by Shane Kuhn
I decide to do it by stealth. Her neighbors know me well and they would surely mention having seen me alone in her building while she was gone. She lives in one of those wildly annoying co-ops where everyone feels they have purchased the right to your personal business along with their one-bedroom, half-bath, cold-water walk-up shoe box. Also, I’m not sure if it’s paranoia or my jungle cat senses, but after the Bendini shit show I feel like someone is watching me. Mind you, I’ve been under surveillance before and I actually kind of like the exhibitionist thrill I get from it. But in this case, we could be talking about Bendini’s goombahs or Alice’s FBI support crew, so I need to take extra precautions to keep them from tracking my movements. Aside from that, stealth is a lot of fun. You get to strap on some cool ninja gear and traverse the city on rooftops—like Batman or Robert De Niro in the second Godfather.
So I take a taxi with my gear in a duffel bag over to the YMCA that is four buildings away from Alice’s. I am a member, which I highly recommend, because it’s like having storage units all over Manhattan. You can rent a private locker at each location and keep it as long as you want. And they only require your YMCA card—which has your fake identity on it, along with a credit card—which is also an untraceable Bob special. No driver’s license or passport bullshit to give his forgers the night sweats. I stroll into the Y, looking at no one, and head for my locker.
* * *
Rule #12: Embrace your inner shadow warrior.
You’ve heard of ninjas. I’m sure you’re laughing to even hear that word. That’s because you’re a stupid American who thinks everything from foreign cultures can be reduced to a late-night talk show bit. And yes, I am aware of the Chris Farley movie Beverly Hills Ninja. There is something that people find funny about ninjutsu, but if you know anything, then you know that there is absolutely nothing funny about it.
First off, they’ve been around since the twelfth century. Like us, the functions of the ninja include espionage, sabotage, infiltration, and assassination. In fact, Bob created the entire intern program based on four of the eighteen principles of ninjutsu: Hensōjutsu (disguise and impersonation), Shinobi-iri (silent infiltration), Bōryaku (unorthodox battle tactics), and Intonjutsu (escaping and concealment). You might call these the four pillars of HR, Inc.
One of my most shining moments was an assignment wherein I first executed all of these pillars flawlessly. Ironically, my target was a Japanese businessman named Raiden Sanjuro, and his great-great-grandfather had been a ninja in the service of the emperor. He had practiced ninjutsu as a boy but had dishonored his family by rejecting it and embracing Western culture—something he loved more than his own. Nonetheless, it had been ingrained in his psyche starting in his formative years, making it impossible to forget.
He was operating a very successful manufacturing outsourcing company in Manhattan, but it was actually a front for his real business—a network of industrial espionage cells gathering sensitive data from Silicon Valley to the Hudson Valley and selling it to the Chinese government. The Chinese are the best copycats in the world, and they decided a long time ago that it is better to simply take the intellectual property and achievements of others and perfect the process of reverse engineering, finding cheaper, more efficient ways of mass production and distribution. This way, they pay a fraction of what others pay in research and development, while remaining on the leading edge of technological advances and destroying the creators of the original products by selling those products for pennies on the dollar. Sanjuro was one of China’s biggest suppliers of sensitive business data, and they paid him handsomely for his services.
The Chinese are also good at protecting their investments. So this guy had the tightest security detail I have ever seen and will probably ever see again unless I get involved in political assassination. He had a small army of Chinese military commandos—all schooled in the United States for language and cultural integration but trained in China to be hard as fucking coffin nails and not give two shits about whether they lived or died. After all, these guys are brainwashed from birth to think of themselves as organs in the body politic, nothing more. If they die, there are a few billion more waiting to take their place and mother China will never skip a beat.
Sanjuro was my target, but being a white boy made my getting an internship at that company a long shot. Of course, Bob pulled it off. He gave me a bullshit military background loaded with technical expertise. Basically, I was a former drone “pilot” with specializations in SATComm, remote avionics, and geomagnetic global positioning systems. Interesting shit, I must admit. Being a gearhead, I ate it up, and Sanjuro’s company ate me up. Hensōjutsu (disguise and impersonation). Check.
