The Evil That Men Do
Page 28
Unsurprisingly, foreign firms are not eager to set up businesses and invest in Putilov’s Russia. Among advanced nations, Russia under Putilov ranks number one for corruption and bribery; it rates last in legal, financial and political transparency. Moreover, doing business in Russia can be highly dangerous if you are not part of Putilov’s in-group. In the last ten years Putilov’s supporters in the business community have bribed cops, judges and prosecutors to imprison their competitors, putting over 300,000 innocent entrepreneurs behind bars. According to one estimate, such individuals represent 15 percent of Russia’s prison population.
Putilov even refuses to build the minimal infrastructure businesspeople need to conduct business. While China during the last decade has built almost 4,500 miles of roadways, Putilov has yet to construct a single transnational highway. Because of corruption, pipelines in Russia cost 300 percent more than they do in the EU. Of the $50 billion Russia spent on the Sochi Olympics, over $25 billion went into the coffers of Putilov and his partners.
Each year, bribery, kickbacks and extortion under Putilov are estimated to drain 33 percent from its $1.26 trillion GDP.
The sad truth is that Putilov and his supporters are less interested in running Russia’s businesses efficiently than they are in robbing the country’s economic sector and hiding the money overseas. As we mentioned earlier, Putilov and his cadre of crooks have hidden over 100 percent of Russia’s annual GDP abroad.
The effect that all this corruption has on the economic well-being of individual Russians is devastating. Credit Suisse estimates the median wealth of adults in Russian households to be $871. In other words, half of Russian adults have total household wealth of under $871. Under Putilov, median household wealth for a Russian adult was 85 percent of that for his or her counterpart in India, where that person was worth $1,040. In Brazil, median wealth is is $5,117; in China it is $8,023.
According to Credit Suisse, in the Land of Putilov, 111 people control 19 percent of that country’s entire wealth, and the upper 10 percent possess 85 percent of the nation’s money.
While the Russian people under Communist rule historically had a long tradition of literacy and academic achievement, and while they are still relatively well educated in math and science, they have embarrassingly limited job opportunities for their best-educated people, many of whom are brilliant, creative, ambitious and highly trained in these disciplines. The country produces shockingly little technological innovation or development. The state of Alabama produces more patents each year than Russia. Austria develops thirty-five times as many. Employment opportunities are so dismal that one poll indicated that almost two-thirds of the Russian population seriously consider emigration.
Under Yeltsin, Russia had financial problems, but people and businesses enjoyed relative personal and financial freedom. Putilovism changed all that. Russia’s expanding free market system was turned into an economic dictatorship with all major business decisions dependent on the whims of a single ruler. To achieve this position of total power, Putilov had to pauperize and subjugate the entirety of the Russian people and rip successful Russian companies apart piecemeal. As Karen Dawisha has written: “Massive companies that had previously flourished in the private sector, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s [oil company] Yukos, were raided and taken over by Kremlin insiders.”
Such tactics have driven most investors out of Russia. U.S. hedge fund magnate William Browder is a classic case. He’d invested heavily in Russia and had done well—until he rebelled against Russia’s corruption and its lack of business transparency. Putilov responded by arresting Browder’s lawyer–auditor, Sergei Magnitskiy, and jailing him. Viciously beaten in prison, Magnitskiy was also starved, subjected to freezing cold and denied medical care. He subsequently died.
The United States under Barack Obama did fight back. Obama put those responsible for Magnitskiy’s death and for the illegal expropriation of Browder’s assets on a visa-denial list and refused them entrance into the U.S. Russia responded to these actions by trying Browder in absentia and Magnitskiy posthumously—both for tax evasion. After sentencing Browder, who by that time was living overseas, to a long prison term, Russia seized and gutted his Russian companies, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into Putilov’s private bank account and those of his jackal pack.
It was also the first time in history a legal system had tried a corpse.
