Holy Shit, Fahad knew that helmet. The SSSh-94 Sfera-S. Inside of it there were sliding titanium plates configured to protect Kazankov’s head as well as dampers to soften the round’s impact on the helmet.
The prick was leaving nothing to chance.
Fahad had planned for such a possibility. He understood that Kazankov was smart—a five-time world chess champion—and he had to know Putilov wanted to kill him. Fahad had been afraid Kazankov might shield his skull.
* * *
One of the many reasons he brought the Dragunov—instead of a newer, fancier sniper rifle—was that the manufacturer machined the receiver for extra-heavy-gauge torsional strength.
And sometimes the op required a stronger, more durable firing chamber.
If his target was wearing bulletproof headgear—which was always a possibility—Fahad had to go for hot-loaded, detonating armor-piercing rounds. Such ammunition was volatile to say the least—almost as dangerous to the shooter as the enemy.
Still he had two of those titanium-jacketed shells—each now in its own padded box—hot-loaded with extra-high explosive. He’d also drilled a hole into each of the slug’s curved sides and loaded these openings, just under their titanium tips, with fulminate of mercury. He’d then filled the rest of the apertures with cylindrical steel plugs that he meticulously shaped and assiduously filed to precisely fit the drilled-out holes.
He’d loaded and tested similar rounds many times in the past and was confident he could penetrate any helmet on the face of the earth with one of these shells. The bullet’s hot load could, of course, destroy the rifle’s firing chamber in the process—maybe the whole fucking breech, which had happened during a couple of his tests—but if he could hit him from 900 yards with a single shot, Kazankov would be a dead man.
Still he honestly hadn’t believed the prick would show up wearing a helmet.
What the fuck? Stranger things had happened to Fahad, and over his two decades as a professional killer and saboteur, he’d learned to anticipate the unexpected.
* * *
Breathing deeply, he refocused the VidCam mounted on the top of the wall. On his iPad screen, he watched Kazankov stand at the podium, grip its edges, and wait for the roaring throng to quiet down.
Slowly the din subsided, and when Fahad saw that all eyes were fixed on Kazankov, the assassin ejected the Dragunov’s magazine, pulled back the cocking hammer and slid a single exploding round into the receiver. Quickly, he stood. Placing a small sandbag on the parapet, Fahad hacked a groove in it with the edge of his hand. He swung the Dragunov down on top of the bag and into the slot.
Taking a deep breath, he allowed two decades of sniper training to take over. He then let the breath out and fixed his eye against the scope. In seconds, the crosshairs converged on the left-hand side of Kazankov’s helmet.
The best look’s your first look. Don’t burn up that target-picture. You have him now—cold zero. Do it.
The big Dragunov jumped in his fists and kicked against his shoulder like a hammer blow. Flames shot out of the breech, half-blinding him, and he slipped back down behind the parapet, unable to see Kazankov and the result of his shot.
Somehow he had the presence of mind to drop the rifle at his feet, pick up his knapsack and race for the far side of the roof. Removing a rappelling line from the pack, he secured it to a nearby fire pump. The friction hitch, which would allow him to pay the rope out with maximal speed and minimal effort, was already attached to the line as was a black nylon climbing harness. Slipping into it, Fahad climbed over the edge of the wall and bounced down the side of the tower in long graceful leaps. He was on the sidewalk and next to his motorcycle in less than fifteen seconds.
Removing the rope and its waist-rig, he mounted his big bike and turned on the engine. He and his friends shot up the street. Each of the three identically dressed motorcycle riders immediately departed down a different street. It wasn’t a foolproof strategy, but it improved the odds that he would escape and proceed to his next assignment.
Fahad further improved those odds by pulling up beside a small VW bug parked next to a Dumpster on the edge of an abandoned warehouse. He slipped out of his leathers and helmet, then threw them into the trash disposal bin. Laying the bike behind the big receptacle, he took a tarp out of the car’s trunk and spread it over the bike.
