Raza was right. There was no time, and the two women barely made it. The second the trapdoor slammed, a platter charge blew the blockhouse door inward in an explosion of wooden slivers and shards. Elena was charging through the smoke and debris into the room with four mercs behind her, all of them dressed in black fatigues and watch caps, their faces darkened with camo paint, their MP7 H&Ks at the ready.
They quickly inspected the other two rooms, which were empty.
Coming back in, Elena cut the wrist and feet ropes with which his torturers had lashed him to the rack, shouting all the while:
“I heard you’d been kidnapped, Danny,” Elena said, “but I never dreamed you’d be here.”
McMahon was speechless. Relieved of the stress, his limbs and joints throbbed horrifically. All he could do was convulse with pain.
“What the fuck was going on?” Elena asked in horror.
His spasms slowly subsided, and McMahon looked up at Elena. She was staring at his crotch. In Raza’s frantic effort to leave, she’d left her black laced panties coiled around his genitalia. Her undergarment was vividly stained with his lust and wet from Raza’s exertions. His upper thighs were crisscrossed and crosshatched with scarlet lipstick smears.
“Where did everyone go?” Elena said, trying not to look at McMahon’s still clearly aroused and hard-used loins.
“They escaped through a steel-lined trapdoor under that rug in the next room,” McMahon gasped raggedly, barely able to get the words out, his ears aching, ringing and roaring from the platter charge’s and flashbang’s blasts. “I heard them bolt it shut behind them just before you blasted the door open and blew out my eardrums.”
Elena could only stare at him, finally rendered speechless.
“What the hell is this?” Jonesy said, coming toward them out of the other room. He had an arm under Rashid’s armpit and was half walking, half dragging him through the doorway. Coming to an abrupt halt, he stared slack-jawed at McMahon, who was still on his rack, the evidence of sexual activity glaringly, humilatingly apparent.
“I don’t know if we walked in on a United Front torture chamber,” Elena said, still shaking her head, “or an S/M brothel.”
“Or maybe both,” Jonesy said, “Outside the door, we heard this boy here gittin’ hisself some mean rocks. I don’t know though. Him and Rashid both look like they gonna need some medical attention.”
“Let’s get them to the choppers,” Elena said. “We can whip out the med kits and then get the fuck out of Dodge.”
“Copy that,” Henry said, standing in the front door. “There’s a TTP base just over the rise, and they have to know we’re here.”
“Raza got to have hit an alarm button,” Jonesy said.
“Time to adios, muthafuckas,” Henry said.
Henry grabbed McMahon off his rack and threw him over his shoulder.
“We outta here,” Jonesy said, throwing Rashid over his shoulder and carrying him out the door. “Gots to admit though, boy,” Jonesy said to McMahon, “you bangin’ that pussy, stretched out on a muthafuckin’ rack? You more man than me.”
They all jogged out toward the rent in the fence.
They had to get around the hill and back to the choppers.
3
Yes, the chauffeur was definitely going down.
FOR BORING THE FUCKING SHIT OUT OF HIM!
—Fahad al-Qadi
Fahad watched Jules Meredith pause at the entrance to the building. The uniformed doorman looked like a banana republic general with thick shoulder pads, crimson epaulets, black braids and gold trim. He even wore a general’s dress hat with a small ebony brim and more gold trim.
Fahad could shoot her where she stood, but the bullet would have to pass through the glass door, and he didn’t trust the glass not to deflect the round. Forcing himself to be patient, he waited for her to move toward the open door, but Jules Meredith wasn’t cooperating. Instead she stood there behind the glass, chatting with General Doorman. Fahad wondered what was taking them so long. There was no way the military-looking dork could be all that interesting.
Again, his concentration flagged, and his attention wandered. He thought he’d figured out why this last-minute hit had been ordered. All of Fahad’s other New York targets were, in one way or another, enemies of the president and his allies, and Jules Meredith was writing a scathing series of exposés on President Tower. As long as the president was eliminating his adversaries, he probably thought he’d dispatch the Meredith woman too. In for a penny, in for a pound.