Meanwhile, Russia’s economy continues to fall apart. Not only has their leader’s ferocity frightened away foreign investors, it has scared Russian businessmen into leaving Russia. Over 300,000 such businesspeople have moved to London, hoping to find a safer environment for themselves and their families. With macabre irony, some of these émigrés have continued to work for their government, ransacking the Russian economic sector. At the same time, however, they and their families rely on law-abiding Londoners and that nation’s respect-for-the-law political system to provide peace and security for themselves and their loved ones. The hard painful truth is that the Western banks have acted as Putilov’s willful enablers and fraudulent financiers.
There is light, however, at the end of this murky tunnel. Putilov’s impenetrable financial labyrinth is impenetrable no more. Any cyber-security system that can be built can be hacked, and the UN’s, EU’s and U.S. Senate’s investigators have uncovered the locations and passwords for most of his and his partners’ black money accounts. They will soon be in possession of them all.
Furthermore, such offshore accounts can be seized. In March 2014—after Putilov’s illegal invasion of Crimea—Obama became Putilov’s worst nightmare when he announced the U.S. was raiding the Western bank accounts of Putilov and his closest cronies. What followed was a race between the U.S., Putilov and his partners to see who could get to all that dark money first. The U.S. thereby created the technological paradigm and legal precedent for freezing and even seizing foreign funds after crimes have been committed internationally. Obama’s people targeted one of Putilov’s most lucrative business ventures with a particular vengeance, one in which all of his financial partners were heavily vested, on the grounds that the organization constituted an “outlaw bank.”
The UN is now determined to go after not only Putilov’s black assets but those of the world’s other financial brigands and redistribute them to those more deserving.
The world’s democracies are backing the UN’s action.
Putilov, your deal’s going down.
The Russian dictator stared at Meredith’s column, his hands shaking even harder than before. He’d have Fahad handle Meredith. He was the best contractor Putilov had ever used, and he’d hired some spectacularly talented professionals over the years. As for Tower? Just a few more weeks—after Putilov had gotten rid of the UN’s Global Expropriation Resolution once and for all—then he’d have Fahad deal with Tower. Putilov planned on doing Tower slow and hard.
Very slow.
Very hard.
He and that whore from hell, Raza Jabarti, had overseen the development of a brand-new, high-tech, scientifically sophisticated drug, and what it did to its victims was unspeakably gruesome. He sometimes described this new method to confidants as “killing men the hard way.”
It was a pun—an inside joke—and just thinking about it brought a vindictive smile to Putilov’s lips.
Yes, the death he had planned for Tower was worth a celebration.
With trembling hands, he reached into his side drawer, took out his krok bottle and unscrewed the cap. Just staring at it got him aroused.
A small stream of spittle appeared in the left-hand corner of his mouth and rolled down his chin. It hung there a long moment before dropping onto the desk. More saliva appeared, then more and more and more.
Oblivious to the drool, now bubbling steadily out of the side of his mouth, Putilov began to grind and chop the pills.
PART XIII
“… it’s time to blow this pop stand.”
—Elena Moreno
1
Fahad’s cab was stuck in gridlock on Manhattan’s Second Avenue on the Upper East Side. Because of the UN’s Anti-Inequality conferences and hearings, the entire East Side looked like a parking lot. He would have taken the new Second Avenue subway except he had a very large suitcase containing weapons and ammunition, which he did not want to tote around in public. He was an Arab; he didn’t want people—or, even worse, some racial-profiling, compulsively curious cop—asking him about its contents.
Goddamn it, he was sick of this assignment. What the fuck was he doing here anyway? He didn’t need the money that bad.
The job violated everything he had learned about personal and professional survival in his two decades as a paid mercenary. He should have turned Raza down ice-cold, gone to ground if necessary, and never looked back.
So why hadn’t he rejected it? The answer to that one was easy. He’d never been short on guts, but even he didn’t have the stones to say no to Raza, Marika and Kamal, not if he wanted to keep his balls in his nut sack.
