The Intern's Handbook: A Thriller (6 page)

“I got a mailroom order requesting case files for . . . Oh shit.”

Alice is standing outside my cube, looking at me like she might look at some foul insect. This is not the friendly reception I was expecting. As my first-class passenger on the Bullshit Express the other night, she suffered what was probably the only rejection she’s ever experienced, and she still appears to be smarting from it. My bad. I overestimated the charm my playing slightly hard to get would have on her. And now she’s in my dark forest of archive hell on a fool’s errand.

“Hi, Alice.”

I hand her a large stack of useless files.

“So
you’re
the hick from Peoria everyone’s talking about.”

“That’s me.”

“Still white and uptight?”

She
is
feeling stung. That means she gives a shit, and I can work with that.

“I’m sorry about what happened at the bar. I hope you don’t take it personally.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

I laugh alone.

“I’m sure you weren’t all that heartbroken,” I attempt.

“Heartbroken, no. But I felt pretty sorry for you, missing out on my unorthodox, yet devastating sexual technique.”

“Rain check?”

“We’ll see, cowboy.”

“You won’t be turned off by the fact that I’m one of Hartman’s new maggots?”

“Maybe I want to sleep my way to the bottom.”

“You’ve come to the right place. How do you like my office? The decor is new-century dungeon.”

“Pretty sweet. I’ve never seen him put a
live
human being down here. He must really like you.”

“I’m special.”

“Needs?”

Now we’re both laughing.

“You should quit, you know?” She grins.

“Why?”

“The black mold down here is going to give you a brain tumor.”

“Thanks for the pep talk. This is turning out to be an amazing first day.”

She laughs. Even better.

“So have you made any headway in your vision quest to become a junior associate?” I ask. Women like to know that you remember things.

“I’ll know soon. Word on the street is that it’s down to me and another guy from my intern class.”

“Let me guess, a white frat boy that went to Harvard?”

“Actually, he’s a Yalie douche.”

“Circle Jerk doesn’t stand a chance.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Your shoes. You could nail a man to the cross with those.”

“Glad someone noticed,” she says, softening a bit. “These fuckers cost more than my rent.”

“They have ‘hire me or I will firebomb this fucking place’ written all over them.”

Always compliment a woman’s shoes or handbag. It makes you seem slightly metro, which translates to emotionally available. Also, it tells them that you aren’t looking at their body (God forbid), which means you are not as much of a creep as they were automatically
assuming you were by even talking to them in the first place. I prioritize shoe compliments over handbags because many women are self-conscious about their feet, and if you sound genuine, you’ll score big points. She takes a seat to relax for a moment, always a good sign.

“I was serious about you getting the hell out of here. You’re going to get lung cancer from the asbestos.”

She removes a shoe and rubs her foot suggestively.

“Yeah, but I prefer that to getting career cancer from being immersed in complete irrelevance.”

“There’s no cure for that. Just slow, painful death.”

“And a lot of terrible self-help books sent by concerned family members.”

We laugh and she puts her shoe on, getting ready to leave. I need to make a move.

“Maybe you can get me on the upper floors so I can beg someone to make me their indentured servant.”

“A favor? We barely know each other,” she says as she looks around my completely blank cube.

“I know, but us maggots need to stick together. You never see just one of us hanging around a rotting corpse do you?”

She looks me in the eye and smiles. This is unexpected. It feels predatory. I look away, cursing myself. Then I look back and find her searching gaze still hanging in the haze of my cubicle.

“I work in Wills and Trusts. Bendini’s turf. I guess I could order a bunch of bullshit files be exhumed from this pit of despair and delivered up there.”

Sounds familiar,
I think.

She smiles and the look grows more intense. I’m not sure if she wants to kiss me or eat me. At this point, I might be persuaded to accept either.

“That would give you some face time up in the big show. After that, it’s up to you. Sound good, cowboy?”

We look at each other for a beat. I want so badly to go toe to toe with her, but that is light-years away from how my persona is supposed to be. I swallow a bitter pill of pride and stay in character.

“I would owe you big-time if you could pull that off,” I gush.

