The Evil That Men Do Read online

  “Mr. McMahon, I hope you don’t think me too forward. In Saudi Arabia, where I grew up, my brothers and father would fill a box with rocks and line me up against the wall for what I’m about to do tonight.”

  “Luckily, I share none of your country’s values, attitudes or beliefs.”

  She treated McMahon to a dazzlingly bright smile.

  “Please, Mr. McMahon, make yourself comfortable.”

  With a nonchalant shrug, he began taking off his shoes, socks and pants.

  She then poured him a goblet of champagne.

  Stripped naked except for his white shirt, he sat down next to her, leaning back against the pillows. He sipped the champagne and groaned with pleasure.

  “Allah never tasted anything better,” McMahon said.

  “Then Allah sold himself short. There are far better things in this life than a mere taste of the bubbly.”

  Unbuttoning his shirt, she leaned her chin on his chest and stared longingly into his eyes.

  “I intend to bring you far more pleasure than a simple glass of fermented grape juice.”

  “Even though I say such terrible things about your faith, your country and your people?” McMahon asked.

  “You just don’t know us yet.”

  “I want to get to know you very much—every square centimeter of you,” McMahon said.

  “You’re about to get to know me better than you think.”

  Seating herself on his lap, she placed her hands around the back of his head and pulled him toward her, artfully rimming the inside of his mouth and teeth with her licentious lips and dexterous tongue. She finally pulled away and stared searchingly into his eyes.

  “Maybe you know me too well,” McMahon said.

  She kissed him again, long, hard, all the while rubbing his chest, stomach and thighs. Pulling way again, she said:

  “Would you like to know me, our ways, our wicked, wicked ways … far, far better?” the woman asked.

  “As long as it doesn’t violate my religious principles?”

  “Which are?”

  “Anything that don’t fly or have web feet.”

  “Do you see any feathered wings or webbed toes on me?”

  “Not a one.”

  “Good, because I want you to not only know us but to see the world through our eyes. I want you to understand us down to the core of our being—our wants, needs, dreams and desires.”

  “You sure that doesn’t involve sex acts with dromedaries?” McMahon said.

  “No, but maybe it might involve some very unconventional congress with me,” she said, “an erotic odyssey which will change you from your hairs’ split ends to the bottom-most soles of your feet.”

  “Then I’m all yours,” McMahon said. “I want to know everything about your world—you, in particular—down to the last microscopic detail.”

  “Then you must. You shall.”

  She turned away and poured him another glass. When she turned back to him, she had the champagne goblet in one hand and a big bulging doobie along with a box of wooden matches in the other.

  “You speak continually of your love of the herb. I thought you might like to sample some of my country’s hashish. It is utterly illegal in our kingdom, but some of our more adventurous citizens grow it in greenhouses and labs. They are quite scientific in their methods, and I am told it is the finest in the world.”

  McMahon immediately took it from her, struck a match on the box and fired it up.

  Holding the smoke in a full half minute, he languorously let it out.

  “Wow!” was all he could say.

  “In my country, we are experts in fine herbs, Mr. McMahon,” the woman explained. “Hashish is derived from the Arabic word Hashashiyyin, meaning ‘hashish-eating assassin.’ In this case, however, this herb will only assassinate your mind.”

  He immediately took another pull, held it in.

  Then another.

  Then another.

  “Excuse me while I bogart this joint,” McMahon said.

  “Help yourself,” the mystery woman said. “I’ve already indulged.”

  She poured him another goblet of champagne.

  “There,” the woman asked. “Are you now feeling better about our country, our way of life?”

  “Am I ever.”

  “Even though you’re a Muslim-hater and you view women as your rightful, lawful prey, as your own eminent domain—as mere disposable pleasures?”

  “Yes, but I’m oh-so-lovable.”

  He took another long pull on the doobie.

  “Maybe I can break down your oh-so-hard resistance,” the woman said.

  “I can be an awfully hard nut to crack.”

  “Consider me your personal nutcracker.”

  “But I am notoriously stubborn.”

