“In the New Testament love of money is far and away the deadliest of all the deadly sins. It tells us that greed will destroy human beings by the billions and will in the end rid the earth of humanity’s shadow.
“The time to stop this oligarchic take over is now. The hard truth is that oligarchy and democracy are mutually incompatible. If this financial exploitation of our planet and its people does not stop today, if the UN’s resolution mandating the mass expropriation and redistribution of a full third of the über-rich’s illegal assets is not passed, we will witness the end of freedom and democracy throughout the globe. The world will enter a new Dark Age, and global totalitarianism will inevitably follow, just as it did in Putilov’s Russia. So we are out of time, and we must act today. There is no room left for compromise.”
There were five, stunned, uncomprehending seconds of silence, then the General Assembly rose up in a single monstrous protracted roar—sudden, spontaneous and elemental—a tsunami of approbation.
Glancing at a panel of side monitors, the Secretary General saw multiscreen footage of massive crowds all over the world—in Beijing and Buenos Aires, in London and Mumbai, in New York and New Dehli—thundering for the bill’s passage.
Mon Dieu, Secretary General Jean Paul Renault thought to himself. This bill will pass! Nothing can stop it—nothing short of an asteroid strike on the UN.
4
“Fuck Tower,” Kamal said. “He’s an idiot.”
Raza, Marika, Fahad and Tariq stood in the closed hangar of the helipad in rural New Jersey. A friendly New York City police officer, whom Fahad had handpicked months ago, had borrowed an NYPD chopper for them, and Raza would pilot it. All four wore the dark blue uniforms of New York’s Finest—complete with gun belts, sidearms and gear.
The craft before them was an Airbus AS365, featuring a cruise speed of over 175 miles per hour, a range of over 500 miles and air-endurance of nearly five hours. Most important, with its two Turbomeca Arriel 2C, turboshaft engines and heavily reinforced, customized cargo deck, it could easily handle three tons of payload. Given the howitzer-barrel nuke in its cargo bay, it would need that kind of power and structural reinforcement.
Raza, Marika and Tariq watched Fahad forklift load the bomb into the chopper’s fuselage, and then watched him strap the bomb down.
“Time to check in with our employers?” Raza asked Marika and Tariq.
“I expect so,” Tariq said.
They entered a nearby office and shut the door behind them. It had three gray metal office chairs, a gray metal desk, two filing cabinets, a desk phone and an open booted-up laptop computer. Raza sat down and punched in the Skype number for Kamal ad-Din, their financial backer. He came on and immediately linked in Prince Waheed. Both Kamal and Ambassador Waheed were dressed in long white thawb robes and keffiyehs.
God, Raza thought, Kamal does look like a “Muslim Moby Dick,” to quote one of McMahon’s more blistering witticisms.
Raza, Marika and Tariq closed ranks in front of the computer so they could all see each other.
“So how is it going?” Ambassador Waheed asked. On the computer’s Skype screen, he was smiling broadly.
“The cargo’s on the chopper,” Raza said, “and we’re ready to rock.”
“Splendid job, Fahad,” Kamal said, joining Waheed on the computer screen. “The number you did on Jowett was outstanding. Because you immediately leaked that in-flagrante-delicto footage, it’s already out there on the web. We were able to watch Jowett’s final hours.”
“Those Wall Street derivative assholes will think twice about fomenting Middle Eastern famines from now on!” Waheed said.
“The networks even ran the footage,” Fahad said.
“With Jowett’s genitals obscured, of course,” Prince Waheed said, “but still the impact was overpowering. The West has to know now that the New United Islamist Front can get to anyone.”
“Did he suffer much?” Kamal asked, his mouth twitching in anticipation.
