Hostile Takeover

  “So I guess you could call this a divorce,” she said quietly.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For making it easy to stop loving you.”

  I jerked the cable out of the motor and fell into the darkness. Above me, an explosion of sparks ignited the grease on the lift cable and flames spread up and down it like a giant fuse. The fire was a deep orange with white tips that birthed long demonic snakes of black smoke, transforming the elevator shaft into a brightly lit tunnel to hell.

  As I waited for impact, memories of my wedding night with Alice flooded my mind and I was thinking, If this is my life passing before my eyes, then God is an even bigger asshole than I thought. Turns out I was the asshole because God or Buddha or Steve Jobs actually had my back in that elevator shaft in a big way. I figured I was just going to plummet to the bottom and bounce. The feds would scrape me up with an overpriced defense contractor spatula and bag me like roadkill. But wouldn’t you know it? Lucky for me, there was another elevator car two floors below that broke my fall. Don’t get me wrong, that was a solid twenty-footer and I didn’t know the elevator car was there, so I hit full force on my back and the impact turned my heart off like a switch. It’s called commotio cordis and it’s a V-fib cardiac arrest caused by a violent blow to the heart.

  I immediately stopped breathing and everything went black. As I was lying there on top of the elevator car, twitching the death tango, I suddenly had the sensation that I was on fire. In fact, my body felt so hot I thought I might explode. I figured I was one more lipstick-smeared butt in the devil’s ashtray, but it turned out the live electrical wire I jerked out of the other elevator car that was spitting and twisting like a snake followed me down the shaft and whipped against the car where I was laid out. BOOM! The live wire juiced the car and defibrillated me right back to the land of the living before it landed on the bottom of the shaft and shorted itself out in a pool of petroleum muck. Roll away the stone, motherfuckers. Thanks to Jesus and a few thousand volts, I was back from the dead.

  19

  When I came to, I didn’t know who or where I was. Then the fog lifted and I looked up the shaft. There was no sign of Alice, which was good, because I was really banged up and couldn’t have held off a sneeze. At a geriatric pace I managed to climb down the service ladder rungs all the way to the basement and bust out through the motor pool garage. I took a manatee-gray FBI Crown Vic from the motor pool that smelled like a decade of chili dogs and beer farts and drove myself to my underworld chop shop hospital. After a ghoulish doc with a Boris Karloff accent and the bedside manner of a lobotomy patient patched me up, I went to the bathroom to take a leak and looked in the mirror. There was a gash below my eye that looked exactly like a bloody teardrop. It reminded me of the Bible verse, And if your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out.

  Truer words. Never spoken. I stumbled, I even fell, but I caught myself before I drowned in the fantasy that was Alice. The burn I had in my chest for her was gone. She had beaten it out of me. And what’s worse is the whole thing was so spectacularly surreal. The last person I expected to see in that field office was Juno, let alone as the mole we’d come to exterminate. I would chalk it up to horrific luck, but the games we play are not often games of chance. I learned a long time ago that coincidences are the things you start believing in right before it just so happens a bullet is crossing paths with your head.

  Speaking of which, it occurred to me that Alice popped Juno pretty hastily, even under those circumstances. One would think that if Alice finally bagged the super spook who, in her estimation, had been threatening our entire operation, she would demand a few questions be answered before pulling the trigger and spraying the answers all over the Mr. Coffee machine. That was the first thing that stopped making sense when I finally had a chance to get my head together.

  The other thing that rang about as true as a cowbell was the whole setup accusation. Riddle me this, Batman, if I was trying to set Alice up, why the hell would I go to all that trouble? I was the one who didn’t want to do the FBI hit in the first place. I risked my neck as much as she did, maybe more. And she was the one with the direct line to the mystery client, the soon-to-be-dead client who told her to kill me.

  The more I thought about all of it, the more the whole thing stunk to high heaven, and either Alice’s nose was too far up her own ass to smell it . . . or she set me up. The latter actually made a lot more sense, so I choked down my emotions and forced myself to play devil’s advocate. First, the FBI mole hunt would have been a perfect way to take me out without any danger of tipping me or the rest of the recruits off—kind of like when a family hunting dog is taken out for a hunt and conveniently never comes home. Second, like I said, she was the one in contact with our mystery client, who might very well be anything but a mystery to Alice. It was rather convenient that the invisible man just happened to be able to give us some helpful tips on the identity of a target we’d been trying to pin down for months and then turn the tables on me when I was most vulnerable and not on candid camera. Finally, the hardest thing for me to admit was that Alice was capable of being so bloodthirsty to own HR that she simply chose her ambitions over me. I wouldn’t have believed it myself at the time, but I sure as hell did after the FBI gig.

  Jesus, I was such an idiot.

  Alice told me back in New Hampshire that she wouldn’t be able to give me what I was asking for, and she was telling the truth. I just wasn’t willing to listen. So, in the wake of her betrayal, I didn’t waste time crying in my beer, thinking that she may have just been using me all that time to get what she wanted. That was very likely true but it was a moot issue at that point anyway. I made better use of my time drinking firewater and thinking about how pulling the trigger was as easy for Alice as telling me she loved me and wearing my ring. But she was going to find out she wasn’t the only one for whom taking a life was as routine as taking a breath.

