The Evil That Men Do Read online

  “How’s it shaking, kid?” Adara asked. She was from Pakistan but had spent over a decade in the States. She’d spent a lot of time around Americans and spoke colloquial English.

  Elena shrugged. “‘The highway’s jammed with broken heroes.’”

  “‘On a last chance power drive,’” Adara said, finishing the Springsteen lyric.

  “But you’re okay?” Elena asked.

  “Still aboveground.”

  “Better than the alternative,” Elena conceded.

  “We have a friend who’s not doing so well though.”

  “Let me guess,” Elena said, shaking her head and rolling her eyes in dismay.

  “I’ll save you the trouble,” Adara said. “It’s Rashid.”

  “I thought he was dead.”

  “Everyone says that,” Adara said.

  “He’s an asshole,” Elena said.

  “But he’s our asshole,” Adara said.

  “Your asshole,” Elena said.

  “But he was yours when you needed him,” Adara said.

  “Which was in another life,” Elena said.

  “Oh, so now you’re no longer part of this world, this life?” Adara asked.

  “I’m not part of Rashid’s life.”

  “Why? Because he’s in trouble?”

  “He’s always been drawn to trouble.”

  “As the sparks fly upward,” Adara conceded, “but he was there when we needed him, when no one else would stand up.”

  “No one else was dumb and desperate enough to do the ops we sent him on,” Elena said.

  Adara took a deep breath, struggling to compose herself.

  “All right, Elena,” Adara said. “Understood. Say all that’s true, but it’s me asking now.”

  “My palms bleed for you.”

  “I got him into it. I asked him to step up, to take the job.”

  “Then it’s on you.”

  “But this one’s big, and Rashid’s the only one on the inside. The people who grabbed him—you know them better than anyone in the world.”

  “I’m out of that business, Adara.”

  “I can’t bring him back without you. I’ll probably need Jamie too. You’re still with him, right?”

  “Yeah, but what do you want Jamie for?”

  “He’s ex–Special Forces. He can handle himself in the field.”

  “You know several thousand guys who can handle themselves in the field.”

  “I heard he sold his computer security firm for $50 billion. I heard he walked off with half of that.”

  “So?”

  “Someone’s got to bankroll this op,” Adara said.

  Elena stared at her, speechless. Finally she got her voice back.

  “You’re too fucking much,” she said.

  “If you two don’t help, these guys that have Rashid will torture him to death.”

  “You’re breaking my heart.”

  “You owe him. You owe me.”

  “Name a figure. Anything. Jamie will pitch in too. No shit. It’s yours.”

  “The people who have him,” Adara said, “you have no idea how bad they are.”

  “He knew the gig when he signed up.”

  “Rashid doesn’t deserve to go out this way.”

  “Cry me a river.”

  “You two are indispensable. I can’t do it without you.”

  “The cemeteries are packed with indispensable people—from the bedrock’s bottom to the roses on their graves.” She continued. “Adara, let it go. You could never save him. He was always a runaway train on a downhill track.”

  “A runaway bullet train just screaming to jump the rail. But you still can’t walk away.”

  “Why not?”

  “The stuff he dug up, it’s too fucking horrifying.”

  “What could possibly be that horrifying?” Elena asked.

  “Remember when ISIS and al Qaeda merged with Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, the TTP?”

  “I know. Rashid brokered the deal.”

  “You also ran him.”

  “I ran the op. I was the op.”

  “And now those guys got him.”

  “I warned Rashid to stay off the grid. Jamie gave him enough money to retire. He should have listened.”

  “But he didn’t. I got him back in, and it’s killing me.”

  “You know what this is?” Elena’s right index finger drew a circle on her left palm. “It’s the world’s smallest record player. Guess what it’s playing?”

  “I know.”

  “‘My Heart Cries for You.’”

  “But Rashid was doing some good. It was important.”

  Elena treated her friend to a small bitter smile and said, as gently as she could, “Adara, he was never very smart.”

  “He was dumber than chicken-fried horse shit,” Adara said, “but there are other reasons you should do it.”

