The Asset

by Shane Kuhn

  The whole philosophy behind HR, Inc. is that an intern is the perfect cover for an assassin. Again, quoting Bob:

  “Interns are invisible. You can tell an executive your name a hundred times and that executive will never remember it because they have no respect for someone at the bottom of the barrel, working for free. The rapport they have with their private urinal far exceeds the rapport they will ever have with you. The irony is that all you really have to be is an excellent employee with a strong work ethic and they will heap important duties on you with total abandon. The duties that their lazy, entitled admins and junior execs wouldn’t do without guns to their heads are actually critical day-to-day tasks that keep a business running. They also open the doors to proprietary data, personal information, and secure executive areas. The more of these duties you voluntarily accept, the more you will get, simultaneously acquiring the keys to the kingdom: TRUST AND ACCESS. Ultimately, your target will trust you with his life and that is when you will take it.”

  As much as I hate to stroke Bob’s ego, the concept is fucking genius. But why, you may ask, do we go to so much trouble just to whack someone? La Femme Nikita can pop a guy with a sniper rifle from a hotel window while she runs a hot bath. Couldn’t we park ourselves on a rooftop with an L115A3 long range sniper rifle and shoot our targets like fish in a barrel? A British commando in Afghanistan took out two Taliban soldiers from over eight thousand feet with that baby. That’s like drilling someone in Battery Park while you’re eating dim sum in Chinatown.

  There are many reasons why we don’t do things like they do in the movies or on the battlefield. First off, even a Navy SEAL sniper is going to miss once in a while, and they’re the best in the world. Bullets and physics are a real bitch, and we can’t afford to miss. Second, when high-profile mucky mucks start getting splattered all over the streets of the biggest city in America with military-issue weaponry, that’s called a pattern. Patterns are one of the FBI’s favorite pastimes. Mix that with politics and you’ve got so much heat you can’t whack a pigeon without getting black-bagged and taken to Guantanamo Bay for the all-inclusive interrogation and torture package. It’s ironic, but this work requires the utmost finesse. That’s what separates the professionals from the shirtless hillbilly dipshits you see on Cops.

  If one can provide a high-quality product for a reasonable price, there’s a huge market for assassinations. As long as you avoid patterns and make it seem like your target’s enemies are the hitters, you can—yes I’m going to say it—get away with murder and make a killing.

  The key to success in this business is quality personnel. That would be you. Here at HR, Inc. we are trained very well. It takes years to perfect this so-called craft, which is why they recruit us when we’re young. But excellent training does not guarantee success or even survival. I’ve seen recruits that were considered stars get that smug look wiped off their face with both barrels on their first job. The most important thing I’m going to try to teach you is this: solid training will give you the skills you need to be good at this work, but good and dead is still just dead. Knowing when to set that training aside and allow your instincts to take over will make you unstoppable.

  I am unstoppable. I owe much of that to experience. So, in order to truly prepare you for what you’re getting yourself into, this handbook will chronicle, in great detail, my final assignment. Within this account, you will see the job as it really is, not as it is in Bob’s theoretical world of “typical scenarios.” I’m sorry, but there are no typical fucking scenarios when you’re planning and executing the murder of a high-profile, heavily guarded individual. Bob will train you and then train you to rely on your training. This is a military approach, and it works well in military operations—for the most part. I will teach you to think like a predator and master the improvisational tracking skills predators use to execute a clean kill and survive. There’s a big difference between these approaches, and the only times I’ve really come close to death were in the beginning, when I was drinking Bob’s Kool-Aid by the gallon.

  In addition to providing a play-by-play of my final assignment, this handbook will also be a field reference manual with some simple, memorable rules to follow, backed up by real-world examples. In my nearly eight years of active assignment—yes, I started wasting people at seventeen—I have thirty-four kills. I may not have seen it all, but pretty goddamned close.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photograph by Sasha Gulish

  Shane Kuhn is a writer, director, and producer with twenty years of experience working in feature films, documentaries, and advertising. He is a cofounder and executive board member of the Slamdance Film Festival, and a member of the Writers Guild of America. He lives in Colorado and works as vice president of creative services for a San Francisco–based media and special events company. He is the author of The Intern’s Handbook, bought for film by Sony Pictures and Original Film, and Hostile Takeover, the second book in the John Lago thriller series.

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  ALSO BY SHANE KUHN

  The Intern’s Handbook

  Hostile Takeover

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition July 2016

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBN 978-1-4767-9621-5

  ISBN 978-1-4767-9623-9 (ebook)