Which got him thinking about Jules Meredith again—and again he found himself getting aroused. Maybe that was the reason he hadn’t had Jules hit years ago: She was too goddamn hot.
And she was different. She was the only person on earth who had the guts to stand up to him, to tell him what she thought of him—to tell him he was full of shit, then prove it to him. And, then, of course, she was blazing-fucking-hot yet categorically refused to sleep with him, which only further inflamed his desire for her. That she wanted desperately to take him down only made her more dangerous, more exciting, more enticing.
Brenda had warned him once that he was drawn to self-destruction, that he was driven to touch the Luciferian flame, and that one day it would burn him alive.
Maybe that was Jules—his Luciferian flame.
So be it.
Still J. T. Tower had to have her. He was committed to it. He had to have her even if he hung for it.
Even if it brought down everything he’d worked for.
Even if it destroyed his whole goddamn world.
He swore on his balls and his eyes he would finally fucking have her.
And then he remembered he’d already put the hit out on her.
He wondered if he should call Putilov and rescind the order, but he feared Putilov wouldn’t understand. He’d think Tower was soft, wishy-washy, couldn’t make up his mind. And Tower couldn’t allow that.
Also Tower sometimes worried that Putilov didn’t like women.
Anyway, Putilov had probably already ordered the Meredith woman eliminated.
He was pretty efficient at that kind of thing.
Still Tower wondered if it was too late to call the murder off.
2
“God made the birds and sea creatures in three days.
Why can’t we extract Rashid in, say, an hour or two?”
—Elena Moreno
The Black Hawk was now approaching the target. Given the brightness of the full moon and the starlit desert sky, the terrain was completely, amazingly visible from the chopper. As they came in for the landing and began setting down in the lee of the hill, the Black Hawk was surprisingly quiet.
“On the other side of that hill is Rashid’s safe house,” Elena told the men in her chopper.
“How will we recognize Rashid?” Eric asked. “I’ve never seen or worked with him.” Eric had signed on at the last minute.
“He’ll be wearing a keffiyeh and riding a dromedary,” Eric said.
“Or he’ll be ridin’ a dromedary and readin’ a Koran,” Leon offered.
“I thought you knew him,” Elena said. She showed Eric a photo of Rashid on her iPhone.
“Seriously,” Kareem asked, “what’s the plan?”
“We go in,” Jamie said, “kill the men holding Rashid, and take him back to the chopper.”
“That’s the plan?” Kareem asked again.
“That’s the plan,” Elena said evenly with a small smile.
“Your plan is insane,” Jonesy said.
“Oh, I get it,” Jamie said. “Reality again.”
“Kareem’s got a point,” Leon said. “You sure we can pull this thing off?”
“God made the birds and sea creatures in three days,” Elena said. “Why can’t we extract Rashid in, say, an hour or two?”
“Who these two ladies anyway?” Henry asked, looking at Jonesy.
“Fine funky bitches with dead men in their eyes,” Jonesy said.
“Only thing that matters is … are you ready?” Elena asked.
“Ready as Freddy,” Jamie said.
“Ready to punch in?” Elena asked.
“Rackin’ and crackin’,” Jonesy said.
“Are you ready to accept the plan God has for you?” Elena asked.
“Sir, yes, sir!” Jamie said.
“Then let’s get that rubber on the road,” Elena said.
“Give ’em that high hard one,” Leon said.
Elena racked the slide on her .45 Magnum Desert Eagle, the most powerful semi-automatic pistol made.
“Nice gun,” Stevie said. “What’s it for?”
“Killin’ rhinoceroses,” Leon said.
“Huntin’ dinosaurs,” Jonesy suggested.
“Time to rock ’n’ roll, ladies,” Adara said in their earpieces.
“Anyone seen Junius?” Elena asked. “Where is he?”
“Checking his pecs in the restroom mirror,” Leon said.
“He’s in this chopper with me,” Adara said in their earpieces.
“Copy that,” Stevie said.
“Anything else?” Elena asked.
“Can I detail your car?” Leon asked. “Do your income tax?”
“So we’re ready,” Elena said.
“Squared away,” Jamie said.
“We good?” Jonesy asked.
“We’re solid,” Leon said.
“Mais d’accord,” Andre said in their earpieces. But of course.
“Big affirm,” Elena said.
“Copy that,” Jonesy said.
The two Black Hawks landed in the lee of the hill, and the people in their holds piled out.
3
To put the sum total of Putilov’s thefts into perspective, consider that the U.S. GDP is $18 trillion and U.S. tax-free offshore accounts contain $2.1 trillion, or 12 percent of its GDP. The world’s GDP is around $75 trillion, and the total amount of global black money buried abroad is around $26 trillion, or about 33 percent of the planet’s GDP. As obscene as those percentages might be, they pale before those of Putilov’s Russia. The $1.3 trillion that Putilov and his cronies have locked away in Western banks is more than 100 percent of Russia’s GDP, which is only $1.26 trillion. In other words, Putilov and his wolf pack have devoured the equivalent of Russia’s entire annual GDP!
