“What word?” McMahon asked, his voice cracking.
“Idiots.”
7
“Yeah, we all gotta get straight with the Man upstairs.”
—Anonymous
The Black Hawks continued to roar through the Pakistani night. Adara listened listlessly to the conversation in her chopper. In the droning darkness, she couldn’t tell who was saying what to whom.
“And the ball goes into the gutter.”
“C’est la guerre.”
“Vive le legionnaire.”
“Stop taking the fun out of my day.”
“Where’s Johnny D.?”
“Got chalked.”
“Dead?”
“Uh huh.”
“Fuck him, man. He took the easy way out.”
“This way’s better?”
“Better the devil you know.”
“Than the one fucking your brains out?”
“There you go.”
“You can only do so much with duct tape and chicken wire.”
“Or spit and chicken shit?”
“Whatever turns you on?”
“I get high on life.”
“No shit?”
“And the Man upstairs.”
“Yeah, we all gotta get straight with the Man upstairs.”
“I hear He looks a lot like Hank Williams, Jr.”
“Or Johnny Cash.”
“The man in black.”
“We go in looking for a way out.”
“Righteous, but we don’t back up. We don’t back down.”
“We hold our ground. We die hard.”
“I makes the other muthafucka die hard.”
“Outstanding.”
“Out-fucking-standing.”
“It always bid-ness.”
“Always.”
“I told them: ‘The whole package never make it back to the station, cap’n.’”
“‘It ain’t my dope, Officer.’”
“Things got so bad we was stabbin’ each other in the front.”
“You wanna do them goat-ass muthafuckas?”
“So bad my dick hurt.”
“My dick wanna bone itself some fine funky bitch.”
“Bone your fist, you mean.”
“You sayin’ I ain’t up for it?”
“You could mouth-bone a bitch maybe.”
“Yeah, you got the mus’-snatch—I mean, mustache—to do it.”
“Got to admit that be one fine poon broom.”
“I hear your mama be a fine woman.”
“Hard-hittin’ woman.”
“Fine funky woman. Easy-ridin’ woman.”
“A low-ridin’ woman.”
“With dead men in her eyes.”
“Too much bitch for you, sucka.”
“Don’t you go pimpin’ on my boy. He got him a fine pussy-pusher.”
“Don’t you give me that big-yard stare.”
“What do you expect from me anyway?”
“A little love?”
“Can we keep it on the down low?”
“I said don’t go pimpin’ on my yard bitch.”
“I ain’t lyin’, I ain’t tryin’.”
“When we get back?”
“In the fullness of time.”
“That which does not kill me makes me dumber.”
“You can’t get no dumber.”
“A natural-born fact.”
“Slippin’, slidin’, easy ridin’.”
“Let’s shake and bake.”
“I be your witness there.”
“I be your witness there.”
The Black Hawks continued on and on through the Pakistani night.
PART XI
“Let me put the pistols on the table, boy. Were you tappin’ that ass?”
—President J. T. Tower to Mikhail Ivanovich Putilov
1
Putilov had whiled away many a lonely sleepless night studying those pathologically pornographic photos and watching DVDs of that cretin being humiliated in bed by leather-masked prostitutes of indeterminate gender, ethnicity and even species. Putilov had rollicked with laughter, his spirit soaring with pure transcendent delight, each time Tower abased himself in plain view of Putilov’s hidden cameras …
Tower was unquestionably driving Putilov to distraction. In fact, Tower’s last all-night Skype call to the Russian leader had nearly done Putilov in. He really didn’t think he could tolerate the bastard anymore.
Where did that asshole, Tower, get off suggesting that he was in any way Putilov’s equal—a brother-under-the-skin? What had Tower ever done except live off his inheritance and fuck predatory women who thought to exploit him for reasons of grasping avarice and personal advancement?
God, the man infuriated him. What Putilov really wanted to do was grab him by the shirt, slam him into a wall and shout in his face:
“HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE YOU KILLED??? WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU KNOW ABOUT ME AND MY LIFE???”
