Everyone except Tower.
Tower alone looked out over the city and felt nothing.
It wasn’t just that he was drunk. He’d never felt anything resembling empathy or awe. He understood that he was missing something—some milk of human kindness, that vast sympathy, common throughout the species, that was often described as a person’s “basic humanity.” That Tower was devoid of anything even remotely resembling “basic humanity” puzzled but in no way disturbed him. He could fake affection if the need arose—at a funeral or a disaster site, a wedding or a birthday party—but, in truth, he dismissed other people’s compassion as a stupid weakness or a bullshit con.
His daddy had never fallen prey to such foolishness. J. J. Tower was the least sentimental man J. T. had ever known, and his son had respected him for it. That alone was something. J. T. respected almost no one. Of course, J. J. had taught his son that respect with his fists. In his youth, the old man had been a Texas state boxing champion, and when J. T. misbehaved, the old man took him down into the basement and gave his son an hour or so of “boxing instruction.” When J. T. was a child, his father instructed him with open-handed slaps that left every square inch of his head, arms and torso covered with crimson finger welts. By the time J. T. was in high school, the old man was punching him with closed fists, focusing on his stomach and kidneys so as not to mark him too conspicuously but occasionally hammering the back and sides of his head, even bloodying his nose and working over his cheekbones and jaw.
From time to time, the old man would walk up behind J. T., reach back and give him a hard, roundhouse clout to the temple, knocking his son to his knees, the kid’s ears ringing and eyes brimming.
“That’s for … nothing,” his father would say.
“When angered, my old man was the Wrath of God,” Tower would occasionally reminisce. “He’s the only man I ever feared, and he was the only person who could make me do his bidding.”
Staring absently in the direction of the UN, he ignored the view and instead studied his reflection in the window—that of an aging angry man with reddish-brown-colored hair, a raptor’s eyes and hatred in his heart.
Is there anything in the world that scares you? he wondered.
Probably not, although he had to admit that the U.S. government did occasionally worry him. With all its infinite power, all its investigative and prosecutorial agencies, it undoubtedly had the ability to put him in prison, and over the decades any number of officials and politicians had made ineffectual efforts in that direction. He did not consider such actions impossible or infeasible. Tower had done many things in his lifetime that could have put him in durance vile for the rest of his days. He’d always lived his life on the razor’s edge and the hair trigger’s trembling touch. Consequently, the impulse to watch his back, to cover his tracks and to protect himself from his enemies in DC and around the world was as instinctive in him as it was undeniably necessary.
He planned on neutralizing that threat soon though.
Only one obstacle stood in his way: that damn Meredith woman. During her decade-long investigations into his business dealings and his political machinations, Jules had uncovered and made public enough serious evidence to have put a less wealthy, less influential, less legally sophisticated and politically connected man in prison for the rest of his days. She had unearthed more dirt on him than the FBI, the SEC and the Treasury Department put together. Those agencies he would soon tame, rendering their attempts to expose him meaningless, but the Meredith woman he could not threaten or buy.
Well, Tower thought to himself, Putilov had told you several times he’d close Meredith’s account for you in one hot second. So, tonight, after she’d pushed you too far, you’d taken Putilov up on his offer.
That interview he’d had with Meredith—during which she had so humiliatingly spurned his advances—was the last straw. She had to go. So he’d called the Russian president after she’d left and put the hit out on her. That he would finally be rid of her did not particularly bother him. Quite the contrary, what nagged at him was why he hadn’t done it earlier. Over the years, he’d faced legions of enemies but none as dangerous and persistent as Jules Meredith. Of all his foes, she was far and away the most deserving of termination—termination with extreme prejudice. She had done more to jeopardize his business empire and his personal freedom than all his other enemies combined.
Why was she still around? Years ago, he could have accepted Putilov’s offers to eliminate her. Putilov would have done it if he’d been in Tower’s shoes. Look how many hundreds of Russian reporters Putilov had had killed, and they were far less threatening to Putilov than the Meredith woman was to Tower. Why had Tower been so loath to order the hit?
