The Evil That Men Do

by Robert Gleason

  Like a land of dreams.

  The living room furniture was surprisingly simple—blond leather and blond wood. The large circular dining table was thick glass mounted on a chrome stand. The chairs were chrome with cream-colored leather seats and backs. The bar area and stools were also glass, chrome and leather.

  Jules followed Tower into the living room. He motioned her toward an overstuffed leather chair, and he took the couch. A burnished oak end table sat between them. On it was a bottle of 100-year-old Rémy Martin Napoléon—his sister’s favorite.

  “I can get you anything else you want,” Tower said, pouring a snifter.

  “The Rémy is fine.”

  He poured three inches of cognac into each of two snifters and handed the first to Jules. She waited for Tower to take a healthy drink. She did not intend to partake of any bottle Tower did not sample first.

  “I thought you never drank,” Jules said.

  “As a rule, I don’t,” Tower said, “but it seemed rude to suggest that you drink alone.”

  “Then a toast?” Jules asked.

  “To the bitter end,” he offered.

  “That toast means you want us to do some serious drinking?”

  “In vino veritas,” Tower said, “and I want to find out what you really want from me and why.”

  “And you think liquor will loosen my tongue?” Jules asked.

  “I’d prefer shooting you with scopolamine and sodium pentothal,” Tower said, “but the law frowns on such techniques.”

  “You could always spirit me off to Guantanamo for physical coercion.”

  “Don’t I wish.”

  “So liquor will have to do?”

  “Liquor will have to do.”

  “And you know I won’t get drunk if you don’t join in.”

  “Yes,” Tower said. “I expect you’ll find the opportunity to loosen my tongue with liquor irresistible, and I plan on drinking you under the table.”

  “Let the games begin,” Jules said.

  She watched him drink off a good two inches of brandy.

  She then decided the liquor wasn’t drugged and took a drink herself.

  2

  “Don’t give an inch. Don’t whine or snivel. Laugh at them if you can. Make fun of them. Try to get them talking. Flirt with Raza. If Marika Madiha shows up, flirt with her too. Those women are vain about their looks, and they love the sound of their own voices. The more you can get those women to talk, the less time they’ll have to torture you, and believe me, those maniacs love to do both. But don’t ever whimper or beg. If they think you’re starting to crack, they’ll become rabid. Fear acts on them like catnip on cats. They sense it in you, and they’ll hit you with everything—blowtorches, pliers, metal shears, hammers and nails.”

  —Rashid al-Rahman to Danny McMahon

  When McMahon came to, he was in a small dark storage room lashed to a wooden bed frame. Moonlight filtered in through a high narrow window, and he could see he had a companion similarly secured to a second frame. The man was naked like himself, but his body was covered with long-forgotten knife and bullet scars as well as fresh burns and whip marks, all of the new ones a bright red.

  “I’m in hell,” McMahon whispered to his cell mate.

  “No, just Pakistan,” the man said.

  “What’s your name?” McMahon asked.

  “Rashid.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “They’re interrogating me,” Rashid said.

  “What for?” McMahon asked.

  “They want stuff I know.”

  “Okay, but what do they want from me? I don’t know anything that could help them destroy the Infidel. I’m a comedian—a talk-show host.”

  “Yeah, I recognize you: Danny McMahon, the controversial American comic and political satirist. You’re infamous in the Mideast for being one of Islam’s most virulent critics.”

  “I have devoted fans everywhere,” McMahon said dryly.

  “Except the fans here would like to fry your balls for breakfast in a little garlic and olive oil,” Rashid said.

  “But I don’t mock and ridicule ordinary Muslims, only Islamist terrorists.”

  ”Unfortunately, the people holding you here are … Islamist terrorists.”

  “Okay, but I still don’t understand why they abducted me,” McMahon said. “I can’t do anything for them. They didn’t do it because they don’t like my show, did they?”

  “Oh, I get it: You want logic and reason from … genocidal monsters,” Rashid said.

