Hostile Takeover

  When she walked in, she looked exhausted and strung out. I braced myself for an altercation, but instead she held me, wrapped herself around me, and pulled me in tight.

  “I’m so sorry, John,” she said.

  She kissed me and tears were running down her cheeks.

  “I love you. Do you forgive me?”

  I was overwhelmed and couldn’t speak, so I nodded, pulled her close to me, and carried her into our bedroom. We lay on the bed for hours, just holding each other. We were both terrified at what had happened and we were clinging on for dear life.

  For better or for worse . . .

  12

  After that night, things were different. It was subtle, but different nonetheless. We had lost some of the playfulness we had before, and I noticed Alice being careful about keeping her emotions in check with me. When I brought it up, she passed it off as growing pains. She said couples need time to get to know each other and learn the most positive way to interact. All of it sounded reasonable, but a little on the self-help book side of the aisle. I think we were both thinking the same thing but were afraid to say it. Had we jumped into this thing prematurely? We could have just worked together and waited to get married. After all, we never really dated like normal people, and neither of us had any experience to apply to the situation. So, we started treating our love like a complicated explosive device that could go off at any moment.

  On a more positive note, our work relationship improved exponentially. Alice was a lot more open to my views on how to run the company and less apt to attempt to steamroll me into submission. And we promised each other that, once we really got HR up and running, we would address Alice’s FBI mole issue and my HR puppet master issue—giving each the same amount of consideration. But we both agreed that the first thing we needed to do was ramp up our efforts to bring in much bigger clients, and replenish the coffers we’d raided to build the new training facility.

  As soon as we put some lines in the water, we hooked a massive fish. An anonymous entity approached us with a five-million-dollar retainer as a calling card. When Alice and I saw who the target was, we could barely contain our excitement. I’ve said many times in the past that our targets have more than earned their status as such, but this guy was going to turn revenge into a dish best served hot with several courses and a sublime Bordeaux.

  Admit it. We all secretly hate tech billionaires. Sure, they slaved over a hot workstation for a few nights and lost a wink or two while they punched in code and drank eighty-four-ounce gas station jugs of The Dew. But it’s not like they built the railroad, invented ­iEverything, or Kentucky Fried three generations of chickens. That’s tycoon-style. Say what you want about people like Gates, Jobs, Ford, Sanders, and Mellon, but they’re in a class all their own, standing on a foundation of brick, mortar, blood, sweat, and tears. Starting Facebook is more like winning the trailer trash lotto. You might have more money than God, but no one’s going to name a library after you or display your bronze bust in the town hall. Tech billionaires are the bourgeoisie of today, spending sucker money on all manner of fine clownery, having their self-aggrandizing autobiographies ghostwritten for them in their late twenties, and pouring more money into tech garbage to digitally enslave the masses.

  Alice and I landed the mother of all nerd moguls. As you know, there are some very popular online dating sites and apps out there. Even though they are infested with robot pimps catfishing with tranny lures, these sites are wildly successful. And our target was the CEO of arguably the biggest and most successful online meat market in the U.S.—and other countries where marriage doesn’t mean a father gives away his teenage daughter to a man his own age in exchange for a couple of goats and some shiny stuff.

  Dr. Love, as the press referred to him, was the first to introduce the 100 percent match and marriage guarantee. The deal was that if you didn’t meet the love of your life, get married, and stay married for at least five years, he would not only refund your money, but he would also write you a personal check for $10,000. And his record was perfect. In fact, it was so eerily flawless that it gave birth to a litter of conspiracy theories ranging in theme from alien intelligence to pharmaceutical mind control.

