The Asset

by Shane Kuhn

  “No, because she would make you laugh before you got pissed off.”

  “I know, right?”

  Kennedy takes a deep breath of the crisp winter air.

  “It’s nice out here,” Love says. “I think she would like it.”

  “Especially being surrounded by all these war heroes.”

  “We’d never hear the end of that.” Love laughs.

  “She’d probably make us salute her,” Kennedy says, catching her laugh.

  Love stops playing and salutes the stone. Kennedy does as well.

  “She deserves it,” Kennedy says.

  “Yeah,” Love says, standing. “Shall we?”

  “We shall,” Kennedy says and stands up with her.

  They stand there and take one last look as the sun begins to fade, casting a pale light that makes everything look frozen in time. Love kisses Kennedy lightly on the lips and they hold each other for a long moment, reluctant to let go.

  When they part, Kennedy looks at his watch.

  “It’s getting late. Don’t want to miss our flight.”

  Kennedy gently pats the top of the headstone and Love straightens the flowers they brought before they walk back across the frozen ground to the cemetery entrance. As they pass through the huge iron gates, a black Range Rover with tinted windows pulls up, and they get in.

  Wes Bowman is at the wheel.

  “Nice visit?” he asks.

  “Very nice,” Kennedy says.

  The back passenger door opens and Nuri jumps into the car, wringing her hands.

  “Holy shit it’s cold out there!” she says, holding her fingers over the heat vent. “Of course they put the Asian war heroes way the hell out in the BFE section. Grandpa sends his love by the way.”

  Wes starts driving them down the long access road.

  “Hey, how does Belle’s stone look?” Nuri asks.

  “Beautiful,” Love says.

  “It’s perfect,” Kennedy adds.

  He turns to Wes.

  “Hey, thanks again for getting my little sis a marker out here. I’m sure that required a few mountains be moved. Means a lot.”

  “No sweat. I figured she could teach all those old war dogs a thing or two about courage. Plus, it’s not every day I get to do something that’s actually beneficial to the world while working for the CIA. Speaking of which . . .”

  Bowman hits a button on the steering wheel and the nav map in the dash changes to a videoconferencing screen. A CIA emblem appears, accompanied by a smooth, artificial female voice.

  “Identification,” the voice says evenly.

  “Bowman.”

  “Kennedy.”

  “Nuri.”

  “Love.”

  “Identification verified. Hold please.”

  The face of a CIA analyst—a handsome young Brit in a perfectly tailored suit—appears on-screen.

  “Hello, Heathrow,” Kennedy says.

  “Afternoon, sir.”

  “What’s our operation status?”

  “Unfortunately,” Heathrow begins, “we’ve just received a bit of a curveball. Loading map.”

  A map of the United Arab Emirates fills the screen.

  “Your target has changed locations for the meeting with his Iranian and Russian financiers. It appears he was getting skittish about security in Dubai, so he set the meeting in Muscat, at his cousin’s compound.”

  The screen changes to a map of Oman, the Emirates’ neighboring country, zooms into an area outside the capital of Muscat, then switches to a sat image of a massive compound with posh homes and a fleet of luxury cars.

  “How sure are we about this?” Wes asks.

  “Sat images confirm, along with reports from the cousins we have dug in with his entourage.”

  “Our assets there are solid,” Love says.

  “Agreed. What does that do to our schedule?” Kennedy asks.

  “I spoke to logistics,” Heathrow continues. “Since the meeting is still taking place at the same time, but now over four hundred kilometers farther from the original site, it makes our ability to get you to the new site on time very uncertain.”

  “Numbers,” Wes says.

  “Target never meets with anyone for more than thirty minutes,” Kennedy answers for Heathrow. “Our margin for error just went from narrow to zero.”

  “Doing the actual math,” Nuri adds, “from this point on, we would have to either make up time or be perfectly on schedule with every travel connection, from the three flights we’re now going to have to take to get there, right down to whatever nightmarish ground transportation they have in that backwater of a country Oman. Probably Uber camel.”

