Damn it, he needed tonight’s diversion, anything that would get his mind off that bitch Jules Meredith and her asshole friend, Danny McMahon. No less a personage than President J. T. Tower had called him up, saying that he’d been sickened by what Meredith and McMahon had been doing to Jowett, their friends and himself, announcing that he, J. T. Tower, was “settling Jules Meredith’s and Danny McMahon’s hash once and for all.”
“As my number one campaign contributor, you deserve a celebration, Ben, instead of all that public ridicule,” President Tower had said to him, “and I am personally setting you up with the hottest young woman I have ever had the privilege to debauch, and you can take my erotic recommendations to J. P. Morgan Chase. I am the gold standard when it comes to bodaciously hot beauties. In fact, I picked this one out special for you. For years, you’ve told me about your fellatio fixation. Well, I too share that particular enthusiasm. I’ve had head all over the world—from the street girls of Rio to the sex goddesses of the Hollywood Hills, from Bangkok brothels to the supermodel penthouses of London and New York. I’ve had it in Hong Kong’s royal palaces and in remote Sherpa villages high up in the Himalayas. When it comes to oral sex, I’ve been up, down and all around, here, there and back again, but I’ve never had anything remotely approaching what this young girl does. She could suck the chrome off an eighteen-wheel diesel-rig trailer hitch. I swear on my balls and my eyes she’ll give you the wildest barracuda blowjob of your young life. Screaming skull? She’ll give you a hummer that’ll hammer your eyeballs right out of your head and send you shrieking like a banshee into the night. In fact, she’ll do anything! Talk about having dollar signs for eyeballs, she’d let you burn her at the stake in a snuff flick if you laid enough scratch on her. And best of all, she’s my personal gift to you, free and gratis.”
“J. T.,” Jowett said, strangely and surprisingly moved. “You’re too kind, too generous. How can I ever thank you?”
“No thanks necessary. We’ve all suffered hideously at the hands of Jules Meredith and Danny McMahon, but their reign of terror is about to come to an end. I have Mikhail Putilov’s personal word on it, so let your own personal celebration begin tonight!”
“God bless Mikhail Putilov,” Jowett said. “I don’t know what else to say.”
“By the way, this young fellatrix may be … underage. I’ve never checked her ID. That’s not a problem, is it?”
* * *
Remembering his conversation with Tower, Jowett got so aroused he became light-headed. He had to walk to his bathroom and splash cold water on his face.
3
“We committed about nine thousand felonies, getting McMahon and Rashid out of Pakistan. You don’t want to be accessoried to any of those crimes.”
—Elena Moreno to Jules Meredith
Elena and her team met in the helipad hangar in New Jersey. Jules—decked out in jeans, a T-shirt and running shoes—was standing in front of the news chopper.
“This chopper any good?” Elena asked.
“It’s a top-of-the-line Agusta with a camera on the fin and in the nose,” Jules said, “which I will operate with a laptop and a joystick. I have a mini-cam as well. We have an EVS-1500 enhanced vision system. The auxillary transversal 132-gallon fuel tanks will let us stay up for five or six hours. Its lift is six tons, but I only have room for five of you.”
“Jamie, Adara, Rashid and Danny are coming with us,” Elena said. “Jamie will pilot.”
“Danny?” Jules asked in stunned disbelief.
“He’s earned it,” Elena said. “Anyway, I may want him to contact Raza if we can get through to her. Believe it or not, she might actually talk to him.”
“Why?” Jules asked McMahon, confused.
“We have a connection,” McMahon explained.
“What is it?” Jules asked.
“Pelvic,” Adara said.
“Are you sure we want him?” Jules asked, dubious.
“Danny’s convinced me he can help,” Elena said, “so he’s coming. That’s it.”
The helicopter held exactly six of them, and Jamie was already in the pilot’s seat, a duffel bag full of weapons on the deck.
They climbed into the aircraft and strapped themselves into their jump seats.
