“That, and you have a fully charged cattle prod in your right hand,” McMahon admitted.
“And a riding crop in my left,” Raza said.
“Look, I give up,” McMahon said. “Just tell me what you want me to say or do. I’ll say or do anything you want.”
“Who says we want you to say or do anything, Mr. McMahon?” Raza asked.
“Then why am I here?”
“I thought you knew,” Marika said.
She relieved Raza of the riding crop, bent it in a perfect parabola and let it snap straight. It thrummed like a vibrating arrow in a target.
Marika then brought it down across his bare ass so hard it cracked like a rifle shot.
His eyes teared and all the breath whooshed out of his body. The pain was as intense as anything he’d experienced.
“Jesus, that smarts,” Danny McMahon finally managed to say, struggling to blink back reflexive tears and catch his breath.
“As well it should, Mr. McMahon,” Marika said.
“But … why?” McMahon asked, starting to lose it.
“Because we’re trained professionals,” Raza said.
McMahon’s eyes rolled back.
“I mean why are you doing this?” he asked.
“Believe it or not, we’re trying to get to know you,” Marika said.
“As you say in the West, Mr. McMahon, we’re just trying to ‘relate,’” Raza said.
“We want you to finally understand us, our people, Islam,” Marika said.
“Are the riding crop and the cattle prod part of my education?” McMahon asked.
“They are indispensable to it,” Raza said.
“Do I have a choice in my curriculum?”
“Better us than the alternative,” Marika said.
“Tariq?” McMahon asked.
“He doesn’t like you,” Raza whispered in his ear.
“He doesn’t know me.”
“Then he’d hate you,” Marika said.
“I don’t like me much myself,” McMahon confessed glumly. “Why should anyone else?”
“But more to the point,” Raza said, “do the words ‘steer,’ ‘capon’ and ‘gelding’ mean anything to you?”
“What do you want from me?” McMahon was becoming hysterical. “I said I’ll do anything.”
“Will you convert to the One True Faith?” Raza asked.
“Now you’re laughing at me,” McMahon said.
“Never,” Raza said.
Her cell phone buzzed and she answered it.
“We have a friend who wants to meet you.”
Kamal ad-Din appeared live on the monitor of a laptop computer. Raza quickly streamed the video transmission onto the 52-inch flat-screen wall monitor. Kamal was in a white robe, his gargantuan bulk taking up most of the vast circular bed on which he was sprawled. Three scantily clad prepubescent girls clung to his arms and legs. Their facial expressions seemed dazed, empty, opaque.
3
“What you did in the dark is coming to light.”
—Jules Meredith on President J. T. Tower
Tower stared at Jules Meredith in silence while she studied the extraordinary eastern view of New York from the needle tower penthouse he called home.
“I asked you,” Jules said, turning back to him, “what you thought of your ex-wife’s allegations of physical battery and violently coerced sex.”
“A tsunami of lies, which you and your fake-news commentators created out of your own sick minds.”
“Facts aren’t lies, and everything I charged you with is supported by hard verifiable evidence.”
“You mean by smoke-and-mirrors gossip,” President Tower said.
“Your divorce transcripts and your ex-wives’ signed sworn depositions weren’t smoke and mirrors. According to your first wife’s divorce deposition, you raped her and ripped hair out of her head by the handfuls.”
“Pure conjecture,” Tower said, his eyes glazing over with alcohol.
“No more,” Jules said. “What you did in the dark is coming to light.”
“And every one of those fabrications came with a price tag on it,” Tower said, “a bill from some bimbo looking to profit off my fortune, name and fame.”
“Are you saying women only want you for your money?” Jules asked, baiting him.
“Especially you,” Tower said, his chin drooping drunkenly. “You’re making a shithouse full of money off me, pillorying me in the yellow press and parlaying those lies into seven-figure book contracts. You called me the ‘Barbaric Billionaire.’ All your stories came replete with banner headlines about tempestuous affairs, violence visited on girlfriends and wives, sometimes in the marriage bed.”