“When I skin that Yalie douche, you can take me out to crush some beers and pull the wings off a few chickens.”

“Deal. I know the best wing place in town.”

“Hicks from Peoria always do.”

With that, she walks away, ensuring I have a full view of her ass as she heads for the elevator. That went well. Not only did I rise above my drooling-hunchback-in-the-dungeon status, but I also made our meeting seem like a
chance encounter,
one of the most powerful aphrodisiacs known to man. Thanks to chick flicks, the concept of true love being orchestrated by the rough, construction worker hands of fate is an easy sell.

L
ater that afternoon, Alice throws me the bone I’ve been waiting for: access. It comes in the form of multiple file deliveries to the upper floors, giving me the chance to suck up to someone who might give me some real work. Sweet Alice. I wheel an ancient cart full of foul-smelling, oddly stained files to the higher floors and loiter my ass off for as long as possible. Then I see my opportunity. One of the senior associates is calling for his assistant to get him some coffee. Said assistant is in the break room, gossiping with the rest of the cake-fed cube farm heifers. I slip into his office, my hands pressed together like Hemingway’s valet, bowing ever so slightly.

“Good morning, sir.”

“Fuck you, Howdy Doody.”

“Coffee?”

“You heard me say it. Should have just gotten it before you walked in here like a mental patient in your grayish brownish greenish fucking . . . what kind of a goddamned suit is that? Don’t answer. I don’t care. Just go. And kick my assistant in her fat ass on your way back.”

“How do you take it?”

“Black. And it had better not taste like it’s been scraped from the bottom of a crematorium oven.”

I leave without a word. ALWAYS let them have the last word in every conversation. If you trail off with some useless acknowledgment,
they will hate you for assuming they give a fuck about any word that comes out of your mouth other than
yes
.

Rule #4: Learn how to make the perfect cup of coffee.

This is the single most important part of your job as an intern. Go ahead, laugh. You can make copies and do runs until you’re blue in the face and an exec will not give a shit. You make him the best goddamned cup of coffee he’s ever had and he may not remember your name but he will make damn sure you are at his desk every morning for a repeat performance. That’s repetitive exposure, which begets access and trust. Forty-four percent of my kills came from my superior coffee-making ability. It’s simple, puts you in direct contact with the target, and it can be a vector for a variety of weapons. This opportunity presents itself more often than you think. Admins HATE making coffee, even though it’s part of their job. That’s because all of them are “just doing this job while they pursue a career in ________.” Fill in the blank: actress, singer, porn star, reality show freak—same shit, different day job.

Example—Job #20. I was working an exec at a military satellite software company for months. He was in the heavily secured upper floors of a ninety-story office building. Every access point I put into the scenario was a dead end. Fucking guy went to the gym with armed security. Then I saw him standing in a long line outside Starbucks one morning with his goon detail. So I stepped up to talk to him, and one of his goons almost curbed me in the bus lane. I showed him my key card and told him to go to his desk, that I would handle this for him and that he shouldn’t be drinking the monkey piss they serve at Starbucks anyway. The goons thought that was funny. The nerdy exec chilled out. Instant connection. Since this was a particularly difficult access scenario, I had to bring in the big guns, so to speak. So I brought him a cup of El Injerto from the Huehuetenango region
of Guatemala—150 euros a pound and not available for purchase in this country. Ground the beans myself. (I keep an entire coffee service case in my cube at all times.) Served it with unpasteurized French cream and raw sugar cane lumps. Guy looked like he wanted to kiss me or be my bunk mate in a Turkish prison.

I brought him that same cup of coffee every day for three weeks and he waited for it like Lou Reed was waiting for his man. Anyway, he finally got tired of having to escort me into his office and gave me full access to the highly secure eighty-sixth floor. Access. Trust. Do you know how many people would love to waterboard this guy to get their hands on his fucking BlackBerry? But he lets some intern, whose name he could NEVER remember, have unescorted access to the floor? Keys to the kingdom. And don’t think for a minute that his being on the
eighty-sixth
floor was lost on me.