Tower did not want to contemplate the implications of his inaction. He hadn’t grown soft; that was for sure. But there was something about that Meredith woman he couldn’t put his finger on. For some reason, he could not give the order—until last night, after she had rejected his advances.
Aw, fuck it. It is what it is. That’s the way it happens sometimes.
J. T. let his mind wander …
Yes, he thought to himself, the Meredith woman was a problem, but he had lots of problems. These were troubling times, no doubt about it. He had organized a select financial elite—superwealthy magnates who were willing to put their riches where their mouths were and change the world—into an unrivaled donor network. They had organized at the state and local level, and after a decade they had conquered most the state legislatures and commandeered the lion’s share of the state governorships across the country. Those victories had given his organization the reins of real political control, the power to effectively disenfranchise minorities, college kids, single moms and the elderly—people who had a vested interest in opposing Tower’s agenda. He’d also acquired the right to gerrymander voting districts to such a degree that he now controlled Congress as well, regardless of the national overall popular vote—which often, sometimes overwhelmingly, favored his opposition.
And then he’d finally staged the greatest coup of all: He had put himself in the Oval Office.
He wondered idly whether he shouldn’t just imprison Jules Meredith.
Fuck it. It was more expeditious to kill her, and anyway the decision had been made, the order given.
He’d told Putlilov that he’d better do it soon. Times were tough, and he couldn’t have her snooping around his finances any longer. He and his donor network were under siege as at no time before. Their enemies were all around them—college professors, crusading reporters, teachers, bureaucrats, scientists, unions, queers, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Democrats anywhere and everywhere. Previously he’d thought his political organization—built on tax-deductible charitable donations, laundered through his political foundations—was impregnable. He’d always believed his control of the state houses and governorships was absolute, but he wasn’t so sure anymore. It seemed to Tower that bleeding-heart pasty-faced peace-creeps were leeching the heart’s blood out of this so-called republic. Of course, his father knew how to handle such agitators. When unions reared their ugly heads, he’d have his boys plant a half a key of heroin in the union leaders’ lockers, then call in the cops. No need to break heads or pay them off. Let the cops do the dirty work for him. Ship a few union leaders off to prison on twenty-year sentences, and all those pesky labor complaints went away. The agitators found out what happens when you fuck with the Towers.
No more union problems now! his father would shout as he howled with laughter, as the union leaders were perp-walked off to prison.
By God, Tower Enterprises had come a long way since those difficult days. Back during his father’s time, he and his ultra-right-wing plutocratic friends had been persona non grata. The politicians would barely talk to them and definitely wouldn’t work with them. Oh, they’d take their money, but they wouldn’t do anything in return. The whores wouldn’t repeal Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SEC, EPA, OSHA or reduce the upper
-bracket tax rates to fiscal absurdity. The politicians of the ’60s and ’70s had considered Tower and his network too extreme to climb into bed with.
That reluctance ended in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan took office. Just thinking about those days made Tower smile. He was just starting to make a name for himself, and he’d found a true soul mate in the Gipper. They’d spent many a night together discussing their vision of the future.
* * *
“First, the Gipper had explained, I plan on abolishing the Fairness Doctrine. That will give an enterprising young man, such as yourself, an opportunity to create TV and talk radio networks dedicated to conservative doctrines and ideals, but which, in no way, will be required to let the other side state their opposing views. Communications satellites will proliferate such cable networks, and I’ll see to it you get in on the ground floor. I can envision newspapers all over this land joining our crusade and spreading our gospel. I’m already in negotiations with the top TV evangelists. They’ve been politically neutral up to now, but I’m enlisting their services and television networks to join our cause and campaign as well. But I’m old, Jim, I can’t do it all. Also as president, I’m under a microscope. The press watches my every move. You’re in the private sector though, and you have the brains, balls and wherewithal to do it for me—covertly, anonymously. You can get this big conservative media ball rolling. When we get our operation up and running, the other side will never know what hit them.”
“Mr. President, J. T. had said, I know what you mean, but I hate that word conservative.’ It’s so—so—”
“Soft?”
“Exactly. We want a movement that’s radical, that’s revolutionary.”
“And you’ll scare the electorate into the arms of our enemies if you put it to them like that. You need to make us seem safe, steady, reasonable, reliable. You can’t make them think we’re plotting a right-wing plutocratic coup.”