  When Alice and I read Dr. Love’s dossier, light dawned on Marblehead. It was actually quite sinister, even to a couple of professional cynics like us. The guy used to be a high-level geek in the NSA domestic surveillance program. He had been in charge of writing programs that would analyze observed behaviors in people and identify trends that would serve as predictor models for their future actions. Basically, because of Dr. Love, the NSA knows us better than we know ourselves and can predict within a high range of statistical probability what we will do tomorrow, next month, or even a year from now. Everything was going swimmingly in their Orwellian dystopia until Love resigned and basically replicated his own tech to build an electronic dating empire. Think about it. If the machine knows a person inside and out—from purchasing behavior that identifies wants and needs, to medical history that defines body type and psychological profile—pairing that person with someone compatible is a piece of wedding cake.

  And it’s got nothing to do with love, brothers and sisters. It’s all about the partnership paradigm. Most people marry to build a fortress that keeps loneliness out and enables them to stockpile social obligations within. It’s all part of the program they’ve been following since childhood and usually has nothing to do with their true desires. What person, in his or her heart of hearts, wants to have a big family? Try pumping out five kids and you’ll see firsthand what it’s like to experience a complete loss of self. But people inherit those absurd check boxes from someone else who they probably knew would withhold real love if they didn’t check each one dutifully—like a parent.

  Of course, strict adherence to the program creates a (false) sense of security that people will fight to protect with much greater zeal than they ever would the preservation of love. What’s the number-one reason people divorce? Money. If Fred Flintstone stopped bringing home the brontosaurus bacon, Wilma would have started banging Mr. Slate. The point is, Dr. Love had the partnership aspect of relationships dialed in. If someone worships money and possessions, fortune cookie says they will end up with the same species and both will protect the arrangement they have with their glorified roommate at all costs—at least for a time north of five years. Like I said, sinister.

  The anonymous client who greenlit Dr. Love tried to appear mysterious, but it’s easy to smell the ham on the hand of the seasoned bureaucrat, and dollars to doughnuts said it was the NSA itself that wanted him sucking dirt. They’ve had their share of raging tabloid embarrassments and it was a good guess that they probably didn’t want anyone to know about the technology they were using to turn the U.S. into the USSR, so a quiet snuff job was the order of the day to keep the tower ivory.

  Dr. Love’s well-documented reclusive, bordering on hermitical, lifestyle was a good indicator they had already tried to take him out—most likely on a number of occasions—and failed. He was rarely seen in public, and when he was, the grainy photos taken yielded such generic images that if you didn’t know who you were looking at, you could easily believe they were all of different people. He lived like Pablo Escobar, very difficult to pin down and almost completely inaccessible without breaching many layers of security. An execution scenario at the office was doable, but definitely the path of most resistance. And our deep-pocketed client was paying us handsomely for our ability to be highly discreet, so we wanted to impress them with our finesse and sophistication in order to keep the wheels greased on Uncle Sam’s gravy train.

  After spinning our own wheels trying to find an opening, an opportunity finally presented itself on a silver platter—Dr. Love’s annual sales and marketing meeting in Las Vegas. A corporate meeting! At a massive Social Networking Con no less! We couldn’t believe our luck. He would be out of his office cocoon and vulnerable to any number
of potential attacks. This was going to be fun. Unfortunately, getting into the event as interns or employees was a long shot due to the fact that Dr. Love had a relatively small and loyal workforce—roughly four hundred people who had been there from the start-up days—and someone with his stratospheric level of paranoia would sniff out an unfamiliar face in a heartbeat.

  As we worked every possible access scenario, we kept hitting the walls we knew Dr. Love would have in place if he was a spook worth his salt. I was about to commence a time-honored ritual of beating my head against the wall, when Alice, in her sweet attempt to calm my nerves with warm affection and a cold drink, was inspired with a brilliant idea.

  “We’re a match made in heaven,” she said, smiling and casually lighting a cigarette.

  “That’s a little corny, but I couldn’t agree more, darling,” I said, taking a drag.

  “No, dummy, we can get into the Dr. Love Con if we’re one of his Match Made in Heaven couples.”

  “Like those slack-jawed breeders he had on Oprah?”

  “Exactly. Every year, he invites ten guinea pig couples to the meeting who have passed the five-year mark and that he feels are great success stories. Then he parades them around like 4-H livestock, wines and dines them, and brings them up onstage for his keynote address. We’d be joined at the hip with Dr. Love!”

