The thought of killing Tower brought a smile to Putilov’s face.
Putilov woke from a stormy, anxiety-ridden sleep … screaming. Tower was not only devastating his days, he was plaguing his nights. Putilov couldn’t stop dreaming—no, nightmaring—about the idiot.
In this last dream, the cretin was blathering on and on about what a great political genius he was, how he’d never held political office in his life, yet had beaten a seasoned pro, a New York senator, who’d served as Barack Obama’s secretary of state. In the nightmare, he was bragging over and over again about his “great brain” and his “instinct for the political jugular.”
Where did the fool get that shit? The truth was he, Putilov, had captured Democratic emails by the millions, ordered the FSB’s “Disinformation Bureau” to fabricate and plant phony news stories under the names of reputable-sounding sources about Tower’s Democratic opponent and his other rivals. Putilov had then rifled the U.S. election registration lists in key swing states and disqualified legitimate Democratic voters by the millions. Simultaneously, one of his plants was running the FBI and had also subpoenaed and examined his opponent’s political emails, handed out press releases filled with vague accusations and veiled attacks, ridiculous rumors and misleading innuendos—just enough stupid chump-bait to get the U.S. media blathering about how untrustworthy the poor woman-candidate was, how scandal-prone she was.
Did Tower understand at all the sheer size and scope of the cyberwar that Putilov had waged against his presidential rival? First, he’d hired a small army of Russian/Americans living in the U.S. He’d paid them through the Russian consulates there and then ordered them to set up hoax news sites. The little creeps had then bombarded the internet with thousands upon thousands of scurrilous ads, tweets and Facebook postings from those sites, linking them to phony news articles, which appeared to have been taken from serious outlets. These spurious stories savagely attacked Tower’s presidential rival.
Putilov’s cyber-goons also created thousands of bots for him—little robotic mischief-makers—which they then transmitted to right-wing online news sites and to social media everywhere, Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter in particular. These preprogrammed bots tracked all mentions of Tower’s opponent’s name, then inundated those internet locations with pro-Tower propaganda and with fictitious, utterly defamatory stories about his presidential rival, which nonetheless appeared to come from legitimate news organizations, engendering well over a billion viewings.
According to one estimate, over 25 percent of election tweets were generated by bots, many if not most of them created by Putilov and his ravening horde of Russian-American trolls. Former–FBI agent turned cyber-sleuth, Clinton Watts, had described Putilov’s internet bombs as “bot cancers,” which was exactly what they were.
Putilov had taken the American Social Media industry to the cleaners. He’d scammed 150 million Facebook users—well over half the electorate—with his specious advertising and spurious posts, his henchmen so brazen they bought many of their fake ads with … rubles. Twitter, he’d inundated with 1.4 million disinformation tweets, which had triggered 280 million viewings, burying Tower’s rival for the presidency alive in denigrating lies. He’d also gone after Google and YouTube, pressing every conservative hate-button and driving America’s right-wingers into frenzies of paranoid rage. The United States news media claimed Putilov’s principal propaganda dispenser was Russia Today, aka RT.com. Its content was so electrifying that Google was soon designating it “a preferred outlet,” guaranteeing that this online news service would be one of the most watched of the YouTube channels in the nation during that election cycle, scoring over 1 billion YouTube viewings. After the election, the United States Justice Department branded that outlet “an enemy agent,” which pissed Putilov off. By then, however, Tower was firmly ensconced in the presidency, and in any event, Putilov never stopped—never even slowed—his incessant barrage of agitprop, which continually built up Tower and tore down his rivals. Why shouldn’t he continue to hammer away? Most of America’s social media refused to prohibit political dissembling, caring only about the “authenticity” of the sites releasing the ads and posts. The truthfulness of the attacks was irrelevant. America’s social media industry viewed political lying as perfectly acceptable.
There was another reason, however, why those firms refused to scrutinize Putilov’s propaganda. His cut-out investors had pumped billions upon billions of ad/investment dollars into those companies, so much money that the owners could not afford to probe too deeply into Putilov’s activities on their sites, let alone block them. They did not want to look their gift rubles in the mouth.