“We actually have a summary of a medical report,” Marika said, “that was leaked to the papers and posted on the internet just a few minutes ago. The report’s summary reads:
The coroner’s report says that Jowett was found with “his penis in a condition of extreme tumescence and black with gangrene. Seeping green pus, the penis was exuding a foul-smelling gas from the orifice.” The autopsy also noted “retrograde infection with massive swelling of the inguinal lymph nodes. The scrotum,” the report said, “looked like a fully inflated soccer ball.” Jowett’s eyes were described as “glazed, the subject’s mouth thick from heavy respiration due to his attempts to expel the acid load created by the body’s sepsis. Since sepsis is highly catabolic and capable of causing the subject to burn up to 6000 calories a day, the subject appears to have sustained weight loss.”
“So,” Fahad asked, “how’s that for sheer unmitigated agony? Did Jowett go through as much hell as you people had wanted?”
“That sonofabitch got what he deserved,” Kamal said, his computer-screen grin even wider and brighter than before. “He personally orchestrated famines throughout the Mideast, then bragged about it afterward—all for the sake of making a few quick dirty bucks.”
“Who knows how many people he starved to death?” Marika said.
“Millions,” Raza said, agreeing.
“There was one minor mishap,” Fahad said. “I couldn’t get a clear shot at Jules Meredith.”
Fahad did not tell them why. That failure was too humiliating.
“We know,” Kamal said, “and Putilov is furious. He was not only mad at her himself, he’d promised President Tower personally that you’d take her out.”
“Gentlemen,” Raza said, attempting to placate Kamal, “it will happen. I guarantee it. There just wasn’t time to do everything.”
“That’s too bad,” Ambassador Waheed said. “I wanted the bitch dead as well.”
“Gentlemen,” Fahad said. “We’re under no time pressure to kill her. We can do it any Monday morning.”
“Still Putilov is hopping mad,” Ambassador Waheed said. “Tower won’t be happy either.”
“Fuck Tower,” Kamal said. “He’s an idiot.”
“Agreed,” Fahad said. “Also perhaps you might remind Putilov how long it took for his hero, Stalin, to kill Trotsky, so Meredith’s time will come. I plan on seeing her again. Personally. Meredith isn’t going anywhere.”
Fahad was lying. He was taking off when this was over, disappearing like smoke and never seeing any of them again.
“We’ll tell both of them that,” Waheed said.
“I’ll offer my services as well,” Marika said.
“Moi aussi,” Raza said. Me, too.
“That should appease them,” Kamal said.
“Not if they decide to attend that UN Anti-Inequality Conference,” Waheed said.
His comment provoked gales of laughter.
“Speaking of which,” Raza said, “we have to get going. We have a conference to attend to.”
The men were still laughing when Raza switched off the Skype call, and the four of them walked out of the office toward the chopper.
5
Please, just let us get through this alive, one more time, Elena silently prayed to the God in Whom she’d never believed, and I promise I won’t allow any of us to do anything this goddamn stupid again.
Elena sat strapped into the chopper’s jump seat, alone with her thoughts. What was happening? What had she done? She’d always been destined to end up doing something utterly disastrous, something as insane and fucked up as this. She could see it all so clearly now.
She recalled her childhood, growing up in the West Texas desert country. Her father had been a former biker, who cooked crystal meth for the Hells Angels, until he blew himself and his cook shack to Kingdom Come, leaving Elena an orphan. By coincidence, however, she’d recently met Jules, a fellow El Paso ninth-grader, and Elena had saved her from getting stomped by an outlaw girls’ gang. J
ules and her family immediately took Elena in and raised her as one of their own.
Her first year of college she’d dated a guy who’d turned out to be a bona fide Mideast terrorist. He’d returned to Pakistan, but her obsession with him had led to her join the Agency. She’d blazed through their training school—“The Farm”—with flying colors. Testing high on linguistic skills, she had excelled in the field. After becoming the Agency’s foremost undercover agent in Pakistan, she’d met Jamie there. He was running black ops for the Special Forces on the Afghan–Pakistan border, and they’d fallen in love. Eventually, she had taken over the CIA’s Pakistani desk. For a time, she’d been the world’s foremost expert on Saudi–Pakistani terrorism. But then the Company had turned on her, Jules and Jamie, putting out shoot-to-kill orders on them all. They had had to flee the country.
