it, and he wasn’t about to put a permanent blowhole in his cash cow. Bob II was sucking wind, struggling like mad to get out from under me. Wrangling the fat son of a bitch was like trying to cinch into eight seconds with a pissed-off Brahma. So, I stuck a knife in his subclavian vein and he passed out from shock. I held the blade in place so he wouldn’t bleed out. My NYPD contact acknowledged my text but said it would take them at least three minutes to get there because of traffic. That was an eternity we didn’t have.

  Then my beautiful wife did something brilliant. The windows in the suite had SPD glass—suspended particle devices. These are nano-scale particles suspended in a liquid layer between two panes of glass. When voltage is applied, the particles align and let light pass through. Thus, the glass is nice and clear when it’s a cloudy day or if it’s night. When the sun is bright, a breaker is tripped and the voltage is removed, causing the particles to move randomly, darken the windows, and block excess UV rays. It’s kind of like the bigger, more expensive version of those bowling alley manager glasses that darken in sun and lighten inside. Alice fired a single round into one of the electrical outlets, causing a surge and flipping the breaker for the entire room. Out went the lights and black went the windows.

  Then Bob II regained consciousness. Perfect timing.