Instead of putting the bong’s stem to his mouth, however, he ignored the fumes, reached into the open desk drawer and removed a plastic bag containing a presterilized syringe. He’d put it in the drawer the day before, after a friend told him that the krok delivered an even bigger kick if one injected it into a vein.
Having injected many suspects with scopolamine and sodium pentothal, he knew how to use syringes. Rolling up his shirt sleeve, he took off his belt and wrapped it around his upper forearm. He then tied it off tight as a tourniquet. Large pulsing purple veins instantly popped up just beneath his elbow. He sterilized the needle and the largest of the distended veins with Everclear.
He paused before shooting up to ponder the implications of this moment—and to thank the Almighty that he was Mikhail Ivanovich Putilov—a man born with the indomitable fortitude and iron will to abjure addiction. He was truly one of those whom his idol, Friedrich Nietzsche, had dubbed Die Übermenschen—the Supermen. No drugs—for that matter, no man or nation on earth—was powerful or cunning enough to make Mikhail Ivanovich Putilov do what he didn’t want to do.
Slipping the needle into the distended vein, he pushed the plunger home and was instantly hit by a jolt of pure incandescent pleasure.
It’s like kissing … God, he thought worshipfully.
Then his head fell forward, and his eyes rolled back until only the whites showed. His jaw dropped to his chest. Saliva slavered slowly out of the dictator’s gaping mouth and rolled down his chin.
6
“We long for the End Times the way you lust after beautiful women. We do not fear death, and we laugh at extinction. We pray that we might vanish into the Final Fire. Nukes, to us, are not a deterrent but a temptation. That is the advantage we have on you, and I, for one, burn and yearn to unleash the nuclear lightning. Nothing, not even total nuclear retaliation, can stop us from erasing your major cities from the face of the earth.”
—Marika Madiha
When McMahon came to, he was strung up by his wrists to the overhead beam, his feet dangling a half foot above the floor. Every inch of his naked body throbbed and burned with pain. His butt and joints felt like they were covered with flickering flames.
“But enough about us, Mr. McMahon,” Raza said, “have you enjoyed our hospitality so far? How were your accommodations? Is this safe house up to your high architectural standards?”
“I’m not sure it’s even a house,” McMahon said.
“No?” Marika asked. “What does it look like to you?”
“Termites holding hands,” McMahon said.
“That was hurtful, Mr. McMahon,” Raza said.
“Utterly unnecessary,” Marika agreed.
“More important though,” Raza said, “is whether we have cracked your shell, whether you now understand the peace and comfort and commitment that over a billion and a half people worldwide find in Islam.”
“I am concerned,” Marika said, “that despite Raza’s and my best efforts you are still critical of our faith.”
“I don’t care what religion anyone subscribes to,” McMahon said. “I think they’re all stupid. But I don’t understand why yours is so violently stupid. I don’t understand why you hate the non-Muslim world with such vengeance.”
“And you never will,” Raza said, shaking her head. “Mr. McMahon, you will never fathom the One True Faith. You will always look for multiple meanings and myriad motives. You will forever seek subtleties, nuances, complexities. You will always be a man of the West.”
“Okay, but just out of curiosity,” McMahon asked, “if Allah cares so much about his followers and their One True Faith, why are you people so backward? Why are you losing to us? If He’s so powerful, why doesn’t He kick some infidel ass Himself?”
“Allah has not vouchsafed our victory,” Marika said with complete seriousness, “because we have let Him down. We’ve shown you kaffirs [infidels] too much soft compassion, too much Western-style weakness.”
“But your faith in Him is undimmed,” McMahon asked, “even though He has spurned you?”
“Yes. Always,” Marika said.
“How?” McMahon asked. “Why?”
“Our faith unites our soul in action,” Raza said.
“And in violence,” Marika said.
“Some of us believe the Islamic soul is created in violence,” Raza said.
“I don’t understand,” McMahon replied.