“I’m okay with McMahon,” Elena said to Jules. “What I don’t like is you coming along.”
“Do you want me to miss the story of a lifetime?” Jules said. “The nuking of the UN?”
“We committed about nine thousand felonies,” Elena said, “getting McMahon and Rashid out of that Pakistani torture chamber. You don’t want to be accessoried to any of those crimes.”
“Also if Tower learns we’re in the Apple,” Jamie said, “he’ll order the goddamned U.S. Air Force to shoot us out of the sky.”
“We won’t be hard to spot,” Elena said. “There won’t be a lot of choppers checking out the UN. Jules, I really don’t want you with us.”
“You need me,” Jules said. “When we’re in that TV news chopper and over Manhattan, if the cops radio us, I can talk to them. I’m the only one with press credentials, and I’m well known. I can bluff my way past most law enforcement.”
“How long did you say this crate will stay up?” Adara asked.
“Five or six hours,” Jamie said.
“And it’s got a cruising speed of two hundred miles per hour,” Jules said. “If you want to get to the UN in time for the Secretary General’s address to the General Assembly on the Anti-Inequality Expropriation Bill, we better haul ass. The clock is ticking.”
“Copy that,” Jamie said.
“Let’s hit it,” Rashid said, slapping a magazine into a Barrett M83 .50 caliber anti-transport sniper rifle. “I’m door gunner in case we run into any violent opposition. This Barrett’ll take down planes, choppers, tanks and battleships at sea. Jules, you got your tail-, nose- and mini-cams set up?”
“They’re ready to go,” Jules said, “locked and cocked.”
“Then let’s get this bird in the air,” Jamie said.
The rotor turned, and the din was deafening.
4
“Think of yourself as Paolo, in Dante’s Second Circle of Hell. He and Francesca whirl together for all eternity in an agony of lust, which they can never satisfy or consummate. Except yours will be more agony than lust.”
—Fahad al-Qadi to Benjamin Jowett
When Benjamin Jowett came to, he was in a suite in one of J. T.’s Needle Tower hotels. To the south he could see Wall Street and to the west, the vast expanses of New Jersey. It was night, and New York and the Garden State were bathed with brilliant luminescence.
He suddenly realized he was spread-eagled naked on an ultra-king-size bed atop purple satin sheets. His wrists and ankles were lashed to the bed frame’s legs, and he was tightly gagged. Adding to the weirdness and the terror, a translucent bag filled with a clear liquid dripped slowly into a needle inserted into his arm.
How the fuck had he gotten here?
Slowly, it all came back to him.
* * *
He’d come up to the room, just as President Tower had told him to do, and the president’s young woman was waiting for him in a white negligee and matching high heels, ready and eager but at the same time strangely shy, appealingly innocent. On the bedside tables were sterling silver dishes overflowing with pure cocaine, beluga caviar, toast points and Cialis. On both sides of the bed were sterling silver ice buckets of Dom Pérignon.
After fortifying himself with the refreshments, including the Cialis, he lay back and let her undress him. Working her way around every square inch of his body—stomach, back, arms and hands, legs and feet—she gave him the most incredible world tour of his life. Finally wending her way up his knees and thighs, she paused at the immensity of his …
Tower was right. She was soon giving him the greatest barracuda blowjob he’d ever known. Part of her skill was to take him to the edge of ecstasy but then pull him back, return him to the brink and then yan
k him away from it again, then again, then again, over and over, until he was begging her to finish, to let him come, every ounce of his coke-addled, Cialis-fueled lust driven mad by his criminally carnal, odiously obscene cravings.
“No,” she said, stopping to look up at him with her large, amazingly expressive eyes and to grin sensuously. “First, a fresh glass of champagne, and then I will give you the greatest, grandest finale of your life, followed by much, much much more.”
So she poured two glasses and insisted that they each drink one in a single gulp. At that point, she’d done everything so perfectly Jowett was ready to go along with anything she said.