  20

  FBI-NCAVC, Quantico, Virginia

  Present day

  Fletch is smiling. It’s one of those fatherly smiles that a dad wears for his son when the kid strikes out and blows the Little League game.

  “What?” I ask.

  “I didn’t say anything,” he says.

  “I’m talking about the smirk on your face.”

  He tries to give me the I don’t know what you’re talking about look.

  “Really? You want to play me like this?”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “Fuck it. I’m going back to my cell. Guard!”

  “Hold on, John. Let’s talk about this.”

  “Yes, let’s. I want to know why you had that look on your face or I’m out of here.”

  I slam the table with the palm of my hand. Fletch jumps and his hand moves to where I presume his gun is holstered. He stands and backs away from me. A little well-placed anger can be very effective. In this case, it creates a question in Fletch’s mind about my level of volatility. His simplistic view of “guys sitting in the chair across from him” causes him to underestimate to what degree everything I do is calculated. Despite all of my strengths, to him I have a weak mind with a loose screw. To him, I am like a wolf that could turn on someone at any moment, as evidenced by his flight reaction.

  “Are we going to have a problem, John?”

  “Share and share alike, Fletch. Or did you drop out of kindergarten?”

  Fletch pulls his chair back to sit down and slides it a little farther away from me. I resist the urge to jump at him just to make him flinch.

  “I was smiling because I was a little surprised at your incomplete assessment of Alice’s betrayal.”

  I’m a little surprised by his eagerness to offer information. It’s contrary to his normal approach, but he can’t help himself because he needs to save face with me in front of his colleagues.

  “Do tell.”
br />   “Didn’t it seem odd to you that Alice would choose this method of taking out the mole?”

  “Are you admitting that Juno was a mole?”

  His excitement fades a little knowing he has already said more than he should.

  “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that she was.”

  “For the sake of argument.”

  “Attacking her in the FBI field office would only bring down more bureau pressure on Alice. You don’t really believe that Alice thought we would be intimidated by her brazen act, do you?”

  “Just spit it out, Fletch, before you pop.”

  “Alice had a reason for killing you, John.”

  “Is there an echo in here?”

  “It wasn’t just because she wanted to take over and you had served your purpose. Your purpose was to take the blame with the bureau. That way, Alice gets rid of the mole and pressure from us. If you’re dead, we have no one to hunt down.”

  “She was there too.”

  “Wearing a gas mask most of the time, deftly avoiding cameras. And even if we could identify her, she’s not in our system. As far as we would be concerned, she would have been your Patty Hearst, along for the ride.”

  I return Fletch’s fatherly smile.

  “Not bad, Assistant Director Fletcher. Not bad at all.”

  I allow him to bask in his proud glow, glancing up at the two-way mirror from time to time.

  “I’m thinking Alice’s head would make a nice addition to your trophy room, Fletch. What do you think?”

  “Like I said, John, I’m working on it.”

  He starts a new page in his nearly full notepad.

  “What happened after you made it out of the field office?”

  21

  After I got cleaned up, I assessed the damage, and things were actually a lot worse than I thought. My phone had been deactivated and I couldn’t access my bank accounts. That night, I went to our apartment and the locks had already been changed. I knew Alice wouldn’t be sleeping there, so I climbed in through the fire escape. Most of her clothes were gone. She had packed in a hurry, taking only what was near and dear, and left the apartment probably for the last time. Something caught my eye, glittering in the trash can. It was her engagement ring. I started to pick it up, but then left it in there. I would never go back. I could never go back. She’d tossed us out just like the ring, and in that moment I hated her for it, almost as much as I hated myself.

  Then I went to HR. Same situation. My security code didn’t work. I had installed webcams in the office when we renovated and I could still access those. I watched the place for a couple of hours and saw Alice fortify it with a small army of mercenary types to cover her ass. Made perfect sense. People like Alice and I may kill people, but every hour of every day someone is looking to kill us, someone professional. We live it and breathe it. She knew if she got rid of her husband, the only person who truly had her back, she would have to beef up her security big-time to keep the vermin out, especially since the FBI would be putting a truckload of money on the street to turn every player with a record into a snitch. Eventually she remembered to cut off my external password access to the system, and my camera feed, along with everything else, went dead.

  I called the banks with my accounts to assess the situation. Alice had emptied all of my accounts, even the ones I had no idea she knew about. She hadn’t wasted any time scrubbing me from the face of the earth. I wanted so badly to give her a twelve-gauge shotgun divorce, but that was pretty much impossible. I had no money and no immediate access to weapons. I didn’t even have any clean clothes. Also, I was pretty sure that after she shot me and saw me plummet down a flaming elevator shaft, Alice was under the impression I was dead, and I intended to keep it that way for the time being. The smart thing to do was to disappear for a while and find a hole to crawl in so I could lick my wounds and regroup. But before I blew town, I needed to pay someone a visit.