  “Good point,” McMahon said softly.

  “On the other hand, you are a high-value target that will bring them a lot of publicity—maybe even a ton of ransom money.”

  “If that’s the case, then they’d want to keep me healthy. They won’t want to hurt me, right?”

  “Were they only so rational. McMahon, you and I are both in for a whole world of hurt. We have Raza Jabarti and Tariq al-Omari handling our interrogations. They won’t rest till we’re begging them to kill us.”

  “Even if I don’t know anything? Even if I‘ve got nothing to tell them?”

  “You think your stupid ignorance will stop them from torturing you?” Rashid actually burst into laughter.

  “You’re saying they’d torture me for no reason at all?”

  “Is ice cold? Fire hot? Does camel shit stink?”

  “So you’re saying these people are sadistic psychopaths?”

  “That’s their good side.”

  “What’s their bad side?”

  “Nuking cities off the face of the earth.”

  “You’ve dealt with these people before?”

  “I’ve worked with them, been around them my whole life long. I know everything about them.”

  “You speak awfully good English though,” McMahon said.

  “I spent a lot of time in the States, and I’ve freelanced for a lot of your defense and intelligence contractors—even the Agency.”

  “Any advice?”

  Rashid turned his head and stared at McMahon, suddenly serious. “Don’t give an inch. Don’t whine or snivel. Laugh at them if you can. Make fun of them. Try to get them talking. Flirt with Raza. If Marika Madiha shows up, flirt with her too. Those women are vain about their looks, and they love the sound of their own voices. The more you can get those women to talk, the less time they’ll have to torture you, and believe me, those maniacs love to do both. But don’t ever whimper or beg. If they think you’re starting to crack, they’ll become rabid. Fear acts on them like catnip on cats. They sense it in you, and they’ll hit you with everything—blowtorches, pliers, metal shears, hammers and nails.”

  “Never show the feather?”

  “McMahon,” Rashid said as earnestly as he knew how, “you’re going to have to be all balls—no weakness whatsoever.”

  “But our situation seems so … hopeless.”

  “An hour ago, I’d have said yes. Now I don’t know. You’re famous and powerful. You’ve have connections. There are people in the States who care for you and want you back. Washington might try to rescue you. I personally see abducting you as a mistake. I don’t know why they did it.”

  “There must be someone who wants to rescue you or would pay a ransom to get you back,” McMahon said.

  Rashid’s laughter was painful to McMahon’s ear. “Most of the people I know would pay these guys to torture and kill me.”

  “What about your friends? Won’t they help?”

  “Those people are my friends.”

  “You have no one?” McMahon asked in stunned disbelief.

  “One person, and she’s working on something,” Rashid said. “She’ll help if she can.”

  “Rashid, if anyone comes for me, I’m not leaving without you.”

  “Your people will want me. I know stuff the U.S. needs to know. Your country’s survival is at stake.”

  “But in the meantime you and I are in for it, aren’t we?”

  “You better believe i
t,” Rashid said. “Just don’t crawl. Stand up to them. It’s your only chance.”

  3

  “In my doxology, there is no Higher Power, only the quick and the dead.”

  —President J. T. Tower to Jules Meredith

  “So what have you been up to?” Jules asked, sipping her Napoléon brandy.

  “Besides scaling the Eiger and bow-hunting rhinos?” Tower asked.

  “I thought chasing orphans across ice floes was more your style.”

  “I only do that in my spare time,” Tower said.

  “What do you do full-time?”

  “Plot the downfall of Western civilization.”

  “And you’re doing a bang-up job.”

  “So what’s happening in Jules World?”

  “You’re happening, J. T.” She gave him an infectious smile. “May I call you J. T.?”

  “Of course—even though you don’t feel that friendly toward me.”

  “You could tell?”

  “You do have me in your crosshairs.”

  “Oh, do I ever—cold zero, dead center.”

  “Then it’s lock and load?”

  “Cocked and locked,” Jules said.