Oh well. Mine is not to reason why.
Still the woman continued to chat. Or listen. The old guy in the Third World general’s uniform was talking up a storm, yakking as if his life depended on it. As for Jules Meredith, she just stood there, staring him dead in the eye and listening with rapt attention, as if she had all the time in the world, and he was the most fascinating motherfucker on the planet.
Well, Fahad was running out of patience fast. He had a whole city full of assholes he had to kill, and he didn’t have time for this horseshit.
Maybe you should put a bullet in General Doorman’s yapping mouth just for pissing you off.
A black Cadillac Escalade SUV pulled up in front of Meredith’s apartment building. An ancient wizened gray-haired chauffeur in a navy blue suit, a white shirt and dark tie double-parked parallel to a white Ford Escort. The driver got out and limped up to the entrance of Meredith’s building.
Still Jules continued listening to General Asshole Doorman like he was Moses come down from Mount Sinai with God’s Word, blazing and smoking in two stone tablets. Every neuron in Fahad’s nervous system wanted to shoot both of them through the glass door.
Calm down. Relax. Wait for your best shot.
The gray-haired chauffer-cretin opened the door and actually bowed before Meredith there in the doorway like she was Princess Di. When she moved toward the open doorway and paused, he’d kill all of them—the driver and doorman after he took out the bitch.
There. She was shaking hands with General Idiot. Now she was shaking hands with the chauffeur, and he was also telling Meredith the story of his life.
She was still behind the fucking glass!
Yes, the chauffeur was definitely going down.
FOR BORING THE FUCKING SHIT OUT OF HIM!
Fahad took a deep breath and willed himself to calm down.
Jules Meredith had stopped shaking hands with the driver and was waving goodbye to the doorman as she headed toward the open door.
He finally had her out in the open and dead in his sights.
4
“Someone was gibbering like a gibbon.”
—Rashid al-Rahman
Seated in brown stuffed chairs around a bolted-down walnut table, Elena, Adara, Jamie, Jonesy and McMahon were flying over the Atlantic on one of Jamie’s Gulfstream G650 jets. The five of them were wearing whatever civilian clothes they could find on the plane—jeans and slacks, polo shirts and jogging clothes. They were on course for a private New Jersey runway near New York City.
“Danny,” Elena said, turning to McMahon, “We went there to rescue Rashid, and we find you. What the fuck were you doing there?”
McMahon stared at Elena a long moment. She was wearing khaki cargo pants and a black T-shirt. Even after a long hard op, forty-eight hours without sleep and with no makeup on, she looked terrific. He then caught his own reflection in a bulkhead mirror, and he couldn’t say the same for himself. Decked out in a white T-shirt, tan cotton slacks, gym shoes and no socks, he was a mess. His eyes were red-rimmed, his face drawn and haggard, his brown hair dirty and unkempt, and he looked like he’d lost thirty pounds. A professional performer, he had always been scrupulous about his appearance; now he couldn’t have cared less, which was weird. He wondered why he’d ever cared.
“You remember that show I did with Jules?” McMahon finally said, his voice hoarse and uncertain.
“Uh, yeah?” Elena said.
“Afterward, I fo
und some crazy terrorist chick waiting for me in my hotel suite. She seduced and drugged me. Then three men in dark suits—partners of hers—kidnapped me out of my hotel room.”
“You okay?” Adara asked.
“You wouldn’t understand,” he said softly.
He got up and headed toward the galley.
“Something wrong with Danny?” Jamie asked.
“I’ll say,” Elena said. “He won’t even look at Adara or me, not even when we talk to him. I’ve tried flirting with him. Nada. It’s like something’s not there.”
“Like he’s been mind-snatched,” Adara said.
“It’s like talking to an abandoned house,” Elena said.
“To a Dumpster,” Adara agreed. “You get no affect, no connotation, nothing.”
McMahon returned to the table. He had managed to liberate a water bottle.
“Where’s Rashid?” McMahon, taking a deep drink.
“Lying down,” Elena said. “You sure you don’t want to rest?”