I was assigned to work with Zhen, one of Sanjuro’s sales execs. But this guy was not your usual booze-guzzling golf bully. He was former Chinese military intelligence and he was the biggest asshole I have ever met in my life. When he wanted something, I was his indentured servant with the rights of an ant colony drone. What impressed him was my absolute willingness to do whatever he asked without question or complaint—something he previously thought Caucasians were completely incapable of comprehending. I was on call round the clock, and there were times that I didn’t sleep for twenty-four hours. Like everyone else, Zhen got hooked on the freedom I afforded him by basically doing his job for him, and he eventually gave me far too much latitude. The next thing I knew, I had complete access to Sanjuro.
Shinobi-iri (silent infiltration). Check.
Then came the hit itself. I may have lulled Zhen into complacency, but Sanjuro was another matter completely. He was creative in his paranoia and pursuit of hidden enemies and would very often have me strip-searched for concealed weapons. I silently and pleasantly agreed to everything he asked, but this seemed to make him even more distrusting. He told me I had the scheming eyes of a fox and he did not believe I was who I said I was. Yet he didn’t send me packing because I was becoming more valuable to the company with each passing day.
Knowing the vigilance of his security detail, this case required some serious Bōryaku (unorthodox battle tactics) if I was going to pull it off. My best kill scenarios did not yield any acceptable escape and concealment scenarios (Intonjutsu). Sanjuro was the kind of man who had an expansive network of loyalists. He had organized his business to run as smoothly without him as with him. So it was not just about the hit. It was also about taking down the organization with the hit. Otherwise, what was the point of doing it at all?
It occurred to me that the answer might be found with Sanjuro’s clients, the Chinese. If I could somehow make the hit also poison the well with the Chinese, they would systematically eliminate anyone left in order to kill any connection to them and Sanjuro’s organization. Then we would be golden. If the Chinese felt exposed by Sanjuro, they would move swiftly to adjust the situation. And as I thought about that, the answer for Sanjuro came to me almost immediately. That level of failure would be devastating for Sanjuro. It would be dishonorable and, even though he had severed his connection with his Japanese ancestry, he still lived by the ninja warrior code: death before dishonor. Thus, the only way for him to save face would be to commit the ritual suicide known as seppuku. Sometimes you can get a shark to eat itself if you fill the water with enough blood.
I hacked Sanjuro’s laptop—courtesy of Zhen’s lazy ass and Bob’s crack nerd squad—and gathered enough files to completely destroy him ten times over. I hid the files in a phantom data packet on Sanjuro’s secure e-mail server. The next time Sanjuro logged in, it was set to send itself to several people who would be very interested in its contents: FBI, CIA, Homeland, the usual suspects. The cover letter with it involved Sanjuro explaining that he wanted protection from the Chinese, immunity from prosecution, etc. Of course, the Chinese secret police have people in all aspects of our government—as do we in theirs—so it would be a matter of hours before Sanjuro’s clients found out about his betrayal. At which point, Sanjuro would commit suicide to balance things out wit
h Buddha, and I would go down in HR history as a fucking genius.
But things didn’t quite work out the way I planned. The e-mail did go out and Sanjuro was placed on the Chinese “Ten Most Wanted to Torture and Kill List,” but I had overestimated Sanjuro’s dedication to Japanese custom. Instead of going all Bushido Blade and eviscerating himself on his kitchen floor, he grabbed as much money as he could fit into his Louis Vuitton luggage and attempted to flee the country. Bob was not happy. In order to clean up what had become a prodigious mess, I had to take Sanjuro before a helicopter picked him up from the roof of a luxury hotel in Los Angeles. He was holed up in the celebrity overdose suite just below the helipad.
