The Evil That Men Do

by Robert Gleason

  “Okay, but I only work with professionals,” Stevie said.

  “Who can hold their mud,” Jonesy said, “and keep their shit.”

  “You think Adara, Jamie and I would be in this if it wasn’t completely righteous?” Elena asked.

  “We’re going in with sixteen men in all,” Jamie said.

  “Who are the other players?” Andre asked.

  Jamie rattled off eight more names.

  “We saw them already,” Elena said.

  “That’s a hell of a crew,” Stevie said.

  “When they found out who we were springing from that Pakistani hellhole,” Adara said, “they were in.”

  “Who is it?” Stevie asked.

  “We didn’t want to tell anyone until they were in,” Elena said.

  “It’s Rashid al-Rahman,” Adara said.

  The men were silent a long moment.

  “Why the fuck didn’t you say so?” Stevie finally said. “Yeah, I’m in.”

  “D’accord,” Andre said. Of course.

  “If the roles were reversed,” Leon said, “he’d be there for us.”

  “He got me out of more shit than I care to remember,” Jonesy said.

  “Hell, yeah,” Henry said.

  “Just tell us the plan,” Andre said.

  “We come in in two Black Hawks,” Adara said, “grab the guy and leave on one or both of the choppers.”

  “So one chopper’s for backup?” Andre asked.

  “In case we lose the other,” Elena said.

  “But what’s the plan?” Stevie asked.

  “That’s it,” Adara said. “We’ve all done extractions before.”

  “Shouldn’t we have a rehearsal of some sort?” Leon asked.

  “And leave it on the practice field?” Adara said.

  “Or in the gym?” Elena said. “In the locker room?”

  “So that be … the plan?” Jonesy asked.

  “Uh huh,” Elena said.

  “So you got no plan,” Leon said.

  “Sure we do,” Adara said. “We attack, kill, disrupt, improvise.”

  “We charge into that compound like Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill,” Elena said.

  “That ain’t a plan,” Stevie said.

  “It’s some kind of horrible … spasm,” Leon said.

  “That is embarrassingly true,” Elena said.

  Adara placed her leather shoulder bag on the table. She opened the flap and took out a manila envelope with folders in it. They were high-def aerial shots of what appeared to be a whitewashed blockhouse on the edge of a hill in the Pakistani desert.

  “There’s a TTP base maybe 250 meters due south,” Elena said. “Otherwise the safe house is in the middle of nowhere.”

  “We chopper in from behind the hill,” Adara said, “so we won’t be visible to the base.”

  “We hit the safe house from behind the hill in the dead of night,” Elena said. “We grab our target so fast and we’re out of there so quickly they won’t have time to react or call in for reinforcements.”

  “They’ll never know what hit them,” Adara said.

  “You aren’t serious, are you?” Andre asked.

  “It worked in Zero Dark Thirty, didn’t it?” Adara said.

  “And Rambo,” Elena said.

  “You left out Apocalypse Now,” Leon said.

  “That too,” Jamie said.

  The eight men stared at the two women, silent.

  “All feeling for Rashid aside,” Stevie finally asked, “what’s our end?”

  “Besides the satisfaction of a job well done?” Adara asked.

  No one laughed. The men’s stares were hard enough to cut diamonds.

  Jamie wrote a number.

  “For real?” Jonesy asked.

  “Half up front when you reach the chopper,” Elena said.

  “We’ll put the second half straight into your numbered accounts after we lift off,” Jamie said.

  The men stared at them and slowly began to nod.

  “Like it?” Adara asked.

  “Love it,” Stevie said.

  “We go in strapped?” Leon asked.

  “To the fuckin’ nines,” Adara said.

  “Un’nerstan,” Henry said, “Rashid or no Rashid, I gotta git paid.”

  “We said we got a bank,” Elena said.

  “Kind of bread you’re promising,” Henry said, “it better be Goldman Sachs.”

  Henry had come in late. He didn’t know.

  “I got it covered,” Jamie said.

  Henry emitted a soft, low whistle. “It be Goldman Sachs and J. P.”

  “Understood,” Elena said. “We’re all taking a risk.”

