The Evil That Men Do

by Robert Gleason

  “We’re in the middle of the Pakistan desert in a top-secret location,” Elena agreed. “They have no reason to suspect anything.”

  “They’ll all probably be asleep,” Jonesy said.

  “I’m more concerned with securing our two choppers,” Adara said.

  “It’s a long walk out of here,” Jonesy said, nodding.

  “Which is why half the team is back protecting the choppers,” Elena said.

  “Tower guard down,” Jamie said in their earpieces.

  “You took him out?” Elena asked, double-checking.

  “I thought it would improve his character,” Jamie explained.

  “And I bet he never even thanked you,” Henry noted.

  “Not one word,” Jamie said.

  “Then it’s time to blow this pop stand,” Elena said.

  They split up into three groups and began working their way toward the fence, moving from rock to rock, from clump of brush to clump of brush.

  PART XIV

  “Your brother will come to grief with me.”

  —Jules Meredith to Brenda Tower

  1

  “J. T. Tower owns the FBI, the CIA, the SEC, the Treasury, the courts. Hell, that former FBI director, Conley, helped Putilov get my brother elected.”

  —Brenda Tower on her brother, the president

  Jules Meredith couldn’t believe Brenda had been taping her brother on the sly for the last ten years and was now playing the tapes for Jules.

  She’d even said she was giving them to her.

  The two of them listened to a small sample of Brenda’s tapes—five hours’ worth—and they were utterly mesmerizing in a macabre kind of way. Tower clearly proved in his own words that he was a psychopath of maniacal proportions.

  The dawn sun was coming up over Manhattan, and the two women finally put the tapes and the recorder away. For a long moment, they stared at each other in silence.

  “All of these recordings are yours,” Brenda said. “Just promise me one thing: Somehow you’ll make that bastard pay.”

  “Why is it so important to you to punish Tower now?” Jules asked. “After all these years?”

  Brenda handed Jules a manila envelope. “Open it.”

  Jules perused it quickly. It was a recent medical report on Tower’s sister, and its findings were unmistakable. The words “stage-four uterine cancer” jumped out at Jules.

  “My condition is irreparable and beyond hopeless,” Brenda said. “I’ve refused chemo and radiation.”

  “What does Jim say about this?”

  “He doesn’t know. He thinks I’ve been visiting Vegas for the drinking and gambling. I was, but I’ve also been seeing a cancer specialist secretly and incognito.”

  Jules put her hand on Brenda’s arm, but Brenda gently removed it.

  “Don’t worry about me. I just want you to stop that sonofabitch. He can’t go on doing these terrible things and profiting off them.”

  “Brenda, this is a very difficult undertaking, and you’re ill.”

  “I can hold up my end, and I have dirt on him—in his own words—that will shake even you. We can put my brother away forever.”

  “I’m not sure I’m the one,” Jules said. “He’s the president of the United States. Really, the FBI would be better.”

  “J. T. Tower owns the FBI, the CIA, the SEC, the Treasury, the courts. Hell, that former FBI director, Conley, helped Putilov get my brother elected.”

  “All the more reason this won’t work,” Jules said.

  “You’re the only one who has any chance at all at nailing J. T.”

  “But this is too big—even for me.”

  “You have to do it, Jules. Please. You’re the only one I trust. You’re the only one I can turn to.”

  “Is the evidence you have on him really that incriminating?”

  “I have stuff on him that would turn the heart to stone,” Brenda said.

  What am I going to do? Jules thought, looking away.

  2

  McMahon had mocked the faith of some of the most dangerous people on earth, and karma had finally come after him. And while he despised these people for what they were doing to him, he had to admit that, in part, he’d done it to himself. Like Odysseus, he’d chosen to howl at the Cyclops and shout his name at the gods.

  Late at night, chained to a steel bed frame in a small locked room, McMahon stared at the ceiling. A narrow window just below the ceiling was filled with brilliant night stars.

