The Evil That Men Do

by Robert Gleason

  “It’s very simple,” Marika said.

  “WHAT IS IT?” McMahon roared.

  “Tell him, Raza,” Marika said.

  “We want to hear you scream,” Raza said, cracking the crop against her riding boot.

  “So let’s get this show on the road,” Marika said, walking toward McMahon, a pair of pliers in one hand, a cattle prod in the other.

  McMahon’s reverberating wails echoed through the night.

  4

  “I WANT MY FUCKING MONEY! GIVE ME MY FUCKING MONEY … NOW!!!!”

  —President J. T. Tower

  “You want to take me down?” Tower asked. “Is that why you write such foul things about me?”

  “I only hope to tell the truth and shame the devil,” Jules said. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Does your so-called ‘truth crusade’ give you the right to impugn my character and call me names?”

  “Give me an example.”

  “That thing you blogged yesterday. You said I ‘careen through life like a hurricane out of this inferno.’ You described me, Jules, as ‘swaggering through a hellworld of my own making with Mein Kampf in one hand and Atlas Shrugged in the other.’”

  “I also described you as ‘a depraved megalomaniac suffering from predatory greed, malignant narcissism, paranoid ideation and severe delusional thinking.’”

  “That’s only your opinion,” Tower said. “My supporters call me a ‘jobs creator.’”

  “Except the world would be better off without the vile jobs and toxic products you poison it with,” Jules said, “and without your heinous hedge funds and gargoyle-ugly needle towers.”

  “But what gives you the right to be judge, jury and executioner?”

  “President Tower, I reported on some of your more disreputable deeds—stories that were all excruciatingly accurate—and then I summarized what they meant. What’s wrong with that?”

  “But do your summations have to be so hateful?”

  “In your case, the truth has to hurt,” Jules said. “You’re a world-class psychopath with genocidal impulses and the world would be better off if you were dead.”

  Tower’s cell rang. Grimacing, he said:

  “Sorry, but my sister, Brenda, says I have to take this. It’s the president of Mexico.

  “Yes, President Rodriguez, very good to speak to you too. How’s the family?… Excellent … Now, Señor President, I have people with me, and I’m a little pressed for time. If it’s okay with you, I’m going to be blunt. I hope you don’t take offense at my words, but you do owe me and Tower, Inc.… money. In fact, you and your entire nation are very seriously in arrears, and I and my company want our money … now.”

  There was a moment of silence during which Tower listened intently, his face reddening slowly.

  “All right, I completely understand. Now let me tell you what my position is. I don’t want to hear about how miserable and broke your people, taxpayers and businesses are or what a shithole of a country Mexico is. That is something I can do nothing about. Yes, I know you and your people are suffering. Well in my opinion you were all born to suffer. So no excuses or extenuations.”

  More silence, more grimaces and groans from Tower.

  “Yes?” Tower finally said. “Yes? What do I want, you ask?… I WANT MY FUCKING MONEY! GIVE ME MY FUCKING MONEY … NOW!!!!”

  There was a long silent pause, and Tower held the phone a full foot away from his ear, all the while smiling.

  “Oh, you call me a ‘bastardo,’” Tower said. “Si, there are many bastardos in the world, and, es verdad, I am one of them. Some say we bastardos own the world, but in truth, we only run it. And you, cabrón, this time, you fucked with the wrong bastardo. This bastardo-gringo’ll send some men down there who will alter you surgically and set you up in a Tampico brothel as uno hombre-puto. It will be a major comedown for a man of your machismo. Then I’ll pimp out your mother, your sisters, your daughters. I’ll destroy your credit rating in all the world’s financial markets. I’ll flood the market with dirt-cheap oil and drop its price so low you’ll have to pay your customers just to take your petrol off your hands. When I’m done with you, you’ll be blacklisted from every bank, stock exchange and marketplace worldwide. Forget about taking out loans or selling goods. The Mexican cartels will eat you alive and move to Colombia so you won’t even have drugs to smuggle. You’ll have to go to Bogotá to buy a joint. Then I’ll turn Mexico into a charnel house of horrors, a blood-splattered abattoir. There’ll be enough left in your benighted land for the vultures to peck at. When I’m finished with you, you’ll be so busted-out you won’t be able to sell frijoles in an alley or peddle your fat ugly puto ass in the street.

