The Evil That Men Do

by Robert Gleason

  “Hi guys,” Raza’s voice was on their radio. “Who all’s there?”

  “Rashid and I, for openers,” McMahon said.

  What the fuck? Elena thought, stunned.

  “Ask her what’s going on!” Rashid shouted. “That’s not a terrorist nuke, is it?”

  “Is a pig’s pussy pork?” Raza thundered in their headsets, clearly having heard his question. “But don’t worry. It’s only one kiloton—probably less. It won’t destroy your sacred Big Apple, but it’s going to incinerate the holy shit out of J. T.’s 59th Street Needle Tower of Power—to say nothing of those mega-rich motherfuckers inside. You know, the ones plotting a hostile takeover of Planet Earth?”

  “Almost ready,” Rashid said.

  “I thought you were going to nuke the UN,” McMahon said to Raza.

  “And kill all those caring, hardworking, innocent people?” Raza asked. “What do you think I am? A terrorist?”

  Her insolent laughter filled their headsets.

  “Instead,” McMahon yelled, “you’re going to nuke Tower’s oligarchs?”

  “Of course I am,” Raza said.

  Again, her malicious laughter rang in their ears.

  “I don’t get it.” McMahon said.

  “And you never will,” Raza said. “Remember what I always told you, Danny?”

  “Not to understand you too quickly,” McMahon recited numbly.

  “Because,” Raza said, “you can never understand us—our world, our women, our lives.”

  Suddenly, Raza was back at the controls, and her police chopper was lifting off, then banking south away from the Tower of Power, as fast as it could.

  Rashid’s big Barrett roared, but the shot missed, as did the second.

  “Don’t chase me,” Raza yelled at them. “You’ll head straight into the fireball. Bank north as fast as you know how.”

  Jamie instantly wheeled the chopper around and headed straight for the park.

  “Goodbye, Danny,” Raza shouted, laughing maniacally. “Don’t think of me too harshly. In my own way I almost … love you.”

  Elena and her crew were back over Central Park, Raza’s hilarious howls still bombarding their eardrums like the baying of bloodhounds after treeing a prey. Rocketing over the zoo, they were coming in fast and low over the Central Park Reservoir, then—

  They were too close to the bomb to hear the blast, which at that distance produced decibels far beyond their hearing range. Against the windscreen, however, they glimpsed a dimly reflected flash of the bomb’s thermal flare, and the reservoir water below replicated the blaze as well. They felt the shuddering, shattering, earthquake power of the shock wave. Knocking them sideways, it sent them spinning toward the drink. Crashing into the water, the blades smashing and thrashing against the surface, the chopper rolled twice. The aircraft finally came to rest upside down in about five feet of water, which quickly extinguished the engine’s flames.

  Unbuckling their harnesses, they dropped down onto the cabin ceiling, which was now underneath them. One by one, they eased themselves out of the hatch into the middle of the reservoir.

  To the south, an incandescently brilliant, ever-expanding, red-yellow fireball slowly rose above the city. It was too blindingly bright to observe with the naked eye, but Elena could note its progress, which was mirrored in the reservoir’s H2O. Only when roiling billows of dark, dense smoke enveloped it did she turn to watch. Levitating upward, the rising fire and dark, billowing smoke slowly, incrementally began to dissipate with infinite lassitude.

  As the dense, fiery clouds languidly and lazily dispersed, Elena turned to survey the extent of the destruction. Through the drifting haze and to her eternal dismay, Elena saw that J. T.’s Needle Tower of Power was no more.

  EPILOGUE

  The evil that men do lives after them;

  The good is oft interred with their bones.

  —Julius Caesar, III, ii

  By attempting to nuke the UN, Tower, Putilov, and their Saudi allies had obviously conspired to commit a crime of almost unimaginable horror. This was clearly one of the most important stories in history, and Jules’s book publisher nagged Jules to write a book.

  She was uniquely positioned to tell that story and was the most logical person to tell it. Many of the participants offered to help. Elena said she would give Jules the inside story of Danny and Rashid’s rescue, and Elena was convinced she could talk both Rashid and McMahon into telling Jules theirs and Raza’s story. The two men owed Elena and Jamie their lives and would be honor-bound to assist. And, of course, Jules still had all of Brenda Tower’s tapes.

