Putilov had whiled away many a lonely sleepless night studying those pathologically pornographic photos and watching DVDs of that cretin being humiliated in bed by leather-masked prostitutes of indeterminate gender, ethnicity and even species. Putilov had rollicked with laughter, his spirit soaring with pure transcendent delight, each time Tower abased himself in plain view of Putilov’s hidden cameras …
Tower was unquestionably driving Putilov to distraction. In fact, Tower’s last all-night Skype call to the Russian leader had nearly done Putilov in. He really didn’t think he could tolerate the bastard anymore.
Where did that asshole, Tower, get off suggesting that he was in any way Putilov’s equal—a brother-under-the-skin? What had Tower ever done except live off his inheritance and fuck predatory women who thought to exploit him for reasons of grasping avarice and personal advancement?
God, the man infuriated him. What Putilov really wanted to do was grab him by the shirt, slam him into a wall and shout in his face:
“HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE YOU KILLED??? WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU KNOW ABOUT ME AND MY LIFE???”
Reflecting on all the people he’d murdered—or had murdered—always soothed Putilov’s nerves. Sitting back in his easy chair, he stared out over the Black Sea, his personal fleet of yachts in the harbor, and he remembered the first time he had ever taken a life …
* * *
It went back to that tiny four-room St. Petersburg apartment, which had been home to his family and two others as well. Armies of ferocious brown rats—often ten inches in length, rump to nose—infested the apartments’ inner and outer walls, savagely attacked the human inhabitants and had turned that building into a kind of Rat Battle of Stalingrad. They assaulted the apartments’ occupants anytime, anywhere, devouring holes in the plaster and wood, the brick and Sheetrock—as well as in people. Putilov personally believed the little buggers liked the taste of that filthy shit.
Still he was ordered to stem the tide. When he wasn’t at school, he had to spend his hours in the apartment, attempting to hunt and kill the invading rats. However, it was tough. Luring them into cages was unproductive. They were just too damn shrewd. Spring-powered traps they recognized and disdainfully ignored. Even placing arsenic-laced cheese in front of the holes did little good. The rats were too smart to devour it whole. They would test it first, nibbling a small bite or two, then waiting to see if it disagreed with them. If the bait did sicken them, they ignored the rest of it and told their comrades to do the same.
Sometimes though he could outfox the rats with a bait and switch. He’d feed them a good bait, say peanut butter, and convince them that it was safe to eat. He’d then slip some poisoned peanut butter in, watch them devour the entire portion and die. Sometimes Putilov would turn off the lights, leave a chunk of unpoisoned cheese or sausage or peanut butter in front of the rathole and hide behind a couch. He’d hide for hours, waiting for them to come out. Eventually they would enter the room, and Putilov would let them take their test-nibbles. When the rats were sure the food was edible, and they were alone, they dug in. Putilov had a small garden shovel in his hands, and when the rats were focused on and absorbed in their repast, he’d spring from his hiding place and hammer them to death.
He remembered the first time his parents had come home from work, and he’d presented them with his trophies. The five-year-old boy had killed three large rats.
His parents and the two other families living in the four-room apartment were ecstatic. They’d found a rat-killing prodigy.
Nor did his rat-battles end there. The apartment complex had a large, filthy, trash-strewn courtyard where all the children gathered and played. Whenever another kid got on Putilov’s nerves, he didn’t see a human at all but a rat, and he fought him the way rats fought. Clawing at the kid’s eyes, he bit him savagely, ripped out clumps of his hair, kicked him in the shins, the balls and would not stop. Even when the kid gave up, and kids pulled Putilov off the youngster, he would only pretend to quit. As soon as he got his wind back, he would throw himself on the poor kid again, scratching, biting, crotch-kicking, pulling his hair.
In school, it was the same—so much so he was declared a hooligan. For several years he was denied entrance into the Young Pioneers—the much-honored USSR organization which was reserved only for good clean young Russian men.
Putilov was considered too unstable and too … psychopathic.
But he didn’t care. He loved beating the hell out of people. Fighting, even killing, was as natural to him as breathing, as vital to his well-being as blood. He not only fought his way through school, he would kill hundreds of rats before leaving that slum apartment. From his point of view, for the rest of his life, he’d never stop kicking the asses of kids who got in his way and killing rats—reporter rats, in particular. He’d killed those rats and tamed Russia’s recalcitrant news media in a manner that would have impressed even his personal god, Uncle Joe. He wondered absently whether Stalin had exterminated as many of the press as he had? He honestly did not know. Possibly not.