“Nor will you ever understand,” Marika said, “not in your heart and soul, not in your bones and blood. You will never understand that our world—Dar al-Islam—is driven by a single primum mobile.”
“And what is that?” McMahon asked.
“Surcease,” Marika said.
“Death is our culture’s sole determinant,” Raza said. “It is all we know, see, hear and feel. It is the very air we breathe. Earth for us is hell, and Paradise is Allah’s eternal peace. The best thing we can do is to die in such a way that Allah instantly sweeps us up into His Divine Everlasting. Striking a blow against the infidel accomplishes precisely that feat. Look in the eyes of our suicide bombers—in their smiling eyes.”
“Dying for Allah may or may not get you into your Afterlife of Honey, Dates and Seventy-two Virgins,” McMahon said, “which may or may not exist. The world around us, however, does exist, and martyring yourself for Islam definitely won’t help you succeed in that world.”
“Which is why our only hope of salvation lies in your utter obliteration,” Marika said.
“In other words,” Raza said, “in your nuclear obliteration.”
“And you really think you can pull that off,” McMahon said, “given our enormous advantage in high-tech nuclear weaponry and delivery systems? We might, in retaliation, turn your world into a thermonuclear parking lot.”
“You forget the edge we have,” Marika said. “There is no deterrence against a nuclear jihadist who desires one thing and one thing only—Armageddon—and that is our world in a nutshell. We long for the End Times the way you lust after beautiful women. We do not fear death, and we laugh at extinction. We pray that we might vanish into the Final Fire. Nukes, to us, are not a deterrent but a temptation. That is the advantage we have on you, and I, for one, burn and yearn to unleash the nuclear lightning. Nothing, not even total nuclear retaliation, can stop us from erasing your major cities from the face of the earth.”
“Do you have any targets in mind?” McMahon asked. “Any auspicious time frames?”
“Oh, Mr. McMahon,” Marika said, “let me assure you, your hometown, New York City, is numero uno on our hit parade, on any terrorist’s nuclear list. And the time for its nuclear immolation is at hand.”
“Why?” McMahon asked weakly.
“New York has so much to offer—Wall Street, the UN, Radio City, Jews.”
“We don’t call it Jew York for nothing!” Marika shouted.
“New York has more Jews than Jerusalem and Tel Aviv combined!” Raza pointed out. “It’s the Jew capital of the world.”
“And it is so Western,” Marika said, “so decadent. Look what it represents: tolerance, togetherness, democracy, the melting pot—I especially hate the fucking melting pot.” Marika roared the last four words.
“Even our Muslim brothers and sisters,” Raza said, “when they immigrate to New York, they assimilate.”
“They lose themselves in your fucking melting pot,” Marika growled.
“You know what else New York really represents, Mr. McMahon,” Raza shouted. “Do you want to know the Big Apple’s true bottom line?”
“What?” McMahon asked weakly.
“New York represents … life!” Raza shouted.
“I hate life!” Marika howled.
McMahon’s mask of derisive stoicism suddenly cracked, and he grew visibly despondent.
“Look, Sister-Friend,” Marika said. “The thought of nuking New York makes Mr. McMahon sad. You don’t want us nuking New York, do you?”
“Not really,” McMahon said.
“But I thought that you knew,” Marika said, “that you’d figured it out. We’ve targeted Manhattan since the very beginning, and now we’re going to do it. We’re burning your beloved island down to bedrock, down below its waterline, till harbor and the rivers roll over it, converge, and New York is no more.”
“There’ll be nothing left of New York except salt water,” Raza said.
“Is anything wrong with that?” Marika asked.
“Is anything ‘right’ in the nuking of New York?” McMahon asked. “Do you know anyone who wants mass slaughter on such a scale?”
“My world teems with such people,” Raza said.
“Not mine,” McMahon said. “The West abhors death.”
“Perhaps,” Marika said, “but yours is also a world steeped in blood, which has perfected torture and murder until they are a way of life. Your America is a world awash in nuclear weapons, insane with feral violence and blind greed, subsisting in death’s teeth and avidly waiting for the nuclear hammer to fall, which is why your nation—your entire Western world—must go.”