  Furthermore, Elena was convinced that if Jules didn’t write it, the true story might never be told. Putilov, the Saudis, Tower and their allies were already flooding the airwaves and internet with cleverly crafted disinformation, preposterous conspiracy theories and outrageous lies. Elena told Jules she owed it to history to set the record straight. Her account would have an authority and authenticity that the other reports could never possess.

  For a long time, Jules resisted, saying she wasn’t up to it. She was too close to everything that had happened and frankly found what she and her friends had gone through to be intensely depressing. In the end, however, she understood that the story was too historically significant not to be told and that, like it or not, she was the only writer capable of obtaining all the facts.

  And luckily, as awful as the bomb attack had been, the blast’s aftermath wasn’t hopelessly unmanageable. It could have been much worse. While the casualties would eventually number in the thousands, and the property damage was exorbitantly expensive and devastating in the extreme, the city itself was not rendered uninhabitable—not even in part. Fahad’s bomb had been a partial fizzle—barely half a kiloton—and so it achieved only three percent of the Hiroshima yield. Also, since it had been detonated from a height of one thousand feet, the city experienced far less fallout than it would have suffered had the bomb been exploded at ground level. As a result, its destruction was focused and localized: It eradicated J. T.’s Tower of Power, but not entire blocks of buildings.

  Still the cleanup posed a massive challenge, requiring the combined efforts of FEMA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as well as legions of private contractors. Toxicity tests had to be run throughout much of the city, followed by months upon months of arduous decontamination.

  While many New Yorkers relocated, most duct-taped their windows and sheltered in place, leaving their homes only for food and other necessities. Within two months the bulk of those who’d been displaced were back in their homes and returning to work. New Yorkers had, once again, been resilient, indefatigable, and the city was soon recovering with impressive celerity.

  Within a year, most of the cleanup had been completed.

  Tower and his sister had been meeting with the mayor in downtown New York at the time of the blast, and Putilov had been in the Kremlin; hence, they survived. Their reputations, however, would not fare as well. Rashid had worked with Raza, Marika and Kamal ad-Din on the plot, and since they did not know at that time that Rashid was a double agent, they had told him everything. His testimony implicated Putilov and the Saudis’ U.S. Ambassador, Prince Waheed, in New York’s nuking. Rashid also testified that while Putilov and Kamal had not trusted Tower with all the details, Tower, however, knew that something horrendously catastrophic was about to happen at the UN—a terrorist act so cataclysmic it was guaranteed to derail the UN’s Expropriation Resolution—and by dint of that knowledge Tower had tacitly acquiesced.

  Shortly before her death from cancer, Brenda Tower confirmed her brother’s complicity under oath.

  Even so, the principal players—Putilov, Kamal and Waheed—proved to be beyond the reach of international law. Russia and the Saudis refused to extradite them to The Hague for prosecution. Nor did the FBI build an indictable case against Tower. His plausible deniability proved too steep a hill to climb, and the Bureau’s former director, Jonathan Conley, had a long an
d notorious history as a Tower stooge. He’d spent several years assiduously covering up Tower’s misdeeds. But while Tower might have avoided prison, he seemed destined to spend the rest of his life as a political pariah, universally reviled, with law enforcement agencies worldwide investigating every sordid detail of his financial and political life, past, present, future. Moreover, impeachment was always a possibility. While those proceedings had turned partisan and were, for the time being, stalled in the House, expulsion from office was still a possible outcome for Tower.

  As for Raza, she had clearly committed an unpardonable crime against humanity. While many people—perhaps even the majority of the world—despised the billionaire oligarchs for their predatory greed and exploitative monopolistic business practices, no one condoned nuking them into fiery oblivion. Jules denounced Raza’s attack in her book as an unspeakable act of barbarism. Among other things, the nuke killed untold thousands of innocent bystanders. Among the blast’s many victims were the Tower of Power’s employees—everyone from janitorial help to waitstaff to security personnel. Furthermore, many nearby residents succumbed from or would eventually die from the explosion, its fallout and the combined aftereffects.