  Rashid, who was also shackled to a bed frame, lay a few feet from him. Tariq and Marika had been much harder on Rashid than Raza—than even Marika—had been on McMahon. This was, in part, because Rashid had information they truly needed. Also McMahon couldn’t get over the feeling that Raza somehow found him … entertaining.

  In fact, sometimes he wondered if she actually liked him.

  What the fuck, he thought aimlessly. That’s how I make my living—entertaining people.

  “The stars in that window seem awfully bright,” McMahon whispered to Rashid.

  “We’re in the desert. The stars are always brighter in the desert.”

  “I hate the desert,” McMahon said.

  “I’m told the desert is where we go to find God.”

  “If you think you can find God in Pakistan,” McMahon said, “I have a great deal for you on reclaimed swampland in British Honduras.”

  “Finding God has never been part of my life’s plan.”

  “Does your life’s plan include being tortured to death by sadists? I’m worried about you, Rashid. I’ve got nothing these lunatics want. They just torture me for kicks, but they need what you know.”

  “My problem is if I tell them everything I know, I’m a dead man. So I’m better off holding out.”

  “You seem to be taking it pretty well,” McMahon said.

  “They aren’t getting any cherry.”

  “Still you aren’t giving them shit,” McMahon said, “no matter what they do. I’m impressed.”

  “You aren’t doing half-bad yourself. For a fucking TV comedian, you’ve surprised everyone. You got a pair of balls on you.”

  “You want to see balls, you should catch my act. Doing stand-up in front of an insane horde of stamping, shouting, drugged-out, crazy-fucking-PC college kids—now that takes balls.”

  “Still everyone’s amazed. Danny McMahon—asshole Islamophobe celebrity—turns out to be a stand-up guy. Who would have guessed?”

  McMahon closed his eyes. What was happening to him? He could finally understand why Raza and Tariq abducted him. They wanted spectacular terrorist attacks to frighten the West, and to convince the world no one was beyond their reach; that if they could abduct Danny McMahon, TV superstar, they could abduct anyone.

  But now he was wondering not about them, but himself. In retrospect, he could see he’d been begging for something like this his whole life long. After all, what had driven him to write and perform monologues so insanely insulting, so outrageously inflammatory and conduct interviews so incendiary that they would inspire people halfway around the world to kidnap him and then smuggle him into Pakistan?

  Why had he deliberately chosen to drive some of the most dangerous and demented people in the world into paroxysms of paranoid fury? What had caused him to fuck up so badly?

  He did have a few ideas. In his student days, in classrooms, he’d always been a relentless provocateur. Once in college he’d run out of money and landed a job teaching eighth-, ninth- and twelfth-grade English. He’d instinctively set out to bait his classroom students.

  When he taught the eighth-graders Lassie Come Home, he’d told them Lassie was a stupid hound who could never navigate hundreds of twisting, turning miles without help, guidance or direction and who was utterly, congenitally, pathologically incapable of finding … her way home. He told his students that if he stuck one of them and their pet dog in a windowless room and locked the door from the outside, giving them only water and no food, within two weeks all t
hat would be left of the student would be a glisteningly white skeleton and their pup, Fido, would be the only one left alive. He’d be licking his grinning, blood-flecked jaws, his belly bulging with their remains.

  McMahon’s tirades against man’s best friend so angered the students that he got in trouble with their parents. The principal advised him to “stop attacking their dogs.”

  When he taught his ninth-grade pupils The Old Man and the Sea, he told them that the old fisherman, Santiago, was a self-destructive old fool who killed the big fish out of ignorant pride, broke the little kid’s heart for no good reason and caused himself to have a heart attack. McMahon further argued that the novel’s only winners, the only ones that knew what they were doing and had an honest productive mission in life, were the sharks, who stripped the big fish clean. They won; everyone else lost.

  “If I had to be a character in that miserable story,” McMahon had fumed at the class, “I’d want to be one of the sharks.”