But as soon as he drank the champagne he felt light-headed.
The room was moving, lurching.
He was growing weak, faint, dizzy.
Then he was spinning—down, down, downward to darkness, into a bleak bottomless abyss of blackest night.
And then he knew no more.
* * *
He suddenly saw the young woman walk out of the boudoir’s bathroom.
She was smiling, the grin no longer sweet and demure but filled with conceited condescension and venomous contempt.
Then a Middle Eastern man in a black expensively tailored suit and a platinum Rolex with emerald-cut diamonds was standing beside her. He bore a startling resemblance to Omar Sharif.
The man loosened the gag.
“Any questions?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Jowett asked. “What the fuck is going on?”
“We understand that you are exquisitely sensitive to Viagra and Cialis, both of which create in your genitals a rare condition called ‘pathological priapism.’ Furthermore, your affliction has grown worse as you’ve grown older. During the last year, by our count, you made six trips to the hospital to reverse this condition. Nonetheless, you still insist on fooling around with anti–erectile dysfunction drugs, otherwise known as AEDs. Your abuse of AEDs and your addiction to shockingly hard-core porn have made an already dangerous disorder much, much worse.”
“Well,” the woman said, “we now have something even more powerful than Viagra and Cialis for you to amuse yourself with. It’s totally illegal, of course. One of America’s drug companies developed it and spent millions trying to market it, but could not get it through the FDA. When it was tested on rats, they either died of what doctors call ‘expiration by erection’ or, if female rats were available, the males simply … fucked them to death. You, I’m afraid, won’t have this option. During your last hours, you’ll be all alone, spread-eagled and gagged on this bed, in this hotel penthouse, watching nonstop porn starring … moi.”
“So get ready,” the man said. “The drug company called their original version Verpusarrigas, and it’s the drug currently entering your brachial artery through this intra-arterial drip. It will induce terminal tumescence. Eventually producing a thrombus in your corpus cavernosum, this drug will incite penile ischemia, necrosis, infection and gangrene, all of which will seed your bloodstream with pathogens so lethal they will inevitably engender a fiercely fatal sepsis. Your genitals will experience unimaginable suffering, which will lead to your long interminable utterly unendurable demise.”
“You aren’t really going to do this,” Jowett said, “are you?”
“But we are,” the woman said. “In fact, this version of the medication is even more powerful than what your drug companies had originally attempted to create and market,” the man said. “Mikhail Putilov had his scientists take a crack at it, and they have now made it truly … excruciating.”
“That is true,” the man said. “In the past Putilov had ordered me to kill a number of people with polonium-210, a poison that caused its victim to suffer several days of unbearable pain. It felt as if the polonium was setting fire to the recipient’s stomach and intestines.”
“Unfortunately,” the woman said, “Russia was the only nation that manufactured polonium-210, and the toxin had become inextricably identified with Putilov. Anytime he had someone killed with it, everyone knew instantly who had ordered the hit. Much to his chagrin, Putilov had to stop using it.”
“So guess what?” the man said. “You will go down in history—as the first man to be tortured to death by this landmark drug.”
“But I thought we had a thing!” Jowett shouted at the young woman. “I thought we felt something. I felt something.”
“You felt lust. I felt nausea.”
“But you can’t do this,” Jowett said, shaken, unbelieving.
“Oh, we can do it all right,” the man said. “Unfortunately, what we can’t do is stay and watch. We both have other pressing matters to attend to.”
“I can, however, offer you a surrogate me,” the young woman said. She pointed to the 100-inch flat TV screen. She clicked it on with a remote. On the screen a young, spectacularly gorgeous hooker—namely, herself—was giving him head.
She then wheeled in five more 100-inch flat screens. The same porn video was playing on all of them.
“The sedative and painkiller should be wearing off by now,” the man said. “Do you feel … uncomfortable?”