  “In point of dull plain fact you have tried my patience long enough, so let me be just as plain as the balls on a tall dog. When I want to buy a woman … I go to a whore. When I want to buy a murder … I go to a paid killer. And when I want to buy a squalid fifth-rate shit-stinking outhouse of a country and its brain-damaged IQ-30 pederastic president, I go to Mexico. I buy that country and that president lock, stock and barrel, and guess what? They stay bought. Your country stays bought. You stay bought. ’Cause if you don’t, I’ll nail your ass to the floorboards. I’ll bring the whole U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force down on you. I’ll then personally arm every peon, bandido, drug dealer and revolucionario in Mexico against you. When I’m done, you won’t have enough money, property or credit to get jackrolled by your drunken, syphilitic puta madre. You’ll be deader than refried javelina shit—deader than dead, dead as dead can be. Do you catch my drift? Is there any part of this you don’t comprendo? Understand me now … GREASER?”

  Slamming the phone down, he looked up at Jules Meredith. “Now where were we?” President Tower asked with an amiable smile.

  5

  The thought of killing Tower brought a smile to Putilov’s face.

  Putilov woke from a stormy, anxiety-ridden sleep … screaming. Tower was not only devastating his days, he was plaguing his nights. Putilov couldn’t stop dreaming—no, nightmaring—about the idiot.

  In this last dream, the cretin was blathering on and on about what a great political genius he was, how he’d never held political office in his life, yet had beaten a seasoned pro, a New York senator, who’d served as Barack Obama’s secretary of state. In the nightmare, he was bragging over and over again about his “great brain” and his “instinct for the political jugular.”

  Where did the fool get that shit? The truth was he, Putilov, had captured Democratic emails by the millions, ordered the FSB’s “Disinformation Bureau” to fabricate and plant phony news stories under the names of reputable-sounding sources about Tower’s Democratic opponent and his other rivals. Putilov had then rifled the U.S. election registration lists in key swing states and disqualified legitimate Democratic voters by the millions. Simultaneously, one of his plants was running the FBI and had also subpoenaed and examined his opponent’s political emails, handed out press releases filled with vague accusations and veiled attacks, ridiculous rumors and misleading innuendos—just enough stupid chump-bait to get the U.S. media blathering about how untrustworthy the poor woman-candidate was, how scandal-prone she was.

  Did Tower understand at all the sheer size and scope of the cyberwar that Putilov had waged against his presidential rival? First, he’d hired a small army of Russian/Americans living in the U.S. He’d paid them through the Russian consulates there and then ordered them to set up hoax news sites. The little creeps had then bombarded the internet with thousands upon thousands of scurrilous ads, tweets and Facebook postings from those sites, linking them to phony news articles, which appeared to have been taken from serious outlets. These spurious stories savagely attacked Tower’s presidential rival.

  Putilov’s cyber-goons also created thousands of bots for him—little robotic mischief-makers—which they then transmitted to right-wing online news sites and to social media everywhere, Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter in p
articular. These preprogrammed bots tracked all mentions of Tower’s opponent’s name, then inundated those internet locations with pro-Tower propaganda and with fictitious, utterly defamatory stories about his presidential rival, which nonetheless appeared to come from legitimate news organizations, engendering well over a billion viewings.

  According to one estimate, over 25 percent of election tweets were generated by bots, many if not most of them created by Putilov and his ravening horde of Russian-American trolls. Former–FBI agent turned cyber-sleuth, Clinton Watts, had described Putilov’s internet bombs as “bot cancers,” which was exactly what they were.