Tower nodded his agreement. The old man was obviously right.
“Just get that big media complex going,” Ronnie said. “The tax breaks and subsidies I’ll give your petrochemical companies, investment banks, casinos and real estate development firms will more than fund it. We will also need conservative think tanks and foundations filled with scholars dedicated to writing the legislation and organizational plans necessary to our takeover. After we take control, we’ll have all those bills and position papers locked and loaded, in the can, so we can make them the law of the land as soon as we have the power.”
“Won’t the Washington elites try to block that legislation, Mr. President?”
“The Washington elites—including the Elite Media—will step in line. They’re drawn to power like iron filings to a magnet. Mark my words, they’ll come around to our side, and you know why?”
“Money talks and bullshit walks?”
“Hell, yes. They’ll even come to believe in our Cause.”
“They’ll learn to ‘love Big Brother.’”
“Just like Orwell wrote. They’ll come around to our way of thinking.”
“But with all due respect, we don’t need more ‘thinking,’” the young J. T. Tower had told the president. “We need to turn things upside down and inside out. We have to shake this country up. Abolish Social Security, Medicare, all federal law enforcement, the goddamned IRS, the EPA, OSHA, the SEC. And we’ll have to be strong, tough, decisive. We have to seize the flame. We can’t show any weakness.”
“We’ll get there, Jimmy, we’ll get there.”
“But how, Mr. President? Through news networks, think tanks, words? We need action.”
“Oh, we’ll take action. How do you think Lenin came to power in Russia? How do you think Hitler took over Germany? Not through revolution. They were coupists, not a revolutionaries. Well, we’ll do it quietly. Do the words ‘silent coup’ mean anything to you?”
Tower realized, of course, the old man was right.
“You’re a wise man, Mr. President. I have much to learn from you.”
“And you’re a young, smart, strong and tough. You can be my sword, my shield. Together, we’ll perform wonders.”
“But we need to do some serious planning, Mr. President. This can’t be a hit-or-miss, hit-and-run operation.”
“You’ll do it. I know you will. I won’t live to see. You though—you could see it happen in your lifetime.”
* * *
That day had come. Tower and his organization had put together a right-wing juggernaut of money, media, think tanks and lobbying groups that had taken Washington, D.C. and the state houses by storm.
If only a Wall Street meltdown hadn’t hammered his first term and cost him the Senate, he’d have owned the country by now. Even so, Tower had been certain he’d get the Senate back during the next election, but now he was having doubts. It had all been going so well until Jules Meredith came out with that blistering series of articles. She was inflaming the electorate, and she was capable of taking him down the way Ida Tarbell had targeted and destroyed John D. Rockefeller’s oil empire with a series of muckraking pieces, followed by her book, The History of the Standard Oil Company. The public outcry had been overwhelming, and within a few years, Theodore Roosevelt had rallied the Congress and forced the breakup of the Rockefeller empire.
Jules Meredith was whipping up public sentiment against him the same way, and if anything, he was more vulnerable than John D. had been. Tower’s business dealings could not stand scrutiny, nor could those of his political/financial network. And now Jules Meredith was shining a spotlight on both those operations—a blinding spotlight.
She had to go—not only to stop her from probing into his business affairs but also to make it clear that no one fucked with J. T. Tower.
They were all conspiring to pauperize him and liquidate not only his fortune but everything he and his old man had worked for, robbing not just him but his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and their descendants to come as well. They wanted his head on a stake, his balls in a vise and every dime he ever made paid out in taxes, back taxes, penalties and fines. They wanted to bankrupt him forever.
And then imprison him.
Even worse, the prices of oil and gas, which had been on a decade-long decline, were now dropping like a rock. Tower had failed to foresee that new technologies such as fracking and the high-tech extraction technologies, which overnight had made unlimited amounts of gas, shale and tar sands oil readily available, would result in an inevitable drop in oil prices, which was now threatening his entire global empire.
A second mistake had been his failure to foresee that wind and solar would prove as practicable and economically competitive as they now were.
Hell, Walmart was now powering every one of its facilities with solar!