“I can’t,” McMahon said.
“What’s wrong?” Adara asked.
“I keep seeing things I can’t unsee,” McMahon said.
“Wow,” Adara said. “Raza flipped your switch, didn’t she?”
“I never want to have sex again,” McMahon said.
“That’s not the Danny McMahon I know,” Elena said.
“Me neither,” Jonesy said. “We heard your ass outside the door. You was gittin’ some hot-ticket booty in there.”
“Hard-trade booty,” Jamie said.
“You’ll never know,” McMahon said, shaking his head and looking away.
“We missed grabbing her by seconds,” Jonesy said, “but we heard you and her going at it.”
“That was one fever-driven fuckfest,” Elena said.
“I heard you two in the other room,” Rashid said, joining them at the table. He wore black jogging pants, a gray athletic T-shirt and running shoes. “It sounded like you were banging a gibbon.”
“A gibbon?” McMahon asked, confused.
“Someone was gibbering like a gibbon,” Rashid explained.
“More like a chimpanzee on crack,” Adara said.
“What was all that yowling about?” Jamie asked. “You weren’t mounting a mountain lion, were you?”
McMahon looked away, his eyes distant and unfocused.
“You sounded like a chain saw,” Elena explained.
“It was like fucking Death,” McMahon finally said, empty-eyed, emotionless.
Adara snapped her fingers in front of McMahon’s eyes. They didn’t blink.
“You really are an idiot,” Adara said, studying McMahon intently.
“I hear a lot of that lately.”
“What the hell did they do to you?” Elena asked.
McMahon just stared at her, unresponsive.
“And why did they do it?” Elena asked. “Why did they kidnap and torture you?”
“I’m starting to understand,” McMahon said, “that there are people in this world who don’t like me.”
“My friend,” Elena, said, patting his arm and giving him the kindest smile she could muster, “you are richly and widely reviled.”
“But what brought you guys to the safe house, if you didn’t know I was there?” McMahon asked. “What’s going on?”
“Tell him,” Jamie said. “Like it or not, we’re all in this together.”
“Why not?” Adara said. “After what you’ve gone through, maybe you deserve to know. Rashid, tell us what you said back in the chopper.”
5
Jules was determined to give them bonuses they would never forget.
Jules said goodbye to the doorman. She and Niko had been friends for eighteen years, and his story of his daughter’s divorce had been wrenching.
“Drugs and alcohol do terrible things to people,” Niko had been telling Jules over and over again.
“That they do, Niko,” was all she could think of to say. “That they do.”
Well there was Jimmy, out of his car and entering the doorway. He was bowing before her as if she were the Second Coming of Christ. She had to find some way of breaking him of that habit.
Then he began telling her about the traffic jam.
“Ms. Meredith, that Anti-Economic Inequality Conference at the UN has traffic gridlocked here to the New Millennium. I’m not sure there’s a good way to get you to your publisher’s offices on time. It’s too late to cut through Central Park. The West Side Highway—they now call the part we would want Jonathan DiMaggio Drive—is as far from the UN as you can get. Maybe if we took J. D. Drive down to Hell’s Kitchen and cut over? Would that get us there? What do you think?”
Actually, Jules didn’t care how they went. She did have to get there though. She had to tell them about the new series of exposés she was doing on President J. T. Tower and ask them whether there was any ethical way she could work any of her interviews with him into those pieces. She didn’t think so. He’d been emphatic that conversations were on deep background and not for publication.
Still Jules wanted her publisher’s input. She also need to discuss potential defamation of character suits. She thought they had the best libel lawyers in the news business, and she needed their input, given how wealthy and litigious Tower and his friends were.
“Jimmy, you know the streets and traffic better than I ever will. I trust your judgment. Let’s take the route you think is best.”
“I don’t know, Ms. Meredith,” the driver continued. “Maybe West End down to 10th Avenue and then cut over on—”
Jules was just stepping into the open doorway and onto the sidewalk when the screams rang out. Instinctively, she spun around and dived to the ground, off to the side, and away from the open door. A second later, Jimmy and Niko were throwing themselves on top of her.