Eventually they’d been cleared, but they’d all sworn they’d never return to the States. Something had happened to America. The whole nation had gone wrong. None of them had wanted any part of the U.S. ever again.
But then this shit happened, and none of them could turn their backs on it—Jules in particular. She had dug up stuff on Tower and the Saudis that they just couldn’t ignore.
Still Elena knew in her soul that she, Jamie and Jules never should have come back and gotten involved. She should have somehow stopped them. She should have stood up, put her foot down.
Well it was too late for recriminations. Hell was coming to the Homeland, and once again, she, Jules, Jamie and her friends would be in the thick of it. And if the U.S. caught them, Tower would see to it that they spent the rest of their lives in some Guantanamo-style hellhole.
Or Kamal’s crew would kill them.
If she could just keep them all alive, if she could get them all out of this in one piece, she swore she would drag them all back to Sweden by their throats, crotches and the scruffs of their necks. She would never let any of them return to the U.S. ever. She would never let any of them get involved in this crazy shit again. America and rest of the world were just too fucking crazy.
Please, just let us get through this alive, one more time, Elena silently prayed to the God in Whom she’d never believed, and I promise I won’t allow any of us to do anything this goddamn stupid again.
She stared out of the chopper’s windscreen and watched the skyscrapers of the Big Apple growing larger and larger.
6
Who would have dreamed it? Raza Jabarti—a heartless murdering terrorist with more blood on her hands than any hundred men in the movement—was smitten with a foul-mouthed American comic-satirist and had moved heaven and earth to bring McMahon to Pakistan so she could be with him.
Raza sat in the big police chopper, alone with her thoughts. No one was saying much. They all had a lot on their minds. She was piloting them toward the UN’s imposing, flat-roofed skyscraper—its Secretariat Building. It would make an excellent bomb site. At that height, the blast and fire damage would be much greater than it would be at ground level. The New United Islamist Front physicists had calculated that the explosion would easily obliterate the entire UN complex.
“Let those UN assholes try to confiscate our offshore trillions after we nuke them off the face of the earth.” Ambassador Waheed had laughed when she’d first told him of her plan.
Her mind wandered. She could not stop thinking of Danny McMahon. She’d told him about growing up as a Saudi girl, then a young woman, and how miserable her existence had been. She’d joined the jihad for the simple reason that two of her group’s stronger men, Fahad and Kamal, had thought that if women fought and died like men, they should have the same rights and privileges as men. Fahad and Kamal had looked out for her, protected her from the clerics and fanatics. She’d known freedom for the first time in her life.
Still she’d hungered after more. Given her high position in the movement, she’d had access to Western books and DVDs. Fahad and Kamal believed in Sun Tzu’s dictum, “Know your enemy,” and so they’d encouraged her to learn the ways of the West.
She would never forget the evening she stumbled on McMahon’s DVD documentary on the insanity of organized religion. Entitled Relig-Idiots it reduced all faiths, most notably Islam, to sheer, babbling lunacy. She’d watched it hundreds of times, could recite every line of it and was haunted by it even to this day.
She began reading his books, watching his monologues and TV shows assiduously, recording copies of every one of them. In plain fact, she’d become obsessed with him. He had truly liberated her, lifted the scales from her eyes and shown her the Light.
All religions—Islam most of all—were pure fucking madness.
So she’d organized McMahon’s kidnapping. She’d argued they should abduct him, because he was the biggest, high-value, anti-Islamist critic on earth. By capturing and transporting him from New York to Pakistan, they would prove for once and for all that no one in the world was beyond their reach—not even America’s superstar entertainers.