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Tower asked. “What would I have to do to convince you I was really all right?”

  “Stop hurting people,” Jules said. “Make the world a better place.”

  “There’s not much money in that.”

  “Does everything have to have a price tag on it?” Jules asked.

  “In Jim World it does.”

  “But you’re already rich.”

  “No one can ever be rich enough.”

  “And what would you hope to get out of more money?”

  “Anything and everything.”

  “In other words, in Jim World you get to play God.”

  “In Jim World, I am God.”

  “And the master of all you survey?”

  “Not everything,” he said, leaning toward her. “I’ve never mastered you.”

  “And never will, Jimmy.”

  “I’d like to change that.”

  “Say what?” Her face was suddenly filled with shocked skepticism.

  “There has to be something I could do to improve your attitude toward me.”

  “Cure cancer. End poverty. Outlaw war.”

  “Isn’t what I’ve already done enough?”

  “What is it you’ve done with your life anyway?” Jules asked. “I’d really like to know.”

  “I created an empire out of nothing but my blood, brains, balls and my two bare hands.”

  Her laughter was loud and harsh. “J. T., I know all about your business career. Your father was a filthy-rich war criminal, and he started you out with $90 million of his ill-gotten gains.”

  “And I parlayed it into billions.”

  “Had you put it all into a Class-A New York City real estate fund fifty years ago, you’d have become ten times richer than you are now.”

  Jules knew those words would drive him nuts.

  “I worked like a sonofabitch for everything I got,” Tower said, his voice menacingly soft.

  “I’ll grant you’re a sonofabitch, J. T.,” Jules said, leaning toward him, giving Tower her brightest, most radiant smile, “and that you ran six of your largest businesses into the ground and put them into bankruptcy afterward. But tell me: Do you ever think about the contractors, suppliers and employees whose lives you destroyed while you deliberately eviscerated those enterprises?”

  “Those people knew the deal when they signed up for it,” Tower said.

  “And what deal was that?” Jules said with a mocking smile. “Kill or be killed? Eat or be eaten?”

  “Maybe you think the world’s some fucking rose garden,” Tower said, “but it’s not. It’s war to the knife, and I don’t apologize for not laying down and letting it cut me to ribbons.”

  “Well then, what about that ‘great big beautiful wall’ you were going to build along our 1,500-mile Mexican border—the one Mexico was going to pay for? That was your number one campaign promise, but you couldn’t even get your own Congress to go along with it—and your party dominated Congress. When they found out you needed $30 billion and three times the concrete that went into Hoover Dam, they told you to take the concrete and pour it up your butthole.”

  “They’re mean-spirited, small-minded little men,” Tower said, “with no vision.”

  “Or maybe they understood walls aren’t the answer,” Jules said.

  “You know a better way to seal off our border?” Tower asked.

  “Isaac Newton said we needed bridges not more walls,” Jules said.

  “Isaac Newton’s been dead for 400 years,” Tower said. “When I want advice, I’ll ask someone who’s still alive and understands what I’m up against.”

  “So much for Homer, Plato and Shakespeare,” Jules said.

  “Homer, Plato, Shakespeare and, yes, Newton, can suck my dick,” Tower said.

  “What about selling forty nuclear power plants to the Saudis and their neighbors? Your customers are the very people who bankrolled al Qaeda and ISIS, and those nuclear plants you’re selling them are nothing less than starter kits for a nuclear weapons program. Once a nation has nuclear power they are 99 percent of the way toward building a bomb. Everything else is a low-tech, relatively simple operation.”

  “Hey, Eisenhower sold Iran and Pakistan their first reactors, and the Saudis bankrolled Pakistan’s purchase. Why can’t Jimbo and his friends get some of that M-O-N-E-Y?”

  Shaking her head, Jules stared at him a long minute.

  “Does honor have a place in your world?” she finally asked. “What about simple decency? Basic morality?”

  “What’s that got to do with Jimbo’s bottom line?”