  Jules and her friends condemned the strike categorically.

  Still Jules was also aware that with a single nuclear strike, Raza had stopped the oligarchical takeover of the world’s democracies dead in its tracks. It was a historic achievement to say the least—that much was undeniable—but one Jules honestly couldn’t get her head around. In an act of inconceivable destruction, Raza—it seemed to Jules—had come to symbolize the species’ most aggravating paradox. The human heart was indeed a marriage of heaven and hell, and her bomb blast had proven Raza capable of incomprehensible evil and at the same time … redemption. Because of Raza, the forces of global freedom would live to fight another day.

  Jules wondered how history, hundreds of years from now, would come to view Raza—or any of them for that matter. She honestly did not know. She wasn’t even sure what she thought of Raza. Hoping Shakespeare might illuminate the conundrum, Jules took her book’s title from Mark Antony’s funeral oration in Julius Caesar.

  The evil that men do lives after them;

  The good is oft interred with their bones.

  Jules titled her book The Evil That Men Do.

  Ironically, much of the planet, at least for the time being, romanticized the wickedness inherent in Raza’s act. A so-called “Cult of Raza” rose up across the globe, honoring her for her epochal, frighteningly violent, world-changing feat.

  Furthermore, Jules had pulled from her camera footage a truly electrifying photo of Raza in the chopper. Having taken off her cop’s uniform, she was decked out in a black tank top, panties, the police hat tilted back on her head. Her long ebony hair was flung over one shoulder and down her chest. The wire stock of her MP5 was braced against one hip. She had removed her wraparound aviator sunglasses and was staring fearlessly into Jules’s camera—and by extention into the hearts and souls of people around the world. Her glinting eyes were evil as sin, lewd as Lucifer; the right corner of her mouth was hooked into a supercilious yet startling sensuous sneer. She seemed to be telling everyone everywhere to “go fuck themselves.” For decades to come, that shot would appear on TV screens and magazine covers around the world and was reproduced on hundreds of millions of posters and T-shirts. Raza graffiti and slogans sprang up on walls and buildings across the globe, featuring rallying cries such as:

  “Raza lives!”

  “Raza for President!”

  “I Love Raza!”

  “Go Raza!”

  Despite the carnage her nuke had wreaked, she was celebrated everywhere as a living legend and a transcendent hero. Billions of people worldwide admired her beyond reason or measure.

  Nor did Raza’s war on the planet’s financial elites end with the nuking of the Tower. Not only was the UN’s Anti-Inequality Expropriation Bill passed by acclamation, Jowett’s assassination and Raza’s annihilation of the top five hundred global oligarchs inspired the explosive emergence of clandestine vigilante groups across the globe. Many of these organizations called themselves “Soldiers of Raza” and were soon attacking the super-rich wherever they could find them. Their admirers called them, “freedom fighters,” while their critics naturally branded them terrorists. Whatever they were, they made the lives of the world’s wealthiest plutocrats a living hell. Many of these tycoons retired from the business world to armed compounds, leaving their worlds of commerce and living out their days in paranoid isolation, in private fortresses, surrounded by security forces and armed to the teeth.

  But while the world struggled with what Raza had done, Jules still had a book to write. She had reams of material on Tower—she’d already written exposés of his financial criminality for over a decade, and of course, she had his late sister’s tapes—but while Putilov’s and Kamal’s histories of predation were well-known and extensively reported on in the West, Raza was a mystery unto herself.

  Jules was able to establish that Raza had been born to a wealthy Wahhabist family who lived in a large compound outside of Medina. She learned Raza’s father had been strict and severe in his enforcement of his Wahhabist faith and that she had eventually left home and joined a cadre of militants who, among other things, granted equal rights to women warriors. Quickly, Raza had risen through the ranks.

  Jules, however, felt that she did not understand the woman. She saw Raza as the key to understanding everything, particularly Danny’s experiences. Something had happened between Raza and him. It was common knowledge they’d had sex. The evidence of their dalliance was glaringly apparent to Elena’s team from the moment they broke into the torture chamber … everything from black, lacy, semen-stained panties wrapped around McMahon’s hard-used gonads to bright crimson lipstick streaks garishly emblazoning the insides of his upper thighs and his crotch.