Sanjuro had a dozen thugs protecting him at the hotel, and he was heavily armed. Bob’s people intercepted the call for the helicopter and hid me in the cargo hold of a chopper that we sent in place of the one Sanjuro ordered. While the pilot bullshitted with two of Sanjuro’s security detail on the roof, I slipped out and dropped down into Sanjuro’s suite. Ten guys sounds like a lot, I know. However, keep in mind that Zhen was not part of the ten, nor were any of the other Chinese military guards that had been part of Sanjuro’s original detail, on account of their new orders to kill him with extreme prejudice. So he had pulled together a motley crew of muscle—and that’s being generous. Knowing this, my biggest concern was Sanjuro himself. But I knew at this point that he was a fucking pussy and would try the escape route first. So as he bolted for the helipad, the chopper pilot was waiting for him with a syringe full of the same black ops knockout juice he used to take out the security guys on the roof—my own recipe, of course.
Meanwhile, inside the suite, the ten thugs came at me in laughably predictable ways. My biggest challenge was to keep them from firing their weapons before I killed them. The last thing I needed was hotel security, followed by LAPD, charging up here to heroically stop a gun battle in the $10,000-a-night presidential suite. Also, we needed to cart these fuckers out of there without a trace, so a bloodbath was not an option.
What ensued would have made Sanjuro’s great-great-ninja-grandfather proud—of me that is. I had been studying their fighting techniques since I started with HR. My whole body was a weapon. Every point from fingers to toes, elbows, knees, chin, brow ridge, heels, everything. And when you are trying to be silent about combat, you tend to rely on the most effective kill strikes. You don’t have time to break a chair over someone’s head or pick them up and throw them through a plate-glass window. It’s a close-quarters dance, and it is eyeball to eyeball.
The first two tried to pull MAC-10 submachine guns—a cheap, unreliable gangbanger special. I shoved the barrel into the eye socket of one and used the strap to snap the neck of the other. This little exchange made me seem vulnerable to the others. They figured they would take me while I was busy killing their buddies. What they didn’t know was that is exactly what I wanted them to do.
“Jump in, boys. The water’s fine.”
The two that jumped on my back ended up falling on each other as I slipped between them and crushed both of their throats with each of my feet in a move they call “hawk seizes mouse.” When the other six saw this, I could see that they were regretting getting too close to me, but they also knew retreat was not going to be possible. Two of them stupidly reached for guns. Both got open-hand strikes to the nose and shards of their own facial skeleton in their frontal lobes. Two others actually tried to bolt and got the caveman special—grab the back of the hair and strike the cervical vertebrae for a quick and painless internal decapitation. The last two tried to pull the old high-low on me. One went for my legs while the other tried to tackle me around the head and torso. I grabbed the guy on top by the head and flipped him over my shoulder, simultaneously snapping his neck and using his body as a sledgehammer that I brought down on the bottom guy, crushing his chest and obliterating his heart.
The chopper pilot brought Sanjuro in and set him down on the couch. When he came to, we had already removed the bodies of his security detail and refreshed the room to look pristine. He looked like he thought he was dreaming at first, but when he saw my face, he smiled.
“I am not surprised,” he said.
“I am,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because this . . . this is not the action of an honorable man, running from failure.”
He stopped smiling and bowed his head. I might as well have deflowered his sister, the way his whole body slumped in shame.
“But, out of respect for your ancestors, I am prepared to help you do the right thing,” I said evenly.
I set a katana down on the coffee table. I had taken it out of his apartment. Judging by the slight fray in the handle wrap and tiny pits in the metal, it was in excellent condition but very old. He wept when he saw it.
“You are a man of honor,” he whispered.
He bowed deeply to me and shoved the blade into the space just below his rib cage. He did not have to disembowel himself because the initial puncture severed his superior aorta and that was all she wrote.
Bob was pleased. In the end, I got what I wanted and it was the right outcome, but Bob warned me never to leave anything to chance again. And I never did. Until this assignment, of course.