  “Like what? Your undying gratitude?”

  Adara stared at her, silent.

  Elena leaned in close. “I’m speaking as a friend. You’re a bridge too far on this one. You watch your own six.”

  “Or?”

  “You’ll find yourself strung up next to your friend, electrodes hooked to your genitals.”

  “So that’s it?” Adara said. “I ask you for help and you tell me to step the fuck back?”

  “Tell you what: The drinks are on me. That’s my best offer.”

  “Rashid was always there for you, for us. He never backed up, and he never backed down. I’ve seen him fight circle saws for both of us.”

  “There’s a lesson in that.”

  “What?”

  “Learn when to quit. Learn when to cut your losses.”

  “He never would have let you and me down. He’d have been there for us.”

  “Then more’s the pity.”

  Adara ordered them another round.

  2

  “If you’d let me level St. Basil’s Cathedral—right there on Red Square—I could fit both a Needle Tower Hotel and a really classy casino in that space.”

  —President J. T. Tower to Russian President Mikhail Ivanovich Putilov

  Mikhail Ivanovich Putilov carefully put the phone back in its holder. He hated Tower’s phone calls. The man wasn’t supposed to contact him unless it was absolutely necessary. Relations between their two countries were strained to the breaking point. Many world leaders viewed Russia as a rogue state and Putilov’s administration an outlaw regime. Putilov was widely reviled as a despotic killer.

  Most of the world was contemptuous of Tower too, for that matter. If Tower’s calls became public knowledge, people would think that he and Putilov were plotting evil shit—which was, of course, true—and it would be bad for all concerned. Furthermore, Tower had no self-restraint. The calls were bound to come out.

  But Putilov couldn’t make Tower stop telephoning him. It was not widely known, but Putilov spoke good English—he even understood most American idioms—and the two men could converse fluently. As soon as Tower found that out, he began besieging Putilov. He had to talk—even though all Putilov got out of their interactions was a sick stomach, nerves on fire and a splitting head.

  The calls consisted of Tower either bragging about how smart and tough he was or whining about how no one appreciated what he was going through or understood him. Oh, Putilov appreciated Tower, knew what he was going through and understood him perfectly. He understood he’d like to shove a double-barrel shotgun in Tower’s mouth, ram it as hard as he could into the back of his throat, ear back the hammers and pull the twin triggers. After that, Tower’s brain—assuming he had one—would be … no more.

  The thought of splattering his office wall with Tower’s gray matter almost brought a smile to Putilov’s cruel lips.

  Almost.

  No, he was still too furious over Tower’s call. Nothing he said or did could stop the cretin from calling, and tonight Putilov was so enraged he wanted to hurl the phone against the wall and shatter it like an egg
. That infamous idiot had been telling him again about how they were so alike, how Putilov was the brother he’d never had, how he understood Putilov like no one else on earth and about how they would do great things together.

  He’d then asked Putilov if, after he—Tower—retired from the presidency and went back into the private sector, he could build a “J. T.’s Needle Tower of Power Hotel” in Moscow. Tower told Putilov:

  “If you’d let me level St. Basil’s Cathedral—right there on Red Square—I could fit both a Needle Tower Hotel and a really classy casino in that space.”

  Demolish St. Basil’s Cathedral in order to build a butt-ugly monstrosity, thereby defaming and disgracing the sacred ground that was Red Square? And Tower would further desecrate it with a fucking casino?

  Putilov had pretended to seriously consider the man’s demented request when, in truth, all he wanted to do was smash the phone in the imbecile’s face.

  Who did Tower think he was? Where did all his endless stream-of-consciousness macho bullshit come from? Where did he get his incessant horseshit about “rocks,” “balls” and “stones” and how he and Putilov had had to have them to have been able to achieve what they had in their lives? What was this shit about cojones anyway? Tower didn’t know the first thing about real courage, about taking serious life-death-or-thirty-years-in-a-Siberian-gulag risks. Tower knew nothing about the dangers he—Putilov—had faced and the ordeals Putilov had to endure to get to where he was. Tower had no idea what real yaytsas were.

