“Why not leave?” McMahon asked.
“Islam is in my bones and blood. I am not suited to your world.”
“Why not?”
“You wear but one face? I wear a thousand: one for every time and place, person and mood. Only dogged duplicity allows any of us to survive. Without our lies and self-deceptions, we are nothing. I am nothing. They are all we have. They make us—sum us up. You fear death like the plague? I long for its cold, dark, everlasting embrace. The only peace I will ever know is the peace of the grave.”
“Leave. You don’t have to live like this.” To McMahon’s surprise his voice was breaking up and he found himself imploring her. “I can help you. I will help you.”
To his shock and astonishment, he realized he was sincere.
“Mr. McMahon,” Raza said, “that is so sweet. But, no, I am not cut out for your world or for mine. In point of fact, I am suited for one thing and one thing only—the fight.”
“Come with me anyway,” McMahon said, “till we find someplace safe. You can decide then what you want to do and then—”
“You think so?” Raza asked. “If my people, if your leaders—particularly Tower, the Agency and his FBI, which worked with Putilov to get Tower elected—find out you’ve been with us, they will assume you and I know too much about their own plans and operations. They will kill us both.”
McMahon looked away. “Fuck them. You’ve told me nothing about whatever schemes they’ve hatched, and anyway we can still escape. I have friends, good friends, powerful friends. We can get away.”
Raza laughed. “Run from people like Tower, Waheed and Putilov? You’re naïve.”
“We have to try.”
“Danny, it is too late. Things are about to get bad—very bad.” She touched his cheek, and her expression softened. “But when it happens, please do not judge me too harshly, too quickly. I am not the thing I seem. One day, you will understand.”
“Really?”
“Mr. McMahon,” Raza said, leaning over him till they were nose to nose, “Mark my words: I will surprise you before this is over.”
“Then tell me why you’re doing this? Who’s your enemy? What do you fight against?”
“I believe that humanity’s oldest and evilest enemy has always been filthy lucre and the power it commands. In our world, it is oil money, which shields our kingdom from ameliorating influences, strengthens our nation’s tribalistic traditions, exacerbates our men’s misogyny, allows them to subjugate the helpless Saudi women, bankroll terrorists and oppress Dar al-Islam.”
“We suffer from the same sickness,” McMahon said.
“Absolutely,” Raza agreed. “Your world is haunted by ‘the money curse’ as well. Your immeasurable wealth has made your country our planet’s premier nuclear proliferator and merchant of military death. The wealth and power of your politically rich plutocrats have been and will always be your country’s and your people’s eternal foe—arguably the focus of evil in the world today—and your predatory elites will inevitably bring you down. Quite possibly your country’s politically rich will bring all of us down.”
“So your war is ultimately against power and money?” McMahon asked.
“Now you’re starting to understand me, Mr. McMahon. As your St. Paul wrote: ‘We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against powers, against principalities, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.’”
“Well I’m glad you’re opposed to ‘wickedness in high places,’ but you’re not putting President Tower or Ambassador Waheed through hell. I’m the one you’re breaking on a rack. So what do you have against me?”
“Nothing, Mr. McMahon,” Raza said. “As I told you, I am your biggest fan. When I was young, I secretly collected your books and DVDs. I found them … liberating. I find you liberating. You’ve influenced and inspired me more than you can know.”
“Is that why you kidnapped and tortured me?” McMahon asked, his eyes starting to roll back in horror. “To get to know me?”
Raza’s laugh was not unkind. “In part, yes. I also wanted to repay the gift. I wanted to teach you something. You taught me about your world. I honestly wanted to show you what my world is all about.”
“I admit you’ve taught me to howl like a feral hound, baying his brains out at a blood-mad moon, and you’ve taught me to the meaning of spine-freezing, nerve-fraying, hair-frying terror.”
“True,” Raza said, “but believe it or not, I want you to survive this ordeal, and I will do everything in my power to keep you alive. But live or die, win or lose, this I guarantee: You will be changed. I will change you.”
“But not necessarily for the best.”
“Perhaps,” Raza said, “but I have benefitted immensely from our little tête-à-têtes. The truth be known, getting to know you, even under these extreme circumstances, has been the greatest thrill of my life. In my own way, Danny, I actually care about you. I always have.”
“If this is caring,” McMahon said, “I never want to feel your rage.”
Raza stared at him a long minute. “You have been through a lot, and I must say, you’ve taken it remarkably well. Marika and I have been more than a little impressed. Even Tariq was surprised at your … endurance.”
“You wouldn’t know it from the way he hones that scalpel and stares at my testicles,” McMahon said.
“We have been rather hard on you, haven’t we?” Raza said.
“You’ve shocked me with cattle prods,” McMahon said, “ripped my joints loose on a rack and a strappado, whipped me halfway to death with a riding crop, threatened to castrate me like a boar hog and pretty much made, parlayed and marmaladed my ass.”
“You poor baby,” Raza cooed, smiling.
“I’ve been blued, screwed and tattooed.”
“Your watch is wound a little tight, isn’t it?” Raza said.
“No fucking shit.”