  The kids screamed at him with blind hostility.

  When he taught the twelfth-graders Hamlet, he argued that Hamlet was a psychopath who brought death and destruction to Denmark and was responsible, directly or indirectly, for killing everyone in the play. McMahon had then raged that the world would have been better off if Hamlet had killed himself in the “To be or not to be” scene. Or better yet the first act.

  By the end of each of his classes he’d had the kids madder than hornets.

  And he’d loved every second of it.

  The truth was that’s how he had always gotten his rocks off—antagonizing the mortal shit out of people all in the name of making them laugh and teaching them some sort of outrageous morality lesson.

  Maybe in the end all he’d really wanted to do was piss them off.

  Well, kid, you’ve pissed some people off big-time now.

  Why had he always done shit like this? Once when he was out with Jules—and trying, unsuccessfully, to get into her pants—he had made the mistake of trying to match her drink for drink. He’d learned the hard way no one could drink Jules Meredith under the table.

  Instead of screwing her, he’d gotten drunkenly maudlin and laid bare his soul. He’d told her about his childhood, about growing up in an Irish neighborhood in Brooklyn. His father had been born in County Cork, had encouraged him in sports and also bequeathed to him his dark, Irish wit and an inherent sense that the world was mad.

  His mother was a librarian and a bookworm, who had instilled in him a love of literature, an obsessive interest in history and a burning sense of right and wrong. Her parents had survived Auschwitz by the skin of their teeth, and as a child she’d grown up listening to her relatives’ Holocaust survival stories. When she entered school, she read all the Holocaust memoirs she could get her hands on. She was also, however, utterly irreligious. The Holocaust survivors’ experiences had convinced his mother that there was no God.

  McMahon had found nothing in his study of history or in his personal experiences to refute his mother’s beliefs, and he had become an atheist at an early age. In fact, he was so passionate on the subject that atheism had quickly become his own Church Militant. By his early teens, he was already deriding people of faith as fools, knaves, charlatans or all of the above.

  After that long drunken evening with Meredith, after she had listened half the night to stories of his Brooklyn childhood and after absorbing hour after hour of antireligious harangues, she asked why he was so iconoclastic, so eager to provoke and inflame.

  “Because I believe in the things I say,” he’d answered her glibly.

  “I’m sure that’s true,” Jules said.

  “But you think there’s another reason?” he’d asked.

  “Maybe.” Jules shrugged. “For openers, you’re the most deeply divided person I’ve even known. I’ve spent half my life listening to you fulminate against every form of wickedness and injustice—and that is all to the good—but most of the time it sounds like you’re railing at yourself, as if the real war was inside of you.”

  “You think so?” he asked with wry mockery. “Then who’s the enemy, and who’s winning?”

  “Oh, Danny, that’s a war you can never win,” Jules had said. “The half of Danny McMahon, which you got from your Jewish mother, hates the half of you that’s a drunken, raving, hilariously funny Irish Catholic asshole. That half of you—the Irish Catholic asshole half—he despises the part your Jewish mother bequeathed you: namely, the somber intellectual activist who broods over injustice and will forever rage against the night. Each of your personalities has waged war on the other half for as long as I’ve known you, and as to either personality ever winning, that’s not in the cards. Nor can you call a cease-fire, proclaim a separate peace or even declare a pox on both your houses and walk away. All you can do is fight, and that war will never end.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you have a very high opinion of me,” McMahon said.

  “I think deep down inside of you is a really good man, and I hope one day you know in your soul how good a man you are, escape the self-hate that consumes you night and day, and feel the love, respect and admiration that all of your friends, including me, feel for you. I doubt that will happen, but still I hope. I am certain of one thing though: You may find love, but you’ll never know peace.”

  McMahon had laughed long and hard at the time. He said he’d prefer getting “a piece of Jules” to “making peace with himself” any day of the week and then once again tried to get in her pants. She adroitly deflected his advances, eventually got them both into a cab and took him home.

