The Evil That Men Do

by Robert Gleason

  “Just for the time being,” Brenda said. “We’ll come back at her later. We’ll still be rich and powerful as God. We’ll still own the politicians. We’ll eventually roll the initiative back.”

  “This too shall pass?”

  “If you let it.”

  “I got plans, sis, and Jules Meredith’s not slowing me down.”

  “One world at a time, Jimmy, one world at a time.”

  “But you know how important this is to me.”

  “Which is why we have to hunker down, watch our butts and hang on to all those politicians.”

  “You mean our sock puppets?” Tower said, his eyes now merry with malevolence.

  “They are idiots, aren’t they?”

  “Almost as dumb as the press,” Tower said.

  “They’re all so stupid I sometimes wonder why we have to spend so much money on them anyway.”

  “We do it to promote the financial debaucheries of the super-rich, namely, us,” Tower said.

  “Our fiscal and physical debaucheries?”

  “Yes, and then have the news media praise us for our crimes.”

  “That too.”

  J. T. poured himself another cup of black coffee.

  “Goddamn, I feel good,” Tower said. “I’m giving Putie a call.”

  “I’m sure Putilov will love it,” Brenda said, voice toneless, her eyes empty of emotion.

  Brenda was sure Putilov hated every second of his conversations with her brother. Why wouldn’t he? She did.

  She then lit another Gauloises Blue and poured herself her first morning snifter of Napoléon brandy.

  3

  “Did Tower actually think power meant … pussy?”

  —Mikhail Putilov on U.S. President J. T. Tower

  Putilov put down the phone. God, he hated Tower. He’d ducked the idiot’s calls for as long as he could, but the man was relentless. It was like Tower was stalking Putilov, sniffing out his spoor, drooling on it like a puppy, fishing for the stupidest compliments. He practically licked Putilov’s palms and feet, as if he had some sick masochistic need to get Putilov’s approval when in truth, the only thing Putilov wanted to give Tower was his boot up his ass and a 12mm round between his goddamn eyes.

  Putilov didn’t know how much longer he could take dealing with him. Tonight, for example, the phone call from him had been a living hell. Tower had been unable to stop pontificating.

  “You know, Comrade Putilov”—yes, the imbecile actually had the temerity to address him as “Comrade”!—“what makes us so alike? We aren’t motivated by the things that obsess most people. You and I recognize the preeminent importance of power in this world—its acquisition, its practices, its abuses and its uses.”

  Power?

  What the fuck did that cretin know about “power”?

  One time Tower actually stopped talking long enough for Putilov to ask him what he meant by “power.” Tower quickly warmed to the subject, telling him over and over and over again:

  “Power means having anything you want—earning billions of dollars, owning monstrous McMansions, private airliners, expensive toys of every description and dimension, reaching high office if you want to, and getting that superstar super-head and sex-goddess pussy any time you want it.”

  Did Tower actually think power meant … pussy?

  The man really was a moron.

  Real power had nothing to do with sex or paltry possessions.

  * * *

  No, in Putilov’s world, power had nothing to do with greed or lust. In Russia, where the courts and legislatures were inherently, irremediably corrupt and justice was always sold to the highest bidder, you had to have real leverage if you wanted to keep what you thought was yours—let alone acquire more. His was a world of apex predators who threatened those less powerful at every turn. Power meant having everything or nothing—being able to take whatever you wanted from whomever you wanted, including that person’s life. Power meant not only your financial well-being but your physical survival and the destruction of those who opposed you. Without power, great wealth only made its possessor a gravely endangered species, a target with a great big fucking bull’s-eye on the possessor’s back. You not only needed more brains, more balls, more influence—more vlast, as he called it in Russian—than anyone else, you always had to be ready to defend what was yours, ready to hit and hit hard.

  And if necessary, you had to be ready to kill.

  In Putilov’s case that meant the willingness to kill en masse.