On top of everything, AI was rapidly rendering most employees obsolete, and the layoffs were pandemic. That downsizing and the stock market crash had so incensed the voters they had thrown the Senate incumbents out into the street, all but tar-and-feathering them. The electorate would be coming after him next with torches, pitchforks and noose knots.
All of them led by Jules Meredith. She was prying into his business and political operations the way Woodward and Bernstein had gone after Nixon.
But he wasn’t Nixon.
J. T. Tower would not go gently.
Jules Meredith had no idea whom she was fucking with. J. T. Tower ate people like her for breakfast, and if he didn’t, Putilov would. Maybe he should let Meredith know what he had done to that mistress of his, Juanita Juarez, who tried to leave him. She’d learned the hard way what happened to people who fuck with J. T. Tower. Last he heard, that Mexican drug cartel he’d paid to handle her had her hustling tricks in a Guadalajara casa de puta.
Hard-trade tricks.
It had been going so well. Everything was on track. What the fuck had happened?
His old man believed it all went wrong when that Jew, Roosevelt, was elected—him and his fucking New Deal—his “Jew Deal,” h
is daddy used to call it. “Roosevelt and his fucking Jew York press,” his daddy would thunder. He wondered what the old man would think if he were alive today. If his daddy needed any proof that the Democrats are all a bunch of depraved degenerates, the old man could just look at their former president, that Kenyan cocksucker, Barack Obama—case closed, end of story.
Tower’s golden triumph had of course been Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that nullified a century of campaign finance reform, clearly contradicting the will of the people, who wanted big money out of politics. That was supposed to fix everything. He and his hit team of 200 donors could spend any amount of tax-deductible dark money they wanted, privately, with utter anonymity. And they could write it off their 20 percent carried-interest taxes. Assuming they even paid that much.
Citizens United. It should have been called Oligarchs United, because that’s what he was going to achieve, even if it killed him. The American people had proven themselves incapable of self-government, and now that the blacks and Hispanics were outbreeding the whites in this country, reproducing like Viagra-crazed lemmings on crack, he’d see to it that “one person, one vote” was a thing of the past. He’d piss all over their parade till his enemies thought they were getting swamped by a hurricane of stinking yellow urine.
Once more, he caught a glimpse of his aging face reflected in the window. Staring at it, he felt nothing. The more he thought about it, he wondered if he’d ever felt anything besides raw animal lust and a murderous urge to destroy anyone who got in his way or simply pissed him off.
Is that what everything came down to in the end? Is that all Life was—lust and destruction? Maybe that was all there was. Tower certainly knew what his life and his father’s life had meant—and he did not see that Life itself was any different.
What was Life anyway? he wondered, staring absently at his reflection. It was nothing more to him than a knock-me-down, drag-me-out, beat-me, kill-me, make-me-write-bad-checks yet somehow sexy-as-hell whore who seduced you into her bed then took a straight razor to your balls. Life was always ready to run a Georgia train up your ass, fill it with high-octane fuel and fire a flare gun into its fuming, gasoline-choked maw. From Life’s point of view, murder was infinitely preferable to impotence; natural selection was Her only iron law, and all moral values were empty as prayer and meaningless as a submongoloid’s dreams. Tower had glimpsed the skull beneath Life’s skin, viewed Her death’s-head stare and laughed at the cruelest hilarity of them all: that Death was a spectacularly stupid joke worthy of only the darkest derision, an ignorant farce almost as ludicrous as Life Its Own Self. That the joke was being played on as vain, vapid and self-deluding a species as the human race made the jest, in Tower’s eyes, no less ridiculous. He’d once heard a friend quote a line from King Lear that he’d never found one reason to disagree with: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: They kill us for their sport.” That being the case, he firmly believed nothing could be true, and everything was permitted. God—if there was a God—was an omnipotent idiot, and Tower couldn’t believe God saw a dime’s worth of difference between Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ. Why should He? Tower didn’t—and when Tower died (if he ever died!), he believed the universe would come to an abrupt and ugly end. In fact, the thought of all that infinite, starless, lifeless, everlasting void made Tower … hard.
The Evil That Men Do Page 26
