by Shane Kuhn
“Shut the fuck up,” she spat.
“Or what?” I said.
“Or maybe I’ll kill you right now.”
“If at first you don’t succeed. Try, try again . . . and again . . .”
“You’re not as clever as you think, John.”
“Really? Did you know I was coming today?”
Silence.
“You still thought I was dead, didn’t you?” I laughed.
“You were to me,” she said.
“Oh, that hurts, darling.”
“Not as much as it’s going to hurt,” she said.
“That’s the spirit,” I said coldly.
“Why are you here, John? I didn’t know you were in town, so you had the element of surprise. What’s the point of getting back into your tired old character?”
“I’ve missed him,” I said.
“I’m going to tell Marjorie to fire you today. I have an assignment here, so if you want to settle something with me—”
“I do and we’ll settle it here. I can make this assignment go away and you know it. Then you’ll be at the mercy of your clients, and what would be the fun in that? You’d have to go to war with them and you’d be blacklisted for . . . ever.”
“Fine. You’ve made your point.”
“Not quite, Alice. My point is this: you made a mistake. Maybe the biggest of your life.”
“Poor baby. You’re just mad that I fucked you, kissed your earlobe and told you I loved you, then slapped you like a bitch.”
Then she doused my crotch with the boiling-hot coffee in her cup. My junk is the one part of my body that is not a numb piece of scar tissue. The pain was shocking and took my breath away. My animal brain sent my hands to the rescue, covering my searing nuts, but my internal fighting brain knew this was no good and that point was proven when Alice rang my bell with a high-heeled side kick. I lost my balance and was on a head-on collision course with the monstrous snack machine. In that moment, we worked together to avoid this. If the Chinese cavalry heard my 190-pound frame shatter a five-foot-tall, one-inch-thick pane of glass covering rows of Bugles, Lorna Doones, and microwave burritos, they’d have been in there in seconds shooting first and asking questions later.
Of course, the moment I regained my balance, we were back in the trenches and Alice attempted to throat kick me. I caught her foot with one hand, ripped off her shoe, and whipped the sharp high heel into her ear canal. The only thing that kept me from bursting her eardrum and driving all six inches into her brain was her sinking her teeth into my hand. She looked at me, surprised at the fact that her bite didn’t make me grimace in agony or draw even the slightest drop of blood from my rawhide skin.
“What the fuck?” she asked.
“I just don’t have any feelings for you anymore,” I said smugly and whacked her injured ear with an open-palm strike. The blunt impact and air forced into her ear canal instantly pulled the rug out from under her equilibrium. She swung her hands wildly through the air, attempting to throw up any kind of defense while her brain tried to reset itself. She fell to her knees and I was staring down the barrel of the one split second I had to finish her. This was the diamond emerging from the truckloads of coal that every fiber of my being had been compressing and smashing to make. This was the kill moment.
Because it was Alice, I quickly dispensed with all of the obvious choices—heart punch, pile driver to the back of the skull, back-breaking body slam—and went for something more intimate. I slipped myself around her like a boa constrictor, encircling her neck with one arm and locking it in place with the other. My legs bound hers, reminiscent of an old wrestling move known as the Guillotine. The fight she delivered was predictably fierce and would have easily thrown off a normal person with normal nerve endings. I was beginning to wonder if she would ever choke out when I heard the footsteps of what sounded like an army marching down the hall. They were chanting something in Chinese. I let go of Alice and we both waited to get gunned down in a hail of bullets.
The doors burst open and several people stormed in, armed with a birthday cake and some two-liter bottles of orange Fanta. They looked at us briefly as we smoothed out our clothes and smiled courteously. One guy winked at me, as if Alice and I had been getting busy in the conference room. Then they broke into song, belting out “Happy Birthday” in Chinese to a four-hundred-pound woman wearing what appeared to be Hello Kitty overalls.
29
After a few days of annoying intern orientation at CIS—a dog and pony show of training, actual Human Resources paperwork, and some serious ass kissing to curry favor with a middle manager who might give me a decent gig—I was ready to jump off the roof. A battle-starved, combat drone like myself draws nourishment from the gasoline of war, not the brown-water coffee, stale Danishes, and single-cell work tasks that were piled on my desk. After our stirring orientation, getting to Alice was virtually impossible, as she made certain we were never in the same part of the building at the same time.
On the positive side, the terminally lazy, entitled employees made it really easy for Alice and me to eventually secure excellent assignments. She was working in IT and I was sent to, get ready, Human Resources. Ah, the irony. You could have cut it with a chain saw. I knew being in Human Resources was going to expedite things in a big way, so the weekend after orientation week, I strolled into the office feeling like it was anything can happen Monday. I was optimistic about finding an angle, a way to eventually weasel my way into point-blank range of Alice. Being in my department, I could potentially gain access to the entire company because that Human Resources was always hassling everyone with reams of paperwork, flu shots, and annoying personality tests.