  No, mere political leverage and the acquisition of riches had only been his first step. Ultimate power, for Putilov, meant possessing the power of the State. Early on in his career at the KGB, he had realized that state power had to be vested, not in parliaments or in the business community or, heaven forbid, in the electorate but in an utterly ruthless ruler, namely himself. To achieve that end, he had to attack the very structure of the Russian government.

  That opportunity had come not when Yeltsin succeeded Gorbachev, but after Yeltsin left office, drunk, sick and scandal-ridden. By then, Putilov had so enriched and empowered his junta of former KGB bosses, his superwealthy potentates and his coterie of ruthlessly rich mafiosi, he seemed to them a perfect choice for prime minister. Not only had he proven himself to be an effective, competent and talented leader but he had earned the trust of those around him, including many in the journalistic community. “He makes you feel as if he shares your opinions and has your interests at heart” was a common reaction to Putilov.

  That he’d been born to poverty and was “a man of the people” further enhanced his political image.

  He set about creating a personality cult that would one day rival Stalin’s and reduce that of the tsars to absurd obscurity.

  * * *

  Glancing at the wall mirror to his right, he caught his reflection in it. He instantly forgot about Tower and allowed himself a rare arrogant smile.

  God, you’re a handsome devil—short light-blond hair, wicked blue eyes, that sly all-knowing grin. So what if your critics accuse you of narcissism? When you’re as good-looking as you are, boy, you’ve got to flaunt it.

  That was why he released that photo of himself bare-chested on a horse in a rugged wilderness. He wanted the people of the world to see him in all his guts and glory. Of course, his effete, weak-kneed, limp-wristed critics—particularly in the West—mocked him for his imposing and frankly amazing machismo. Those pathetic little creeps were so timid, so cowardly, so light-in-the-loafers they could not bear the sight of a real man—a man who was everything they weren’t.

  Looking away from his reflection, he—suddenly, inescapably, humiliatingly—flashed back to his last conversation with Tower, and once again he was consumed by blind fury. Where did Tower get off lecturing to Putilov about “the uses and abuses of power” and how he and Putilov were so similar and understood each other so completely? Tower had no idea what it had taken to seize power in Russia and become that nation’s dictator. What did that idiot know about Putilov’s life and his almost infinite capacity for inflicting violence and terror on those who opposed him?

  Where did he get off thinking he could lecture Putilov on … anything?

  His hatred of Tower was starting to drive him around the bend—so much so that three nights ago, after one of the man’s ranting phone calls, he decided it was once again time to pay “the krok” a visit. God, that stuff was good. It relaxed him totally, and nothing ever relaxed Putilov. Sure, he knew it was addictive, but he also knew the krok could never conquer him. He’d make sure he never took it except in times of dire emergency. After all, he was Mikhail Ivanovich Putilov. He was an invincible avatar of iron discipline. He couldn’t have gotten to where he was if he hadn’t been.

  He could handle a little desomorphine, and after a half hour on the phone with Tower, he definitely needed it. He had to have something that could put him to sleep. Otherwise, he didn’t think he could take the stress of dealing with the man anymore.
>
  It was quite possible that Tower was driving him insane.

  4

  The total amount of stolen taxpayer dollars residing in secret, numbered, offshore accounts equals over a third of the world’s Gross Global Product.

  —Jules Meredith

  It was dawn when Elena finished her friend’s book.

  Well, she could see why Tower, Waheed, and that prick Putilov were pissed off. The book was a firebomb, and it was due to detonate just when it could hurt those three men the most.

  Scrolling back up through the book, she reread a few of the passages Jules had tagged—only four passages out of hundreds.

  Today eight billionaire oligarchs, six of whom are Americans, hold one-half of the world’s wealth in their hands. These numbers are based on Oxfam, Forbes, the latest Global Wealth Report and studies by the Swiss bank Credit Suisse. President Tower and Russia’s Prime Minister Mikhail Putilov missed the list only because most of their cash hoard is buried in offshore accounts so secretive they have not yet been located. But even their accounts will be penetrated in the near future. The UN and the U.S. Senate bills, if passed, will finally reveal once and for all how much illegal wealth the two men have amassed.