  “For sure,” Leon said. “It’s Pakistan.”

  “On the other hand,” Elena said, smiling, “as someone once said, ‘All of life is always six to five against.’”

  They all nodded, silent.

  “So you finally admit this is really dangerous?” Andre asked.

  “This op would scare Hunter S. Thompson sober, “Elena said, “clean and sober.”

  “What are the odds of us actually succeeding?” Stevie asked.

  “You want to live forever?” Elena asked.

  “Fuck the odds,” Leon said. “If I was afraid of chances, I’d have been an accountant.”

  “Fuck ’em all but six,” Stevie said, “and save them for pallbearers. I wouldn’t have it any other way,”

  “Then let’s burn this bitch down,” Jonesy said, grinning.

  “But we can’t fuck this up,” Stevie said, serious. “It’s Rashid.”

  “Only the dead never fuck up,” Leon said with a shrug.

  “So we’re righteous?” Elena asked.

  “We’re solid,” Jonesy said.

  “You couldn’t find Johnny D. for this one?” Henry asked.

  “You can find him at the Resurrection,” Elena said.

  “He got hisself aced?” Henry asked.

  “Deader’n Elvis,” Adara said.

  “Deader’n a Kentucky Fried Rat,” Elena confirmed.

  “The poor bebe,” Andre said.

  “Just make sure,” Adara said, “we don’t join him.”

  “So we go in dark?” Jonesy asked.

  “Like we were black holes,” Adara said.

  “Of course we go in dark,” Elena said. “We’re going in by fucking Black Hawk.”

  PART X

  Well maybe you can’t kill all your critics, but Litvinenko sure as hell won’t bother you anymore. Neither will Anna Politkovskaya or Marina Salye. You killed those three deader than Dostoevsky’s yaytsas [testicles].

  —President Mikhail Putilov, looking back on enemies he’d had murdered

  1

  “I hate Americans. I hate them more than I hate myself, more than I hate a hangover. I hate them morally.”

  –John le Carré

  “Do you really want to know why we hate Americans so much?” Raza asked McMahon, repeating his question.

  McMahon, still belly-down on his rack, looked at Raza over his shoulder.

  “Yes, I do,” McMahon said. “We’ve had conflicts with other nations but afterward everyone gets over it. We all but obliterated Germany and Japan in World War II. We did the same to Vietnam as well, but now all those nations and the U.S. are best of friends. Their people love America. Not the countries in your region though. We’ve done relatively little harm to nations like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, yet everyone there hates us and would nuke us off the face of the earth, given the chance. Why?”

  “Because deep down inside, what our people truly despise about you,” Raza said, “is your devotion to science, your dedication to education and industry. Unfortunately, those things that we deem heretical are the very things that make you stronger and more advanced than us,”

  “I don’t understand,” McMahon asked.

  “You honor scientific advancement and intellectual achievement,” Raza said. “We view those activities as Satanic,
as overreaching the One True God. Yet those endeavors have also produced a military machine that dwarfs ours and reduces our attempts at self-defense to absurdity.”

  “What do you honor then,” McMahon asked, “besides Allah and the Koran?”

  “We honor the respect our men and women show one another,” Marika said.

  “The respect your women show to your men,” McMahon said, “translates in our culture as slavish obedience.”

  “Since our men protect us,” Marika explained, “we are obliged to show them our gratitude.”

  “But are you are obliged to let them tyrannize you?” McMahon asked. “To force you to suffer in chadors and chains?”

  “Mr. McMahon,” Marika said, “it is the way things are in our world. We don’t expect you to understand.”

  “I understand your code of honor—your ird, your men call it,” McMahon said, “but it holds women back. Your ird will keep you forever in the Dark Ages. No society that keeps its women—fifty percent of its assets, half its human capital—in bondage can compete in the world today, especially in this new digitized industrialized hyperscientific age.”

  “Mr. McMahon,” Raza said, “you have it exactly right. But the world you have created and have attempted to force on our people is one of corruption and licentiousness, which is why our world can never accept yours.”

  “To do so,” Marika said, “would offend our ird, which you so ignorantly disparage.”