“I documented all of it,” Jules said.
“It wasn’t my fault,” Tower said, now slurring his words badly. “A good marriage counselor would have made all the difference in the world.”
“Counseling wouldn’t have worked,” Jules said.
“What would have?” Tower asked, now very inebriated.
“Electroconvulsive therapy? A prefrontal lobotomy?”
“You’re being cruel,” Tower said, shaking his head. “A good counselor would have saved those marriages.”
“Tower,” Jules said, staring at him, incredulous, “you never needed a marriage counseler or even a shrink.”
“What did I need?” he said, now barely able to hold his head up.
“An exorcist.”
4
Instead Elena had dragged Jamie back into another Agency-fucked mission.
John C. “Jamie” Jameson lay in bed next to Elena but could not sleep. The room was pitch-dark, but still he stared at the ceiling, which he could barely make out.
Why the fuck was he going along with this shit?
The answer to that one was simple: Elena. She was going back to Pakistan again, and he couldn’t let her go there on her own. He just couldn’t. He didn’t know how to turn his back on her even when walking away was obviously the smart move. It now seemed as if they’d been together forever, born joined at the hip, and he couldn’t abandon her.
But he also knew that made no sense. He was a free man with free will. He did not have to walk into a buzz saw just because Elena was doing it.
So why are you doing it?
And where had it all started?
* * *
He knew where it had started—when he had met Elena in Pakistan. He had run some missions for the Agency, and she’d been his control. He’d even rescued her once from a Pakistani hellhole, after the TTP had abducted her.
They’d hit it off, one thing led to another, and they’d become lovers.
While in Pakistan, Elena had worked closely with the NSA to locate targets and enemy emplacements. She had introduced him to the NSA’s world of cyberwarfare, showed him how it worked, and it turned out he had an instinctive affinity for it, a true gift for understanding and for maneuvering in that realm.
He was already putting in his fifth tour in Afghanistan, and when he came home, he was burned out on the whole Mideast. Resigning his marine corps commission, he took a job with a cyber-defense firm, and before long he was personally designing cybersecurity systems for them. His systems were astonishingly successful, and demand for them was heavy, globally. Elena had encouraged him to set up his own shop. She was still working for the Agency—still running the Pakistan desk—and had set him up with some top Agency and NSA people, who hired him to set up systems for them. Soon clients from around the world were beating down his doors. Three of the systems he created revolutionized cybersecurity globally, and he held the patents on them.
In six years he was a billionaire, his firm designing and installing cybersecurity systems for half the countries on earth, particularly for their military and intelligence agencies as well as for the world’s top transnational corporations.
Then he and Elena had stumbled onto a TTP plot to nuke D.C., and in their attempts to hunt down the terrorists, they, the hunters, had beco
me the hunted. A corrupt White House and CIA Director had even issued shoot-to-kill orders on Elena, Jules, and himself.
They had eventually survived the attempts on their lives—in part by fleeing to Sweden—and they were eventually cleared of all wrongdoing; still all three of them had sworn never to return to the U.S. But now they had broken that vow, were heading home, and, boy, was he ever sorry. He’d made his fortune, and had wanted to kick back and enjoy it—and maybe find out if this life had any true serenity in it, any real happiness.
Instead Elena had dragged Jamie back into another Agency-fucked mission.
* * *
God, was he pissed.
Why the fuck couldn’t he just tell her no? he asked himself.
Because there’s no way you can stop her, and if you walked away and she got hurt, you’d never forgive yourself.
Because you love her more than life itself.
And so Jamie lay there, furious at himself, but not knowing what else to do. Staring at the dark, unseeable ceiling, he was still unable to sleep.
He waited for the gray of predawn to lighten the windows.
5
“Don’t thank me till it’s over.”