—Jules Meredith on Mikhail Ivanovich Putilov
Putilov stared into his computer screen, speechless with rage. Now he not only had that idiot Tower to deal with, Jules Meredith was on his case.
Ah hell, maybe it was time for her to go.
For the past year, he’d thought about having her hit. Waheed had been pushing for it. After all, she was major critic of Tower, himself and their whole Oligarch Movement. She was a troublemaker and a serious pain in the ass.
But she also drove Tower crazy, sent him into paroxysms of rage, and that was worth everything to Putilov.
In fact, two hours ago, when Tower had finally broken down and asked him to have Jules Meredith killed, Putilov had lied and said that he would, had yessed Tower to death, all the time fully intending not to do it. No one on the planet could aggravate Tower like Meredith, and tormenting Tower was all Putilov cared about nowadays. Hell, he’d have paid her any amount of money if she could piss Tower off even more. He’d have sent bodyguards to protect her—just to make sure she kept making that moron miserable.
That Tower had the hots for her physically and that she hated the ground he walked on pleased Putilov to no end. When Tower told him how, after he’d come on to Meredith, she’d said: “Tower, I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire!” Putilov had wanted to toss hats in the air and do handsprings. He’d wanted to kiss Jules Meredith himself. He counted hearing her response as one of the high points of his life.
But now Meredith had gone over to the other side. She had written and published a truly horrifying takedown piece on him—on Mikhail Ivanovich Putilov—and so she had to go. That Tower had changed his mind about Meredith and begged Putilov to call off the hit—claiming it was all a misunderstanding and that he wanted another shot at fucking her—was of no consequence. Putilov could not have cared less. Jules Meredith was finished—over and out. Like he’d done to so many other reporters before her, Putilov was turning out her lights.
It wasn’t just that Meredith was now attacking Putilov in print. Lots of people had written articles and books on him and his myriad crimes: his wholesale plundering of the Russian State, the thousands of killings he’d ordered—especially all those p
esky reporters and idealistic human rights activists he’d disposed of—the hundreds of thousands of people he’d had summarily incarcerated … most notably those free-market entrepreneurs who fell afoul of him or his supporters or who had naïvely thought they could do business in Russia without compensating the president for that privilege.
What was wrong with forcing businesspeople to pay those bribes anyway? In Mexico, such disbursements were called the mordida, in India the baksheesh and in Russia, the blat. The difference was, of course, that in his world, the blat was extortionately, excruciatingly expensive—magnitudes greater than it was in other countries—and those who refused to pony up found themselves facing imprisonment or even death.
But all those stories had been widely reported, were universally known, and had Meredith rehashed those old news items he might well have shrugged it off. Frankly he wanted people to know that in his country he ruled with an iron fist, and you paid to play. One more so-called exposé wouldn’t be worth the effort of dropping that final life-ending … dime.
But Meredith’s article did not stop with his crimes against so-called humanity. She took her attack on him to a whole other dimension. She concluded her piece by focusing on his crimes against the Russian people. In doing so, she tacitly encouraged them to rebel, and there was nothing Putilov feared more in all the world than popular rebellion.
He’d seen uncontrollable crowds of angry citizens before. After the Berlin Wall fell, and the German populace was rising up against their Russian masters, Putilov had witnessed a public insurrection in Dresden in front of the KGB headquarters. He’d been in charge there, and the headquarters had almost been overrun. He had seen what revolutionary violence could do. He believed it could happen in Russia as well—it had happened before—and he feared the Revolt of the Masses like hell itself. That was one of the reasons he was dealing so severely with that hedge fund bandit who, with his famine derivatives, had exacerbated the Mideast drought of 2012 and had driven the starving destitute people in that region to take up arms against their rulers. Putilov viewed such political uprisings as a threat against him and his country. He knew revolutions were quite capable of jumping borders and spreading long distances—even as far as Mother Russia herself.
Now that Jules Meredith was attempting to turn the Russian people against him with devastating reports of how he’d robbed them blind and stolen their hopes and dreams, he was determined to put her down hard.
He could not stop himself from masochistically rereading the end of her article:
What has Putilov’s oligarchy done for him, and what has he done for his fellow citizens? In the late 1980s, he’d been thrown out of the KGB, and he was a nobody—just a busted-out intelligence agent who had drifted into politics. He had never been a lawyer, doctor, teacher, scientist or scholar—a manufacturer, a financier, or any kind of businessman. He was merely a KGB functionary who had created nothing of financial worth or socially redeeming value. Yet twenty-five years after entering politics, Putilov owned twenty official residences with 24/7 round-the-clock staffing. One of them—“Putilov’s Palace”—cost his oligarchical supporters $1 billion. He is the proud possessor of four yachts—one of them worth $50 million—fifty-eight airplanes and almost $1 million worth of watches. One of his favorites is his $60,000 white-gold Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar.