  “And to adapt to your ways would be to blaspheme Allah,” Raza said.

  “But what about accepting modest reforms,” McMahon said, “which would radically improve the lives of your people?”

  “Mr. McMahon,” Raza said, “there can be no truce with radical evil and no compromise with your hellish creed. Your country wages war not merely on us, but on life itself. We live in the Holocene, otherwise known as the Sixth Major Extinction Event, to which your country is the number one contributor and creator.”

  “Your own biologists estimate that by the end of the century,” Marika said, “your digitized, industrialized world—through environmental degradation, through your poisoning of our atmosphere and waterways, by heating the planet to infernal levels—will extinguish half the species on land and in the sea.”

  “You created nuclear bombs and every kind of delivery system imaginable,” Raza said, “then mass-manufactured them by the tens of thousands and retailed them promiscuously—not only to ourselves but to our most implacable enemies. You even proliferated the nuclear technology to those same nations so they could manufacture these superweapons themselves.”

  “And then you express dismay,” Marika said, “when nations such as Pakistan, India and North Korea utilize that technology in order to master the black arts of nuclear annihilation, which you created and gave us.”

  “I cannot defend America’s nuclear proliferating,” McMahon said, “but nothing that America has done justifies your attacks on us—your suicide bombings and your own pursuit of terrorist nukes.”

  “Were that only true,” Raza said, “but you created and proliferated the Arms of Armageddon. You threaten, intimidate and destabilize our Muslim brothers and sisters throughout Dar al-Islam with them. You invade Iraq and Afghanistan, throwing half of the Mideast into anarchy, exile and civil war. We cannot attack you at home and do to you as you have done to us, because we fear your nuclear wrath. Therefore, we have no choice but to develop nuclear weapons of our own in hopes of deterring your future attacks. Then we can requite your violence against us with a true quid pro quo.”

  “Eye for an eye leaves both combatants blind,” McMahon said.

  “Yes, but it is also the way of our world—and yours. We all recognize only one unbreachable mandate—lex talionis, the Law of Retaliation. That is our sacred inviolable code of honor—the only commandment governing all people’s lives—blood for blood, a life for a life.”

  “Is that also how your society justifies its barbaric abuse of women as well as its war against the infidel?” McMahon asked. “Lex talionis?”

  “But of course,” Marika said. “Throughout history, our men have feared that a woman’s licentious nature inevitably compels her to resist her master’s stern command. That our men gratuitiously persecute their women for this alleged weakness is wrong, but that is the way things are. Our men avenge themselves on any and all people who do not bend to their will, be they women or infidels. Blood will have blood, and only blood vengeance can sate the rage of men. The strong rule, the weak obey—or suffer their wrath—and that is life. Our faith demands it, and to pretend otherwise is to deceive ourselves and to go against the natural order of things.”

  “So compassion has no place in your world?” McMahon asked.

  “Of course, compassion has its place,” Raza said, “but not in your sense of the word.”

  “To us,” Marika said, “compassion does not mean feeling kindly toward one another. It means two souls sharing the same pain. It means literally ‘to agonize with.’”

  “And that is how you justify torture?” McMahon asked.

  “Bravo, Mr. McMahon,” Raza said. “You are finally starting to understand us. Yes, we are teaching you compassion.”

  “Think how compassionate you will be in the future,” Marika said. “Henceforth, when you see people suffer, you will feel their pain, know their sense of hopelessness and you will care. We will have taught you to ‘agonize’ with them, and one day, if you survive this long dark night of your hideously sinful soul, you will see us as your mentors and your gurus. You will view us in a kinder, gentler light.”

  “I will see you as kinder, gentler psychopaths,” McMahon muttered through gritted teeth, staring up at them from his rack.

  “Perhaps,” Marika said, “but you will also understand, at last, the natural order of things, the way the world really works.”

  “And I am so proud,” Raza said, “that Marika and I could serve as your spirit guides.”

  2

  “The phrase means ‘Death-by-Fire’ in your language,” Putilov said. “It means I put a blowtorch to Conley’s innards.”