  In fact, Jules Meredith pointed out, the total amount of stolen taxpayer money residing in secret, numbered, offshore accounts equals over one-third of the world’s Gross Global Product.

  Mark Twain called the late 19th century America’s “Gilded Age,” but Twain did not foresee the half of it. Today’s era is, indeed, the ne plus ultra of income inequality. Never in the history of the world have the upper-upper classes sucked so much wealth out of the global economy and pauperized so many people. Nor do they earn their wealth through manufacturing valuable products and creating jobs. They develop scams whereby they make money off money, all the while creating … nothing. Today, the U.S. financial sector vacuums up 50 percent of all non-farm corporate profits. According to recent studies, current trends will produce even more outrageously obscene economic disparities. Just five years from now, if the UN and U.S. Senate Anti-Inequality Expropriation measures aren’t passed, three oligarchs will be worth more than one-half the world’s population.

  And democracy as we used to know it will vanish from the face of the earth.

  Jules had even posted the billionaires’ photos inside her article—then added the likenesses of Tower, Waheed and Putilov for good measure. The caption under those photos read: “A Rogues’ Gallery of the Criminal Rich.” Then she added:

  The country needs a President Theodore Roosevelt. A leader who will break up this nation’s power-grabbing billionaire oligarchy, not a predatory plutocrat like Tower whose best friends are Prince Waheed, a Saudi terrorist fund-raiser, and Mikhail Putilov, the genocidal maniac who is gutting Russia like a Christmas goose.

  Elena continued scrolling up until she hit another tagged passage.

  In the United States, the Oligarch Movement is headed by President J. T. Tower. The heart and soul of that movement are its 200 megadonors. He has organized them into a clandestine, rigorously disciplined political group he has nicknamed his “Killer Elite.” Tightly coordinated at the grassroots level, this group is dedicated to steamrolling its opposition in state and local elections and radically gerrymandering Congressional districts in their favor. Active at the topmost levels of government as well, where it strong-arms legislators with primary threats, it is infinitely more powerful than any U.S. political group in history.

  Its contributing members are a “Who’s Who” of the world’s biggest corporate welfare queens. In other words, they are the beneficiaries of some of the biggest, most outrageous government subsidies, tax breaks and outright patronage in history.

  One example?

  The fossil-fuel energy and financial sectors gobble up over $6 trillion a year in global government subsidies. That corporate graft saps up over 8 percent of the planet’s total GDP—so much that the World Bank has asked specifically to outlaw all such energy subsidies everywhere.

  Another example of the energy industry’s power?

  According to military analysts, the U.S. has expended more blood and treasure protecting Mideast oil for J. T. Tower and his associates Elite than it did fighting the Cold War.

  Then Jules took on Tower’s political organization.

  Furthermore, Tower and his cohorts continually lobby and coerce America’s politicians, pressuring them to weaken the country’s tax and environmental codes. At the state, local and federal level, Tower’s network of 200 billionaire investors—that Killer Elite also known as “Murder, Inc.”—spends more on elections than both parties spent on their entire presidential campaigns a mere eight years earlier … combined. They represent an entirely new epoch in America. Tower and his billionaire brethren are determined to seize power and turn his presidency into the “Age of the Oligarchs.”

  At the industrial level, Tower’s minions bankroll his Killer Elite at the taxpayers’ expense. These magnates write their political donations off their taxes, getting billions of dollars back from the IRS. Under the guise of charitable giving, they are fast transforming the U.S. from a democracy to an economic dictatorship. They perpetrate their pseudophilanthropic tax scams so relentlessly, so prolifically, that Warren Buffett has called their network the “Charitable-Industrial Complex.”

  Tower and his billionaire allies have always been crackpots, but their cracks have widened with age. They care about nothing save their own personal wealth and power. No mere predators, they are velociraptors of avarice, almost Luciferian in their hubris, and the war they wage is not simply on the American people but against Life itself. They are truly the Great American Greed Machine.

