The Intern's Handbook

by Shane Kuhn

  “Sorry, John. I fucked up. I should have told you the truth the day you called. When you knew my real name . . . I knew I was in deep shit. But you’re my son. And so much time has been lost. I guess I was hoping you had just found me on your own.”

  I think back on Alice’s so-called generosity and the fact that Mormon Dorothy was just another fucking operative, and my head is swimming.

  “Who are you, then?” I hear myself say.

  “I’m not a former junkie hiding out from the police. And your mother wasn’t a junkie either. We were both working with the CIA. Ghost ops. Way off State Department protocol. We disagreed with some—”

  “He’s a traitor, John,” Bob blurts out almost too quickly.

  Bob’s jealousy of Marcus is clear. He is stung by the fact that I very clearly betrayed him to make a connection with my father, even though it is beginning to sound like that was the plan all along.

  “We were disavowed because we refused to carry out a directive that we knew we couldn’t live with. We planned to run, but your mother was pregnant and they . . .”

  “They killed her,” I whispered. “With me inside her.”

  “That’s right. I stayed as long as I could, but it was untenable. And I couldn’t take you with me. You were on life support . . . and . . .”

  Tears. Even though Marcus was in a similar line of work, he is not like me. He has feelings. He has a conscience. I see how that can be considered a weakness, but it feels very powerful to me. Marcus was the master of his domain and his unwavering mission to stay that way altered his life in the worst kind of way imaginable. But he kept himself.

  Sometimes, that is everything.

  “So, they’ve been looking for you all these years?”

  “We had found him a while ago,” Bob chimes in. “But we could never get anyone close enough to kill him. With his training and experience, I knew we never would.”

  The red-headed stepchild of epiphany kicks me in the balls.

  “Only I could do it because you knew he would trust me.”

  I think I might vomit.

  “It’s actually pretty genius if you think about it,” Alice says.

  I need to center. I need to get back in the game before I peter out. I focus on my rage and use it to push one of Alice’s buttons.

  “Why don’t you shut your pretty little mouth and let the men talk?”

  She backhands me. And now I’m in her head. My mind calculates her weakness: pride. She will risk her life to preserve her pride. She has something to prove. I’ll give her a chance to do just that. And that’s how I will take her down.

  Bob smiles and steps in, gently moving her away from me. Thank you, Bob. You just turned her prideful anger up to eleven. Her judgment will now begin to slip. He kneels next to me, fatherly, gentle.

  “I was looking for your father, but found you instead. I was humbled by your strength. You were so tiny but I knew you would scratch and claw your way into life. After Marcus was long gone, I visited you in the hospital. I paid the bills. I controlled your path from foster home to mental ward to juvenile detention. When I knew you were ready, I tempered you like a sword. Turned your thin skin to the hide of a reptile. Sharpened your teeth.”

  “My foster parents in San Francisco.”

  “Your first assignment. Helped make you what you are.”

  Indio and Diablito. On the fucking payroll.

  “What I am? Nothing in my life is real. It’s all HR. It’s all you.”

  “Remember what the social worker told you when you were six years old?” Bob asks. “He said, ‘You’re nothing if you don’t know where you came from.’ Do you remember that, John?”

  I nod. Suddenly I feel like Sean Young’s character Rachael in Blade Runner when she finds out all of her memories were someone else’s, implanted in her brain to make her think she is human, to stoke the fires of the Bullshit Express.

  “Then you joined us.” Bob smiles. “And our clients couldn’t have been happier. At first, they wanted to try to set it all up themselves. But I told them you’re a very suspicious fellow, that you would see through anything that was laid before you and consider it bait versus prey. So I put you through the wringer with the Bendini, Lambert & Locke thing. ‘Highly irregular’ was your term I think? You had no idea.”

  “And you gave me Alice. That was a particularly clever touch.”

  “Alice is the new generation,” Bob brags. “She’s smarter, tougher, and comes with a lot less psychological baggage. None of this egocentric nonsense that I have had to endure with you.”

