Still, in that last microsecond, balanced between truth and hallucination, between psychosis and reality, during that final hair-trigger eternity, Putilov heard a small voice asking him whether his hatred of Tower was driving him … mad.
Putilov said his good-byes to Tower and put down the Skype phone. He’d eluded the idiot’s calls as long as he could, but this time Tower had told his assistant that the call was critically important—in fact, a crisis—so Putilov broke down and took it. The call, however, was about nothing at all, and he could tell Tower had his cell on speakerphone. Furthermore, his informants had told him earlier that Tower was meeting with CIA Director Burke, Ambassador Waheed and Tower’s hard-drinking, chain-smoking sister. Putilov suspected that Tower had other people in the room and had only wanted to prove to them that he could get a direct line to Putilov any time he wanted.
Would the fool never give him any peace?
Putilov didn’t know how much longer he could take dealing with him. Tonight’s conversation had been especially distressing. Tower had been unable to stop bragging and lecturing.
Putilov poured ten desomorphine tablets onto his desk. Grinding the pills up between spoons, he chopped the granules up with a razor blade and dissolved them in 190-proof Everclear, ether and gasoline. He then boiled the solution in a Pyrex bong and sucked the fumes deep into his lungs, where he held them for a full half minute.
Smoking desomorphine radically heightened the pills’ power.
* * *
Putilov and the bong went back a long way. He’d confiscated it from a suspect in Berlin and kept it as a souvenir. Breaking the man in a particularly brutal and bloodthirsty way, he had employed all the instruments of unendurable pain and perverse persuasion, including pliers, blowtorches and hot knives. He’d then handed the man his own bong, heated it and pumped him full of krokodil fumes, utterly robbing him of his sense and any final scintilla of resistance. In the end Putilov had not only tortured a flagrantly fallacious confession out of the man, he’d convinced the poor imbecile, that he, Putilov, was the man’s best friend, that he had the man’s best interests at heart. Putilov had so brainwashed the moron that the man had actually thanked him for the agonizing auto-da-fé. He had never achieved such total control over an individual in his entire life. It was as if he owned him—mind, body and soul. The man’s eyes were filled with atonement and contrition; even when Putilov had finally granted him his release, his coup de grâce—a bullet between his appreciative puppy-dog eyes—the man was still murmuring his heartfelt gratitude.
At the time, that sense of godlike power had filled Putilov with the most amazing calm and serenity, something almost resembling … joy. Later, however, when he remembered the man’s utter breakdown, his confession, thanksgiving and death, he had felt not mere satisfaction, fulfillment or even genuine happiness but a most special … arousal. Perhaps that feeling of excitation was the reason he’d never thrown away the man’s bong. It reminded him of that very singular night.
* * *
Again Putilov put the bong’s stem to his mouth and inhaled deeply. With an almost overpowering avidity, he waited for the drug to once more take hold of his senses, to vanquish his fears, doubts and anxieties, to hammer him like an express train, full-throttle and out of control. The krokodil never let him down. Still, at the last microsecond, balanced between truth and hallucination, between psychosis and reality, during that final hair-trigger eternity, Putilov heard a small voice asking him whether his hatred of Tower was driving him … mad.