Fortunately for me, Alice was my only objective. Unfortunately for Alice, she had a much more difficult assignment in attempting to bag Zhen. Bob used to call this type of job a Moscow Circus—a moniker reserved for a gig with so many moving and intricately coordinated parts that a lack of precision in even the smallest of tasks could easily topple the human pyramid and result in the untimely demise of a recruit. Alice was staring at the twisted mess of rope that represented Zhen with very little hope of organizing it all into a tightly cinched execution scenario. First off, Zhen worked in an ivory tower and moved in a very controlled, protected, and highly unpredictable fashion. This type of security would have taken me weeks to penetrate and, even then, my chances for success would have been astronomically low.
Of course, Alice is the type of person who always finds a way, and I had to be there when she did. If I allowed her to kill Zhen, she would disappear back into the safety of HR, Inc. and I would be pursued like a dog until I either left town again or they took me out. In a diabolical twist on my former intern gigs, I actually had to keep the target breathing in order to flush Alice out but also to catalyze her failure. I was not only determined to exterminate Alice, but I also wanted her death to mark the end of Human Resources, Inc., a blunt-force eraser in the history books with nothing but blood and bad memories left behind. It was the least I could do for the recruits, and the preservation of my sanity demanded it. The flesh-and-bone chess game with massive stakes had begun. And for every move Alice made, I had to counter like Garry fucking Kasparov and knock the wicked queen into the cheap seats.
* * *
That was not going to be a walk in the park because Alice was working in the one department that had more company-wide access than Human Resources—IT, or Information Technology. I’ll admit I was impressed that she was able to get into that department. Most IT managers think women are intellectually inferior, which makes me laugh, because women are tailor-made for IT work. Unlike men, they actually care about details. Show me a thousand lines of raw code and I’ll be hard-pressed to find more than ten errors that could cause a full-system crash. Smarter dudes might find twenty if they’ve had a good night’s sleep and a gallon of espresso. Alice could probably find hundreds. W
omen need to stop striving to be seen as equal to men because they’re actually far superior. And as soon as synthetic sperm hits the shelves next to the mascara and maxi pads, men will become an endangered species.
The first thing I did when I got access to the personnel databases was to look up Alice’s manager. Her ability to move freely was going to be directly related to him. I knew she would be deploying her considerable talents to attempt to manipulate him into giving her greater responsibilities, so I tracked down his profile. His name was Gavin and he was not what I expected. Normally, IT managers look like aliens who just landed on earth yesterday and hurriedly threw together a “human look” in an attempt to blend in. Gavin resembled a sporting goods catalog model—rugged good looks, youthful build, and sneering confidence.
The way I saw it, that was either a good thing—Gavin already got more ass than an airline toilet and wouldn’t be easily manipulated—or it was a bad thing—Gavin wanted to add Alice to his ass-trophy case and the “manipulation” would be consensual. It turned out to be the latter. Two days after he started at CIS, Gavin took Alice to dinner. According to Sue, they went back to his place. She didn’t stay over, but the fix was in, and I had to assume Alice already had him eating out of her hand, among other things.
Data security is a joke. When you are dealing with communication of any kind, the more entities you have communicating, the more opportunities for potential security breaches. And then you add human beings to the mix and you’ve got red carpet access to just about anything. Once Alice got her Jimmy Choo in the door, she could gain access to any and all information associated with CIS and its global enterprise network and easily expand her access, maybe even as high as Zhen’s executive level.
She got lucky on that note, but just having access to data doesn’t mean you have the time to actually process and scrutinize it. That’s what makes me laugh about the NSA “listening” to millions of Americans’ phone calls or reading zillions of texts and e-mails. Who’s doing that? Do they have cube farms somewhere in the Nevada desert filled with 35,000 trained analysts, with security clearances, poring over the data to find anything suspect? Dream on. The U.S. government is about as efficient as a deaf and blind elephant. You want something stepped on, call Uncle Sam. For everything else, you’re on your own.
Data is like a virus that grows in size and complexity, and attempting to analyze it all at once is something that could take years. So, I still had time on my side, but I wasn’t going to wait around for Alice to get lucky again. Sue and I needed to anticipate her moves so we would know what they were before she even had a chance to make them. I figured that even though the lower floors of CIS were the front company, there had to be at least one channel of communication between Zhen and someone on that level. He would need to oversee that operation, just like anyone cultivating and maintaining a cover, especially since it was a legitimate business. If the financial markets caught wind of CIS being a beard, that would draw the kind of attention to Zhen that could destroy his entire operation and land him in a hard-labor prison.
So we started looking for at least one person working on the lower floors who might report directly to Zhen. We figured it had to be a midlevel manager who would be able to oversee the entire operation and report back to Zhen in a comprehensive way. A higher-level executive would be too risky, as they are always under scrutiny due to their ability to affect the stock price. We needed to find Zhen’s bitch and clip his string before Alice did and got him to spill his guts.
30
Alice was in the perfect position to track down Zhen’s connection. All she had to do was look for encryption code on internal communications—probably similar protocols used for their external communications, as they wouldn’t want to try to integrate two separate systems on the same enterprise. I have worked in many IT departments and I know how the geek cookie crumbles. If Zhen was talking to someone in the lower level of the building, he would have wanted it to be as secure as everything else he did. I had to assume Alice had thought of that and had to find my own way of acquiring e-mail data.