  “Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff until I … blow … you down.” She began massaging the insides of his thighs.

  McMahon lay on his back and stared at the ceiling.

  The room was slowly starting to sway, then revolve.

  “Who are you anyway?” McMahon asked.

  “The one who loves the pilgrim soul in you,” the woman said.

  “You’d have to find it first.”

  “Is it small?” the woman asked.

  “Vanishingly minute.”

  “Really tiny?”

  “Approaching nullity.”

  The room was now starting to spin, even as she continued her sensuous caresses.

  “Suppose I told you, Mr. McMahon, doomsday looms. Suppose I told you that I fear for your immortal soul.”

  “Right now, I’m more concerned with my mortal flesh.”

  “Then let us tend to your trembling and tortured loins,” the woman said.

  She crawled down his body and turned around, until her head was directly over his crotch. Giving McMahon the most terrifyingly wicked smile he’d ever seen in his life, she lowered her eyes, her face, her mouth.

  Suddenly, he was possessed with an all-consuming passion for the gorgeous Middle Eastern mystery woman, whom he’d believed he would never see again. Flipping her on her back, he threw himself onto her, wanting to devour her whole—body, mind and spirit—to touch and tongue every throbbing, palpitating inch of her, to drive her into fierce frenzies of insane excitation till there was nothing left to rub, caress or luxuriate over.

  When neither of them could stand it any longer and they were both delirious with lust, he entered her. Racked by a heart-pounding, mind-cracking, hip-slamming fury, he was no longer a man but a trip-hammer from hell, going at her harder, harder, faster, faster, forcing her on a horrific hajj—that he seriously doubted she was prepared to make—a demented journey to the end of her soul’s blackest night. Lost in the throes of their infernal fornication, they were fucking their brains out in a never-ending apocalypse of crazed cravings and criminal carnality.

  Every time she came, she howled “Daruba!” and “Haram!” which he vaguely recollected as Islamic pleas for religious absolution. The realization that every one of her orgasms filled her with Islamic guilt and religious self-hate, combined with all the weed and alcohol he’d consumed, got him even hotter, turned him on even more, making him hopelessly, helplessly, hideously horny. He was employing every sick, dirty, kinky, perverted stratagem in his interminably twisted trick book of sexual turn-ons. Driving her to the furthest extremes of her most dangerous desires, McMahon kept her coming over and over and over again, her whole body crescendoing and climaxing into one final mind-blowing, pelvis-pounding, obscenity-screaming, genital-detonating roar of … DA-RU-BA!!!!!

  Which McMahon loosely translated in his lust-mad, doped-up mind as:

  “Allah, please forgive me for … COMING SO GODDAMN HARD WITH THIS OUT-OF-CONTROL INFIDEL … MO-THER-FUCKKK-ERRR!!!”

  Then McMahon was exploding into a universe-generating Big Bang of lewdly libidinous proportions. It began with the creation of hydrogen, then helium, then stars, black holes, the heavy elements coalescing into so
lar systems, galaxies, the Milky Way, Earth, humankind. McMahon was born and lived his life right up through to this evening’s show, right up through the entering of his hotel suite, finding the enigmatic creature in his bed, continuing right up to the point that they were making love, getting and giving head, fucking like maniacs, then coming over and over, the ecstatically electrifying spasms pumping out of him and her, through them both, again and again, a planet-killing Armageddon of voraciously voluptuous, luridly prurient convulsions.

  Now, even worse, he was not the only thing going nuts. The room itself was vibrating, twitching, gyrating, ripping itself apart. It was as if his inner being, his mind’s eye was free of his body, was drifting high overhead, floating above him along the ceiling, staring down on his trembling remains, spread-eagled on the bed. He was too weak to move; the mystery woman was now doing all the work, her head between his legs.

  Then he was back in his body, watching her, her head still going up and down, up and down, in an eternal sequence of concupiscent collisions, merging into one single, white-hot, agonizing, insatiable, gargantuan … Götterdämmerung.