The VW was fitted with a Porsche engine and would do 160 mph on the straightaways. He had plenty of cash and extra passports. If he could get out of Russia and get through his next series of ops, he’d be finished with Putilov, Raza and Waheed forever and never see any of them again.
Goddamn, he hated them all.
Turning on the ignition, he started up the street.
Suddenly, his burner phone was buzzing like a wasp against his thigh. Only one man had that number. His nemesis.
He took out the phone and put it to his ear.
“What did you load that round with?” Putilov roared. “TNT?”
Fahad did not want to tell him that the hot-loaded powder cartridge had almost blown up in his face. It had detonated so blindingly that he had neither seen nor known what happened.
“Just about,” Fahad said, deliberately noncommittal.
“I’ll say,” Putilov enthused. “You blew his helmet, brains and skull all over the fucking Kremlin.”
“I’m glad you’re satisfied.”
“Satisfied? I’ve never been happier in my life. Goddamn, you’re good. Now finish the rest of it, and you’ll be set for life!”
“Copy that,” Fahad said softly.
Clicking off the phone, he headed toward the Moscow Ring, where he planned to get far away from Russia’s capital and lost in traffic.
6
Danny McMahon had shaken his fist and thundered his name at the Everlasting Dark too many times for too many boisterous, blasphemous, drug-ridden, sexually possessed, obscenity-screaming years. Now the devil was shouting his name back at him and howling for his hide.
McMahon’s mind was a jumble of drug-addled, sex-crazed memories. He recalled being back in his dressing room, smoking dope with a gorgeous Islamic woman. He was teasing her mercilessly, bombarding her with his most derisive anti-Islamic diatribes and one-liners. While he’d fucked her, he’d muttered one taunt repeatedly into her ear.
“Haram!… Haram!… Haram!” he’d grunted, reminding her over and over that her faith explicitly forbade what they were doing.
That zinger particularly enraged her. Had she not been coming so hard, she might have attacked him.
Then McMahon remembered becoming so aroused that he seemed to have been transmuted by his lust—no, transmogrified by it. He was going after her with everything he had, whaling on her not even like a human being but as if he were a banshee from the Underworld, a maniac of the libido, a demon of desire—banging her just as hard as he knew how.
He remembered her screaming more Arabic imprecations, begging Allah to forgive her for all the convulsive, uncontrollable, mind-blowing never-ending orgasms he was inflicting on her, sobbing, ululating, baying like a hydrophobic bitch-wolf deranged by moon-mad suffering. Every time she climaxed, her entire body, soul, astral being detonated deliriously, inspiring McMahon to go after her even harder, more furiously, until all he could remember was her howling hysterically amid her erotic eruptions even as he himself laughed raucously, uproariously, enraptured and enthralled by her agonizing ecstasy even as his own orgasms exploded out of him into soaring-roaring-horrifying madness.
But then at the height of his demented dreams and furious fever-fucking, his vision started to blur, and his voice began to slur.
Too late he realized she’d given him a drugged joint—and maybe drugged champagne as well.
“In my country, we are experts in fine herbs, Mr. McMahon,” the woman had explained earlier. “Hashish is derived from the Arabic word Hashashiyyin, meaning ‘hashish-eating assassin.’ In this case, however, this herb will only assassinate your mind.”
He
also vaguely recollected three men in dark well-cut suits and sunglasses entering his hotel room, gagging and blindfolding him. Securing his drug-heavy sluggish wrists behind his back with zip ties, they lashed together his ankles and knees, then stuffed him into a black, hugely outsized seaman’s bag. Hanging the bag out the hotel window, they lowered him down on a rope to where some men waited in the alley below. From inside the bag, he felt himself being hustled into a van.
Then he knew no more until he came to. Still in the bag, his guards told him he was in a Saudi State Department jet. Bound, blindfolded and gagged, when he next came to, he found himself slumped over in front of a shipping container in the jet’s baggage compartment.