  * * *

  Like a good recruit, Sue always entered his apartment through the basement service entrance and took the stairs. I was waiting for him when he walked in the front door. I injected Ketamine into his jugular vein and dropped him before he had a chance to put his keys down. When he woke up he was zip-tied and bound tightly with heavy gauge plastic, lying in his bathtub, which I had filled with highly flammable ethanol gel. I couldn’t take any chances with his loyalties, which at that point were almost impossible to predict. Showing disloyalty to Alice or me could easily result in death, so I needed to leverage him to get some answers. In spite of all that, he was really glad to see me.

  “JL, you’re alive!”

  “Keep it down. You’ll wake the neighbors.”

  “Listen, man,” he half whispered, assessing his situation, “I’m really glad to see you and all, but why do you want to kill me?”

  “I don’t want to kill you, Sue. I need information.”

  “All you had to do was buy me a beer.”

  “We’re way past that, kid. I need to know one hundred percent that you aren’t bullshitting me. There’s too much at stake.”

  “What’s that smell?”

  “Butane gel. There’s enough in the tub to incinerate the whole building.”

  “JL, they got kids living here.”

  “I know. Three of them next door. I needed that component in case you decided you didn’t care enough about yourself not to burn alive.”

  “That’s one hell of a bullshit detector you got going, JL.”

  “Never failed me.”

  “And it won’t now, man. I have no reason to lie to you. What the hell you want to know?”

  “Does Alice think I’m dead?”

  “Yeah. After I got her out of the FBI office, she told me the feds shot you and you fell down the elevator shaft. Nothing she could do about it. Lying bitch.”

  I laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Business as usual,” I said.

  “What really happened, JL?”

  “It’s a long story and I’m short on time. Do the other recruits know about my untimely demise?”

  “Don’t think so. She’ll probably tell them tomorrow.”

  I lit a match and held it over him.

  “Yo, what the fuck?”

  “Did you have anything to do with it?”

  “With what?”

  I got closer with the match.

  “Like I said, with what?” he said defiantly.

  He didn’t have it in him to assign his loyalty to someone like Alice. I may have had a blind spot with her but not with anyone else. He blew out the match, and I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Got any weed?” I asked.

  “Vape’s in the medicine cabinet.”

  I took a hit and gave him one.

  “Permission to speak freely, JL.”

  “Granted.”

  “I’m glad you finally cut loose of that psycho. I’d call her the C word, but that ain’t Christian. So, I’ll just be a gentleman and say she’s a rotten, soulless whore with a mean streak a mile long. No offense.”

  “None taken,” I said, laughing through another hit.

  “And if she fucked you over, I got beef with her too and I’ll help you make things right, believe that.”

  “I believe it, Sue. Gotta go.”

  “You going to cut me out of this?”

  I pulled a stiletto and popped the blade. I pointed it at his eye.

  “You didn’t see me,” I said gravely. “As far as you know, I’m dead. I’ll be watching you and Alice. So, if she suddenly thinks I’m alive, I’ll know it’s you and I’ll come back here and hang you upside down over low burning coals, Apache-style, so your eyeballs boil and your face melts off while your brain poaches in your skull. Feel me?”

  “I feel you.”

  “
Good.”

  “Where the hell you going, man? Let me up out of here and let’s both go waste her and be done with it. I’m not playing.”

  “Open up.”

  I held out the knife and he clamped it between his teeth.

  “You’re a good kid, Sue. Keep your head down and your mouth shut and you’ll be all right.”

  22

  On the way out of Sue’s place, I took his Beretta and a couple of hundreds he had in his pocket. I was twisting in the wind, so I needed to get my hands on money, weapons, and any other contraband that would help me vanish undetected as quickly as possible and sustain me until I could regroup. I kept stashes all over the city, most of them well stocked with all manner of assassin sundries. A hitter never knows when the real shit is going to come down and being prepared is the best way to keep from getting buried in it. That’s one of the few useful things Bob taught me, and it saved my ass on more than one occasion.

  While I played scavenger hunt in all the boroughs, I thought about a job that could have been my last if I hadn’t had stashes. Ironically, the assignment had been to smoke a big-time drug dealer. No, he didn’t have gold fronts, two chainz, and a six-four. In fact, he wasn’t a he at all, you sexist bastard. She turned out to be one of my most interesting and memorable marks. You may have heard me speak of duality before? Well, Kiana Nguyen, a half-black, half-Vietnamese Wall Street gunslinger with baroque music tattoos and an entourage of MMA fighters, was the double-edged sword of duality, with each blade razor sharp. By day, she was a partner in a wildly successful boutique hedge fund. And by night she was one of the heaviest hitters in the East Coast heroin trade, known on the street as Kali, after the Hindu goddess of destruction.

  Her hedge fund did legit business but, unbeknownst to her partners, she was using it as a Laundromat for her drug cash. Evidently, her partners in the brokerage found out about her skag lord alter ego and paid HR to put a pin in her before she got busted and the feds seized everyone’s lobster pants and cigarette boats. Of course, they wanted us to do it when the coffers were swimming with drug money they could easily absorb as a Christmas bonus. I swear Wall Street has more scumbags in suits per capita than a Mafia wedding.