  “Yeah, when she shot me in her apartment and almost blew your whole game she looked a lot like the new generation of dumbass.”

  Alice starts to speak. Bob knows I’m trying to draw her out, so he holds up his hand to silence her. This drives her insane.

  “Come on, John. It’s okay to admit you fell for her. Look at her. She’s amazing. And also very talented. She’s basically the perfect woman for you. Without her, you would never have developed the kind of utterly irrational, emotionally driven path that brought you here.”

  The extent of Bob’s deception hits me hard. It’s one thing to be played, but something else to be the sucker in the middle of a long con that makes your whole life a fucking joke. For years I’ve been seeing only what Bob wanted me to see, riding the Bullshit Express straight to my own private hell. I wait for the numbness to come, but it doesn’t. I open my eyes and see their smug faces and the blind rage surges through me like a heroin rush.

  “Bob,” I say, mimicking his trademark cynical grin, “what difference does it make if I know how smart you and your rubber doll over there are? You’re just going to kill both of us anyway. Gloating is not your style.”

  “John, if I wanted to kill you, I would have done it. The reason you’re still alive is because I am your family. You think this guy is your family? The man that abandoned you as a premature infant on the edge of death in some hospital? The guy whose country would execute him for treason if they ever saw his face again? No. He is nothing to you and I am everything to you. Which is why I’m going to let you walk away if you agree to kill him.”

  I laugh out loud. This gets a chuckle from the death squad.

  “You’re even crazier than I thought, Bob.”

  “Fuck this, Bob. Let’s just waste them both.”

  “Shut up, Alice.”

  Nice. That really has her hackles up.

  “I believe in you, John. You’re brilliant, loyal, and have the ability to process the world at a higher level. This is why you’re the best I’ve ever had. By now you know that trying to be a hero for him is a no-win situation driven purely by misguided emotions that I created. I’m giving you a choice. Kill him, show your loyalty, and live. Or refuse and die. We’re going to kill him no matter what. If you play ball, you’re on a private jet to Paris, starting a new life, if that’s what you want. Or you can go straight to hell, which is probably where you are right now anyway.”

  “Do it, John,” Marcus says calmly.

  “No,” I say bluntly. “You’re my father.”

  “Bullshit. I’m more of a father to you than he will ever be.”

  For Bob, this is as personal as it gets.

  Marcus ignores Bob.

  “You need to do this, John,” Marcus pleads. “I will not have your blood on my hands too. I want you to have a life of your own. Do it before he changes his mind.”

  “No fucking way!”

  I close my eyes. I’m starting to lose it. My mind will not accept this reality and the seed of a psychotic break is quickly taking root. In my defense, this particular reality is one that most people would have difficulty believing let alone accepting. It’s like the end of a Scooby Doo episode written by the fucking Manson family . . . on acid. I half expect Velma to walk in, her orange turtleneck drenched in blood from a ritual killing, to jerk off the villain’s mask and deliver a shrill indictment. Speaking of which, let me see if I can wrap my head ar
ound this bullet—Alice doesn’t work for the FBI. She works for Bob. . . . Huh? I’ve been spooning with a sociopath sent to use and manipulate me? Get the straitjacket. Bob has been hunting my father, a former CIA spy, for over two decades. My mother was also a spy, assassinated by some cloak and dagger jagoffs while she was pregnant with me. Fire up the shock treatment paddles. Bob and Alice actually used me as bait (and other clichés) to get to my father, knowing that I am the only person he would trust. Everything else was just window dressing for the big shit show. Fuck it, let’s skip right to the lobotomy. I open my eyes and see their smug faces and the blind rage surges through me like a speedball rush. Do not pass go. I try to contain myself, but I can feel everything slipping. I use the last shred of my sanity to address my father.

  “I have been looking for you since I was eight years old. This is not how this is going to end.”

  “How is it going to end, John?” Bob asks casually.

  “Let’s just kill them both and get on with it,” Alice says.

  “Shut your mouth, you dirty fucking whore!” I scream.