A big ugly bear of a contractor, still dressed in a black business suit, removed the blindfold and said to him just as he shoved him through the shipping container door:
“Mr. McMahon, the next stop is Pakistan, so enjoy the flight.”
“Yeah,” another dark-suited handler said, “you’re headed toward the worst place on earth. I wouldn’t want to be you.”
“You know,” the other man said, “if you weren’t such a miserable Muslim-hating infidel sonofabitch, I’d almost feel sorry for you.”
“Almost,” the other man said.
The two men both laughed, then slammed and locked the shipping container door.
His head throbbed. He felt dehydrated, and his joints ached from his restraints. Still he couldn’t believe this was happening to him. Only gradually was he able to accept that he was in a dark, soundproofed steel box. Then slowly, surely, the utter horror of his situation began to sink in. This was no nightmare from which he’d awaken, frightened but relieved. No, he was in for his issue of big-time trouble. Danny McMahon had shaken his fist and thundered his name at the Everlasting Dark too many times for too many boisterous, blasphemous, drug-ridden, sexually possessed, obscenity-screaming years. Now the devil was shouting his name back at him and howling for his hide.
His deal was going down.
The vultures were coming home to roost.
This was all the trouble, he, Daniel James McMahon, had spent his life searching for.
Danny, you are finally, terminally, hopelessly … fucked.
7
“It didn’t matter whether we called it ‘supply-side finance’ or ‘trickle-down economics,’ it always came down to the same thing, what David Stockwell called ‘a Trojan Horse for upper-bracket tax cuts.’ None of it ever reached the Great Unwashed. So why didn’t they rise up before? They have to know it’s never worked, at least for them.”
—Brenda Tower
Later that night, Brenda sat up with her brother in his big New York penthouse overlooking New York, Long Island, Staten Island and New Jersey.
“Hey little brother, I see you’ve been wobbling a bit on immigration—on whether birth in the U.S. should guarantee babies citizenship. At least, when it comes to Russian babies, you’re wobbling. You now say that it should?”
“You think I’ve turned softhearted in my old age?” He treated her to a smug smirk.
“No, I think you did the math.”
“And which math was that?” he asked.
“The math that counts all the money you’re making off your Russian birth-tourism business.”
Tower allowed her another small smile of mean merriment. “We have made a few bucks off those Russian rug rats, haven’t we?”
“A few bucks? Your tycoon buddies over there crank out hundreds of thousands of dollars every time they send one of their pregnant wives or mistresses to Miami. They pay us to put them up in our ultra-luxurious apartment complexes for three months or so. Their women-friends then drop their obnoxious tots here in the States. The mamas get to claim U.S. citizenship for the drooling, puking tykes, who, at the same time, keep their Russian citizenship. When the little ankle-biters turn twenty-one, their mega-rich parents can then apply for green cards under your ‘family unification program,’ all of it done through the good offices of J. T. Tower’s lavish high-rises and your pals in the birth-tourism business.”
“So I’m an astute but softhearted entrepreneur.”
“One who also campaigned on the promise to send all those Mexican babies born in the U.S. back across the border, kicking and bawling and screaming.”
“So?”
“Isn’t that a little … inconsistent?”
“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
Brenda stared at him, shaking her head. “Do you have any idea at all who said that?”
“I did.”
“Ever heard of Ralph Waldo Emerson?”
“He claims he said that?”
“He did say it.”
“Then he can also suck my dick while he’s saying it.”
Brenda stared at him in frank astonishment. “Oh, my poor little brother,” she finally said. “No one understands you, do they?”
“Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, understood me,” Tower said to his sister, suddenly serious. “They knew that if they had sent the FBI after me and after Wall Street’s top VPs in 2008, we’d have paid them back by crashing the global credit markets. We’d have eviscerated the international economy and bled it out like a butchered hog. We’d have flooded the streets with red ink and blood. We’d have proved once and for all who was really running things and that we were not only too big to fail, we were too big to jail.”