  “Just when I didn’t think it was possible for me to love you any more, Alice, you drop this mad genius trip on me.”

  “I know, right?”

  So, we worked with Sue and set the wheel of cheese in motion. Getting into the group of couples was the easy part. Regional sales reps submit candidates, so we hired some heavy hitters to “convince” the New York rep to submit us for the Northeast region and keep his mouth shut about it or his wife would find what was left of him and his mistress in her yoga bag.

  The hard part was building our execution scenario. First, we needed a great hitter profile so the NSA would never be suspected of pushing his button. Second, we needed to find a way to whack him that was elegantly subtle. A bloodbath would have been counter­productive, as it would have opened up an investigational can of worms with the FBI and the press. Imagine the shit storm you’d create if you pulled a drive-by on Mark Zuckerberg—the media would follow that blood trail like a pack of rabid dogs until eventually they had your sorry ass up a tree.

  To find the right execution scenario we turned the tables on Dr. Love and put him under the microscope. He didn’t have a lot of enemies from his NSA days because he was a think tank jockey and anyone who had been wronged by him would have had no idea who he was. And in any event, we wanted to avoid a connection to the NSA in the interest of shielding our client. So we dug into his life as the matchmaker CEO and opened the door to a veritable clown car of potential enemies. The best of these was a former Mossad agent whose wife had had a brief affair with Dr. Love. The affair resulted in divorce and the wife was never seen again. The Mossad agent was at large, but it was suspected he made it back to Israel and was under protection there.

  We liked this scenario for a couple of reasons. First, Mossad agents know how to kill efficiently and discreetly and disappear as soon as the job is done. Second, this would bring the affair to light and the press would have a field day with adultery being the reason for Dr. Love’s death. Kind of like Dr. Oz choking to death on a Ding Dong. Finally, the Dr. Love Con was happening during the week of the Mossad agent’s wedding anniversary date, so motive was locked and loaded. The narrative would be your garden-variety hypocrite, fall from grace tragedy, and the resounding chorus would be “He got what was coming to him.” We put Sue on to work out the logistics.

  13

  When Alice and I arrived in Vegas for the event, we were treated like royalty. They put us up in a suite at one of the nicer hotels and packed our days with appearances and activities. The perks were nice, but spending time with the other couples was worse than torture. They were a gaggle of milquetoast suburban zombies who finished each other’s sentences and turned karaoke night into a PDA blitzkrieg. Who tongue kisses in the middle of an “Islands in the Stream” duet? Alice and I seriously considered doing the world a favor and killing all of them as a bonus. When one of the wives asked Alice if she was a stay-at-home mom, I thought my wife was going to shank the cow-eyed dullard right then and there. It became clear fairly early on that Dr. Love’s system probably weeded out more intelligent people who had pesky mental complications, like an above-average IQ, that might get in the way of myopic devotion. Love is indeed blind when you’re dealing with someone who gets all hot and bothered about the early-bird special at HomeTown Buffet.

  Dr. Love fancied himself a progressive business guru, so he subjected his employees and us to several farcical team-building and training activities designed to show us all how to maximize our potential—­upside-down painting (from point of view to point of you!), trust-fall workshop (there’s no “me” in team!), ropes course (fear is a four-letter word!), and the list goes on. The trust-fall workshop was probably the most fun because Alice deliberately dropped me just to horrify the other couples.

  The ropes course provided our first potential opportunity to smoke Dr. Love. Predictably, he favored the extreme version, and he liked to do it at night to really get people pissing in their Dockers. A fall from the highest platform was a good fifty feet, but that alone wasn’t enough to ensure a kill. We needed a little insurance.