  She punches me in the face. I fall over and smack into the tile floor. And this, brothers and sisters, is when I totally fucking lose it. I spend the next few minutes screaming and jerking as hard as I can, the nylon sash cord cutting into my skin and drawing blood. I’m having a full-on fit and no one knows quite what to do. I can see the reactions of everyone in the room. They range from apologetic and empathetic (Marcus), to disgusted (Bob), to amused (Alice), to wildly entertained (death squad guys). While I have my temper tantrum on the floor, I find myself facing the sliding glass doors that lead to the back patio. Since Bob, Alice, and the death squad are facing the opposite direction, only I can see the small detachment of heavily armed Honduran soldiers racing up the beach to the house. I feel the adrenaline surge, clearing my head and locking my body into an objective—one that I will have only seconds to execute. I kick Marcus’s chair legs and he falls down next to me. And I use every last bit of strength I have left to get one of my hands free.

  “Alto!” the Honduran Army commander yells as he and his soldiers fill the rest of the room.

  Nobody moves. The commander gives Marcus a look. Marcus gives me a look. I smile. The fucking cavalry has arrived.

  “Stay down,” he says.

  41

  * * *

  CHOPPING OFF THE HAND THAT FEEDS

  For what feels like a full episode of Gunsmoke, we all sweat it out in this Mexican—sorry, Honduran—standoff. Then, as you might expect, one of the death squad guys gets trigger-happy and starts spraying the Honduran soldiers with machine-gun fire. Next thing you know, the room is a black cloud of smoke, bullets, and chaos. Meanwhile Marcus and I are on the floor, tied to fucking chairs. I jerk my arm out of the ropes and pull a knife from a dead Honduran soldier. I quickly cut myself free then Marcus. A bullet grazes the side of his neck and blood soaks his shirt, but he keeps his focus. Fighter pilot instinct. Turns out we have a lot more than genes in common.

  “Come on!” he yells and grabs my arm.

  We crawl through the mayhem into Marcus’s bedroom. He pulls up floorboards in the closet and grabs two MP7s. He throws one to me as the death squad guys come rushing into the room. We both open fire, expertly wasting those toothless motherfuckers before they can even get a bead on us. Like father, like son.

  “Outside!”

  I follow him out the broken patio door and head for the beach. As we get to the back patio, we are suddenly on the front lines of a massive gun battle between Bob’s mercenary death squad and the Honduran soldiers. Machine-gun fire peppers the wall, and we barely make it to the ground in time. I see Alice on the beach, blazing away at us.

  “You take her. I’ll find Bob!” Marcus yells.

  We split and I move to the beach, taking cover and firing at her from different positions. As we get closer to each other, the bullets are getting closer too, and I can’t get a clear shot because of all of the fucking smoke. I take cover and look inside through one of the broken windows. Marcus has Bob cornered behind the kitchen island. Marcus has great cover near the fireplace. Bob has nowhere to go. It’s only a matter of time before Bob runs out of ammo and has to try to run for it.

  A round blasting in the wall, temporarily blinding me with plaster dust, reminds me that Alice is out there. Instead of continuing on my current path, I backtrack and come around the other side of the house. I slap a new mag in the MP7 and wedge it in between the wall of the house and the air-conditioning unit. It’s pointed in her general direction, so I jam the trigger with a rock. While it continues to fire on its own, I sprint around the front of the house. On the way, I snag an AK-47 off a dead Honduran soldier and haul ass around the other side of the house. I find a good cover position behind a stucco wall and wait.

  Then I see Alice peering down the side of the house, trying to make out my position. I aim carefully at her head and I am about to squeeze off a round when I hesitate. I can’t do it. Shit. My hesitation and sudden distraction by that hesitation causes me to indiscriminately fire my weapon at nothing. Of course, this alerts her and others to my position and they all open up on the wall.

  It’s a grind, but I start taking out the death squad mercenaries one by one. Predictably, it comes down to Alice and me in another target-shooting competition. We nick and scrape each other, but we are both too good to open ourselves up to a kill shot. Meanwhile I catch glimpses of the gunfight in the house. Bob throws an M84 stun grenade and Marcus is blown back hard into the stone fireplace.