  “Exactly,” Heathrow says. “Which is why logistics recommends you scrub the operation and wait for a new window to intercept the target.”

  “It took us four weeks to get this window, and this meeting could very well be the last step in getting Iran the tech it needs for long-range nukes,” Kennedy says. “We can’t afford to wait for another window.”

  “Agent Bowman, you’ll have to make the call on this one,” Heathrow says drily. “Logistics filed their recommendation with operational brass here, so only the senior agent in charge can supersede.”

  Wes looks to Kennedy.

  “What do you think, team leader?”

  Kennedy looks at Love, who gives him a roguish grin. Nuri looks at the car screen and makes the “jagoff” motion with her fist. Kennedy looks back at Wes, smiling confidently.

  “Let’s see,” he begins. “Seven thousand–plus miles in three legs through twenty-eight different climate zones in less than twenty-four sleepless, malnourished hours, with ground travel unknowns, hostile host country, questionable tactical support, a revolving door of intel, the Russian military, and bloodthirsty Iranian government officials with suitcases full of cash, all to black-bag a target who is, arguably, the deadliest arms dealer in the world. Does that about sum it up?”

  “In a nutshell,” Bowman says.

  “Piece of cake.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to my family—Amanda, Skoogy, Kenners Bear, Jo Mama, Mary B, and Ky—for the love, patience, and support that kept me going through the long hours consumed by this book. Thank you to my Simon & Schuster team—Sarah Knight, Brit Hvide, Marysue Rucci, Jonathan Karp, Erin Reback, Dana Trocker, Kaitlin Olson, Flag Tonuzi, and Tamara Arellano—for another fine collaboration. Thank you to my hardworking ­representatives—Hannah Brown Gordon, Brad Mendelsohn, and Jeff Frankel—for keeping the dream alive on paper and celluloid. Thank you to all those who generously provided their time and expertise in my research process—Tom Blank; Mingzhong Wu, PhD; Michael Wells Jr.; Jenny Fischer; Mallory Sinclair; Ted Frericks; and Gregory Ford Pike. Thank you to my guardian angels—Kenneth, Tina, Kara, Margaret, and Gilbert Kuhn; Warren and Bernie Witham; Nana DuWors; Big Bri Mahoney; and Nixon—for reminding me of the beauty and terror of impermanence, how it has shaped me, and how it has informed the motivations of my protagonist. Ubi concordia, ibi victoria.

  Turn the page for more from Shane Kuhn in

  THE INTERN’S

  HANDBOOK

  1

  * * *

  IT’S THE HARD-KNOCK LIFE

  If you’re reading this, you’re a new employee at Human Resources, Inc. Congratulations. And condolences. At the very least, you’re embarking on a career that you will never be able to describe as dull. You’ll go to interesting places. You’ll meet unique and stimulating people from all walks of life. And kill them. You’ll make a lot of money, but that will mean nothing to you after the first job. Assassination, no matter how easy it looks in the movies, is the most difficult, stressful, and lonely profession on the planet. From this point on, whenever you hear someone bitch about his job, it will take every fiber of your being to keep from la
ughing in his face. This work isn’t for everyone. Most of you are going to find that out the hard way because you’ll be dead by the end of the month. And that’s still just the training phase.

  If you’re having second thoughts, that’s a natural reaction. The idea of killing people for a living is what second thoughts were made for. In response to all of your questions regarding whether or not you’ll feel bad, lose your nerve, live in constant fear, or even want to kill yourself, I can provide one simple answer: yes. All of your worst nightmares will come true in ways you never imagined. And either you’ll get over it, or you’ll be gargling buckshot. Either way, you’re covered.