He was suddenly aware that he was very uncomfortable. In fact, he was currently experiencing a firestorm down below. He stared down at his luridly livid, grotesquely engorged member. Christ, it felt like a thermonuclear conflagration was engulfing his crotch.
The young woman was laughing at him now, mocking him with childish giggles.
“Big tough macho Wall Street big shot,” she was saying, barely able to contain her hilarity. “I want our little encounter to be a night for you to remember. I want you to watch us on the TV screen for as long as you live.”
“Think of yourself as Paolo in Dante’s Second Circle of Hell,” Fahad said to him. “He and Francesca whirl together for all eternity in an agony of lust, which they can never satisfy or consummate. Except yours will be more ‘agony’ than ‘lust.’”
“You can’t!” Jowett howled.
“Oh, but we can,” Fahad said, “and we shall. If it’s any consolation though, you won’t die unsung. You will, in fact, die in a blaze of infamy and notoriety.”
“We’ll see to it that a digital copy of you, me and your final hours is sent to Jules Meredith and Danny McMahon,” the young woman said. “Mr. Jowett, we’re going to make you a superstar of porn.”
“Albeit snuff-flick porn,” Fahad said.
“With you our snuffed star!” the young woman enthused.
The man held Benjamin’s nose, and when his jaw opened, he inserted a hard black rubber ball in his mouth. The ball was affixed to a leather strap that he tied tightly around Benjamin’s head.
“Here, let him listen to some music,” the woman said.
“Excellent idea,” Fahad said. “It will drown out his groans and sobs.”
“Not that anyone would hear him anyway.”
The girl then cranked up the surround sound stereo, and the sensuously melodious, extravagantly erotic lyrics of “Pillow-Talkin’ Time” filled the penthouse.
The two left laughing, congratulating each other with high fives and backslaps.
To Benjamin’s eternal horror, he could not take his eyes off the six TV screens and their prodigiousy libidinous, erotically arousing images of the young woman wailing dementedly on his … thrill hammer.
Even when the conflagration in his groin became insupportable, even then he could not take his eyes off her.
Damn, that bitch was good!
At last, though, the fire-down-below got the better of him, and slowly, ineptly, Benjamin C. Jowett attempted to scream. But the rubber ball, crammed and strapped deeply into his mouth, and the music blaring over wall-to-wall surround sound speakers, blocked and drowned out any protest he could utter.
The best he could summon up was a low, soft, choking, wrenching, pain-racked sob.
But through it all, try as he might, he could not take his eyes of the TV screens and all he could think was:
Damn, that bitch is hot
…
PART XVIII
“Oxfam—in conjunction with Forbes and Credit Suisse—has published a rigorously researched and painstakingly documented study that proves that eight men, six of whom are Americans, now possess more wealth than one-half of the world’s population. These figures probably understate our fiscal crisis. Some economists now argue that the top seven oligarchs are richer than half of the planet’s populace.”
—UN Secretary General Jean Paul Renault
1
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned during my sixty-plus years on this earth, it’s that you can’t trust stupid.”
—Russian President Mikhail Putilov
Putilov sat in his office at his big, sprawling, polished oak desk, reading his daily intelligence briefing, when an encrypted Skype call rang on his computer. He turned on his Skype phone and both Kamal ad-Din and Ambassador Waheed appeared on his computer screen.
“My friends,” Putilov said with a beaming smile, “how nice to hear from you.”
“Everything is going as planned,” Prince Waheed said. “Raza and her associates have landed in New York, and ‘Operation UN’ is about to commence.”
“Excellent,” Putilov said. “I also see you have taken the time to dispose of a few loose ends.”
“I thought you’d appreciate the job we did on Jowett,” Raza said.
“A work of art,” Putilov said. “I just got a digital link to it. It made my polonium-210 assassinations look amateurish by comparison.”
“We didn’t tell Tower about our plans for Jowett,” Kamal said.
“We were under the impression he liked Jowett,” Waheed said.
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