  “So there is no right or wrong in Jim World,” Jules said, “no categorical imperatives?”

  “In my doxology, there is no Higher Power,” the president said, “only the quick and the dead.”

  “And all that counts is that you’re not the latter?” Jules asked.

  “There are only two choices in this hard life,” Tower said, now leaning toward Meredith, invading her space, staring at her fixedly. “Are you going to be the one on your knees, giving all those long, slow blowjobs—or the one getting them? What’s it going to be, Jules?”

  “That’s the Fallacy of the False Choice, Jim Baby,” Jules said. “Life is never black or white, either/or. And none of us ever gets it all.”

  “You mean we all fall down?”

  “As Dylan says, ‘we all serve somebody,’” Jules said.

  “Then can I serve you?” He lifted the bottle and refilled both their glasses.

  Jules paused to study J. T. He was pouring with a heavy hand. She had been told he never drank, but because she was a woman with less than half his body mass, he thought he could match her drink for drink and get her drunk.

  That was a mistake.

  No one had ever succeeded in matching Jules Meredith drink for drink—and stayed on their feet.

  Tower had no idea what he was getting into.

  PART VII

  “Please, Mr. McMahon, do not understand me too quickly.”

  —Raza Jabarti

  1

  Over his two decades of service in the Mideast—including the Iraq War, followed by the Iraqi and Syrian civil wars—Fahad had not exactly grown used to violence. The truth was that violence had never particularly fazed him. His first assigned killing hadn’t bothered him in the least, and professionals generally considered the first to be the most disturbing.

  Fahad al-Qadi got off the plane at JFK and met his driver, Haddad al-Naqbi, at baggage claim. Both men wore black suits, white shirts, dark ties and sunglasses, but the resemblance ended there. The chauffeur wore a cheap, off-the-rack suit and a discount-store white shirt. A fake street-vendor Rolex adorned his wrist. Fahad’s suit, on the other hand, was a Desmond Merrion bespoke custom-tailored for him in Dubai. A w
hite silk D’Avino shirt and a Stefano Ricci tie of sheerest scarlet silk went with it. His Rolex platinum Submariner was studded with diamonds and rubies. Dita Grandmaster designer sunglasses completed the ensemble.

  Most professional assassins sought anonymity. Fahad desired it as well. His problem was that as a dark-skinned Muslim male—especially one who had spent much of his life on utterly illegal missions, traveling through airports—he was subject to racial profiling, which could easily lead to search and seizure. Even worse, Interpol had his fingerprints, and he might very well be a suspect in those recent Moscow murders. After all, he’d done them.

  Fahad had learned decades ago, however, that when he was expensively dressed, law enforcement officers tended to give him a pass, no doubt on the assumption that professional terrorists wouldn’t dress like billionaire celebrities. Nor did they wish to provoke the ire of a man who appeared to be both wealthy and powerful. Also because of his expensive attire, people seldom looked at his face. They either glanced furtively at his wardrobe and accoutrements or gawked openly at them. They remembered the costly clothes, not the man’s face.

  And he liked haute couture.

  As for facial anonymity, his ubiquitous sunglasses—combined with an ever-changing variety of haircuts, hair coloring and tinted contact lenses—further reduced the likelihood of facial identification.

  The driver, Haddad, led him through the automatic glass doors, and Fahad followed him into the parking lot to the black Lincoln Town Car. He climbed in the backseat, taking his black Gucci shoulder bag with him.

  “Is everything arranged?” Fahad asked.

  “In the trunk, sir, and at the house.”

  “Excellent.”

  “Rush hour doesn’t start for another hour, so we should make good time,” the driver said.

  Fahad sat back, loosened his tie and pondered his assignment. Over his two decades of service in the Mideast—including the Iraq War, followed by the Iraqi and Syrian civil wars—Fahad had not exactly grown used to violence. The truth was that violence had never particularly fazed him. His first assigned killing hadn’t bothered him in the least, and professionals generally considered the first to be the most disturbing.