Three days later, I made him a special cup. Mixed in a little isopropyl nitrate and laced the sugar lumps with a catalyst I’d rather keep to myself. You can’t have all my secrets, grasshopper. Per the routine, I brought him the coffee; he dropped in the lumps, etc. But while he mixed it, I pulled on the Kevlar poncho I had stuffed in my file cart and took cover behind the fire door in the hallway. I didn’t get to see his face as the coffee solidified and released a concentrated hydrogen gas that blew him and his office back to the days of disco, but I’m sure he was surprised. I’d make a joke about strong coffee, but you know how Bob feels about my jokes.

Why would I blow him up, you might ask? Doesn’t seem very subtle, but it’s all about the profile. This guy is essentially an arms dealer, so his enemies are fond of bombs, specifically exotic explosive devices. Feds will assume they planted a device, which will appear to be very sophisticated and worthy of his enemies’ time, money, and expertise. Ballistics will never find fragments of my cup—a hardened polymer that dissolves into the same type of melted plastic you find from a variety of objects at ANY fire investigation. So the end result is a crime scene that points a smoking gun at a very specific class of perps.

Unfortunately the explosion didn’t take out his security detail, and those guys were tough as nails. Within a few seconds of the blast, they stumbled into the hallway, ears bleeding, and opened up on me with two TEC-9 submachine guns. The Kevlar poncho saved my ass, but it felt like I was inside a laundry bag getting beat up by a bunch of gorillas with sledgehammers. They emptied their clips and bounced me down the hallway until I smashed through a quarter-inch glass conference room window. I’ll never forget the looks on the faces of the poor bastards cowering under the conference table as I pulled a flash grenade from my suit jacket pocket and chucked it into the room. It’s a nonlethal stun grenade that uses a bright flash of light and a loud bang to knock anyone within ten feet of it unconscious. I dove back into the hallway as it detonated. Meeting adjourned.

I had to go through all of this rigmarole because no one could know that I was ever there. Bob’s instructions were very specific: target eliminated with a covertly planted device so that the identity of the bomber would only be a matter of speculation. So I was not in a position to get into a gun battle with the security guys, who were now reloading in the hallway. I knew I had to make a move before they got those second clips in, so I whipped out The Pig
.
It’s a little invention of mine, kind of like a Taser, but instead of using wires to deliver a high-voltage shock, it uses barbed darts and thin surgical tubing to pump drugs, poisons, and other nefarious liquids into the target. I can dial up all kinds of exotic, untraceable cocktails with The Pig. I just need to get close enough to deploy it. And since these guys were fifteen feet down the hall . . .

I took off at a full sprint. The first one chucked his TEC and went for the Beretta on his hip. Dumb. By the time he had it out, I was fully airborne, smashing my size twelve, nondescript, brown wing tip directly into his chest. As he went down, I deployed The Pig into his armpit. Side note: forget the neck, Dexter. The medical examiner
will see that a mile away. ALWAYS choose a hairy injection point. You could jab a horse needle in there and lazy-ass autopsy drones will never go bushwhacking for clues. He’s out before he hits the floor, but his buddy now has the TEC locked and ready to rip right in my face. I bench-press his buddy into him just in time for him to pull the trigger. The barrel is buried in the guy’s ass, causing the blowback to reverse in the chamber. The TEC-9 explodes in his face, and he goes down.

Now I had a mess to tend to and I had about thirty seconds before the fire crews would come crashing into the hallway. I bagged both TEC-9s in my Kevlar poncho and quickly removed the shrapnel from the security guys’ faces. Then I dragged them both into the target’s burning office so they would get good and charred and fit right into the scenario. Scooping up the shell casings was a major pain in the ass but I bagged them all, got into the stairwell, and jumped through the door on the floor below just before the fire crew went stomping past.

Yes, that is a lot of extra work
after
the target is already dead, but remember that we don’t just whack people pell-mell and drop our guns at the scene like you see in some of the shittier movies about our profession. It’s all about finesse and keeping the politics under control. Next day, the
New York Times
reported a terrorist bombing. That’s when the job is truly complete, when the paper of record prints your target’s epitaph on the front page and shovels coal into the formidable engines of the Bullshit Express.