  Then Jules went into Tower’s poisoning of America’s air, lakes, rivers, and water table to say nothing of the populace itself.

  Tower kills people en masse the way Putilov kills them with his assassins and al-Waheed does through state-funded terrorism. In fact, Tower probably kills more than both those other men put together. Because of his petrochemical avarice, one-half of the U.S. population lives within ten miles of a toxic waste site. Those who live nearby pay for these plants with both their lives and their tax dollars. Tower murders them with impunity, forcing these victims to eat the medical expenses generated by his cancer-inducing chemical plants, to pay for his decontamination costs when the EPA occasionally forces him to clean up one of his carcinogenic cesspools, which he continually creates, to pick up his IRS bills for him, reducing his tax burden to zero—to less than zero.

  Instead of forcing Tower to pay taxes, the IRS gives him credits and refunds.

  So Tower Enterprises continues to pour toxins into our water, air and earth; and the pipelines that they’re constructing will poison us even more disastrously. Those conduits already leak like sieves. When Canadian oil companies proposed constructing the infamous Keystone Pipeline across the U.S. down to its Gulf ports, no one asked why they didn’t build it across Canada and ship it out of Canada’s Atlantic ports. You know why? The Canadian government and its people had declared that kind of highly destructive, carbon-dense oil too dangerous to pipe on or through Canadian soil. The shale and tar-sand oil are too irreversibly corrosive and the pipelines too easily eroded and perforated. The Canadians know such systems would inevitably burst open and disgorge billions of gallons of highly toxic crude into Canada’s soil and water systems, so Canada rejected the pipeline. Thus, Tower Enterprises proposed piping it across the U.S. Americans are more nonchalant about pipeline breaches and the ruination of America’s aquifers and water table than their Canadian counterparts. So Tower, Inc. finally got the bill passed.

  And now the jury’s in. If Tower’s idol, Putilov, has killed and poisoned people by the thousands, his protégé, Tower, has murdered them by the millions.

  The whole book was one protracted attack on Tower and his coterie of oligarchs. Jules was calling them all out on their thefts and murders and on all the trillions of dollars these men and their pals
had secreted offshore—the very thing the UN Resolution promised to expropriate.

  But those chapters on Tower were only part of the book. The last third of it focused on Putilov. Elena had read it twice and still couldn’t accept its implications. Jules exposed chapter and verse the horrors that Putilov had inflicted on the Russian citizenry—physically, financially and spiritually. Putilov had shattered that country’s body politic in ways Hitler and Stalin never even dreamed of. Jules had concluded in an epilogue that Russia would never recover from Putilov’s crimes against its populace.

  Elena understood now that Adara was not exaggerating when she told her Jules was in serious trouble. Putilov had killed hundreds of reporters for far, far less. Furthermore, Tower and his Killer Elite would also see Jules as a terminal threat. Elena honestly believed that when Jules made those final Putilov chapters public, she would have to go into hiding.

  Yet Jules had told her she planned to take her attacks public in less than a week.

  Adara was right.

  This shit was really going down.

  Elena had to help Jules.

  Reaching for an encrypted burner, she punched in Adara’s number.

  5

  “Don’t burn up that target-picture.”

  —Fahad al-Qadi

  Red Square was filled with a howling crowd of at least 60,000 activists, all shouting “Down with Putilov!” “Fuck Putilov!” and “Give us Kazankov!”

  For the most part, Fahad hid behind the walled roof at the top of the Tower of Ivan the Terrible—ignoring the crowd below—and kept a tiny nonglaring VidCam focused on Borya Kazankov’s reserved spaces along the street nearest the speaker’s stand. He studied those empty parking spaces on his iPad and waited for Kazankov to arrive.

  Finally Kazankov’s caravan of four black SUVs pulled up along that part of the square and parked in their reserved slots. A contingent of eighteen bodyguards climbed out of the four cars—nine more than usual.

  Last but not least, Kazankov piled out of vehicle number three. To Fahad’s horror the man was decked out in army camouflage and full body armor. He even wore an official army head protector.