  Bob sees an opening and takes it. I run toward the house, unloading the fucking AK magazine at Alice, pinning her down in the sand. When I make it into the house, I am out of ammo so I dive and tackle Bob. We fight like mad dogs while the Honduran soldiers battle it out with the death squad mercenaries. Bob tries his myriad fighting techniques, but none of them are a match for my blind rage. I am kicking, punching, biting, and gouging. I am the predator, driven by my desire to taste blood, to tear flesh, to devour my prey.

  I lift him and throw him into the stone fireplace wall headfirst. My intention is to break his neck or crush his skull, but he is agile and tucks his head at the last minute. The impact is brutal but not fatal. He hits hard and lays there for a beat. I crawl to him under a hail of gunfire. When I get there, he pulls a razor and cuts my hand deeply. He struggles to his feet, holding his blade, a cornered animal slashing at the air to defend himself.

  “So this is what you call honor, John?” he screams through bloody teeth. “Chopping off the hand that feeds you? That clothed you? That saved your life? You’re just going to kill me like a fucking dog?”

  “No,” Marcus says. “But I will.”

  Marcus shoots Bob in the forehead. Bob stumbles backward with a surprised look on his face and smashes through the bedroom window. When I see him lying there, it’s hard to believe he’s dead. He has always seemed invincible to me, like the steel and glass of the city that he made my prison when I was twelve years old. Now, with his legs twitching on the edge of the jagged, bloody window glass, he’s nothing but a stiff, toppled relic, shaken to his foundation by a better man and left for the rats to judge.

  Marcus shows me an exit wound in his back. It’s as big as a coffee cup saucer and oozing dark venous blood.

  “I’m hit pretty bad,” Marcus says.

  Very bad indeed. Shit.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I say.

  “Watch out!” Marcus screams.

  I see a flash of Alice’s reflection in the window. She is holding an AK. I hit the deck as she opens fire. The Honduran soldiers open fire on her. She runs toward me, ducking their bullets. The death squad stragglers open up on the soldiers and we’re being pummeled by crossfire.

  I take Alice’s legs out with a chair. She falls hard, hitting her head and losing her AK. This barely slows her down. She is off the ground and on her feet as quickly as she went down. I am dragging Marcus into the next room for cove
r and she follows. We square off. She slams her foot into the side of my face. I fall to my knees. This brings a very predictable front kick from her. Going for the throat, huh? After all we’ve been through?

  I kick her right in the crotch. Yes, it hurts them as much as it does us. She doubles over, actually giving me a reprimanding look, and I wipe it off her face with the bottom of my foot. She flips backward and slides across the floor. Bullets explode through the room.

  “We have to go now!” Marcus yells.

  I turn to him. He’s lying on the floor, pale from blood loss.

  I look back at Alice, but she’s gone.

  “Wood chute. Behind the fireplace,” Marcus directs.

  We both crawl back there and stuff ourselves through the narrow chute that Marissa probably uses to deliver firewood in the cooler, rainy season. This puts us on the side of the house where the coast is reasonably clear. As we creep off into the darkness, Marcus stops and pulls a bloody iPhone from his pocket. He punches in a code and his house EXPLODES, shattering the earth and filling the sky with burning ash. We limp into a thick black cloud of smoke and disappear.

  42

  * * *

  PENNY-WISE

  After we make it to the street, I steal a car and take Marcus to a local hospital, which might as well be a butcher shop based on their total disregard for hygiene. We bribe a nurse to take us to a private room and then bribe a doctor that speaks English to help Marcus. The news is not good. The shrapnel destroyed part of his liver and tore a major vein on the way out the back. He has lost a lot of blood. He also has a small, but potentially lethal, brain bleed from the impact with the fireplace stones. The idea of having brain surgery in Honduras makes Marcus laugh out loud. The doctor is not amused. Finally, Marcus’s heart is showing a strange arrhythmia, most likely due to the damaged vein and blood loss. We start doling out the dollars for blood, antibiotics, and pain meds. And more doctors.