  McMahon, however, was silent as the grave on the subject of Raza and made it clear their story was off-limits. Jules felt stymied.

  But it wasn’t McMahon’s silence about Raza that bothered her. In the end, she didn’t care as much about the story as about Danny. In her private life, Jules was guarded and did not make close friends easily. Next to her sister, Elena and Jamie, Danny was the best friend she’d ever had. Now he was in trouble, refused all attempts at contact, and she didn’t know what to do.

  It was also clear to her that his sojourn in the beast’s belly—in that Pakistani hellhole—had damaged him far more than he was willing to discuss or would admit. Jules believed that his memories of physical and psychological pain not only tormented his mind, they tortured his soul. That he refused to discuss what had happened or how he felt only made matters worse. He now suffered from a black despondency that seemed to know no bottom. Jules believed he’d lost something back in that safe house, and if something was not done quickly, he might well snap. She feared he would kill himself.

  Among other things, he no longer performed; he never went out in public and never laughed. He never even smiled. He’d lost his sense of humor. He stayed home alone, refused to see friends, drank and smoked dope.

  When Jules learned how bad off he was, she immediately flew to L.A., and against Danny’s avid and reiterated orders, drove straight from LAX to his home in the Hollywood Hills even though it was after 10:00 P.M. Getting out of her rented car, she caught a glimpse of herself in the side mirror. Dressed in a tastefully tailored black three-piece power suit and matching heels, she looked to be the personification of respectability. Good. She wanted him to feel he could rely on her. She needed his trust if she was going to help him.

  She then turned to take in his house. She’d visited Danny here whenever they were both in L.A. but hadn’t been back for at least two years. It was even more impressive than she’d remembered. A four-level white stone mansion, its front was dominated by a picture window so huge and all-enveloping it appeared to be almost a wall of glass. Perched on the edge of a
high cliff, it looked out over L.A. from an imposingly Olympian height.

  She started up the sixty steep brick steps to the front porch. Looped over her shoulder was a black canvas book bag containing a first edition of her new book on J. T. Tower, Filthy Lucre: J. T.’s Tower of Financial Power. She had affectionately inscribed it to her old friend. She also brought four bottles of his favorite Bordeaux as well as assorted cheeses, black olives, jars of mustard and baguettes. She feared Danny would resent her intrusion, and she hoped, if necessary, to bribe her way into his home and confidence with food and wine. Nonetheless, she struggled to steel herself against his wrath. He’d made it clear on the phone she was unwelcome.

  Reaching the big oak door, she stood on the glisteningly white, Corinthian-pillared porch and knocked gently. When nothing happened, she knocked harder. When that failed to rouse him, she hammered on the door as hard as she knew how with the bottom of a Bordeaux bottle.

  “Danny, I know you’re in there,” Jules screamed, “and if you don’t let me in, I’m going to smash three bottles of super-expensive Bordeaux all over your pristine, pure-alabaster porch. You’ll never get the stains out. Then I’ll throw the last bottle through your embarrassingly ostentatious picture window. I’ll write columns about you saying that Raza turned you into a fucking S/M freak. I’ll announce you’re coming out of the hard-trade kinky-deviate closet. You better let me in or I’ll write that you—”

  Finally, the door swung open, and McMahon was standing there in a black fluffy terry-cloth bathrobe, his face puffy, his eyes bloodshot and haggard.

  “Here,” she said, extending the black book bag filled with goodies, and when he reached out to grab them, she put a shoulder into him, knocked him off balance and bulldozed her way into his vestibule, then into the living room.

  The front room was immense, taking up half the house’s main floor. Its carpeting and furniture—particularly the big semicircular couch and overstuffed armchairs—were all upholstered in white silk. On the matching walls hung exquisite Matisse, Monet, and Manet prints. On one side wall hung a 100-inch flat-screen TV, and on the other was a Bose sound system. In the far corner was a grand piano which Danny actually played rather well.