  Then the room detonated too, blowing him out of the hotel, up above the city, through the stratosphere and into space. All by himself, naked, alone, soaring away from Earth, past Mars, Jupiter, he was picking his way through the shooting gallery of a million billion careening asteroids, then Saturn, Neptune, on and on, into the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt, the circumstellar disc beyond Saturn, home to Neptune and Uranus, that remote realm where the planetoids lived, thrived and died. Cavorting with the comets, he bid the solar system a fond farewell, spun free of Sol’s stern hold, and shot off into the everlasting vastness of the interstellar void.

  And then suddenly everything around him was whirling out of control, a widening gyre that knew no stint, a burgeoning vortex of infinite infinitesimal bits, beyond time, beyond God, beyond madness, clarity and everything in between. Then the maelstrom was expanding exponentially, everywhere at once, ballooning into a massive ball of flame, and he was hurtling through it, plunging headlong into hell’s deepest abyss. Down, down, downward to darkness he plummeted, until, in the end, all he wanted was surcease, all he wanted was for the terror to end. And then, to his surprise, his wish came true. Infinitude groaned, Eternity closed, the lights went out, and with a last gasping sob, Daniel McMahon gave up the ghost.

  After that he knew no more.

  PART IV

  “You know what Danny McMahon calls our middle-class supporters?” President Tower said. “‘The chickens that eat at Colonel Sanders.’”

  1

  Fahad planned to paint the air, the podium and Red Square itself with the chess champion’s brains.

  Fahad and his three friends were dressed in ebony leathers, matching boots and motorcycle helmets. All three had large black knapsacks on their backs. They pulled up behind the Tower of Ivan the Terrible on Red Square and parked their bikes on their kickstands. Putilov’s FSB, formerly the KGB, had cleared the tower for Fahad, and Putilov himself had assured him he would encounter no interference in the course of his work—not on the way in or out.

  “I’ll be back when I’m back,” Fahad said to the three men.

  “See you then, brother,” the tall one, named Dmitri, said. The other two nodded in silence.

  Fahad climbed off his bike and entered the big unlocked door at the building’s rear. He crossed the massive, empty, high-ceilinged stone hall in the back, reached the elevator bank, and punched in the top floor. Once out of the lift, he took the stone fire stairs to the top of the building. Putilov had seen to it the roof door was also unlocked. Fahad crossed the roof and walked up to the wall. Below he could see both Red Square and the Kremlin.

  He shrugged the knapsack off his back and removed the case inside. Dropping to his knees, he clicked it open. It contained the scoped Dragunov—Fahad’s noise- and flash-suppressed sniper rifle. He then allowed himself a quick glance over the top of the wall.

  Three days before, Fahad had paced off the distance from the tower’s base directly below to the speaker’s stand on the edge of Red Square. Earlier this evening, he’d used that number to compute his firing plan’s trigonometry and integral calculus. Taking out his calculator, he now factored in windage, which was blowing out of the north at eight nautical miles per hour. Done. Adjusting the scope, he bore-sighted the speaker’s podium.

  He was ready to go—as ready as he would ever be. Once the polymer stock and its pad were braced against his armpit, his eye would be clear and his hands would not tremble.

  It was by any standard a difficult shot, but Fahad was undismayed. He’d killed many men and women at greater distances and under far more difficult circumstances. Fahad had once put a round in a Chechen sniper’s right eye at 1,300 meters in a brisk wind—downhill. Now that one took some doing.

  Taking a deep breath, he once again peered over the wall. During the next half hour, one of Putilov’s sole surviving presidential opponents, the legendary Russian chess grandmaster and five-time world champion Borya Kazankov, would enter Red Square and lead a major anti-Putilov rally. People were up in arms over the brutal murder of Putilov’s other rival, Boris Nemerov, and Kazankov was getting serious traction. Putilov was in trouble in the polls, and the chess grandmaster could beat him.

  Protected on the streets by a phalanx of nine devoted bodyguards, Kazankov had proven almost unkillable, so Putilov had finally brought in Fahad—the man who never let him down.