  Putilov had taken the American Social Media industry to the cleaners. He’d scammed 150 million Facebook users—well over half the electorate—with his specious advertising and spurious posts, his henchmen so brazen they bought many of their fake ads with … rubles. Twitter, he’d inundated with 1.4 million disinformation tweets, which had triggered 280 million viewings, burying Tower’s rival for the presidency alive in denigrating lies. He’d also gone after Google and YouTube, pressing every conservative hate-button and driving America’s right-wingers into frenzies of paranoid rage. The United States news media claimed Putilov’s principal propaganda dispenser was Russia Today, aka RT.com. Its content was so electrifying that Google was soon designating it “a preferred outlet,” guaranteeing that this online news service would be one of the most watched of the YouTube channels in the nation during that election cycle, scoring over 1 billion YouTube viewings. After the election, the United States Justice Department branded that outlet “an enemy agent,” which pissed Putilov off. By then, however, Tower was firmly ensconced in the presidency, and in any event, Putilov never stopped—never even slowed—his incessant barrage of agitprop, which continually built up Tower and tore down his rivals. Why shouldn’t he continue to hammer away? Most of America’s social media refused to prohibit political dissembling, caring only about the “authenticity” of the sites releasing the ads and posts. The truthfulness of the attacks was irrelevant. America’s social media industry viewed political lying as perfectly acceptable.

  There was another reason, however, why those firms refused to scrutinize Putilov’s propaganda. His cut-out investors had pumped billions upon billions of ad/investment dollars into those companies, so much money that the owners could not afford to probe too deeply into Putilov’s activities on their sites, let alone block them. They did not want to look their gift rubles in the mouth.

  The Saudis, like Russia, had also invested heavily in America’s cyber communications companies and the fact that those digital dimwits had accepted all that corrupt cash still made Putilov shake his head in disbelief. Didn’t they understand? Russia and the Saudis opposed everything the internet industries claimed to care about—all the messianic libertarian tripe about promoting free-market competition and the free flow of information everywhere, their pious platitudes about respecting all religions and points-of-view, giving everyone a voice and a platform, no matter how big, powerful or small the individual was. Putilov and the Saudis had proven that in the end the big internet media firms were just … money whores. Tainted loot spent just as well as clean currency, and at the pinnacles of financial power that was all that mattered. In the case of Putilov, he and his pocket oligarchs were collecting their internet investments profits, then using them to finance their disinformation campaigns. Exploiting the weakness of the worldwide online community, they used social media to trumpet their anti-democratic, anti-free-market propaganda globally and to even subvert an American election. Nor did those firms’ CEOs object. They were too intent on opposing Washington’s attempts to regulate them, and nothing would divert these internet titans from their bottom-line monomania. Not even the fact that the Putilov gang and the Saudis intended to one day destroy the very freedoms these internet moguls swore fealty to. Nothing could stop these captains-of-internet-industry from snapping up Putilov’s rubles and the Saudis’ rivals. Nor did their ultra-wealthy high-tech firms need dirty money to survive and expand. Their business empires were among the most profitable on earth, and in the grand scheme of things the Russian-Saudi money wasn’t that huge—all of which only made the unrelenting avarice of those social media chieftains even more appealing. They had betrayed their country for mere pennies, and Putilov knew why they did it. They took his ill-gotten lucre simply because it was … there. For the truly greedy, too much was indeed never enough.

  Putilov knew dictum for a fact.

  It was a rule he lived by himself.

  Bernie Sanders supporters’ websites had been an especially target-rich environment for Putilov. Sanders’s admirers were so angry at the American political process that Putilov was able to quickly and easily piss them off with sordid, bot-driven anecdotes about Sanders’s primary opponent, now Tower’s opposition. The Russian dictator had convinced them that Tower’s rival was unacceptable and that if they disliked both candidates, they should stay home from the polls.

  The American voters were so mind-numbingly dumb they actually went for all that shit! Putilov thought with smug satisfaction.

  And shit it was. Putilov’s cyber-trolls had confected and disseminated pseudo-news stories for him around the clock, accusing Tower’s female opponent of everything from pornographic depravity to sadistic serial murders to gargantuan acts of larceny and fraud planetwide. They buried America’s news outlets and social media sites alive in that dementedly derisive bullshit, drowning out all objective discourse. Putilov’s salacious slanders proliferated exponentially in the social media echo chamber, the right-wing blogosphere and the conservative punditocracy, spreading like wildfire throughout the battleground states.