She’d argued the publicity value was incalculable, the ransom money astronomical and furthermore it would be … fun. For the rest of their lives, they would laugh their asses off over his kidnapping and the excruciating tortures which they would inflict on him.
But in truth, his kidnapping had merely been a very complicated way of getting to meet and know her idol.
Who would have dreamed it? Raza Jabarti—a heartless murdering terrorist with more blood on her hands than any hundred men in the movement—was smitten with a foul-mouthed American comic-satirist and had moved heaven and earth to bring McMahon to Pakistan so she could be with him.
She wondered what he thought of her. She’d terrified, beaten and tortured him halfway to death. She had also given him the wildest fuck of his entire life. Even more amazing and more unbelievable, while she’d had sex with legions of lovers, she’d never come close to experiencing an orgasm with any of them—not ever. She hated men—and life, for that matter—so obsessively she feared that her fury had robbed her of some simple essential erotic … feeling. In fact, she had been so indifferent to her lovers’ myriad ministrations that she’d wondered if she would ever come.
Well McMahon had cured her of that problem once and for all. He’d rocked her world like Ragnarok, Götterdämmerung and Armageddon. All she had to do was think of him, and she was detonating with desire.
But what did he think of her?
Whatever he thought, he thought wrong.
Raza would prove him wrong.
Do not understand me too quickly, Danny McMahon, she’d told him. Think not I am the thing I seem.
PART XIX
“Raza-girl, we’re going to bridge the inequality gap the old-fashioned way—by vaporizing those 500 billionaire cocksuckers! That’s what I call a good start!”
—Raza Jabarti
1
“If God had anything better, He kept it for Himself.”
—Russian President Mikhail Putilov
President J. T. Tower sat in his private New York office at the top of the Excelsior Hotel. The furniture was all polished oak, the couches and armchairs upholstered in burgundy-hued raw silk. Portraits of the world’s great warlords, Alexander and Caesar, Washington and Napoléon, MacArthur and Patton, hung on the walls.
But Tower was oblivious to all of it.
The only thing he could do was stare at his 96-inch wall-mounted flat-screen monitor and scowl. The damn UN bill was going to pass.
Suddenly, miraculously, Putilov returned the call that Tower had placed less than ten minutes prior. It usually took days for Tower to reach him, but Putilov must have been nervous about the vote as well.
“What the fuck is happening, Comrade?” Tower shouted into the phone.
Putilov hated it when Tower addressed him as “Comrade.” He’d had men flogged, incarcerated, even killed for less offensive remarks. Still he had to humor this imbecile—for at least a while longer.
“Never fear, old friend,” Putilov said unctuously. “This was all to
be expected, and I shall soon extirpate the UN expropriation movement, root and branch.”
“You can still stop them?” Tower asked, astonished.
Tower had been clearly unnerved by the UN speech and the enthusiastic reaction it was receiving across the globe.
“As you Americans sometimes say: ‘I might have been born at night but not last night.’ Of course I can.”
“But people are agitating around the world to seize our offshore revenues,” Tower said, “and this is just the beginning.”
“So?” Putilov asked, his tone mocking.
“But how can you stop them?” Tower asked, his voice trembling with panic and terror.
Putilov suddenly lost it. Consumed with rage at the imbecile at the other end of the Skype call, he roared:
“By turning UN Plaza into a levitating nuclear fireball and annihilating every living soul in it! That’s how we deal with our enemies over here. Understand me now, you pathetic fucking moron???”
Putilov was thundering at the top of his lungs, his face working in rage, his anger at Tower all but blinding him. Utterly beside himself, Putilov was no longer capable of placating or finessing or bullshitting the ridiculous born-rich fool any longer. Pulling a 9mm Makarov semi-automatic pistol from out of his middle desk drawer, he racked the slide in full view of Tower’s hysterically screaming, jaw-gaping face and emptied the entire magazine into the Skype camera, his computer screen and Tower’s confused face, which was staring back at him, bawling and sobbing in twitching, pissing horror.
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