His chief bodyguard entered the room instantly, his gun drawn.
“What’s wrong?” the tall strapping uniformed Captain of the Guard, Dmitri Pavlov, asked, clearly distraught.
“Nothing, old friend,” Putilov said, suddenly smiling for the first time in weeks. “Just something I’ve been wanting to do ever since I first spoke to the guy on the other end of the phone.”
Putilov raised the smoking gun and studied it for a long moment.
“Can I help you in any way, Mr. President?” Dmitri asked.
“Everything’s fine,” the smiling Putilov said, motioning the man toward the leather and mahogany chair in front of his desk. “Here, sit down. Goddamn, I feel good. In fact, for the first time in years, I really feel really … at peace.”
“I couldn’t be more pleased for you, sir,” the captain said, hesitantly, uncertain how to respond.
“Reminds me of the early ’90s, Captain,” Putilov said, “when we were just coming into our own, when we were getting our first taste of power. Damn, we killed a lot of people back then. I just plain lost count.”
“You had men killed, Mr. President?” Captain Dmitri asked—still not sure what else to say.
“Does the Pope shit in the woods?” Putilov shouted, slapping his thighs and laughing like a lunatic.
Christ, Putilov must have lost fifty pounds, Dmitri thought in stunned horror. He had been on vacation, hadn’t gotten a good look at the president in several weeks, and now saw Putilov was a mess. His white shirt fit him like a loose sack. His cheeks were drawn and sunken; his parchment-skin hung on him like a shroud. He was utterly emaciated, and his face was twitching uncontrollably.
“Those sound like wild times, Mr. President,” the captain said uneasily.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Putilov muttered. “Wyatt Earp and Bill Hickok had nothing on us.”
Putilov slowly began to scratch his arms, then his face and neck, then his thighs and ankles. Taking the krok syringe out of his right-hand desk drawer, he at last stopped scratching and began to rub the syringe with an almost sensual intimacy.
“Most of all, I loved the fliers,” Putilov said in a low whisper, as if imparting a discreet secret.
“Fliers, sir?” the captain asked.
“Those were the suspects,” Putilov said, “that we’d take to a high window, maybe to the twenty-fifth floor or, say, to the top of the Ivan the Great Bell Tower on Red Square. A couple of us would hang the man upside down by the ankles. I’d say to the fellow, often a man we’d been close to for years, even decades, a man who thought we were his friends: ‘You think you’re so smart. You think you’re better than us. You think you can do anything, don’t you? I’ll bet you think you can … fly? Here, show us.’ Then we’d let go. But none of them could fly. Instead, they dropped, like lead bricks—except these lead bricks screamed and thrashed their arms all the way down, as if their limbs were wings.”
Sitting down, Putilov threw his head back and laughed like a loon.
“You did this a lot?” the shocked captain asked.
“More times than I can count,” Putilov said, wiping his eyes and smiling happily as he reflected on his past. “But those were hard times. Anyone who even looked like they could double-cross us had to go. We did give them a chance, of course, to prove their innocence. Nikolay Kruchina, Georgy Palov and Dmitriy Lisovolik—none of them had to die. They all had their chance … to fly—or die.”
Again, Putilov exploded with hilarity.
“Then there was Mikhail Khodorkovsky,” Putilov said, struggling hard to pull himself together but having to wait for his laughs to subside. “He got rich like the rest of us, but then he decided he was a reformer! So I seized his oil company and gave him a chance to reform our Gulag Archipelago from the inside. For nine years—in two of the toughest and coldest of our hard-labor camps—he learned what happens to those who turn ‘reformer’ on me!” Putilov then whispered conspiratorially to the captain. “I paid guards and inmates to ‘reform’ Khodorkovsky—that is, to beat the piss out of him and freeze him half to death in ice-cold isolation cells every day and night of those nine years. ‘Reform those guys, bitch!’ I always wanted to howl at him!”
Once more, Putilov’s laughter rang and reverberated like the very bells of hell. In fact, Putilov was now laughing so loud and so hard that, once again, tears came to his eyes.
Reaching into his side drawer, Putilov pulled out a huge diamond-studded gold ring. Waving at at Dmitri, he slipped it onto his wedding finger.