  He’d gotten up the next morning in his bed with a blinding hangover. Jules, who’d slept on his couch, was scrambling eggs and making coffee for him. She’d even fixed a Bloody Mary for his hangover. They talked all that morning about friends, their work, the fate of the earth and they laughed, but they never discussed what made Danny McMahon tick again.

  In his own mind, he’d, of course, dismissed her analysis as “cheap-psych headshrinking” and “Julesbabble.” Now, however, he had to wonder whether Jules had been right. Where had his iconoclasm and his contrarianism—most notably his war on religion—come from, and what had he hoped to accomplish with all his darkly comedic diatribes and funny-but-infuriating tirades? McMahon had mocked the faith of some of the most dangerous people on earth, and karma had finally come after him. And while he despised these people for what they were doing to him, he had to admit that, in part, he’d done it to himself. Like Odysseus, he’d chosen to howl at the Cyclops and shout his name at the gods.

  Well the gods had had enough of his disrespect, his rank disdain and his insubordination. Their judgment had been rendered, and they were making their verdict known.

  His day of reckoning was now at hand.

  3

  “My brother’s planning shit with Putilov, the Saudis and the United Front that will make your story on them read like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”

  —Brenda Tower

  Jules spent the next week listening to over one hundred hours of Brenda’s most defamatory tapes. On them, her brother admitted and incriminated himself in scores of Class A felonies.

  She had also given Jules all of her brother’s offshore tax-evasive black-hole bank statements, including usernames, passwords and secret account numbers. Jules had enough evidence to put the president away for a hundred years. Sitting in their secret hotel room, Jules showed Brenda an annotated list of all the statutes her brother had violated and in what way.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to take this to the FBI or Treasury?” Jules asked.

  “Too many of the directors and top officials are on his payroll. I know. I’m in on all of his business and legal meetings.”

  “And you’re absolutely positive you want me to do it?” Jules asked. “You’re about to cause a political earthquake.”

  “Yes, because I believe you’ll see it through to the bloody end. I’ve seen you take on terrorists, the FBI, the White House,
and you’re still standing. I honestly think you’d stand up to a thermonuclear fireball, and I don’t think you can be bought.”

  “Everyone has a price, and anyone can be scared,” Jules said, shaking her head. “Also this would be no ordinary investigation. Other journalists have gone after J. T. Tower. They didn’t keep their jobs. He doesn’t tolerate reporters going through his dirty laundry.”

  “I will continue to lay everything out for you.”

  “Brenda, I’ve done some articles on him, and will continue to write articles. But frankly I’d wanted to get back to my book on the Saudis and the New United Islamist Front.”

  “He’s part of that book. My brother’s planning shit with Putilov, the Saudis and the United Front that will make your story on them read like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”

  “Jesus,” Jules said, whistling softly, “I really am feeling … inadequate.”

  “Jules, he’s genuinely diabolical. He’s trying to sell the Saudis and their terrorist neighbors forty nuclear power plants.”

  Jules studied Brenda a long hard minute. Brenda’s eyes were moist, and her hands were starting to tremble.

  Jules finally let out a slow, deep sigh.

  “Your brother will come to grief with me. I promise.”

  It happened just like that, and to Jules eternal surprise, their friendship was forged. It was not to be an easy friendship for either of them. Jules would force Brenda to relive some of the most horrifying episodes in her own life. In fact, once when Jules tried to commiserate with Brenda’s cancer struggles, Brenda said:

  “Uterine cancer’s nothing compared to growing up with J. T.”

  Jules was relentless. Among other things, she wanted Brenda to tell her what J. T. was like when he first took over his father’s company.

  “At the time of Dad’s death, J. T. had to have me around. He needed me, my support and my loyalty. He was already embroiled in divorce scandals. He eventually bought his ex-wives’ silence, but at a very high price.”