  For the first time in his life, however, Fahad had feared he might fail the Russian dictator.

  But then Kazankov had announced that he would address the rally in Red Square. He would stand behind a bulletproof podium to give his speech, and while Kazankov might protect his torso—even with body armor—his head would be vulnerable. All Fahad needed was a high enough angle and one good sniper round.

  Then goodbye, Kazankov.

  Fahad planned to paint the air, the podium and Red Square itself with the chess champion’s brains.

  2

  “These magnates write their political donations off their taxes, getting billions of dollars back from the IRS. Under the guise of charitable giving, they are fast transforming the U.S. from a democracy to an economic dictatorship. They perpetrate their pseudophilanthropic tax scams so relentlessly, so prolifically, that Warren Buffett has called their network the “Charitable-Industrial Complex.”

  —Jules Meredith

  Brenda and Jim Tower were sitting at the breakfast table in his penthouse’s kitchen area, drinking coffee and reading the papers. They had just returned from meeting with Tower’s “Kitchen Cabinet” in the New York Oval Office the night before. From the beginning, he’d insisted on conducting almost all presidential business in New York City, but now it was getting harder and harder to make her brother attend even the most critically important meetings, even those with his Cabinet. He hated leaving his Tower of Power penthouse, and he could barely tolerate meeting people in his presidential offices in New York’s Excelsior Hotel.

  Brenda couldn’t blame him. Their world was going to hell. All they got these days was bad news, worse news, and knock-me-down, drag-me-out, beat-me, fuck-me, shoot-me-now … unbearable news.

  “She believes, I’m told, that ‘writing is fighting,’” Tower said. “If so, she’s about to get the fight of her life.”

  “I’d give this one a pass, Jim,” Brenda said, shaking her head.

  “Any particular reason?”

  “You’re blinded by rage and something else I can’t define. You aren’t thinking straight.”

  “So you’re saying I should back down?”

  “Remember what Twain said: ‘Never pick fights with those who buy ink by the barrel.’”

  “Meaning?”

  “We eat the pitch. Take one for the team. We live to fight another day. Do that, and we can weather this storm.”

  “No can do, Brenda. That Meredith bitch has gotten to me.”

  “Jimmy, you’
re bigger than she is.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I have to be there when Jules Meredith sees what we’ve pulled off, when she understands how painfully, horrifyingly and disastrously she’s lost.”

  “Why do you have to be there?”

  “To watch her get what’s coming to her. Don’t you just love that?”

  “Not really,“Brenda said. “I’m always afraid one day that person will be us.”

  “That’s why we’re meeting with the boys tomorrow—to see that that doesn’t happen.”

  “I don’t know, Jim. Maybe this time it’s our turn in the barrel.”

  “You don’t remember Big Jim’s Third Law?” Tower said.

  “What is it this time?”

  “It’s never Big Jim’s turn in the barrel.”

  “Why not? We’ve spent decades ripping people off, and our daddy spent decades doing that before us. We pollute rivers and the air with a vengeance. Why not give something back just this one time?”

  “It’s not what we do.”

  “But no one’s buying our bullshit anymore,” Brenda said. “We’ve spent the last hundred years shitting on the entire planet. For a hundred years, we and our friends got all the tax breaks, all the tax loopholes, all the offshore accounts and all the supply-side, trickle-down economics our money could buy, while everyone else got austerity, shrinking wages and skyrocketing taxes. Well, those days are over. The people of Earth are hip to the scam, and there’s no turning back the clock.”

  “Who says?”

  “Wake up and smell the internet. It’s on fire with stories of our profligacy, our trillions of dollars’ worth of tax dodges and offshore funds. Bridging the Global Inequality Gap is the order of the day.”

  “And you think our reckoning is at hand?”

  “The raven’s croaking our name. The bill’s come due.”

  “You see the UN resolution as some sort of karmic backlash?” Tower asked, his eyes filled with scorn and ridicule.

  “Epic payback. There isn’t enough fire in hell to burn our sins away.”

  “So we just let Jules Meredith pick us clean?”