“Did I ever tell you how I got this U.S. Super Bowl ring?” Putilov asked. “George Abbott, owner of the St. Petersburg Pythons NFL football team, came to visit me. He showed me the ring, and I said I wanted to look at it more closely. He took it off, handed it to me, I put it on my finger and walked away. I then refused to speak to him or any of his people for the rest of the night. Nor did I respond to any of his requests to return it, saying only that ‘a gift was gift.’ Sorry, buddy. No returns, no refunds. He even went to his old friend, for whom he’d raised scores of millions in campaign donations, George W. ‘I-Saw-Putilov’s-Soul’ Bush, and had him call me to ask for it back. I told Georgie: ‘I’ll only give him the ring if you let me sell Iran a nuclear weapons manufacturing plant!’”
Putilov’s whole body was racked so hard by convulsive guffaws that he almost fell off his chair. It took him a full minute to compose himself and continue the story.
“That nitwit Bush,” Putilov said, “actually told his friend that his ring had become a national security issue and that Abbott should say publicly that he wanted me to have it.”
Putilov then stared at the captain, his grin now twitching uncontrollably.
“So the man hadn’t given you the ring?” Dmitri asked, still not knowing what to say or think.
“Of course not,” Putilov said. “If the man had given me the trinket, it wouldn’t have meant anything to me. I’d have thrown it in the Moscow River. I have baubles a thousand times more precious than his fucking ring. What makes it priceless to me is that I stole it from him. Abbott loves that ring more than his children, more than his testicles, more than life itself, and every time he glances at his ring finger, he remembers me, my superior smile, my utter contempt for him and how I robbed him of the thing he held most dear in his life, how I humiliated him on the world stage, and how, when he sent George W. Bush to me to get it back, I humiliated him, too, the President of the United States. I manipulated the U.S. president—the man who claimed to see into “my soul”—into making that NFL owner apologize to me in public for asking me for ‘the gift’s’ return. I love that ring because I took it off its rightful owner and now he shakes with rage, fear and pain every time he thinks of me.”
Again, Putilov exploded in an orgy of racketing laughter that shook his office and frightened Dmitri to his soul.
“Thank God,” Putilov said, choking back his maniacal mirth, “I discovered polonium-210. The problem with ‘fly or die’ was it was over too fast, and so it really didn’t hurt all that much. With polonium-210 poisoning though, the people experienced pure agony. They took days, even weeks to die, and all the time their guts felt like they were in flames. And now, I have something even more horrifying, as Benjamin Jowett learned the hard way. That’s a pun, Captain—‘hard way.’ Get it? I killed that bastard Jowett with a hard-on that wouldn’t go down!”
Now Putilov’s hideous horselaughs were approaching apocalyptic proportions, and they only began to subside when he started to rub his arms, legs and neck again. Muttering to himself and grinning maniacally—even as he struggled to catch his breath—he said:
“Did I ever tell you about how I hunted and killed apartment rats as a small boy? I was so obsessed with the little bastards that after I’d clubbed one to death, I’d dissect it. Flies too. When I captured one alive, I’d hold it down with a pair of tweezers and try to figure out what made it buzz. I’d grab a second pair of tweezers and study it in detail. I’d rip
off one wing, then the other. Then I’d tear off its feelers, next its legs. I’d remove its eyes one at a time, then open up its belly, scrutinizing it as closely as I could, examining its remains under a magnifying glass.”
Then Putilov drifted off, humming some unidentifiable tune, his eyes distant and unfocused, a ghoulish grin twisting the left corner of his mouth upward.
“Did you ever find out where the buzzing noise came from?” Captain Dmitri asked, hoping to bring Putilov back to some semblance of reality.
“No, I never did,” Putilov said, suddenly grinning brightly and looking Captain Dmitri straight in the eye. “But, on the other hand, those flies … they didn’t get around so good anymore!”
Giggling like a deranged ape, he was, once more, rubbing his arms, legs, head and neck feverishly. The scratchings and ululations went on and on and on, and just when Dmitri thought they would never stop, to his surprise, they suddenly did. Putilov froze in place, sitting at his desk, still as a statue, staring fixedly, mindlessly at something unseeable and far away—something that seemed to be thousands of yards in the imperceivable distance. Spittle bubbled and burbled out of the right corner of his mouth. The froth oozed slowly down his jaw and after a long moment began to drip off his chin.