Worth over $200 billion, Putilov is easily the wealthiest man on earth, with two and a half times as much money as the second-biggest billionaire, the legitimate businessman Bill Gates.
How has he acquired such prodigious riches?
In the 1970s the USSR had kept tens of millions of dollars’ worth of foreign currency in secret accounts concealed in other countries—partly to fund operations abroad. Intelligence agencies worldwide had abundant evidence that Putilov and his brigands stole almost all of it. He then arranged for the theft of over 500 tons of bullion purloined from the old USSR’s gold reserves. He and his ex-KGB associates also mastered the arcane minutiae of asset-stripping, the privatization of government properties, extortion of legitimate businessmen, outright thievery and the simple art of murdering anyone who got in their way. And of course, they exacted bribes on an almost cosmic scale. Even today, a simple meeting with President Putilov costs a Russian businessman $10 million. Some Russian businessmen privately grumble that the cost of doing major deals in Putilov’s Russia is a 35 percent bribe to the new Czar.
A Spanish prosecutor who had successfully wiretapped many of Putilov’s business partners while they were in Spain—building illicit villas with conscripted Russian military personnel—said the transcripts proved that Russia’s mafiosi were an integral part of that scam and many of Putilov’s other operations. In fact, over the decades Putilov and his coterie of oligarchs have found the Russian mafia to be invaluable allies. To this day they routinely employ them for brutal beatings, targeted killings and other acts of calculated terror, which assure the Putilov clique total domination over Russian politics and economic markets. All the while, he and his junta have reaped hundreds of billions of dollars.
Putilov has even managed to plunder his fellow brigands. Setting himself up as the ultimate crime boss, his form of government became known as Putilovism—a system in which all the players bow to his absolute authority and pay him tribute of almost incalculable proportions. In exchange Putilov confers on cronies the right to pillage those around them on a historically unprecedented level, and he has granted them utter immunity from legal punishment. As part of his protection racket, Putilov awards diplomatic counselorships to his most loyal followers, freeing them of domestic and foreign prosecution and most forms of intrusive surveillance.
Putilov has even co-opted the Western democracies. We assist Putilov and his people at every turn. After Putilov and his pirate crew lawlessly loot their own land, the Western world—with its strict adherence to law and order—sees to it that these freebooters’ ill-gotten gains are safely and secretly secured. Under the aegis of these democratic privacy laws, Putilov has constructed for himself and his cohorts a seemingly impenetrable underground labyrinth of thousands upon thousands of hidden accounts.
To put the sum total of Putilov’s thefts into perspective, consider that the U.S. GDP is $18 trillion and U.S. tax-free offshore accounts contain $2.1 trillion, or 12 percent of its GDP. The world’s GDP is around $75 trillion, and the total amount of global black money buried abroad is around $26 trillion, or about 33 percent of the planet’s GDP. As obscene as those percentages might be, they pale before those of Putilov’s Russia. The $1.3 trillion that Putilov and his cronies have locked away in Western banks is more than 100 percent of Russia’s GDP, which is only $1.26 trillion. In other words, Putilov and his wolf pack have devoured the equivalent of Russia’s entire annual GDP!
So we know what Putilovism has done for Putilov and his billionaire partners. It’s made them all unimaginably rich, but what has it done to the Russian people? Theirs is a story of unremitting poverty and savage exploitation. Despite one statistically aberrant population spurt, that nation now faces a long-term population implosion—not explosion. According to the Brookings Institution, by the century’s end, Russia could well see its number of citizens drop from 143.5 million to 100 million people, its 1950 census level.
Why the contraction?
Putilov’s oligarchy has stretched his people to the breaking point. Instead of upgrading Russia’s collapsing health care system, he has plundered those programs remorselessly and funneled the money into the pockets of himself and his wealthy friends. Consequently, the depressed and oppressed Russian people labor under some of the highest rates of alcoholism, tobacco abuse and drug addiction on the face of the earth. Deaths from HIV/AIDS are rampant as are loss of life from heart disease, air/water pollution and suicide. Consequently, male longevity in Putilov’s Russia is fifteen years lower than that of men in Germany, Italy and Sweden. The life expectancy of a fifteen-year-old boy in Russia is three years lower than that of a Haitian fifteen-
year-old boy. Polish women live an average of six years longer than Russian women. In fact, each year, Russian men kill more women in their families than the Afghans killed Russian soldiers during that entire conflict.
Such long-term depopulation trends also spell economic disaster. A Yale University study says Russia has entered a “demographic perfect storm.” In thirty-five years, persons of worker-age in Russia will constitute less than 14 percent of the population. Moreover, the country is witnessing a rapid decline in the educational and skill levels of its workers. All of these stressors will put profound pressure on the pension plans and health care providers servicing Russia’s rapidly aging population.
The Evil That Men Do Page 27