  He had to admit that he found some of those phony news stories side-splittingly hilarious as well as shockingly effective. Perhaps, as Hitler had said, the voting public liked to believe big lies and outrageous fabrications. One prevarication was so insanely preposterous that it took the internet by storm and proved unstoppable. One of his malevolent little trolls had written that Tower’s opponent was running a child sex-slave ring out of the basement of a D.C. pizzeria, and American voters by the millions gobbled it up. In fact, one of Tower’s incensed acolytes went into a blind rage and shot the place to pieces … with an assault weapon.

  Still Putilov had to admit he couldn’t have done it without some help from that nitwit, Tower. He had to give credit where credit was due. The man’s marketing team had assembled a mother lode of digitized demographic data on almost all of America’s voters in the battleground states and had forwarded all those files to Putilov. That Mount Everest of electronic information had allowed him to target those swing voters relentlessly. Thanks to that inside intel, he had been able to deluge the American Idiocracy with specious news items and bot-generated Twitter/Facebook traffic, all of it disparaging Tower’s opponent and praising Tower to the skies.

  Of course, the FBI had also been of inestimable help. At one point an ex-MI6 operative had compiled a 35-page dossier on Tower, replete with evidence of both his libidinous perversions and his hideous history of global thievery. Those findings could have blown his election chances to Kingdom Come, but, thank God, FBI Director Conley had hidden that political bombshell from public scrutiny until more than a month after the election. Only after Senator John McCain handed a copy of it to the FBI had Conley been forced to acknowledge its existence. Even then, however, the director still managed to keep it quiet. Classifying it as an item of national security interest, he was able to drop a blanket of secrecy over it and keep it out of the news throughout his tenure at the Bureau—even as he continued to blast the shit out of Tower’s political rival.

  Furthermore, Putilov’s “bot cancers” were still alive, well—and metastasizing worldwide like the malignancies they were. His army of cyber terrorists was still hammering innocent citizens across the globe with these malicious bots. Their goal was always the same—to carry out Putilov’s grand strategy of dividing, confounding and dem
oralizing democracies everywhere with his fake hate-stories.

  Of course, in the end, Putilov hadn’t really needed all those fancy bots and cyber-trolls to defeat Tower’s opponent. He’d waged those wars largely for the fun of it. The election itself had always been locked up and in the bag. No democracy could stand up to the kind of electronic campaign he’d visited upon the U.S. in that last election.

  … Putilov had many reasons for despising democracies. First and foremost, it was too damn easy for men like himself to overturn their democratic elections. The stupid Americans had proven that point at a Las Vegas computer convention. At one exhibition, U.S. cyber-experts changed the voter tabulations on thirty different voting machines, turning thirty mock-election losers into winners. The experts changed those election outcomes in mere minutes. Furthermore, they left no trace, no evidence of their criminal manipulations.

  Putilov had, of course, done the same thing during America’s last presidential election. Unfortunately, Putilov’s hackers weren’t as good as the Vegas cyber-experts, and U.S. investigators were able to confirm that Russia had fooled with America’s voting systems. To counter those charges, Putilov immediately launched a disinformation campaign. He ordered one of his stooges—that country’s idiotic FBI director, Jonathan Conley—to issue a statement claiming that the U.S. voting system was too spread out, too diffuse and too diverse for hacking to succeed. That statement was of course a flagrant lie. The voting machines’ software could be compromised in a heartbeat—as the Vegas conference had proved—and, anyway, the main tabulators, which counted the votes, were connected to the internet. The average smartphone had more anti-hacking protection in it than your typical voting machine, and the cyber-tools necessary for stealing elections—especially those needed to purge voter registration lists and to falsify absentee ballot requests—were readily available online. Consequently, Putilov could hack into the U.S. voting system at will and with a vengeance. Likewise, the systems’ manufacturers and support technicians could plant vote-altering malware any time they wanted. Nor were the manufacturers interested in stopping Putilov’s election hacking. When the Princeton Group began testing voting machines, one manufacturer threatened them with lawsuit, and when, in the documentary Hacking Democracy, cyber-expert Bev Harris proved how vulnerable they were, the machines’ manufacturers—instead of thanking her for tracking down the flaws in their equipment—had threatened to sue her.