He also did not want to get on Putilov’s bad side, even though Putilov was dumping on him difficult, dangerous last-minute work. Putilov had ordered Fahad to hit a famous woman journalist, Jules Meredith, whom, even he, Fahad, knew about. Since she was notorious critic of Islam, he had no qualms about taking her out. A woman such as Jules Meredith, he was almost willing to kill for free.
Almost.
There was one obstacle. When Meredith exited her building in the morning, he wanted to shoot her from an apartment across the street. That way he’d have an easier time escaping. But first he had to gain access to one of those windows.
So Fahad had studied the occupants of the most strategically placed coops and finally settled on the one he wanted. The owner was a rather attractive woman, whom he’d shadowed and staked out for the last three nights. Tonight, he planned to meet with the woman for the first time in a neighborhood bar, which she habitually frequented, convince her to take him home and then fuck his brains out.
For a man of Fahad’s acumen, wiles and expertise, he knew her seduction would be no problem at all. He might even enjoy cajoling, enticing and screwing her.
One thing was sure: That Muslim-hating bitch could die a thousand deaths for all he cared.
He would definitely enjoy killing Jules Meredith afterward.
He understood intellectually and in the abstract that according to society’s norms, taking the life of anyone was wrong, but he had no qualms about the laws of nations or the codes of men. He made his living murdering people, and afterward, he didn’t apologize for it. It was what he did, who he was, what he’d always been.
So be it.
But what about the hedge fund guy? What he was going to do to him shook Fahad to his nonexistent soul. That was some truly monstrous shit. It didn’t matter how wicked the hedge fund bandit might be, what Raza and Putilov were forcing Fahad to do to him was pure, concentrated, unmitigated evil.
Just take it one step, one minute at a time. Do it and don’t look back. You can get through this.
But despite the pep talk he’d given himself, he wasn’t sure he could carry it out. Even Fahad al-Qadi wasn’t that cold.
Goddamn Raza and Putilov to hell!
They were two truly scary people.
2
“We’re all monsters, but my brother’s the worst.”
—Brenda Tower
Jules sat in her apartment and stared out the window at the apartment building across the street. She was thinking about Brenda Tower. She hoped she was okay. Hard as it was to believe, she considered Brenda a friend.
Jules remembered the first time Brenda had suggested they get together. She had asked Jules to meet her late at night in a discreet hotel room after a charity event. Brenda believed she could ditch her bodyguards and surveillance team and that the two of them could meet privately. Jules had wondered why Tower’s reclusive-billionaire sister wanted to meet someone so openly hostile to her family.
When Brenda informed her that she loved her articles on the Tower dynasty, Jules was frankly skeptical.
“No, I love your articles,” Brenda had said.
“Why—y—y—y?” Jules had said, letting the word drag out.
“Largely because my brother loathes them. You really get under his skin.”
“But you’re part of the Tower clan too—a very influential part. My articles aren’t kind to you.”
“I don’t disagree with anything you’ve written. We’re all monsters, but my brother’s the worst. He should have been jailed a long time ago.”
“You aren’t helpless,” Jules said. “You don’t have to look the other way and do nothing.”
“True, but you also don’t know what he’s capable of. He’s younger than I am, and I’ve been watching him, up close and personal, since he was born. I’ve seen him do horrifying things—things you can’t even imagine. For me to directly challenge him—well, that’s not a safe or even viable option.”
“So you’re saying your brother’s even worse than what I’ve written. That he’d actually harm you? You’re saying you—the person closer to him than anyone in the world—are terrified of him.”
“I have reason to be afraid. You never knew our little brother, Ronnie. I saw what J. T. did to him, and I saw what J. T. did to the women in his life.”
“He’s reputed to be a rapist. The tabloids over the years have teemed with accusations of sexual predation.”