—Fahad al-Qadi
Fahad’s driver pulled the Lincoln Town Car into the garage of the filthy four-story, formerly white truck stop. It had been a truck stop up until a couple of years ago. Now it was essentially a big, dirty building that hadn’t seen a coat of whitewash or paint in thirty years.
He got out of the car and entered the front door.
On the first floor was the machine shop, which was why the driver had taken a one-year lease out on it for Fahad. Haddad had also leased a dual-beam laser welder that could penetrate far deeper into ultrahard metals—such as titanium—as well as several other metal-cutting machines and other assorted pieces of machine shop equipment.
In Fahad’s case, he had needed a custom-built, specially designed dual-beam laser that was capable of welding the two tamps into the ends of an old Civil War howitzer barrel. Fahad had bought the cannon from the estate of an old collector and had had it recommissioned. It was ready to go.
Two men dressed in white machinist’s overalls walked up to Fahad. One wore a short beard, the other needed a shave and had a thick black mustache. Fahad shook both their hands. They were here to assist him in constructing the nuke.
“We’ve been cleaning up the shop,” Mukhtar, the bearded man, said. “The owners had been unable to sell the place, so it hadn’t been touched or taken care of for the last few years.”
“We must have killed a hundred rats,” Ramzi said. “A week ago, we brought in a couple of cats to help us. Now the rats are either dead, or the cats scared the bastards off.”
“Excellent,” Fahad asked, “and the dual-beam laser welder has arrived?”
“It’s here,” Mukhtar said, “ready and waiting.”
“The howitzer barrel?” Fahad asked.
“It’s under the tarp,” Ramzi said.
“We have a forklift that can handle up to ten tons, and the shop has a hydraulic lift off to the side,” Mukhtar said. “We’ll have no difficulty machining the howitzer.”
“And the medical supplies?” Fahad asked.
“They’re all here—ready for you,” Ramzi said. “We put the drugs in the mini-fridge in the corner.”
“Great,” Fahad said. “But now I’m going to have to take off for several days, and while I’m gone, I want you guys to thread the interior of the two ends of the howitzer barrel so that its grooves will match those of the two tamps. When I get back, we’ll screw each of them in, then I’ll weld the tamps tight.”
“Will the weapon be powerful enough to do the job?” Ramzi asked.
“We only need one kiloton max,” Fahad said. “The bomb will work fine.”
“Ta-Barruk-Allah,” Mukhtar said. Praise be to Allah, our protector. “We have waited for this moment all our lives.”
“Thank you so much for allowing us to be part of your operation,” Mukhtar said.
“Don’t thank me till it’s over,” Fahad said. “We still have a lot to do. You can call me on one of my encrypted burner phones if you need anything. Remember to smash it afterward and scatter its pieces in the Hudson if you have to use it. You know not to say anything stupid that will expose what we’re doing, right?”
“Of course,” Mukhtar said.
“Then we’re straight,” Fahad said. “Haddad and I will spend the night here. First thing in the morning, we’ll take off.”
“I understand this will be hard,” Ramzi said, “but I’m still grateful we’ve been granted a chance to retaliate against the Great Satan for what he has done to Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.”
“At last, we have the chance to hit his homeland—and to hit it hard,” Mukhtar said.
“That is true,” Fahad said. “I’ll give you that. We will hit the Great Satan in a way the American people and the world never imagined possible—not in their darkest, wildest nightmares.”
“Ta-Barruk-Allah,” Mukhtar repeated.
“But in the meantime, I have some supplies to purchase,” Fahad said. “I’ll see you back here in a few hours and take off at first light.”
6
“We’re the makers and shakers, not the losers and the moochers. Those Great Unwashed Assholes, otherwise known as the American People, should be paying taxes to us, not Uncle Sam.”
—President J. T. Tower
Jules sat in Tower’s penthouse, studying the southeastern view of the UN, the East River and Brooklyn.