“Maybe I should loosen it for you—just a little bit?”
McMahon’s face was an instant mask of paranoia. “It isn’t going to breach my religious principles, is it? Or make me writhe in unbearable pain?”
“Oh, we shall certainly contravene my culture’s beliefs,” Raza said. “In my imperiously cruel world, a man may not touch a woman’s hand. Such an act is strictly haram, strictly forbidden. Masturbation is even worse. It’s a flogging offense. Want to go for … a twofer?”
McMahon stared at her, speechless.
“This isn’t going to hurt, is it?” McMahon finally asked, his eyes darting back and forth nervously.
“Does this hurt?”
She was working him over with her eyes, then her hands, touching him all over, then she was on top of him, holding him so close it was almost like she was wearing him, reaching down, down, down.
“I’m going to make you shake and twitch like a baby goat passing olive pits,” she whispered in McMahon’s ear.
At which point she grabbed his lower extremities so hard a blazing bolt of white-hot fire shot through him, followed by a jolt of pure pleasure so dazzlingly incandescent that he almost passed out.
“That was worth at least a flogging, wasn’t it?” Raza asked. “Now do you have the stones to go for the next level—and the serious possibility of a genuine Islamic stoning afterward?”
She raised herself up on her hands, hovering over him, pinning him with her black, blazing eyes. She began kissing him all over—his chest, stomach, neck, his—
For a second—but only for a second—McMahon blacked out, and when he came to, her head was at his hips, bobbing up and down, up and down. His entire being and body was now consumed by one ecstatic explosion after another, the orgasms blasting through him … like … like …
… like the detonation of a suicide bomber’s vest, like a dump truck full of C-4 blowing up a U.S. military barracks in Beruit and killing 231 marines, or truck bombers reducing two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to rubble, the drivers’ smiles serene,
ethereal, all-knowing, or Raza dynamiting buses in Israel for the Hezbollah or with al Qaeda, beheading Syrians in Aleppo for ISIS, incinerating capital cities worldwide for the New United Islamist Front with a never-ending arsenal of terrorist nukes, or …
And still the orgasms would not cease.
McMahon passed out a second time, and when he came to, Raza was sitting up over him, her short red dress gone but the riding boots still on. Magnificent in her nakedness, she appeared to him no mere woman, but a lioness of the species, an apotheosis of erotic apostasy, an Islamic avatar of lewd, lurid, licentious, lascivious … lust.
But he was spent. She had worn him out. McMahon could not go on.
“No more,” he whimpered.
“Oh, Mr. McMahon,” she said, suddenly growing stern, “we’ve only just begun your education, and I promise you I am the last woman in this world you will ever want to … disappoint.”
“Please. I can’t.”
“Want to bet?” Raza whispered, licking the interior of his ear, her steamy breath hotter than Hellmouth. “I’ll make that phoenix rebear himself.”
Reaching down with her left hand, she grabbed him violently between the legs, gripping his manhood with pit bull power. At the same time, leaning forward, she grabbed the rack’s crank with her left hand and gave it two hard turns. The combination of the horrific pain in his separating joints and the electrifying agony in his genitals was unendurable. He roared like a dromedary in its death throes, gone mad with feral suffering.
But then as he groaned, sobbed and fought to catch his breath, to his utter shock he felt something stir, something wickedly libidinous, and then, to his undying horror, he realized he was coming back to life.
He looked up, and Raza was on top now, lowering herself on his hips, a supercilious smile twisting her mouth into a half grin, half grimace, her eyes glinting with sinful sensuality.
“What are you doing?” he groaned, terrified by her twisted sneer and her evil eyes.
“Oh, Mr. McMahon, I thought you knew. I’m going to hammer you like you were the last spike on the first Cairo-to-Baghdad railroad, and I was the fastest, hardest-hitting, most preternaturally powerful pile driver in history.”
Then throwing her head back and wailing-barking like a hysterical hyena, she began banging him as if she were a jackhammer run amok, pummeling him like a rolling barrage of hellfire, damnation and apocalypse, like a bullet train rocketing down a steep mountain pass, jumping its rail and shattering into a billion trillion smithereens, as if all the banshees in Hades were raging inside of her, fighting to get out.
In the midst of his roaring pain and his raw, furious, burning hunger, McMahon was hit unexpectedly by the most frightening orgasm of his life—a demented detonation out of the abyss. It seemed to rip him in two like a thunderbolt. Against his will, screams ululated out of his lungs, shaking the room and careening through the desert wastes, like the screeching, shrieking, bloodcurdling howls of the damned, erupting out of hell’s evilest, most infernal echo chambers. Harmonizing with his madly wanton wails was Raza’s shrilling laughter, both of which soared, in eerie unison, through dark desert sky, the deranged duet ringing in McMahon’s head like a death knell out of hell. But not even McMahon’s heartrending, mind-cracking terror could prevent the prurient paroxysms from convulsing his gonads and pumping through his body, through his entire being, over and over and over again, until he feared the soul-searing, body-obliterating shocks would never stop.