“Until he sued those papers into submission,” Brenda said.
“He is relentless. He’s sued the papers I’ve worked for.”
“Male or female,” Brenda said, “he doesn’t care, and I’ve never known anyone who could stand up to him.”
“He’s also the world’s number one polluter. The carcinogens from your petrochemical plants are responsible for killing millions of people.”
“And our casinos swindle millions more. He and I were talking about that last night. I asked him why he does it. What he hopes to get out of all these exploitative business dealings, all this death and destruction. Want to hear what he said?”
She took out a small digital recording device.
“What’s that for?” Jules asked.
“He confides in me. I’m the only person he opens up to, and I’ve been taping him without his knowledge for years.”
Shit, Jules thought. J. T.’s sister—the only person in the world who he truly trusts—has been taping him surreptitiously. I may have hit the mother lode—or the sister lode.
“And you invited me here,” Jules asked, “because you want to help me to understand him?”
“Yes,” Brenda said, pouring herself a rock glass of brandy. Jules accepted one herself.
Christ, it was 100-year-old Napoléon cognac.
“Why?”
“You may not believe me,” Brenda asked, “but I actually like you. Maybe I see something of myself in you—something I could have been if I hadn’t been born into the Tower clan.”
“You understand that I’m committed to bringing down everything your family is, does and represents. Yet you want to help me?”
“I lack the courage to go up against Jim, but you’re willing to do it. You aren’t afraid. You’ll never know how much that means to me.”
“I’m not as fearless as you think,” Jules said, shaking her head. “Now my friend Elena, she’d fight a circle saw. You should meet her.”
“I expect I’d like her.”
“I don’t get it,” Jules said. “You’re saying you like me—after all I’ve written about your family—and you?”
“I admire the hell out of you,” Brenda said. “You don’t know it now, but you and I are going to be friends.”
“But J. T. scares you?”
Brenda nodded. Twice.
“Then let’s get him,” Ju
les said.
Brenda turned on the recorder. The voices were unmistakably those of Brenda and her brother. Jules was entranced.
3
“Jamie can shoot the balls off a runnin’ buck at 800 yards,” Jonesy said.
Decked out in black fatigues, flak vests and watch caps, their faces darkened with camo paint, Elena, Adara, Jamie, Jonesy, Leon, Henry, Andre and Stevie crouched behind a truck-size boulder along the southern slope of the hill. They carried M7 machine guns, and their flak vests were festooned with flashbangs, fragmentation grenades, Ka-Bar combat knives and extra magazines. Pistols were holstered across their thighs. They each had extra ordnance in their packs. They could see through the windows that lights were on in the house, and the moon and desert stars were so bright they’d decided against night goggles.
The target was a cinder-block building, encircled by chain-link fence, which was surmounted by coiled razor wire. The blockhouse was flanked by a pair of Quonset huts. A watchtower rose above the far fence corner, manned by a solitary soldier. All around the compound, rocky outcroppings scarred its perimeter and the valley’s arid slopes.
“Jamie, can you take out the man in the guard tower?” Elena asked.
“I can hit him from here,” Jamie said.
“Jamie can shoot the balls off a runnin’ buck at 800 yards,” Jonesy said.
“No doubt,” Adara said. “Still, move in a little closer. You have lots of rocks and escarpments to cover you.”
“Affirmative.”
Jamie slipped out from behind the big boulder and worked his way toward the gun tower, dogtrotting low to the ground from rock to rock, crawling when necessary, until he entered the shallow ravine that ran parallel to the front of the fence. He followed it in the direction of the tower on his hands and knees.
“When he takes out the guard,” Adara said, “we’ll make our way to the far side and open the fence with bolt cutters. Andre and Jonesy, you’ll take teams with you and neutralize any troops in the Quonset huts, while Jamie, Jonesy and I will blast our way into the blockhouse with platter charges and flashbangs. We’ll radio you if we need any help.”