Oh, my God, Dmitri thought suddenly, Tower must be the incarnation of evil. Just conversing with him on the phone has turned Mikhail Ivanovich Putilov, the strongest, most disciplined man I’ve ever known, into a raving, mouth-foaming, drug-addled idiot.
Finally, Putilov stopped his staring, reached into his desk drawer and took out his aspirin bottle filled with krokodil tablets. Holding it close to his chest, he began rubbing it intently, almost orgiastically, rocking back and forth and softly humming and singing “The Volga Boatman.”
Yo, heave ho!
Yo, heave ho!
Volga, Volga is our pride,
Mighty stream so deep and wide …
Returning to his right-hand top desk drawer, Putilov took out a bottle of Everclear, a small squeeze can of ether, a flask of gasoline, two spoons and a razor blade.
“I’m going to celebrate,” Putilov said, smiling moronically at the captain, “with a little taste of the krok.”
Putilov began grinding and chopping up the pills. Dmitri noted that the Russian president’s desk was now crisscrossed with razor blade cuts and eroded from dried-up Everclear, ether and gasoline spills. Furthermore, as Putilov chopped away, he sliced his finger with the razor blade, and blood flowed heavily onto the whitish powder. Putilov, however, was oblivious to the bleeding. When he was done chopping, he poured the powder—blood and all—into the Pyrex bong, added Everclear, a long squirt of ether, a dash of gasoline, and applied heat. It quickly came to a boil. Turning off the lighter, Putilov hiked his sleeve all the way up to his armpit and tied it off just below the elbow with his belt. He drew the syringe-full of liquid out of the bong—without even waiting for it to cool—squirted out a few drops and then tapped the needle just to make sure there was no air in it.
“That stuff must be really good,” the captain said in an attempt to make small talk and not appear critical of Putilov’s drug habit. Still Dmitri could not help nervously eyeing the grotesque galaxy of needle tracks garishly scarring Putilov’s fish-white forearm.
“Good?” Putilov said, grinning. “If God had anything better, He kept it for Himself.” He gave the captain a wicked, conspiratorial wink.
Putilov smoothly, knowingly inserted the needle into a hard-used wrist vein—the only visible and viable conduit on the entire arm—and pushed the krokodil home. His hands instantly dropped to his lap, his right index finger continuing to pump blood, unabated, onto his leg. His head then snapped back. Eyes rolling into his head, his jaw fell wide open, hammering his sternum like a blackjack, and he pitched forward.
More spittle spumed and seethed out of the dictator’s mouth. Running down his chin, the translucent slaver relentlessly smacked and splattered Putilov’s desk. The large round globules slowly merged into a small, noxious but steadily expanding pool of drool.
2
Raza’s laughter soared through the night.
Raza piloted the chopper along the East River toward the roof of the UN’s thirty-nine-story Secretariat Building—the highest skyscraper at UN Plaza. Turning on everyone’s voice-mikes, she announced to her team:
“I’m going to set down in a few minutes, so prepare the ramp.”
Marika, Tariq, and Fahad got up from their jump seats and walked over to the far edge of the ramp. As Raza hovered over the roof, they prepared to hydraulically lower the heavy-gauge, ten-foot-long and eight-foot-wide ramp over the edge of the hatch. She would then push the hoist button that raised and rolled the cannon-barrel bomb down the ramp.
“Everyone ready?” Raza shouted.
“Roger that!” Fahad shouted.
Marika and Tariq nodded.
With her left hand fixed on the controls, Raza took an MP5 machine pistol out of her canvas ordnance bag and fired quick bursts into each of them, center-mass first, then their heads.
“Well played,” Raza said softly to herself. “Now let’s head this crate over to its rightful destination—J. T.’s Needle Tower of Power. Its flat roof will make a perfect ‘Tower-of-Power’ landing zone.”
Heading the chopper north, the tall slender Needle Tower quickly swung into view.