Reflecting on all the people he’d murdered—or had murdered—always soothed Putilov’s nerves. Sitting back in his easy chair, he stared out over the Black Sea, his personal fleet of yachts in the harbor, and he remembered the first time he had ever taken a life …
* * *
It went back to that tiny four-room St. Petersburg apartment, which had been home to his family and two others as well. Armies of ferocious brown rats—often ten inches in length, rump to nose—infested the apartments’ inner and outer walls, savagely attacked the human inhabitants and had turned that building into a kind of Rat Battle of Stalingrad. They assaulted the apartments’ occupants anytime, anywhere, devouring holes in the plaster and wood, the brick and Sheetrock—as well as in people. Putilov personally believed the little buggers liked the taste of that filthy shit.
Still he was ordered to stem the tide. When he wasn’t at school, he had to spend his hours in the apartment, attempting to hunt and kill the invading rats. However, it was tough. Luring them into cages was unproductive. They were just too damn shrewd. Spring-powered traps they recognized and disdainfully ignored. Even placing arsenic-laced cheese in front of the holes did little good. The rats were too smart to devour it whole. They would test it first, nibbling a small bite or two, then waiting to see if it disagreed with them. If the bait did sicken them, they ignored the rest of it and told their comrades to do the same.
Sometimes though he could outfox the rats with a bait and switch. He’d feed them a good bait, say peanut butter, and convince them that it was safe to eat. He’d then slip some poisoned peanut butter in, watch them devour the entire portion and die. Sometimes Putilov would turn off the lights, leave a chunk of unpoisoned cheese or sausage or peanut butter in front of the rathole and hide behind a couch. He’d hide for hours, waiting for them to come out. Eventually they would enter the room, and Putilov would let them take their test-nibbles. When the rats were sure the food was edible, and they were alone, they dug in. Putilov had a small garden shovel in his hands, and when the rats were focused on and absorbed in their repast, he’d spring from his hiding place and hammer them to death.
He remembered the first time his parents had come home from work, and he’d presented them with his trophies. The five-year-old boy had killed three large rats.
His parents and the two other families living in the four-room apartment were ecstatic. They’d found a rat-killing prodigy.
Nor did his rat-battles end there. The apartment complex had a large, filthy, trash-strewn courtyard where all the children gathered and played. Whenever another kid got on Putilov’s nerves, he didn’t see a human at all but a rat, and he fought him the way rats fought. Clawing at the kid’s eyes, he bit him savagely, ripped out clumps of his hair, kicked him in the shins, the balls and would not stop. Even when the kid gave up, and kids pulled Putilov off the youngster, he would only pretend to quit. As soon as he got his wind back, he would throw himself on the poor kid again, scratching, biting, crotch-kicking, pulling his hair.
&nbs
p; In school, it was the same—so much so he was declared a hooligan. For several years he was denied entrance into the Young Pioneers—the much-honored USSR organization which was reserved only for good clean young Russian men.
Putilov was considered too unstable and too … psychopathic.
But he didn’t care. He loved beating the hell out of people. Fighting, even killing, was as natural to him as breathing, as vital to his well-being as blood. He not only fought his way through school, he would kill hundreds of rats before leaving that slum apartment. From his point of view, for the rest of his life, he’d never stop kicking the asses of kids who got in his way and killing rats—reporter rats, in particular. He’d killed those rats and tamed Russia’s recalcitrant news media in a manner that would have impressed even his personal god, Uncle Joe. He wondered absently whether Stalin had exterminated as many of the press as he had? He honestly did not know. Possibly not.
The thought of all those murdered journalists and other political opponents brought an exceedingly rare smile to Putilov’s lips. Their names rang in his ears like temple bells, like a paen of praise to his implacable will and unyielding resolve, a grim litany of deservedly dead enemies: Dmitry Kholodov, Ilya Zimin, Ilyas Shurpayev, Yury Shebalkin, Sergey Bogdanovsky, Dmitry Krikoryants, Sergei Dubov, Andrei Aizderdzis, Yury Soltys, Tatyana Zhuravlyova, Yelena Roshchina, Hussein Guzuyev, Gelani Charigov, Bilal Akhmadov, Vladimir Zhitarenko, Pyotr Novikov, Sultan Nuriyev, Jochen Piest, Valentin Yanus, Vyacheslav Rudnev—all of them he’d had killed outright … plus another two hundred journalists whose names he no longer remembered but whose deaths he would carry in his soul like a lover’s sensuous caresses … until the day he died.