The Saudis, like Russia, had also invested heavily in America’s cyber communications companies and the fact that those digital dimwits had accepted all that corrupt cash still made Putilov shake his head in disbelief. Didn’t they understand? Russia and the Saudis opposed everything the internet industries claimed to care about—all the messianic libertarian tripe about promoting free-market competition and the free flow of information everywhere, their pious platitudes about respecting all religions and points-of-view, giving everyone a voice and a platform, no matter how big, powerful or small the individual was. Putilov and the Saudis had proven that in the end the big internet media firms were just … money whores. Tainted loot spent just as well as clean currency, and at the pinnacles of financial power that was all that mattered. In the case of Putilov, he and his pocket oligarchs were collecting their internet investments profits, then using them to finance their disinformation campaigns. Exploiting the weakness of the worldwide online community, they used social media to trumpet their anti-democratic, anti-free-market propaganda globally and to even subvert an American election. Nor did those firms’ CEOs object. They were too intent on opposing Washington’s attempts to regulate them, and nothing would divert these internet titans from their bottom-line monomania. Not even the fact that the Putilov gang and the Saudis intended to one day destroy the very freedoms these internet moguls swore fealty to. Nothing could stop these captains-of-internet-industry from snapping up Putilov’s rubles and the Saudis’ rivals. Nor did their ultra-wealthy high-tech firms need dirty money to survive and expand. Their business empires were among the most profitable on earth, and in the grand scheme of things the Russian-Saudi money wasn’t that huge—all of which only made the unrelenting avarice of those social media chieftains even more appealing. They had betrayed their country for mere pennies, and Putilov knew why they did it. They took his ill-gotten lucre simply because it was … there. For the truly greedy, too much was indeed never enough.
Putilov knew dictum for a fact.
It was a rule he lived by himself.
Bernie Sanders supporters’ websites had been an especially target-rich environment for Putilov. Sanders’s admirers were so angry at the American political process that Putilov was able to quickly and easily piss them off with sordid, bot-driven anecdotes about Sanders’s primary opponent, now Tower’s opposition. The Russian dictator had convinced them that Tower’s rival was unacceptable and that if they disliked both candidates, they should stay home from the polls.
The American voters were so mind-numbingly dumb they actually went for all that shit! Putilov thought with smug satisfaction.
And shit it was. Putilov’s cyber-trolls had confected and disseminated pseudo-news stories for him around the clock, accusing Tower’s female opponent of everything from pornographic depravity to sadistic serial murders to gargantuan acts of larceny and fraud planetwide. They buried America’s news outlets and social media sites alive in that dementedly derisive bullshit, drowning out all objective discourse. Putilov’s salacious slanders proliferated exponentially in the social media echo chamber, the right-wing blogosphere and the conservative punditocracy, spreading like wildfire throughout the battleground states.
He had to admit that he found some of those phony news stories side-splittingly hilarious as well as shockingly effective. Perhaps, as Hitler had said, the voting public liked to believe big lies and outrageous fabrications. One prevarication was so insanely preposterous that it took the internet by storm and proved unstoppable. One of his malevolent little trolls had written that Tower’s opponent was running a child sex-slave ring out of the basement of a D.C. pizzeria, and American voters by the millions gobbled it up. In fact, one of Tower’s incensed acolytes went into a blind rage and shot the place to pieces … with an assault weapon.
Still Putilov had to admit he couldn’t have done it without some help from that nitwit, Tower. He had to give credit where credit was due. The man’s marketing team had assembled a mother lode of digitized demographic data on almost all of America’s voters in the battleground states and had forwarded all those files to Putilov. That Mount Everest of electronic information had allowed him to target those swing voters relentlessly. Thanks to that inside intel, he had been able to deluge the American Idiocracy with specious news items and bot-generated Twitter/Facebook traffic, all of it disparaging Tower’s opponent and praising Tower to the skies.
Of course, the FBI had also been of inestimable help. At one point an ex-MI6 operative had compiled a 35-page dossier on Tower, replete with evidence of both his libidinous perversions and his hideous history of global thievery. Those findings could have blown his election chances to Kingdom Come, but, thank God, FBI Director Conley had hidden that political bombshell from public scrutiny until more than a month after the election. Only after Senator John McCain handed a copy of it to the FBI had Conley been forced to acknowledge its existence. Even then, however, the director still managed to keep it quiet. Classifying it as an item of national security interest, he was able to drop a blanket of secrecy over it and keep it out of the news throughout his tenure at the Bureau—even as he continued to blast the shit out of Tower’s political rival.
Furthermore, Putilov’s “bot cancers” were still alive, well—and metastasizing worldwide like the malignancies they were. His army of cyber terrorists was still hammering innocent citizens across the globe with these malicious bots. Their goal was always the same—to carry out Putilov’s grand strategy of dividing, confounding and demoralizing democracies everywhere with his fake hate-stories.
Of course, in the end, Putilov hadn’t really needed all those fancy bots and cyber-trolls to defeat Tower’s opponent. He’d waged those wars largely for the fun of it. The election itself had always been locked up and in the bag. No democracy could stand up to the kind of electronic campaign he’d visited upon the U.S. in that last election.