“And now billionaire assholes everywhere,” Raza said to herself with droll amusement, “can stare into their TV screens and watch what real power looks like. 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!”
And with that her chopper roared up and over the East River toward the J. T. Tower of Power.
Raza’s laughter soared through the night.
3
“What do you think I am? A terrorist?”
—Raza Jabarti
Jamie piloted Jules’s news chopper south over the Central Park Reservoir en route to the UN. Banking southeast toward the East River, he spotted a police helicopter, a half mile away, heading north up Second Avenue.
“Hey, Elena,” Jamie shouted to her, “something’s weird about that chopper. Its hatch is open, and it’s slowing down over J. T.’s Needle Tower. See if you can a get a look inside.”
Elena had a pair of Monarch HG 10X42 binoculars strung around her neck. At that distance, the inside of the chopper would appear less than eighty yards away through the binoculars.
“What’s bothering you?” Jules asked Jamie.
“Tower has hundreds of federal agents and half the U.S. Army inside that skyscaper,” Jamie said. “Why would a police chopper be over there? It can’t do anything for them. It should be covering UN Plaza. That place is huge, spread out and impossibly difficult to protect. It would take Patton’s Third Army to properly secure it. The UN needs the NYPD choppers, not that building.”
“Oh, my God,” Elena screamed, focusing the binoculars on the interior of the police helicopter through the open hatch, “is that who I think it is? Danny, is that her?”
McMahon took Elena’s binoculars and fixed them on the police chopper.
“As I live and no longer want to breathe,” he shouted. “It’s Raza, and the chopper’s cabin has some bodies on its deck. Someone shot them to pieces, and one of them looks like Marika.”
Elena relieved him of the binoculars and refocused them. “Fahad’s dead too,” Elena yelled. “Jules, zoom that nose camera in on that open hatch. Jamie, move in closer.”
Jules was still strapped into her jump seat, her open laptop camera controls resting on her knees. She moved the joystick around until the camera was focused on Elena’s open door. On her monitor and on the video assist, mounted above the chopper’s control panel, the police helicopter came into view. Jules zoomed in for a close-up. Now Jamie, Elena and their team could also see into the chopper.
The cabin clearly had three bloody bodies in cop un
iforms on its deck, and weapons were scattered all around them. Only Raza, who had just slipped out of her police uniform, was left alive. Decked out in a black tank top, matching panties and sunglasses, an MP5 straddling her lap, she lowered the helicopter onto the roof of the Needle Tower of Power on 59th Street.
Elena’s own chopper was now less than a quarter mile away from Raza’s, and in the camera monitor, Elena saw Raza studying her through a pair of field glasses. The MP5 braced on her hip, Raza lowered her binoculars but continued to stare Elena down, looking her dead in the eye, giving her the evilest grin Elena had ever seen—and would ever see.
Elena also saw that on the cabin’s deck was a hydraulically powered ramp which would lock on the open hatch. Just behind the far side of the ramp was what appeared to be … a … a …
A cannon barrel!
“Holy shit!” Elena screamed. “Raza has the fucking nuke!”
The chopper was now on the Needle Tower’s roof. When two rooftop guards in black suits and sunglasses approached the open hatch, she raised the silenced MP5 machine gun and stitched them each across their faces with short, rapid bursts.
She then pushed a button, lowering the ramp onto the building’s roof. It hooked automatically on to the edge of the open hatch. The hydraulic lift eased the old cannon barrel onto the ramp, and it began rolling down the ramp onto the Needle Tower’s roof.
Elena and her team wore headsets, so Elena said to Jamie:
“They’re probably on a police frequency. See if you can reach them. Danny, you know her. Try to talk her out of this.”
“In the meantime, swing around,” Rashid yelled. He was holding the Barrett-M83 anti-transport sniper rifle by the barrel. “I ought to have a shot.”
“Swing it around,” Elena yelled to Jamie. “Let him take it. Danny, you talk to Raza.”
Meanwhile, Rashid eased himself down on the chopper’s deck. He lowered the Barrett’s bipod. He laid himself belly-down, propping the rifle’s muzzle on the edge of the open hatch. He began adjusting the scope for distance and windage.
The Evil That Men Do Page 37