  That Putilov had survived the KGB during the Russian convulsions of the ’80s and ’90s took incredible brains and balls and was, in retrospect, a bona fide miracle. Tower had no idea what it was like to work as a double agent in Eastern Europe. Just learning all those tongue-twisting, jaw-busting, impossibly difficult languages had been a special kind of hell.

  Tower had no idea how that agency functioned in those difficult times. It gained its own special power by leveraging those with real political and economic clout. Such influential people were best controlled through fear, and the KGB existed to teach people like them the meaning of fear. Working undercover, collecting incriminating information from people in the employ of highly placed politicians and highly influential plutocrats, agents—such as Putilov—could then use that dirt to force those big shots into turning on their friends and colleagues. But that was only the beginning. Putilov and his fellow agents would then force them to blackmail even more powerful big shots above them—and so on and so on, ad infinitum—until the KGB had an army of highly placed individuals who would do anything he told them to do. In Germany, through such operations, the KGB continually purloined invaluable Western technological secrets. The West’s cyberindustrial industry and NATO’s various defense ministries were immensely profitable targets. That kinds of coercion took balls beyond balls beyond balls.

  Framing important people for sex crimes with trumped-up evidence and doctored photos, then threatening them with prison, exposure and disgrace—all that was standard operating procedure. Moreover, many of the people, whom they had frightened and strong-armed, were rich, powerful and politically connected. They hated the KGB with a blind rage, and they were influential people, eminently capable of retaliation. Consequently, an agent’s life was in constant danger.

  Tower knew nothing of real risks and real guts, but that did not stop him from acting like he did. He loved to brag to Putilov about how tough he was. The man even boasted that if push came to shove, he was probably tougher than Putilov. Really? Had Tower ever done anything even remotely … difficult? Anything … truly terrifying? Tower didn’t know the meaning of the word “tough.” If he had ever gone up against Putilov, the Russian president would have crushed Tower like a wet, soggy … blintz.

  Putilov couldn’t take it anymore. Standing up, he threw the phone against the wall as hard as he knew how and watched it detonate into slivers, shards and fragments before falling across his office floor.

  3

  Remembering Helena, Fahad shuddered.

  Fahad al-Qadi stood by his bed in his Moscow safe house. His three-man team—Alexei Konstantin, Oleg Kuznetsov and Leonid Sokolov—were waiting for him. They were dressed in all black—suits, ties, even black shirts. Not that they were trying to make fashion statements—quite the opposite. After the op, while still in the car, they would strip off their clothes and throw them in a Dumpster. Their getaway attire was underneath—light T-shirts and thin cotton pants. They would then make their escape in the two vehicles they’d parked near the waste bin early that afternoon.

  If the Russian police were searching for four black-suited hit men in a dark SUV, they’d be sorely disappointed. With any luck at all, they’d evade detection.

  Fahad’s men each had their standard-issue AK-47s packed in square metal suitcases, which they’d already stowed in the trunks of their SUV. Their Tokarev 7.62mm pistols were shoved inside their belts under their coats. Fahad’s weapons and ammunition, however, were specially made, and he wanted to inspect them one last time. They were spread out on the bed in front of him, and he’d just finished testing the guns’ firing mechanisms. He was now checking everything they needed on his equipment list.

  The weapon on the bed nearest Fahad was a Saiga—a Taktika model 040. A semi-automatic military shotgun, it had a seventeen-inch barrel. Picking it up by the breech, he hefted it. It weighed just under eight pounds.

  From its AK-74M folded-out pistol-grip polymer buttstock to the barrel’s ventilated tip, it was less than two and a half feet long. Its box magazine held eight 12-gauge magnum shells. Every shell contained thirty-two small steel ball bearings, and its open iron sights came with a high post and a notched tangent at its rear.

  So little weight, Fahad thought idly, so much death.