Remembering the men and women he’d murdered or imprisoned always brought him much pleasure. He had been especially eager to take care of the American multibillionaire hedge fund mogul who had invested so heavily in Putilov’s Russia during the early years. The man had eventually become disillusioned with his regime’s “financial practices,” and he’d gone so far as to hire the tax attorney and financial auditor, Sergei Magnitsky, to investigate those activities. Sergei learned what happened to people who fucked with Putilov. He’d been imprisoned almost immediately, and Putilov had seen to it that, while in jail, he was starved, half-frozen and brutally beaten. Denied the medical care he had desperately needed, he had subsequently died.
Investigate me now, Sergei! Putilov thought with a bitter snort.
His employer, the hedge fund CEO, however, had proven himself an implacable and resourceful foe. He lobbied the U.S. Congress and convinced them to pass the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act and to impose economic sanctions on Russia. So far Putilov had had to kill five more people who were investigating him and his people for fraud and tax evasion under that act, including Valery Kurochkin, Oktay Gasanov and Alexander Perepilichny.
Putilov was especially proud of Perepilichny’s killing. He’d ordered him done in with gelsemium, a poisonous extract taken from a rare plant found only in the Himalayas. Favored by Chinese assassins, the toxin was almost impossible to detect and verify medically. Still some supercilious coroner had managed to track it down, and Putilov had been furious. In fact, he’d almost ordered a hit on the asshole medical scientist just to teach him to mind his own business and keep out of Putilov’s way. He still planned on doing something about the man in the future.
Then there was his former boss and mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak. When Putilov had risen to power, the man had been vain enough to think he could prevail upon his past patronage of Putilov, talk to him friend-to-friend, even impose on their onetime friendship. He once even said to Putilov: “You know, I gave you your start. You had nothing until I hired you as my deputy.” So Sobchak had to go. Putilov told his killers to paint his bedside lamp with an extremely painful, hard-to-trace poison, which, when the light was turned on, would heat up and emit ultralethal toxins that would kill anyone in the room.
You never saw it coming, did you, Anatoly? Putilov thought with a cryptic trace if a grin.
Thinking of Sobchak’s demise brought back memories of Boris Berezovsky—the billionaire Russian TV mogul and owner of Russia’s largest television news network, Channel One. More than anyone, he’d been responsible for making Putilov Yeltsin’s prime minister, then forcing Yeltsin to retire and installing Putilov as interim president. Berezovsky had pilloried Putilov’s presidential opponents on Channel One, falsely accusing them of scurrilous wrongdoing and malicious misdeeds. He’d so blackened their reputations that on election day, Putilov won easily.
Berezovsky, like Sobchak, thought he could remind Putilov how much he owed him.
Yeah, Boris, I owed you all right, and I’ve always settled my debts. When my hit team hanged you in England, you were paid in full … at the end of that fucking rope.
The Russian banker and Putilov critic Ivan K. Kivelidi he’d killed with the toxin cadmium. Human rights advocate Natalya Estemirova had been kidnapped and killed. Marina Salye had assiduously investigated his financial activities in St. Petersburg in the early ’90s when he was first starting to steal fortunes for himself and friends. Before she’d been able to collect her evidence of his many killings, however, she’d seen the handwriting on the wall: She would not survive her inquiry. She’d gone into hiding and had wisely stayed undercover for twelve years. Then she returned to public life to resume her crusade against her longtime nemesis, knowing all the while that Putilov might have her killed. Despite the obvious threats on her life, she felt the tyrant had to be stopped.
Big mistake, Marina!
Instead of indicting Putilov, she died of a “massive coronary”—or so the coroner reported.
“Massive cornonary”? Putilov thought, grinning. Yeah, sure, Marina … pro—bab—ly!
He remembered how once in Belgium a French reporter had asked him to explain why he was using heavy artillery on Chechen civilians. He invited the man to come to Moscow, where he could explain Chechen terrorism to him more fully, in more detail and then have him … cas-trat-ed. “We have specialists in that,” he’d told the reporter.