26
* * *
BOYFRIEND-GIRLFRIEND SHIT
Back at the YMCA locker, I don what appears to be a traditional ninja uniform but is actually a black ops hybrid of my own design. The fabric is a microfiber and Kevlar blend. So it’s breathable, flexible, and will stop blades, spikes, needles, and even bullets with calibers up to 9 mm. Plus, it looks totally badass. I wear black rock climbing slippers that have sticky stealth rubber soles, and put on form-fitting rubberized gel gloves that stick like glue to any surface but leave no marks whatsoever. As I make my way up the stairs and out onto the roof, I pull on the hood with narrow eye slits and now I’m in full ninja mode.
Then comes the best part—roof hopping. There’s a reason why most good action movies and crime TV shows have rooftop chase scenes. First off, they are fun. Stunt men and women love doing it. Of course, they have safety lines, but I can guarantee you they wish they didn’t. When you leap across a roof between multistory buildings, it is the closest thing you’ll ever get to flying. Yeah, you could go skydiving. But you know you have the chute. And flying is about getting from point A to point B. Birds don’t generally drop straight down out of the sky and land on the ground unless they are attacking prey. In the end, you’re not even jumping that far. It’s the exposure that makes you feel like Iron Man. As you jump fifteen feet or so, you are clearing more than one hundred vertical feet below you, and it feels like base-jumping the Chrysler building.
The other thing I love about roof hopping, I think as I leap the four blocks to Alice’s apartment, is that I’m afraid of heights. Other than that, I’m pretty much afraid of nothing. I’m not bragging, that’s just reality. When I was a child, I failed to thrive (for obvious reasons) and never developed a healthy sense of fear or apprehension. Also, I was held by my ankles out of a ten-story building by a dealer when I was seven years old, so that might have something to do with it. This is going to sound weird, but I’ve sought out that fear rush ever since. It’s almost as if finally feeling anything at all suddenly made me a human being. Until then I had always been convinced I was a robot. I almost never got sick or upset about anything. It’s probably primordial, to go back to my favorite topic. My brain saw no room for emotions because they would either (a) hinder my predatory instincts or (b) result in zero gains from the outside world.
So when I’m up here it feeds, for lack of a better word, nostalgia about my youth. Some people get that way when they see a baseball field or smell trout on the grill. I get that feeling from vertigo and the Freudian fantasy of falling to my certain death on the pavement below. Or maybe into a hot dog cart! I love it when that happens in movies! Wham! A falling body obliterates a rusty Nathan’s cart. The sidewalk is showered by hot dog water, and the wet wiene
rs skitter across the sidewalk like bait fish on the deck of a boat. Classic.
When I land, silently mind you, on Alice’s roof, I’m thinking about how cool she would think this is. Maybe sometime we can go roof hopping together, leap a few blocks downtown to grab a bite? Beats dodging strollers, obese tourists, and those people who can’t seem to walk a fucking straight line, right? How would I present it to her without arousing suspicion? Or maybe I should arouse suspicion. That always seems to arouse other things.
I climb the fire escape and coax open the kitchen window. I slip into her apartment like a cat and find her laptop dutifully sitting on the small desk in her room. This time I brought the big guns—Bulgarian password crack programs that not only annihilate encryption but also, wait for it, maintain enough encryption after forced entry that the computer itself is unable to generate a log-in record. So you never know you were hacked in the first place. Downloaded them for free from a site that will remain unnamed because the one group that you never want to piss off is the hacker community. They can truly unravel your life like a cheap sweater and all you can do is sit back and watch.
The crack programs do their magic and in fewer than five minutes I am uploading Alice’s entire hard drive onto my cloud server. While that cooks, I start thinking about Alice’s secret stash of Pop-Tarts and remember the scene from Pulp Fiction when Bruce Willis goes back to his apartment to get his father’s watch—the one that had been in Chris Walken’s ass in a Vietnamese prison camp. Alice keeps her Pop-Tarts hidden in the back of that annoying corner cupboard with a lazy Susan jammed full of pots and pans she never uses. She doesn’t hide them so I can’t eat them. She hides them so I don’t know she’s eating them. Alice has a little bit of extra weight on her ass, which I absolutely love. Classic case of a closet carb junkie. I’m doing her a favor by sentencing two Pop-Tarts to death by toaster.