The Intern's Handbook: A Thriller

For Amanda D.

. . . 
Ma Ville Lumière. You are the dream that came true.

Interns are invisible. You can tell executives your name a hundred times and they will never remember it because they have no respect for someone at the bottom of the barrel, working for free. The irony is that they will heap important duties on you with total abandon. The more of these duties you voluntarily accept, the more you will get, simultaneously acquiring TRUST AND ACCESS. Ultimately, your target will trust you with his life and that is when you will take it.

—
The Intern’s Handbook

United States Department of Justice

Federal Bureau of Investigation

Washington, D.C. 20535

To: All field agents

From: William Cummings, director

Subject: JOHN LAGO

Case File #36-F42

Age: 25

Ht/Wt: 5' 10" / 175 lbs.

Hair: Brown

Eyes: Blue

Whereabouts: Unknown

The United States Department of Justice has issued a nationwide and international arrest warrant for John Lago. Lago is believed to be a senior operative in a network of contract assassins working within a shell organization known as “Human Resources, Inc.” Human Resources, Inc. (HR, Inc.), presents itself as a placement agency for office interns. However, it is believed that these interns are actually assassins trained to infiltrate multinational corporations and government agencies in order to eliminate heavily guarded executives and principal employees. The number of contract murders HR, Inc., is responsible for is unknown.

This organization has been the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation. Our objective has been to identify and apprehend
the head of HR, Inc., and its chief financiers, and effectively terminate all operations. Until recently, our audio and video surveillance efforts have yielded hundreds of hours of raw data, but no actionable evidence.

Eighteen hours ago, we intercepted an electronic communication from suspect John Lago. It was addressed to several individuals believed to be new recruits at HR, Inc. It is titled
The Intern’s Handbook
and it appears to be an informal guide for assassins in training. In light of new evidence found in this document, I am placing a priority mandate on the investigation. A manhunt coordinated by the FBI and CIA is under way.
The Intern’s Handbook
is included in this case file as mandatory reading for field agents pursuing suspect Lago.

As he is now the focus of this investigation, I am also providing transcripts from audio and video surveillance tapes in which Lago is a subject. We are attempting to identify the victims and associates referred to in the transcripts, whose names were previously censored. Any persons known to be in contact with Lago are now suspects or material witnesses and should be brought in for questioning.

It is my hope that this case file will facilitate Lago’s capture before more lives are lost.

Best of luck and Godspeed.

—William Cummings, director

SUSPECT JOHN LAGO IS CONSIDERED ARMED AND VERY DANGEROUS. FIELD AGENTS ARE REQUIRED TO FOLLOW STRICT PROTOCOLS AND ONLY ATTEMPT TO APPREHEND HIM WITH A FULL STRIKE TEAM AND LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT BACKUP.

by

John Lago

I
f 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 laughing 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.