“If you’d let me level St. Basil’s Cathedral—right there on Red Square—I could fit both a Needle Tower Hotel and a really classy casino in that space.”
—President J. T. Tower to Russian President Mikhail Ivanovich Putilov
Mikhail Ivanovich Putilov carefully put the phone back in its holder. He hated Tower’s phone calls. The man wasn’t supposed to contact him unless it was absolutely necessary. Relations between their two countries were strained to the breaking point. Many world leaders viewed Russia as a rogue state and Putilov’s administration an outlaw regime. Putilov was widely reviled as a despotic killer.
Most of the world was contemptuous of Tower too, for that matter. If Tower’s calls became public knowledge, people would think that he and Putilov were plotting evil shit—which was, of course, true—and it would be bad for all concerned. Furthermore, Tower had no self-restraint. The calls were bound to come out.
But Putilov couldn’t make Tower stop telephoning him. It was not widely known, but Putilov spoke good English—he even understood most American idioms—and the two men could converse fluently. As soon as Tower found that out, he began besieging Putilov. He had to talk—even though all Putilov got out of their interactions was a sick stomach, nerves on fire and a splitting head.
The calls consisted of Tower either bragging about how smart and tough he was or whining about how no one appreciated what he was going through or understood him. Oh, Putilov appreciated Tower, knew what he was going through and understood him perfectly. He understood he’d like to shove a double-barrel shotgun in Tower’s mouth, ram it as hard as he could into the back of his throat, ear back the hammers and pull the twin triggers. After that, Tower’s brain—assuming he had one—would be … no more.
The thought of splattering his office wall with Tower’s gray matter almost brought a smile to Putilov’s cruel lips.
Almost.
No, he was still too furious over Tower’s call. Nothing he said or did could stop the cretin from calling, and tonight Putilov was so enraged he wanted to hurl the phone against the wall and shatter it like an egg. That infamous idiot had been telling him again about how they were so alike, how Putilov was the brother he’d never had, how he understood Putilov like no one else on earth and about how they would do great things together.
He’d then asked Putilov if, after he—Tower—retired from the presidency and went back into the private sector, he could build a “J. T.’s Needle Tower of Power Hotel” in Moscow. Tower told Putilov:
“If you’d let me level St. Basil’s Cathedral—right there on Red Square—I could fit both a Needle Tower Hotel and a really classy casino in that space.”
Demolish St. Basil’s Cathedral in order to build a butt-ugly monstrosity, thereby defaming and disgracing the sacred ground that was Red Square? And Tower would further desecrate it with a fucking casino?
Putilov had pretended to seriously consider the man’s demented request when, in truth, all he wanted to do was smash the phone in the imbecile’s face.
Who did Tower think he was? Where did all his endless stream-of-consciousness macho bullshit come from? Where did he get his incessant horseshit about “rocks,” “balls” and “stones” and how he and Putilov had had to have them to have been able to achieve what they had in their lives? What was this shit about cojones anyway? Tower didn’t know the first thing about real courage, about taking serious life-death-or-thirty-years-in-a-Siberian-gulag risks. Tower knew nothing about the dangers he—Putilov—had faced and the ordeals Putilov had to endure to get to where he was. Tower had no idea what real yaytsas were.
That Putilov had survived the KGB during the Russian convulsions of the ’80s and ’90s took incredible brains and balls and was, in retrospect, a bona fide miracle. Tower had no idea what it was like to work as a double agent in Eastern Europe. Just learning all those tongue-twisting, jaw-busting, impossibly difficult languages had been a special kind of hell.
Tower had no idea how that agency functioned in those difficult times. It gained its own special power by leveraging those with real political and economic clout. Such influential people were best controlled through fear, and the KGB existed to teach people like them the meaning of fear. Working undercover, collecting incriminating information from people in the employ of highly placed politicians and highly influential plutocrats, agents—such as Putilov—could then use that dirt to force those big shots into turning on their friends and colleagues. But that was only the beginning. Putilov and his fellow agents would then force them to blackmail even more powerful big shots above them—and so on and so on, ad infinitum—until the KGB had an army of highly placed individuals who would do anything he told them to do. In Germany, through such operations, the KGB continually purloined invaluable Western technological secrets. The West’s cyberindustrial industry and NATO’s various defense ministries were immensely profitable targets. That kinds of coercion took balls beyond balls beyond balls.
Framing important people for sex crimes with trumped-up evidence and doctored photos, then threatening them with prison, exposure and disgrace—all that was standard operating procedure. Moreover, many of the people, whom they had frightened and strong-armed, were rich, powerful and politically connected. They hated the KGB with a blind rage, and they were influential people, eminently capable of retaliation. Consequently, an agent’s life was in constant danger.
Tower knew nothing of real risks and real guts, but that did not stop him from acting like he did. He loved to brag to Putilov about how tough he was. The man even boasted that if push came to shove, he was probably tougher than Putilov. Really? Had Tower ever done anything even remotely … difficult? Anything … truly terrifying? Tower didn’t know the meaning of the word “tough.” If he had ever gone up against Putilov, the Russian president would have crushed Tower like a wet, soggy … blintz.
Putilov couldn’t take it anymore. Standing up, he threw the phone against the wall as hard as he knew how and watched it detonate into slivers, shards and fragments before falling across his office floor.