… Putilov had many reasons for despising democracies. First and foremost, it was too damn easy for men like himself to overturn their democratic elections. The stupid Americans had proven that point at a Las Vegas computer convention. At one exhibition, U.S. cyber-experts changed the voter tabulations on thirty different voting machines, turning thirty mock-election losers into winners. The experts changed those election outcomes in mere minutes. Furthermore, they left no trace, no evidence of their criminal manipulations.
Putilov had, of course, done the same thing during America’s last presidential election. Unfortunately, Putilov’s hackers weren’t as good as the Vegas cyber-experts, and U.S. investigators were able to confirm that Russia had fooled with America’s voting systems. To counter those charges, Putilov immediately launched a disinformation campaign. He ordered one of his stooges—that country’s idiotic FBI director, Jonathan Conley—to issue a statement claiming that the U.S. voting system was too spread out, too diffuse and too diverse for hacking to succeed. That statement was of course a flagrant lie. The voting machines’ software could be compromised in a heartbeat—as the Vegas conference had proved—and, anyway, the main tabulators, which counted the votes, were connected to the internet. The average smartphone had more anti-hacking protection in it than your typical voting machine, and the cyber-tools necessary for stealing elections—especially those needed to purge voter registration lists and to falsify absentee ballot requests—were readily available online. Consequently, Putilov could hack into the U.S. voting system at will and with a vengeance. Likewise, the systems’ manufacturers and support technicians could plant vote-altering malware any time they wanted. Nor were the manufacturers interested in stopping Putilov’s election hacking. When the Princeton Group began testing voting machines, one manufacturer threatened them with lawsuit, and when, in the documentary Hacking Democracy, cyber-expert Bev Harris proved how vulnerable they were, the machines’ manufacturers—instead of thanking her for tracking down the flaws in their equipment—had threatened to sue her.
You got off lucky, bitch, Putilov thought to himself. In my country, I’d have had you jailed, killed—or both!
God, Putilov hated that documentary. He was sure that after it came out the Americans would build a cybersecurity firewall around their voting systems. In that film and on her website, www.BlackBoxVoting.org, Harris had described defect after defect after defect in America’s voting systems. For instance, she showed how touch screens could be programmed to register one’s vote for the opposite candidate. She laid out how incredibly simple it was to flip absentee and mail-in ballots and make them register as votes for a candidate’s rival. She pointed out how in one district votes for Al Gore in Florida had been subtracted from Gore’s final tally instead of being added to it. She demonstrated how—after voting systems had been hacked and the vote tabulations changed to elect the loser—forensic investigators lacked the technological means to detect and prove the system had been hacked and the outcome reversed … the same thing the Vegas experts had proved. She laid out for the world how hackable U.S. elections were.
But the moronic Americans did … nothing.
So Putilov had waged an all-out cyber-attack on America’s last political race, and after more than twenty years of hacking elections—both in his country and in those of his neighbors—there was nothing Putilov and his experts did not know about rigging a country’s electronic voting systems. So they penetrated and plundered every aspect of America’s state, local and national elections, and those vote thefts had been as easy for them as stealing milk bottles from sick babies. In fact, they had faced no obstacles at all. The voting machine vendors refused to work with the anti-hacking experts, because they knew that they could be held liable, when their voting equipment was proven faulty and that their stock prices could very well plunge precipitously. The states, who had absolute control over all elections within their borders, also refused to let the Department of Homeland Security help to them insure the integrity of their elections. They had stonewalled them when they offered to help prevent election hacking. Many of those states were already in the business of rigging elections through voter suppression laws and voter registration purges, and they did not want the feds looking over their shoulders. The state politicians also feared that their ineptitude in the face of proven cyber-attacks would become a political issue. In the coming elections, their opponents would accuse them of gross incompetence, and their opponents would, of course, be right. Thus, the states, like the private firms, ignored almost all outside cyber-security help. Putilov recalled how The New York Times had described in painful detail the states’ refusal to cooperate with these federal anti-hacking experts. The Times reported that the states would not allow the cyber-cops—both from within and without the U.S. government—to sort through voter databases, searching for vulnerabilities or attempts to phony up voter data, even though such intrusions had already been spotted in elections in over twenty-one states. Instead the states and the private companies rebuffed offers of almost all in-depth forensic investigations into their blatantly hacked elections. They had made sure that government couldn’t probe and monitor U.S. elections and that there was almost no way to audit the vote tabulations afterward. Only two out of America’s fifty states created systems that allowed for accurate vote recounts. Putilov and his allies could even kill many of their opponents’ votes in the cradle before their ballots could be cast. Putilov and his U.S. allies could purge any and all voters who were ex-felons, who had the same names as other voters in the registry or who had failed to vote in recent elections.
