The Asset (37 page)

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.”

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.

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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