  Mossad is big on wire garrotes, so our plan was to rig a wide loop of the safety wiring they used on the course at neck height above the platform. It would be impossible to see in the dark, and since we would be up there with him, Alice was going to distract him while I attached the end of the loop to his harness rope. A last-minute change in the beginning of the course would cause him to immediately lose his balance, and the fall would trigger the wire loop, causing it to rapidly cinch and relieve Dr. Love of his head. A dangling piece of anchoring hardware would be enough for the Vegas PD to call it an accidental death, but the wire guillotine would leave the Mossad bread crumb trail for the feds.

  Everything was going according to plan until Dr. Love decided that doing a zip line from the roof of our hotel to another was more extreme, and we had to send Sue back to the drawing board. The good doctor appeared to be fond of Alice (shocker), so we toyed with the idea of having her lure him into a tryst in which foreplay would involve putting a .22 slug in his head—also a Mossad favorite due to its quiet, close-range killing ability. But Sue discovered that the guy had metal detectors fitted around his hotel suite doors and windows, and any visitors—like the escorts that were ordered to his room each night—were required to completely disrobe before entering. Since Alice was not fond of the idea of keistering a vial of neurotoxin—another Mossad party favor—we scrapped that plan as well.

  Time was running out and with it our options. So I dipped into that treasure trove of resources known as the movies, and wouldn’t you know it, one of my all-time favorites provided inspiration for our kill scenario—The Godfather. Specifically, the scene where they tape a gun for Michael Corleone to the back of a toilet in a Brooklyn restaurant so he can come out blasting after excusing himself to take a piss. If we hid a gun somewhere in the staging prior to Dr. Love’s highly anticipated keynote address, we could retrieve it and pop him during one of the evening’s many absurdly theatrical moments. Sue found out that there would be a lot of pyrotechnics (rekindle the fires of romance!), strobe lights, and loud music, so we could theoretically take him out and vanish undetected before they served the champagne toast.

  Getting the gun into the staging area, however, turned out to be a bigger problem than we anticipated. The stage was already assembled and heavily guarded. Anyone bringing anything in or out was subject to search and metal detectors. So, we had to get creative. Back to the movies—In the Line of Fire. John Malkovich is the clever assassin who builds a composite gun in order to smuggle it into a fund-raiser an
d kill the president. Since then, composite has come a long way and there are some firearms almost completely fabricated from exotic carbon fiber recipes. But whether it was made of plastic or butter, it would still look like a gun, so we needed to smuggle it in piecemeal. It just so happened the cheap-ass award trophies Dr. Love was going to give each couple were big acrylic hearts shaped like wings mounted on wood stands. Sue was able to find a way to hide the gun parts in our trophy, but we still had no solution for bullets, something we would not be able to smuggle into the room in a rabbit’s foot key chain.

  Sue paid a visit to one of our exotic gunsmiths in Reno, and he suggested we take an old-school cap-and-ball approach. The gun chamber could be fitted with a plastic casing full of powder and a powder cap that uses chemical release, versus a hammer strike, to ignite the powder. All we needed was a projectile, and my lovely wife was going to supply that in the form of a four-carat diamond on a ring that closely resembled her engagement ring. A diamond would ensure that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Dr. Love’s egg head back together again, and thematically, it was a home run.

  The night of the keynote address, everything was in place. Sue was able to get our trophy in with the others due to the original trophy maker’s sudden illness, and Alice was sporting her deadly bling. As you can imagine, the entire affair was a cacophonous cheese fest, replete with saccharine testimonials and a full-frontal media blitz. Dr. Love was a hybrid of Tony Robbins and Jerry Springer, moving around the stage like a self-help carnival barker.

  Then the warm cold duck was passed to everyone in plastic flutes and Dr. Love brought all of us Match Made in Heaven couples to the stage. The video wall behind us was aflutter with animated winged hearts circling like a crimson cloud of monarchs on a summer day. We were all handed our trophies by a band of bikini-clad ladies in impossibly high heels, and Dr. Love took center stage. While he blathered through his address, misquoting Shakespeare and comparing Cupid to Jesus, Alice and I very carefully removed the gun parts from their angelic housing and she blindly assembled it in the pockets of her black ostrich feather Dries Van Noten skirt.