“Your world is in our rearview mirror,” Raza said, “dimming, dwindling, disappearing into the vanishing point.”
“New York most of all,” Marika said.
“Come on, Mr. McMahon,” Raza said. “New York’s incineration won’t be that bad.”
“Were New York to go,” McMahon said softly, “it would, to me, be as a death.”
“So?” Marika asked. “What’s wrong with death?”
“For that matter,” Raza asked, “what’s wrong with … mass death?”
“You’re talking about doing what Herman Kahn called ‘the Unthinkable,’” McMahon said.
“But not the undoable,” Marika said. “Must I repeat? Your leaders for the last seventy-five years have worked ’round the clock to see that our world gets nuclear weapons, to make your own destruction not only possible but inevitable, and now we are about to give you what you’ve been asking for all this time.”
“My friend is right,” Raza said. “You sold us the original technology that got our nuclear weapons programs going. Did you really think we would not develop them? Well we did, and admit it: Deep down inside, you wanted us to use them on you. Your president Tower is trying to sell ourselves and our Muslim neighbors forty nuclear power plants, as we speak. Why else did you entrust us with your darkest secrets and most violent technology? Well guess what? We have those weapons now, and it’s our turn to use them.”
“Trust me, Mr. McMahon,” Marika said, “we are going to use them on you.”
“Mr. McMahon,” Raza said, smiling, “You have my personal word on this. We will not let you down.”
“Do you have any moral code at all?” McMahon asked.
“In the sense that you define it,” Raza said, “remarkably little.”
“Ever-approaching the nil point,” Marika said.
“Asymptotically,” Raza added.
“I’ve been told I personally have the ethical sense of an event horizon,” Marika said.
“Which marks the maw of a black hole,” Raza said, explaining the phrase.
“In my case a supermassive black hole,” Marika said.
“So there is no right, no wrong in your universe?” McMahon asked.
“Wrong is whatever pisses me off,” Raza said. “Right is whatever gets me aroused.”
“And does the nuking of American cities turn you on?” McMahon asked.
“You betcha,” Raza said.
“Why should anybody care about your country anyway?” Marika asked. “America is not so much a nation as a lunatic asylum packed to the rafters with self-righteous, pseudo-superior, apocalyptically violent, me-me-me, what’s-in-it-for-me, psychopathic narcissists! Who cares if we blow that madhouse—particularly its nerve center, capital city, number one psycho ward, the Big Apple itself—into nuclear oblivion?”
Raza did a double take, then stared closely at McMahon’s right cheek. A tear was rolling down it.
“Isn’t that touching?” Raza said. “The poor boy is crying. He evidently likes New York.”
“Oh, please,” Marika squeaked with fake falsetto, pleading, “please don’t hurt the Big Apple.”
“But we must,” Raza said, “or we abandon our faith, our honor, our sacred ird, and become infidel money-whores and deranged death merchants like yourselves.”
“And in the process, abjure the One True God,” Marika said.
“You know that any objective sanity inquiry would declare both of you psychotic?” McMahon said.
“Except in our godly realm what you call insanity is the accepted norm,” Raza said, “and our people’s ruling passion; therefore, it is in no way aberrant. It is in nature’s course, the way of our world. Your dreams of love, of Christ’s compassion and Isaiah’s ‘Peaceable Kingdom’ we deem to be madness.”
“So you reject ‘Love your neighbor’?” McMahon asked. “‘Blessed are the peacemakers’? The Sermon on the Mount?”
“Your people did,” Raza said. “You flogged Christ half to death, then nailed His body to a cross for three days and nights. And still each Sunday you cannibalize His flesh and drink His blood.”
“Yet you call us mad,” Marika said.
“Christians believe Christ died for their sins,” McMahon said softly, for the first time in his life honestly identifying with Christ Crucified.