Door glass was detonating throughout the apartment building’s lobby and entranceway like shrapnel. Down the block people were screaming and horns honking and thankfully a siren began to wail.
Placing her hands over her head, she pressed herself as flat as she could on the lobby floor and hoped Jimmy and Niko, who were still spread-eagled on top of her, didn’t get hurt.
Jules was determined to give them bonuses they would never forget.
6
“A one-kiloton terrorist nuke is the perfect weapon for a UN decapitation strike.”
—Rashid al-Rahman
Rashid sat back in his airplane swivel chair and looked at his rescuers.
“I’d infiltrated the New Islamist United Front,” Rashid explained to Danny McMahon and the people sitting around him on Jamie’s plane. “Among other things, I learned the Front was plotting with Ambassador Waheed, President Putilov and with the full cooperation of the American president, to take out the UN with a one-kiloton terrorist nuke. They were fueling the nuke in the U.S. with bomb-grade highly enriched Pakistani uranium, which Putilov had smuggled in on a Russian transport plane under a diplomatic seal. They have an expert—our old friend, Fahad al-Qadi—assembling the nuke in a machine shop somewhere near or in the city. Kamal ad-Din and your old friend Raza Jabarti are involved in it too.”
“You probably don’t know Fahad,” Elena said, “but he may be the most dangerous individual on the face of the earth.”
“All of them are very bad news,” Jamie told McMahon.
“But why nuke the UN?” McMahon asked.
“You know that Global Anti-Poverty Conference at the UN?” Elena said.
“Of course,” McMahon said, nodding.
“The UN is voting on a plan to address global income inequality worldwide,” Rashid said. “They’ve summoned the world’s five hundred richest billionaires in an effort to convince them—coerce them if necessary—into donating a third of their gross annual revenues to the Anti-Poverty Initiative. Otherwise, the UN will mandate the expropriation of a third of all illicit funds held in the planet’s biggest offshore tax-haven bank accounts.”
“Which is
nearly $10 trillion,” Elena pointed out.
“The U.S. Senate, Japan, India, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, and the EU are all on board, which means it will happen,” Jamie said. “The democracies of the world are demanding it. Even China’s coming around, because they will receive on net far more money than their elites will have to pay out.”
“And in the end,” Elena added, “China’s elites have other ways to funnel that money into their pockets.”
“If you have a totalitarian state,” Rashid said, “you can get away with all kinds of shit.”
“On the other hand,” Jamie continued, “the world’s oil-centric megamoguls are about to lose a whole shithouse full of money. We believe the Saudis—who bankroll the New United Islamist Front—are joining Putilov, Fahad and Raza Jabari in this plan to obliterate the conference.”
“Ambassador Waheed is central to this plot,” Elena said. “Putilov and his Russian oligarchs are in it too. Russia used to be the biggest oil-exporting nation on earth, and plummeting oil prices are killing them. Furthermore, over 100 percent of Russia’s GDP is squirreled away in foreign tax havens. The Saudis have 55 percent of their GOP hidden abroad. They’ll have to give up one-third of those funds or face ostracism from the global economy in the same way Iran was banned after it attempted to accelerate its nuclear weapons program. Economic ostracism is no small threat; it almost bankrupted Iran. Still if you combine dropping oil prices and the planned expropriation of one-third of Russia’s and the Saudis GDP, you’re looking at the fiscal destruction of those countries. Either way, Russia, Putilov, his oligarchs, the Saudis and quite possibly our own president are terminally fucked. They see nuking the UN as their only way out of this mess. They’ll do anything to stop the expropriation movement.”
“You’re convinced Tower is in on it too?” McMahon said.
“Putilov and the Saudis own his ass,” Jamie said.
“Putilov, in particular,” Elena said. “Tower wouldn’t be president if Putilov hadn’t fixed the last election for him.”
“I must be hallucinating,” McMahon said.
“Afraid not, Danny,” Elena said. “It gets worse. Tell him, Rashid.”
The Evil That Men Do Page 32