On and on and on, the two of them climaxed, their carnal cries reverberating across the arid wastes and through the everlasting void. In a last fleeting barely lucid moment, McMahon wondered if the agony-in-ecstasy racking him would ever end, would ever set him free.
He prayed for oblivion, pleaded for release, begged for death, for anything that would make the relentless hammering cease and the Satanic spasms subside, but still Raza would not quit, would not let him go, and still the darkness would not come.
Only after the gray predawn tinted the torture chamber windows did the pit mercifully open into a black heartless hole of blind passion and eternal surcease, and McMahon finally fell in it. Where it would end, he did not know, but at last he was falling, falling, falling.
Into a night that knew no end.
PART XVI
“Remember General Tommy Franks’s prophetic warning when he retired? He believed one nuclear terrorist attack on the U.S. and Congress would very likely hand its power over to a military-backed dictator.”
—Elena Moreno
1
The memory of their meeting, drinking, seduction, lovemaking, garroting, her struggles and her death throes got Fahad … hot.
Fahad sat in a straight-back chair by Adrienne’s living room window. The glass double doors in the front of Jules Meredith’s apartment building were less than one hundred feet away, so he hadn’t bothered with a high-power sniper rifle or even a scope. On his lap rested a scoped AR-15 set on semi-auto. It had a custom-made collapsible wire stock, flash and noise suppressors, and it would more than suffice. He could make that one-hundred-foot shot in his sleep, standing on his head, underwater, on sodium pentothal.
His main obstacle now was boredom. He’d been waiting for Jules Meredith to exit her apartment building for two hours, and he was getting restless. He willed himself to stay vigilant.
Still his mind drifted.
* * *
He remembered making love to Adrienne the night before. She was lithe, nimble and inventive in bed, but despite her many trysts, he knew she’d never experienced lovemaking with a man possessing Fahad’s knowledge, talent and expertise. At one point, he’d made her scream with excitation, and after he’d finished, she’d sobbed like a little girl, thanking him over and over for taking her to sexual heights she’d never dreamed possible.
When at last he’d wrapped her thin leather belt around her neck, she had encouraged him. Sitting bolt upright, she told him she was all his and “ready for anything you want.” The poor thing had thought he was teaching her a new weird trick, some sort of erotic asphyxiation game.
“This is so exciting!” she’d enthused.
So he’d encircled her neck with the belt. Wrapping the two ends around each of his wrists, he gripped them tightly in his fists and took a deep breath. He then yanked both ends crossways with all his strength. Her feet instantly shot up, kicking convulsively at the far wall and the ceiling. Her hands grabbed and clawed so furiously at his wrists it felt like he was battling an insane ape on a bucking bronco. Still he did not falter or flinch; he continued to pull as hard as he knew how, refusing to loosen his grip or relax the implacable tractor-pull of his arms.
She was stronger than most of his victims, and he had to fight her a full two minutes. Finally, however, her bladder discharged, and she died.
Fahad sighed. He would remember Adrienne. By Fahad’s perversely outrageous standards, she had been exhilarating. In fact, the memory of their meeting, drinking, seduction, lovemaking, garroting, her struggles and her death throes got Fahad … hot.
All over again.
* * *
Focus! he said to himself. He fixed on Jules Meredith’s apartment’s entrance, waiting for her car service to pull up and for Jules to exit her building’s glass doors. Before she could step off the curb, he’d shoot her in the head.
Since the rifle barrel was flash- and sound-suppressed, no one would hear or see the shot. He was dressed in black, the rifle was dark as well, the window open, and his room would be unlit. He would not raise the rifle until the last second. No one would be able to tell where the shot came from.
All they would see was the woman drop, like a hammered steer, where she stood.
He would then take the fire stairs, three at a time, to the basement and depart by the service entrance along the side of the building.
This was going to work.
2
“I don’t know if we’ve walked in on a United Front torture chamber or an S/M brothel.”
—Elena Moreno
“We’ve got company!” Marika yelled, bursting into McMahon’s torture room, her shouts shocking him out of his demented delirium.
To her shock and confusion, Raza was stark naked and on top of McMahon, who had just come to and was clearly out of his mind. Both of them were in full flagrante delicto, mad with lust and concluding a final series of sobbing, howling climaxes.
“I thought you were torturing him,” Marika said to Raza, stunned by the spectacle in front of her. “I thought those were screams of agony.”
Raza wearily dragged herself off McMahon. Grabbing her short red dress off the floor, she threw it on.
“How many attackers did you spot?” Raza asked.
“At least ten,” Marika said, unable to take her horrified eyes off the embarrassingly erect, supine man on the rack, “all armed to the teeth. They just killed everyone in the Quonset huts. We have to kill Rashid and McMahon and leave. Tariq’s already split.”
The soldiers outside began hammering the reinforced door with a battering ram.
“There’s no time,” Raza yelled, grabbing Marika and pushing her into the other room.
Through the open door, McMahon saw them lift a heavy trapdoor with a piece of carpet glued to the top of it. The women climbed down the steps into the escape tunnel below, lowered the trapdoor, and he heard them bolt it shut.
The Evil That Men Do Page 31