  On the bed directly above the Saiga was Fahad’s Dragunov SVD sniper rifle. It had a black folding polymer stock and a detachable cheek rest. Forty-four inches in length with the stock extended, its barrel was fitted with a slotted flash suppressor, a handcrafted silencer that Fahad had designed and built himself, and a PSO-1M2 scope effective for ranges well over 1,000 meters. Chambered for 7.62×54mmR rounds, it had a curved, removable magazine. The cartridges were double stacked in a zigzag pattern, and while it had a ten-shell capacity, Fahad never kept more than eight in one. He thought the spring was too weak for ten.

  He loaded the Saiga and the Dragunov into their dark rectangular traveling cases. The bottoms came with custom-fitted slots designed to hold and lock the weapons and their accessories into place so that nothing would rattle around loose.

  Fahad turned from the bed, entered the bedroom’s walk-in closet, located a hidden lever and pulled back the false rear wall. He was facing a four-foot-tall Assa Abloy drill-proof, fire-resistant gun safe. After punching in the safe’s lock codes, he swung open the door. He placed the encased Dragunov in the safe, standing it up on its end, buttstock toward the floor.

  He’d be back for it later.

  Locking the safe, he exited the closet and caught a glimpse of himself in the bedroom wall mirror. Women were always telling him he looked like that Egyptian actor who starred in the American movie Doctor Zhivago. An old girlfriend of his, Helena Katayev—a freelance flight attendant from St. Petersburg, whom he’d eventually recruited and still used from time to time for particularly horrifying assignments—had been especially adamant about it.

  Remembering Helena, Fahad shuddered reflexively.

  Jesus, she was one scary bitch.

  Still he’d seen the actor once on the big screen, and he had to admit there was more than a fleeting resemblance. He just couldn’t remember the guy’s name.

  Picking the Saiga’s case up off the bed, he nodded silently to the team. They followed him out of the bedroom and toward the safe house’s back door.

  4

  “Once you have the fissile highly enriched uranium, which isn’t that hard to purchase on the black market, a high school student could cobble together a Hiroshima-
style nuke. That’s what Luis Alvarez, the inventor of the Hiroshima triggering mechanism, wrote.”

  —Jules Meredith

  Danny McMahon escorted Jules Meredith to right-center stage. They each seated themselves on dark leather-and-steel armchairs and faced the applauding audience. When the ovation subsided, McMahon gestured to one of the cameramen, who then projected the photo of an extremely obese Middle Eastern man in a white thawb, or robe. He was standing in the desert in front of a tank. Beside him stood a slender, dark-haired, highly attractive Middle Eastern woman in camouflage fatigues and boots, the stock of an AK-47 cocked on her hip. Even in army issue she was … stunning.

  “What do you think of this new global terrorist threat?” McMahon asked. “It’s known as the ‘New United Islamist Front,’ and these two people there on the screen, Kamal ad-Din and his smoking-hot femme fatale sidekick, Raza Jabarti, are heading it up. According to your recent Huffington Post article, Kamal’s bankrolling it. You wrote that Kamal and Raza have organized the strongest, most violent, most ruthless parts of al Qaeda, ISIS, and TTP into that new terrorist operation and that their goal is the nuclear destruction of the U.S. of A.”

  “Danny, after what those groups and their comrades have already done to Europe and the U.S., I will never discount the significance of their threat. And, yes, I do have sources who tell me that a nuclear attack is coming, that it’s funded by wealthy Saudis and that President Tower is so deep in hock to them that he won’t address this menace or even acknowledge it.”

  “I’m willing to believe all of that,” McMahon said. “Look at President Tower’s Muslim immigration ban. He claimed that there are people in those six countries—the ones whose people he prohibited from entering the U.S.—who would kill Americans on U.S. soil. No one from those nations has ever killed anyone on U.S. soil. Yet Saudi citizens and their Sunni allies have murdered Americans on U.S. soil by the thousands, and those nations aren’t covered by the ban. Tower has clearly gone into the tank for the Saudis, their client states and for Mikhail Putilov.”

  “Tower is in willful nuclear denial,” Jules said.