Brenda stared at her brother a long hard minute, then sighed.
“Jimmy, why do we talk about money and power, violence and slaughter so much?” Brenda asked her brother. “Why don’t we talk about something else?”
“You’re not interested in my sex life,” Tower said.
“What about love?” Brenda asked. “I’m told it makes the world go ’round.”
“But filthy lucre oils the wheels.”
“Is it possible that under all our cynicism and hardness that we’ve missed out on something?” Brenda asked. “I’m told it’s okay to show the soft, sensitive side of our personalities to those whom we care about. Do you really think it’s okay to love?”
Tower snorted with derision.
“You’ve never known love?” Brenda asked him.
“Oh, I get it. You think I’ve grown a paper asshole.”
“You don’t even believe love exists, do you?”
“Nada—only bills come due.”
“Then, to you, collections are everything?”
“The only thing,” Tower said. “Collecting what’s yours is life’s single-most important skill.”
“The Jim Tower I know wants to collect not only what’s his but half of everyone else’s.”
“You mean all of everyone else’s.”
“So love is just a promissory note.”
“A quid pro quo,” Tower said. “Nothing more.”
“Like eye for an eye?”
“Fuck with me, it’s a head for an eye.”
“The poets say,” Brenda said, “that love is a gift—one freely given and freely received.”
“Nothing is free,” Tower said, leaning toward her for emphasis. “Everything’s bought and paid for.”
“You talk like you hate love,” Brenda said.
“How can I hate something that doesn’t exist? What you call love’s a snare, a scam, a fucking lie—pure and simple.”
“How is it a lie if people believe it in their hearts, their souls, their minds?” Brenda asked.
“Because those people are liars,” Tower said with a scathing sneer. “They begin by lying about love to themselves, then lying about it to each other, and then they end up lying about it to everyone else.”
“Is making love to someone you care about also a lie?” Brenda asked.
“Sexual love might begin as a big, happy fun-fuck, but it always ends as a huge, ugly … hate-fest.”
“Does heaven—or hell—ever enter into your calculations?”
“I want both,” her brother said.
“And w
hat makes you think you’d like either?” Brenda asked.
“I want to visit heaven so I can see if peace, serenity and dreamful ease really exist.”
“If they do, why would you want to go to hell?”
“For the nightlife,” Tower said.
“You are your father’s son.”
“That I am, sis. That I am.”
Tower looked away, strangely silent, distracted. Brenda could read his moods and saw he was morose.
“So what’s wrong?”
“I don’t understand any of it anymore.”
“You mean why the people want to ransack our offshore bank accounts?” Brenda asked.
“That’s not it,” Tower said. “I understand why they want to close the inequality gap. From their point of view, it makes perfect sense. I’d try to shrink the wealth gap too if I were in their shoes. What I can’t figure out is why the public has supported me for so long. They had to know I was going to rob them blind.”
“We ripped off most of them,” Brenda had to admit.
“Yes,” Tower said, “and they willingly, adoringly gave their money to us and our friends.”
“It didn’t matter,” Brenda said, “whether we called it ‘supply-side finance’ or ‘trickle-down economics,’ it always came down to the same thing, what David Stockwell called ‘a Trojan Horse for upper-bracket tax cuts.’ None of it ever reached the Great Unwashed. So why didn’t they rise up before? They have to know it’s never worked, at least for them.”
“I understand why their representatives back us,” Tower said. “We give money to them—to a lot of politicians to get them elected—and they fill our coffers many times over. Afterward, we all laugh on the way to the bank. But what about the ordinary people—the good, strong, hardworking men and women, in particular—who support us so slavishly? They have to know we’re going to loot then piecemeal, and if we had our way, we’d take everything they had.”
“Especially their Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid,” Brenda said, nodding.
The Evil That Men Do Page 10