  When you reach your darkest hour—which will arrive daily—take comfort in the fact that you never really had much of a choice in the matter. Like me, you’re gutter spawn, a Dumpster baby with a broken beer bottle for a pacifier. We’ve been described as “disenfranchised.” Our diagnosis was “failure to thrive.” We were tossed from county homes to foster homes to psych wards to juvenile detention centers—wards of the state with pink-slip parents and a permanent spot in line behind the eight ball. Little Orphan Annie would have been our homegirl. So, what were you going to do with your life, starve on minimum wage, greeting herds of human cattle at Wal-Mart? Sell your ass to Japanese businessmen? Peddle meth to middle school kids? I think not. For the first time, you’re going to be able to take advantage of being a disadvantaged youth because everyone knows that orphans make the best assassins. Try humming “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” while you empty a fifteen-round Beretta mag into Daddy Warbucks’s limousine and you’ll see just how sweet revenge can be.

  If you’re reading this, you are a born killer and the people that recruited you know that. You have all the qualifications. First off, you’ve never been loved, so you feel no empathy for loss. To experience loss, you have to have had something to lose in the first place. Since love is the most important thing you can ever feel, and you’ve never felt it, then you are bereft of just about every emotion except anger.

  And let’s talk about anger. Have you ever heard of Intermittent Explosive Disorder? Even if you haven’t heard of it, you’ve experienced it. It’s that blinding, uncontrollable rage that turns you into a violent, sometimes homicidal, maniac. Maybe you beat your foster brother half to death for drinking the last Pepsi. Or maybe you fully unleashed it on your juvie cell mate and granted him an early release in a body bag. All the social workers, corrections counselors, and psych doctors, with their nicotine-stained fingers and permanent caffeine twitch, have classified you as dangerously antisocial with a footnote about how you have nothing constructive to offer society. But at Human Resources, Inc., everything that made you a pariah will now make you a professional.

  Now let’s talk about brains. You’ve been kicked, thrown, and dragged out of every school you ever attended. But if you’re reading this, you are of genius level intelligence, even though you probably beat the shit out of every bumper sticker honor student in your town. How else would you have survived? Only someone with wits beyond her years can stay alive when the whole world thinks she’d be better off dead. You’re at the top of the evolutionary food chain, adapting to things in ways that would have made Charles Darwin soil his Harris tweeds.

  * * *

  Finally, you may have noticed you have some extraordinary physical abilities. I’m not talking about superpowers, for those of you whose only male role models came from a comic book rack. If you had been raised by something other than wolves, you might have played football or basketball or earned your black belt in something. You would have excelled because you are stronger, faster, and more agile than the average person. Your reflexes are like lightning and your field of vision captures everything down to the finest detail. Incidentally, that’s why you avoid crowds. Simultaneously concentrating on every movement made by hundreds of people is not only overwhelming, but it also makes you hate humanity even more than you did before. Bottom line: you did not choose this career, it chose you.

  This is your handbook. The Intern’s Handbook. It’s not a part of your new-hire welcome packet. In fact, if they catch you reading it, you will be dead before you can turn the page and your faceless, fingerless corpse will be divided into six trash bags and dissolved in a vat of sulfuric acid in some nameless New Jersey chemical plant. So, please be discreet, because there’s a good chance this handbook will save your life.

  My name is John Lago. Of course, that’s not my given name because my biological parents were too busy disappearing from my short life to sign my birth certificate, which said “Male Baby X.” My foster parents called me whatever they managed to blurt out between backhands and booze. So when I was old enough to scrape up a hundred bucks, I paid a guy to forge me a new birth certificate and make a man out of me.

  Why John Lago? I could have chosen anything and it’s not every day that you get the opportunity to name yourself. It all started with my love of classic cinema. The only friend I ever had growing up was Quinn, the projectionist at the local porn theater. When the place closed for the night and all the pervs slithered home, Quinn would spool up some amazing films from his extensive collection. I grew up on Stanley Kubrick and Akira Kurosawa. I knew who Clint Eastwood was before I knew who was president. For me, film is the great escape (which is also an amazing movie), and I recommend you cultivate an appreciation for it because you’re going to need something other than hideous, soul-eating nightmares to occupy your mind. Monsters like us can learn to be human beings from watching movies. All of the experiences we never had are covered in film, and they can be our emotional cave paintings, guiding our path among the ranks of normal society. So your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to try watching something other than epic fails and donkey porn on YouTube. Just avoid assassin movies, because they’ll give you all kinds of bad ideas.