“Give me a hint of what’s in your new book?” Tower asked.
“I discuss at length your penchant for prevarication,” Jules said. “The Washington Post and New York Times have now tabulated your total number of lies, since entering politics, as numbering over several thousand. The Wall Street Journal—hardly a bastion of left-wing political discourse—has complained on its editorial pages that you have set the political truth bar so low that now half the country no longer believes anything politicians say or what they read or hear in the news.”
“I like to think of myself as being ‘clearer than the truth,’” Tower said with a self-satisfied smirk. “What else do you say about me?”
“Among other things, I describe at length how your father got his start building weapons factories for Hitler and Stalin and that you admire him for it.”
“As did George W. Bush’s granddad and many other good patriotic American businessmen along with him,” Tower said. “So what? They each made a fortune, and, yes, I admire both of them for doing it.”
“But your father was a petrochemical-munitions manufacturer, who helped Hitler and Stalin build up their arms industries—specifically teaching them how to refine high-octane aviation fuel for their armies and air forces. You profiteer off the Saudis. They are the chief financiers of Islamist terrorism in the world today, yet you have offered to build forty nuclear power plants for them and their Arab neighbors. Doesn’t a willingness and even a desire to profit off mass-murdering despots indicate a certain lack of moral character?”
“Hell, no,” Tower said, but his vision was starting to twitch and his tongue was growing heavy. “My daddy and old George W.’s antecedents were real men, not like those sissy bitches running companies today. They didn’t stand on ceremony, decorum and red tape. They saw something they wanted, they went after it. It’s always easier to apologize later than to ask permission. And all that ass they kicked and names they took, they did it all for the old U.S. of A. I tell you, they loved this land. Cut them old boys, Jules, and they bled red, white and blue.”
“But you, your relatives and your cronies could have made just as much money in legitimate businesses,” Jules pointed out. “Why did your father instead choose to traffic with devils like Hitler and Stalin? Why have you climbed into bed with the Saudis? So many people in your administration are making a fortune off Putilov’s companies and off the Saudis. Are they patriots too?”
>
“Of course,” Tower said. “And what’s wrong with Putilov anyway?”
“He’s a mass-murdering psychopath of global proportions for one thing.”
“But he’s also a hell of a businessman.”
“Which in Jim World justifies everything?”
“You know ‘Jim’s Golden Rule’?” Tower asked.
“‘He who has the gold, rules,’” Jules quoted numbly.
“You do understand me, don’t you?” Tower said, smiling brightly.
Jules ignored his jibe. “And your support of the Saudis?” Jules asked.
“I suppose you hate them too.”
“Hillary Clinton once described them as ‘providing clandestine financial and logistical support to ISIS and other radical Sunni groups in the region.’ Some people characterize their riches not as petrodollars but ‘blood money.’ Yet you do business with them.”
“So do a lot of western businessmen,” Tower said. “In fact, the Saudis just held a business conference in Riyadh, which I attended. They had 3,500 invitees—mostly from the western democracies—people, who in aggregate, controlled over $22 trillion. By my calculations that averages $611 billion per person. We all came to invest our dirty dinero in the disreputable Saudi Kingdom, and everyone kicked in. None of us had the moral hubris to reject their fantastically lucrative business offers.”
“But you and your friends are super-rich. You don’t need their blood-stained cash.”
“Like I always say, Jules. Money doesn’t care about its lineage or its future. It just … is. It flows through the earth’s economic systems like the blood coursing through humanity’s veins.”
You don’t need them to make your billions. Does all their carnage—and the knowledge that you’re backing and bankrolling their atrocities—turn you on?”
“Suppose I said we do it for love of country.”
“In other words, you’re a patriot?” Jules said evenly, without emotion. “Before you ran for the presidency, you were quoted as saying you pledge allegiance not to the U.S. of A, but to the country with the biggest tax loopholes and the lowest tax rates.”
The Evil That Men Do Page 17
