Valhalla Virus by Nick Harrow (best management books of all time TXT) 📕

that seemed like a bad plan. If he’d wanted me dead, he wouldn’t have woken me up to seal the deal.

“That’s me,” I said and did my best not to flinch as my lips scraped across the gun’s muzzle.

Neither of us moved for what must have been a thousand years. Finally, the gun moved a few feet away from my mouth, but its bore remained centered on my head. Still, I considered that progress.

“Gotta job for you,” he said. “Get dressed.”

“I don’t know—”

“This is a one-time offer, and it expires when I get pissed off.” The man’s gruff voice told me we were very close to that expiration. “You do this, you get a billion dollars. You fuck it up, or you lay there in bed like a slug for a few more minutes, and I’ll introduce you to one of Mr. Shooty’s bullet friends.”

He tipped the gun’s muzzle up so I could stare down the bottomless black well of its barrel.

I scrambled out of my warm, comfy bed and onto the cold hardwood floor like an electric eel had just tried to climb up my ass.  The freezing shock of the wood against the soles of my feet filled me with the sudden urge to empty my bladder, but there was no time for that. I grabbed the black sweatpants and matching T-shirt that I’d dropped on the floor before climbing into bed a few hours ago and practically dove into them.

“I’ll need my laptop,” I said as I tried to reach past the big dude to collect my bag off the dresser behind him.

“No.” He blocked my arm with his massive body. “We’ve got everything you need at the job.”

I wanted to explain to him that there was no way he knew what I needed. That laptop was loaded with tools I’d built or modified over a decade of security work. Asking me to do my job without that laptop would be like asking a carpenter to build a house without his hands.

“You don’t understand,” I tried to explain, but the big boy was having none of it. He abandoned the shadows for the rectangle of milky moonlight that spilled through my bedroom window and shoved his pistol into my ribs hard enough to leave a bruise.

But the gun wasn’t what freaked me out.

The shadow man was a straight-up monster. His enormous head was as bald as a newborn’s ass, with a brow so heavy it looked like you could break bricks on it. His beady eyes perched above a spade-shaped nose lined with whorls and ridges of flesh, and a pair of cracked tusks jutted from the corners of a gruesome, lipless mouth.

To top it all off, the dude was a puke shade of green and smelled about the same.

“We were told you were the best, and that is why I came for you,” he said, his carefully enunciated words at odds with his bestial appearance. “But you have reached the limits of my patience, and I am about to move on to our second choice.”

“After I kill you.”

If I’d had any doubts about his willingness to put me in the ground, they vanished after one quick glance into his eyes. I didn’t know what had happened to this guy, but whatever nightmare accident had wrecked his face left him looking like a Lord-of-the-Rings-style orc straight out of central casting. He also looked like he might eat me after he shot me in the face.

“Lead on,” I said. I’d spent more than my fair share of time in the gym, because if you spend all day pecking at a keyboard, you have to do something or you’ll turn into a wad of sugar cookie dough. But I had no illusions that my sparring matches and weight lifting would stand a chance against this legit monster. I was sure he wasn’t actually an orc, but he still looked as big and mean as one of Tolkien’s bad boys.

“Don’t try anything stupid,” he said and waved the pistol’s muzzle toward the door.

I followed his directions and kept my hands well away from my sides as I left my bedroom. I didn’t have a weapon, but I didn’t want the orc lookalike behind me to think that I did and get antsy.

Besides, there was an upside to all this. If I pulled off the job they’d kidnapped me for, I’d be a billionaire.

I kept that thought locked firmly at the front of my mind as we left my apartment. The orc steered me toward the elevator and made his gun vanish as soon as we entered the car. He didn’t so much as glance in my direction for the rest of the trip.

“Can I at least know what corp wanted me so bad they sent you to shanghai me?” I asked between floors twelve and eleven. “I don’t usually go on a first date without knowing a name.”

He mulled the question over until we hit the eighth floor and then said something that scared me even more than his ugly mug.

“Inkolana Syndicate,” he said, as if deciding it didn’t matter whether I knew who’d hired me.

Well, that explained the guns and money. The Inkolana Syndicate had more of both than they knew what to do with, and they weren’t afraid to use either of them to get what they wanted. And what they wanted was usually a bigger slice of the drug business and for their enemies in various world governments to disappear into deep, dark holes.

But what the hell would the world’s scariest cartel need with a hacker?

I asked that question when we hit the ground floor, but the orc just grunted and clapped an oversized hand on my shoulder. He steered me through the lobby and out to the sidewalk where a black sedan waited for us. My kidnapper shoved me into the back seat, then slid in next to me without another word.

I scrambled to the other side of the car before he could smash me under