The look of horror on the man’s face still made the Russian tyrant smile.
That was another journalist he planned on meeting again one day.
Perhaps Putilov’s favorite hit of all had been his longtime political opponent and nemesis, Boris Nemtsov. Putilov had given him a fair warning. He’d jailed him several times, and Nemtsov’s own mother had told him Putilov would kill him if he continued his crusade against the Russian president. The man wouldn’t listen though. He was throwing large-scale political rallies and preparing to expose Putilov’s invasion of Ukraine and seizure of Crimea for the war crimes they were. Well, those sorts of spotlights Putilov could not countenance. He’d had Nemtsov shot to death in front of his girlfriend under the shadow of St. Basil’s Cathedral in the Kremlin.
What you put out, Boris, baby, Putilov thought grimly, you get back.
But while Putilov enjoyed reminiscing about all those enemies whom he had shuffled off this mortal coil, lately, Tower had taken to ruining even that small diversion for the Russian dictator. Whenever the idiot, Tower, heard about a Russian reporter or political opponent or human rights activist whom Putilov had had ingloriously eliminated, he’d call Putilov and congratulate him on “a job well done.” Tower was even stupid enough to express on the phone his heartfelt wish that he, Tower, could “dispatch unfriendly journalists and opponents as expeditiously as you do, old friend.”
“Why not announce on CNN that I killed all those people and you wish you could do the same?” Putilov had shouted at Tower. “Phones can be tapped you know? I tap them every day.”
Tower had immediately apologized for his indiscretion and his lapse in judgment, but within a week he was, once again, on the Skype phone, complimenting Putilov on another journalist he’d “neutralized.” Nothing Putilov said or did could make Tower shut up about it.
Human rights activ
ists especially incensed Putilov—and he’d had any number of them eliminated—but Tower wouldn’t even let him enjoy those murders in peace. The nitwit had been especially ecstatic at the murder of the beautiful and charismatic activist/reporter, Anna Polikovskaya. She was bent on exposing everything Putilov had done. So he’d had her tea poisoned on an airline flight, and after she’d survived that attempt, he’d ordered her shot to death in the elevator of her apartment building two years later in 2006. Some things, he’d thought at the time, you don’t leave undone.
Tower had been insanely aroused over that one.
“Damn, Putie, that Anna P., she was some kind of gorgeous. That bitch was smoking-hot. So right here I have to ask you a personal question. I mean, we’re men. We both know about these things, right?”
“What things?” Putilov asked, suddenly apprehensive.
“Let me put the pistols on the table, boy. Were you tappin’ that ass?”
A jolt of pure violent rage hit Putilov like nothing he’d ever felt in his life. It was as if he had a live volcano in his bowels, and it was welling upward through his abdomen, stomach, chest, esophagus, then hitting his brain like an explosion of molten boiling magma.
For a moment, Putilov blacked out and fell off his desk chair. When he came to, he was on his back, and he could hear Tower on the Skype’s speaker phone, bellowing:
“Putie, where are you? Where did you go?”
Putilov might well have cracked and gone terminally insane at that very moment, but for the last week he’d been meeting with an anger management psychiatrist, who was helping him deal with his homicidal hatred of Tower. The man practiced something called “Eidetic Therapy.” He’d taught Putilov to visualize himself and Tower in situations that reduced his rage and then concentrate on those images.
Well, the only images he had of Tower that gave him any relief were images of himself, Putilov, killing the imbecile … painfully, painstakingly.
Instantly, he pictured Tower standing there in his office. In his mind’s eye, Putilov had an AK-47 in his hands and a bucket of plastique at his feet. Empting the AK’s magazine into Tower’s stomach and gonads—guaranteeing that his death would be horrifyingly slow, not quick and merciful—he then bent over him and shoved handfuls of plastique up his ass, into his groin and then his mouth. He inserted pre-wired blasting caps into the explosive, hid behind his desk, and with a smile on his face, big as St. Basil’s, he pushed the detonator’s plunger.
The Evil That Men Do Page 24