That’s where Rebecca, Sue’s new girlfriend, came in. Rebecca was a new recruit whom Alice had taken under her wing as a potential protégée. I found out later that the reason for this was Rebecca’s prowess with technology. A self-styled “data curator,” Rebecca had a unique talent in that she was able to pull data pretty much out of the air. Alice had bragged that Rebecca’s equipment cost her nearly half a million dollars but it was worth every penny. I knew Alice would put Rebecca on the case, so I made sure I put Sue on Rebecca.
After a night of Korean barbecue and live-band karaoke—two of Rebecca’s favorite things—Sue found out that she had written a program that Alice installed on the CIS network. It monitored all outgoing communications from lower-floor employees and sniffed out those containing heavy encryption. Then it gathered all of these types of messages and analyzed them for similarities in the return encryption. When it identified messages from the same “family,” it then analyzed where they traveled. If their destination was singular, then they were largely ignored. However, if they bounced all over the world and never really had an identifiable landing spot, then they were collected under the category of impossible to trace, the gold standard of truly secret information transfer in the age of Big Brother. It was actually genius. Too bad for Rebecca that her lips weren’t as tight as her coding skills.
“Harold Leung,” Sue announced.
“He’s our fish?”
“Oh yeah. My girl sniffed him out pretty easily.”
For the next part, I had Sue crawl up Harold’s ass and set up camp.
“Sue, I want this guy on twenty-four-hour surveillance. I want to know everything about him.”
“Copy that. Comic books to cock rings.”
Within twenty-four hours, I owned Harold Leung. I had access to his office and apartment, keys to his car, and I knew the names and addresses of everyone who meant anything to Harold. Rebecca’s program hit the bull’s-eye. Harold was basically the caretaker of the legit business Zhen had going on the lower floors. He was very efficient and had actually managed to make CIS not only legit but also profitable. At that point we started monitoring and decrypting every message Leung sent. For the most part, Leung would only contact Zhen on the internal system from 7:00 A.M. to 9:00 A.M. each day. The timing of Zhen’s response, from him pressing send to delivery in Leung’s in-box, led us to believe that this was most likely the time each day when Zhen was actually in the building. And if she could work Harold over for the location intel, this would also likely be the time Alice would try to pop a cap in Zhen’s ass.
Which is why I needed to throw Sue out of Harold Leung’s ass and crawl up there myself and wait for Alice to make her grand entrance. Getting access to Leung was the easy part. He had no security detail, an apartment that a twelve-year-old junior smash-and-grabber could pop in thirty seconds, and highly predictable patterns of movement. Weirdo ate a Happy Meal for lunch at the McDonald’s around the corner from the office every day and lined up the toys on his credenza. Who the hell does that? And every night he took the same bus home, ate Lean Cuisine with his wife, and watched reruns of Who’s the Boss? I think maybe part of me wanted to kill him for being such a loser. The hard part was going to be coordinating it so that Alice and I got access to him at the same time.
31
Eventually I got a break and saw Alice getting ready to make her move. The previous evening, the IT department auto-message server (Alice) had sent out a laptop system software-upgrade notification to several employees. Harold Leung received it and so did Zhen, his BFF. I knew it because Rebecca spilled the beans to Sue about the brilliant rig she designed for Zhen’s laptop. Clever girl. Just in case Alice didn’t go through with it, I had to make sure it wasn’t obvious that Sue was burning my end of the candle with Alice’s intel. So, I volunteered to pass out dental plan pamphlets all over the building
(greater access), so I could stalk her that day. I made sure she saw me clocking her moves several times so that her brain would simply assume that I was able to intercept her because of my own wily surveillance techniques, which was true, because I also had the wiretap unit on her iPhone.
What Rebecca had designed for Alice was a virus that would shut down the entire internal network. This would necessitate quarantine for the offending machine and any other machine that IT had been repairing at the time, because they would take down the individual unit firewalls for repairs. Basically, Alice created a way to keep both laptops for several hours, during which Rebecca was undoubtedly going to analyze both machines in order to be able to track Zhen’s movements. She would then quietly give the laptops back and Alice would stick an ice pick in Zhen’s wishbone the next time he surfaced outside of his protective office hive.
Frankly this seemed like a very roundabout way of doing things. But it did give me an idea . . . one that would require me to return to my past life as a street illusionist. You heard me right. The reason I didn’t say “magician” is because I wasn’t a kids’ bday party clown. I was more of a hustler. Hey, when you’re always broke, you find ways to make money in New York. Some guys sell handbags they stole off a boat. Some blow conventioneers or beat the crap out of construction workers looking to go on the disability dole. You do what you got to do. For me, it was card tricks—up close and personal. And I was good. But the cops weren’t too pleased about the fact that I was using the card tricks as a distraction so I could filch pockets, Italian gypsy–style. I used to bag three or four fat stacks a day. Anyway, I had to channel my three-card monte persona to execute my fiendish plan.