“Face it, Mr. McMahon,” Raza said. “Your softheaded, softhearted, love-your-neighbor, blessed-are-the-peacemakers slave morality is the ultimate madness, and it has terminally corrupted your culture.”
“How do you view the weak, the poor-of-spirit and the peacemakers of this world?” McMahon asked.
“In our world, the weak are irrevocably cursed,” Marika said, “and the peacemakers are forever fucked.”
“In our world, the poor-of-spirit strap explosives to their moronic bodies,” Raza said, “and blow up your school buses and malls.”
“Yours is the only culture that does such things,” McMahon said.
“Want to know why?” Raza asked.
“Yes, please,” McMahon asked.
“Because ours is the only culture that gets it,” Raza said.
“Gets what?” McMahon whispered.
“The joke,” Raza said. “I thought you got it too.”
“What joke?” McMahon asked, against Rashid’s exhortations, almost whimpering.
“The joke?” Raza said, smiling. “Tell him, Marika.”
“That life sucks,” Marika said. “That there is nothing in this vale of tears that is worth the awful misery it inflicts on us poor humans. Our existence is one huge horrible mistake, and we human beings have been made to suffer unbearably so the stars, planets, black matter, black holes, the infinite intergalactic void and, yes, the gods themselves, can look down at our pain and laugh. We’d all be better off dead, and Islam is the only religion that recognizes these fundamental hair-raising, irrefutable truths.
“Islam recognizes that life is inconsolable sorrow and that our only hope is in the Hereafter.”
“Meaning: the grave,” Raza said.
“Hope for this world sure as shit isn’t in the Mideast,” Marika snorted with hilarity.
But Raza was no longer smiling. Ignoring Marika’s mirth, she said:
“Only Islam recognizes the harsh truth of our existence—that our lives aren’t worth living,” she said sternly, “and only Islam revels in it.”
“So you think that the poor should basically go fuck themselves?” McMahon asked.
“Actually, in our doxology, the poor should praise Allah and beg Him for an even quicker release from this mortal coil,” Raza said.
“We are all supposed to view death as a gift,” Marika said, “and we are all supposed to beg Allah daily to hurry our deliverance from this hellish dispensation.”
McMahon could only stare at the two women in mute horror.
“Mr. McMahon,” Raza finally said, “will you never understand
? Mohammed conquered a kingdom for us. He departed this world ruling a triumphal empire, a grand and glorious imperium. At the time of His death, He was at the height of His powers and accomplishments. Christ, on the other hand, died in ghoulish agony, in shame and ignominy, betrayed by those who professed to love Him—and made His grave amid the wicked.”
“Don’t you like winners, Mr. McMahon?” Marika said. “Wouldn’t you prefer Mohammed over Christ? The victor over the loser?”
“But you have to admit that Christ’s religion,” McMahon said, “teaches people a respect for learning, for philosophy and literature, for truth and logic, for evidence and facts—and for love. In the end the love of knowledge makes Christ’s followers winners, and your hatred of knowledge makes you losers.”
“Actually a contempt for learning may be Islam’s greatest strength,” Raza said.
“How?” McMahon asked.
“Because it allows us to define the truth any way we want,” Marika said. “Which means we can shove industrial quantities of dromedary shit down the throats of our benighted masses and laugh about it afterward.”
They roared heartily at the thought.
“You’ve created an Islamist 1984 the way Orwell never dreamed it,” McMahon said softly, shaking his head.
“Georgie never knew the half of it,” Raza said.
“And I suppose your Islamic 1984 justifies—indeed requires—torture?” McMahon asked.
“But of course,” Raza said. “Torture has been de rigueur since time out of mind. In our land, it is a way a life, our heart’s blood.”
“What did Orwell say in 1984?” Marika said. “‘If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.’”
“Just as money is your ‘Second Blood,’” Raza said, “I like to think of torture as ours.”
“Our people believe in a loving God,” McMahon whispered simply, not knowing what else to say.
“Yes, and we have a word for such people,” Marika said.
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