Putilov allowed himself a small, malicious smile, as he recalled how he and his military spy agency, the GRU, had pillaged the providers of electronic election equipment and services and the anachronistic voting machines themselves as well as how he had exploited the states’ laughably ludicrous recount procedures. Putilov and his henchmen had raided the private vendors and state-run voting systems in almost half of the country and reversed the nation’s election results with breathtaking facility.
Of course, the GRU’s manipulations did not go utterly undiscovered, but it did not matter. When cyber-irregularities were occasionally detected, Putilov’s good buddies, J. T. Tower and Jonathan Conley, saw to it that his electoral sabotage was quickly debunked and deflected. Even before the election, when the FBI caught Putilov’s people hacking into the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Conley saw to it that the Bureau bungled and delayed informing the DNC of the cyber-attacks. Consequently, Putilov had every file and email that he needed—with which to discredit the Democratic Party and its candidates—long before the DNC realized the seriousness of the breach.
Putilov’s hackers now knew how to overturn any and all U.S. elections at the state, local and national level with impunity. There was nothing America could do about it. As Wired magazine had titled one of its articles, “America’s Electronic Voting Machines Are Scarily Easy to Target.”
The memory of those cyber-assaults forced the Russian dictator to laugh out loud. When North Korea had hacked the electronics/media firm, Sony, the U.S. had done more to punish the Hermit Kingdom than that country had done to Putilov, and he had overturned many of their last state, local and national elections. He had even made J. T. Tower the American president.
And now with the help of J. T. Tower and their Saudi allies, he and an elite cadre of global oligarchs were poised to purge the earth of all its so-called democracies. The pernicious plague of “one person, one vote” would be flung down the planet’s “memory hole” for all time to come.
You can’t help but love capitalism, can you? Putilov thought, grinning. It had made him the richest man in the world, and now the Old Free Enterprise System was about to help him wipe all those reprehensible representative democracies off the face of the earth.
* * *
Putilov couldn’t wait to hack America’s coming election. He would be even better at it next time. After that election his band of merry cyber-thieves would leave no evidence whatsoever.
Yes, Putilov thought, he was the one who had made Tower president of the United States. That sleazy, weasily, cretinous geek had nothing to do with it, but all that pretentious retard could do was brag about his “great political brilliance.”
Putilov didn’t know how much longer he could take it. Somehow he had to though. He had to endure Tower until he could stop the UN threat to expropriate his and his backers’ clandestine offshore funds. He then had to consummate his seizure of the Baltic States and Ukraine, derail the Global Alternate Energy Movement and then, maybe then, just maybe, he could have Tower … assassinated.
The thought of killing Tower brought a smile to Putilov’s face.
How would he have it done?
The image of Tower, writhing in blind agony, succumbing to a long, slow, infinitely torturous death, was the only thing anymore that brought Putilov anything resembling … peace. Maybe he’d have a marksman with a sniper rifle take Tower apart with exploding bullets a micrometer at a time, starting with the feet, inching his way up through the shins to his kneecaps, working his way up Tower’s thighs, penis, scrotum, testicles, prostate, carefully hammering the shit out of the bladder, the colon, the small intestine, the kidneys and the stomach—shot after shot after shot after shot. He’d stop at the stomach. Any higher and the shooter might accidentally put Tower out of his misery.
And, Lord only knew, Putilov wanted the bastard to suffer.
Oh, did he ever want Tower to suffer.
Putilov went back to bed. He thought maybe now he might be able to get back to sleep.
But it was not to be.
Again, he sat up. He was too rattled. He decided he better smoke some more krokodil. The krok never failed to calm him down.
He fished an aspirin bottle of desomorphine tablets out of his bedside table drawer, dumped out ten tablets and began grinding them up. He got out the two tablespoons, the razor blade, the Everclear bottle, the ether squeeze can and gasoline flask, the bong and the lighter.
Razor-chopping the pills assiduously, he poured the powder into the bong and watched it dissolve in the super-potent liquor. He heated the solution with the lighter. Watching the fumes fill the bowl, he began to slowly suck them in.
He smiled with anticipation.
Putilov knew the krokodil was now the only thing in this world he could truly depend on. As he pulled the fumes deep into his lungs and held them there—greedily allowing the krok to seep into every cubic millimeter of his heart and body, soul and mind—his eyes rolled back in his head, and his jaw went slack.
The krok always knew what he needed.
The krok would always be there for him.
The krok would never let him down.