  Back to my self-inflicted, Hollywood-inspired moniker. My surname is born out of the greatest era in American cinema—the 1970s. “Lago” is the name of the doomed western town in Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, a film that is, without question, the story of my life. I chose “John” because, even though I’m guaranteed eternal damnation, I’m a big fan of John the Baptist. He prepared the unwashed masses for the coming of the Messiah, is given props in the Qur’an for his Purity of Life, and unlike Jesus, he never asked God for a get-out-of-jail-free card before Herod served his head up on a silver platter. I learned all of this by watching Chuck Heston bring the fucking brimstone when he played headless John in the biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told.

  As for the rest of the meat puppets in this tragic parable, some of the names have been changed to protect the guilty. I didn’t manage to stay aboveground and out of a supermax hellhole by broadcasting the identities of my contacts at HR, Inc. or my targets. And I’m not going to start now. In keeping with the theme, their names have been pulled from the venerable celluloid of classic and contemporary cinema. If you can figure out what films they come from, you’ll get extra credit.

  I’ve been an employee of HR, Inc. since I was twelve years old. I’m now twenty-four, soon to be twenty-five. I have “completed the cycle,” as they say. When I started here, my recruiting class consisted of twenty-seven smart-ass punk motherfuckers with two feet in the grave, including myself. There are three of us left. So you might say I know a few things. Or in what is undoubtedly your parlance—that of a modern-day smart-ass punk motherfucker with two feet in the grave—“Dude’s got mad skills, yo.” Hip-hop, you have fucked the king’s English for life. Good on you.

  If you’re anything like I was at your age, you’re probably convinced you’re going to live forever. I have news for you, brothers and sisters. The shortest distance between truth and bullshit is six feet straight down. It doesn’t matter if you believe me or not because there’s no greater reality check than a 230 grain .45 caliber hollow point hitting your forehead at 844 feet per second.

  So swallow your
pride and read this book. I don’t have to write it. I’m doing you a favor. In fact, I’m risking my neck for you, and I’ve never even met your sorry asses. The thing is, no one ever gave me the heads-up on anything when I started this gig. Of course, I had my training. But I never got the inside scoop. In most businesses, you learn the ropes from those with more experience. Not this one. Bob, our intrepid leader, wouldn’t talk dirty to his wife unless she was on a need-to-know basis. In my opinion, Bob’s tight-ass approach to secrecy is the reason why many of my classmates now have tree roots growing out of their eye sockets. He calls himself a “big picture guy.” This is a Business 3.0 way of saying he doesn’t give a shit about anything but the bottom line, least of all you. There are more where you came from, and when you whack one mole in this business another invariably pops up. Protecting the interests of his “clients”—the bloated, scotch-guzzling frat boys of the nouveau American aristocracy—is his first and only priority. Everyone else is expendable.

  You are my priority. If I can save some of you—the most pathetic human punching bags next to the orphans in India that swim in rivers of human excrement—then maybe I’ll only end up in the seventh circle of hell instead of the eighth. And if you live through all of this, maybe you can make some kind of name for yourself, shrug off the filthy rug you’ve been swept under, and create a legacy that transcends trailer parks, drunken beatings, and fucking for food. We will probably never meet. However, in our own twisted way, we are the family that none of us ever had and we have to stick together. It might not be much, but this little handbook is the only proof you’ve got that someone has your back.

  Despite the fact that absolutely no one ever had my back, I’m rapidly approaching the ripe old age of twenty-five, a milestone that very few of you will ever cross. While most young professionals are just getting their careers started at twenty-five, that is the mandatory retirement age at HR, Inc. According to Bob, it is the cutoff point at which people begin to question anyone who would be willing to work for free. And I quote: “Even if people believe you are still an intern at twenty-five, you will call attention to yourself as a loser who is way behind in his or her career path. And calling attention to yourself is a death sentence.”