  Russian President Mikhail Ivanovich Putilov had just gotten the autopsy report on that ex-FBI jerk, Jonathan Conley. His new poison had put that asshole through the tortures of the damned. Putilov was so pumped up he had to share his excitement with someone who would understand. For the first time in his life he felt the need to call Tower.

  Tower was so shocked to get an unsolicited call from Putilov, he picked up immediately—even though it was the middle of the night in New York.

  “You have to hear this,” Putilov said. “For two decades I’ve sent my people all over hell’s creation, researching the most obscure, most painful poisons on earth. I’ve had them comb the planet—from the frozen mountains of Tierra del Fuego to Uganda’s sweltering jungles, from the Pacific Ring of Fire to the darkest depths of Chile’s most noxious guano pits. I’ve had them tracking poisons for decades, and guess what? They’ve found a toxin down along Brazil’s Rio Negro has to be the most diabolically depraved substance anyone’s ever heard of.”

  “The Rio what—?” Tower asked, confused.

  It was 3:37 A.M. Eastern Time in the States, he was half-asleep, and he had no idea what Putilov was talking about.

  “We’ve extracted a hideously horrifying toxin from a deadly flower one of our botanists discovered in the Amazonian rain forest. It’s an exceedingly rare blossom—found only on small, isolated, floating islands on the Rio Negro and—”

  “No one calls black people ‘negroes’ anymore,” Tower pointed out, yawning.

  “Not negroes,” Putilov shouted, incensed at the man’s stupidity. “Rio means ‘river’ in Spanish. Negro means ‘black.’ It’s a South American waterway called the Rio Negro—the River Negro. Get it?”

  “Oh, I get it,” Tower said quietly, still finding it hard to focus.

  “This flower grows only on these floating islands on the Lower Rio Negro, a blackwater tributary to
the Amazon, coursing through the heart of the Brazilian rain forest. The plant’s extract incites the most agonizing death throes of any of my poisons yet. And best of all, no one will know what killed that asshole Conley.”

  “That’s what you killed Conley with?” Now Tower was awake.

  “Hell, yes,” Putilov said. “We tested it on apes first, and they yiped and convulsed for hours on end like their insides were being incinerated. But even weirder was its etiology: We couldn’t find any. No one could identify the cause of death. The apes’ autopsy reports listed cause of death as nonidiopathic.”

  “Nonidiopathic?” Tower asked, repeating the word, confused.

  “Don’t you get it?” Putilov shouted. “I can kill anyone I want, and no one will know how I did it!”

  “That’s amazing,” Tower said. “How did you say this poison works?”

  “Didn’t you read Conley’s autopsy report?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Here, I’ll show you. I just sent an email. Open the attachment.”

  Tower’s bedroom laptop was at his desk and still on, so he got out of bed, crossed the room and went into his inbox. Clicking on Putilov’s email, he opened the attachment. It read:

  GROSS ANATOMY: The abdomen was markedly distended and contained feces, gas and approximately one liter of congealed blood. There was edema of both the small and large intestines obscuring the normal anatomic boundaries. The entire colon from the ileocecal valve to the anorectal junction appeared homogeneously black indicating intramural hemorrhage. A single large perforation was identified in the sigmoid colon that was associated with frank hemorrhage and extravasation of fecal material into the abdominal cavity. The lumen of the colon contained feces and approximately one liter of congealed blood. The greater and lesser omenta were edematous with patchy areas of hemorrhage, and the mesenteric lymph nodes were atrophic.

  MICROSCOPIC ANATOMY: Sections of multiple regions of both the small and large bowel were cut with a microtome, stained with hematoxylin and eosin and examined at both 10X and 100X magnification. There was complete effacement of the villi, denuding of the mucosa and transmural thickening (approximately 2-fold normal) in both the small intestine and colon. There was marked mucosal edema in the small bowel, and transmural hemorrhagic necrosis of the colon. The intima and adventitia of both the small and large bowel were diffusely infiltrated with inflammatory cells that appeared to be mostly neutrophils, macrophages and natural killer cells. Pneumatosis cystoides intestinalis was present in the sigmoid colon most prominently at the site of perforation. The greater and lesser omenta were diffusely inflamed and contained aggregates of acute inflammatory cells.