The thought of all those murdered journalists and other political opponents brought an exceedingly rare smile to Putilov’s lips. Their names rang in his ears like temple bells, like a paen of praise to his implacable will and unyielding resolve, a grim litany of deservedly dead enemies: Dmitry Kholodov, Ilya Zimin, Ilyas Shurpayev, Yury Shebalkin, Sergey Bogdanovsky, Dmitry Krikoryants, Sergei Dubov, Andrei Aizderdzis, Yury Soltys, Tatyana Zhuravlyova, Yelena Roshchina, Hussein Guzuyev, Gelani Charigov, Bilal Akhmadov, Vladimir Zhitarenko, Pyotr Novikov, Sultan Nuriyev, Jochen Piest, Valentin Yanus, Vyacheslav Rudnev—all of them he’d had killed outright … plus another two hundred journalists whose names he no longer remembered but whose deaths he would carry in his soul like a lover’s sensuous caresses … until the day he died.
Remembering the men and women he’d murdered or imprisoned always brought him much pleasure. He had been especially eager to take care of the American multibillionaire hedge fund mogul who had invested so heavily in Putilov’s Russia during the early years. The man had eventually become disillusioned with his regime’s “financial practices,” and he’d gone so far as to hire the tax attorney and financial auditor, Sergei Magnitsky, to investigate those activities. Sergei learned what happened to people who fucked with Putilov. He’d been imprisoned almost immediately, and Putilov had seen to it that, while in jail, he was starved, half-frozen and brutally beaten. Denied the medical care he had desperately needed, he had subsequently died.
Investigate me now, Sergei! Putilov thought with a bitter snort.
His employer, the hedge fund CEO, however, had proven himself an implacable and resourceful foe. He lobbied the U.S. Congress and convinced them to pass the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act and to impose economic sanctions on Russia. So far Putilov had had to kill five more people who were investigating him and his people for fraud and tax evasion under that act, including Valery Kurochkin, Oktay Gasanov and Alexander Perepilichny.
Putilov was especially proud of Perepilichny’s killing. He’d ordered him done in with gelsemium, a poisonous extract taken from a rare plant found only in the Himalayas. Favored by Chinese assassins, the toxin was almost impossible to detect and verify medically. Still some supercilious coroner had managed to track it down, and Putilov had been furious. In fact, he’d almost ordered a hit on the asshole medical scientist just to teach him to mind his own business and keep out of Putilov’s way. He still planned on doing something about the man in the future.
Then there was his former boss and mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak. When Putilov had risen to power, the man had been vain enough to think he could prevail upon his past patronage of Putilov, talk to him friend-to-friend, even impose on their onetime friendship. He once even said to Putilov: “You know, I gave you your start. You had nothing until I hired you as my deputy.” So Sobchak had to go. Putilov told his killers to paint his bedside lamp with an extremely painful, hard-to-trace poison, which, when the light was turned on, would heat up and emit ultralethal toxins that would kill anyone in the room.
You never saw it coming, did you, Anatoly? Putilov thought with a cryptic trace if a grin.
Thinking of Sobchak’s demise brought back memories of Boris Berezovsky—the billionaire Russian TV mogul and owner of Russia’s largest television news network, Channel One. More than anyone, he’d been responsible for making Putilov Yeltsin’s prime minister, then forcing Yeltsin to retire and installing Putilov as interim president. Berezovsky had pilloried Putilov’s presidential opponents on Channel One, falsely accusing them of scurrilous wrongdoing and malicious misdeeds. He’d so blackened their reputations that on election day, Putilov won easily.
Berezovsky, like Sobchak, thought he could remind Putilov how much he owed him.
Yeah, Boris, I owed you all right, and I’ve always settled my debts. When my hit team hanged you in England, you were paid in full … at the end of that fucking rope.
The Russian banker and Putilov critic Ivan K. Kivelidi he’d killed with the toxin cadmium. Human rights advocate Natalya Estemirova had been kidnapped and killed. Marina Salye had assiduously investigated his financial activities in St. Petersburg in the early ’90s when he was first starting to steal fortunes for himself and friends. Before she’d been able to collect her evidence of his many killings, however, she’d seen the handwriting on the wall: She would not survive her inquiry. She’d gone into hiding and had wisely stayed undercover for twelve years. Then she returned to public life to resume her crusade against her longtime nemesis, knowing all the while that Putilov might have her killed. Despite the obvious threats on her life, she felt the tyrant had to be stopped.
Big mistake, Marina!
Instead of indicting Putilov, she died of a “massive coronary”—or so the coroner reported.
“Massive cornonary”? Putilov thought, grinning. Yeah, sure, Marina … pro—bab—ly!
He remembered how once in Belgium a French reporter had asked him to explain why he was using heavy artillery on Chechen civilians. He invited the man to come to Moscow, where he could explain Chechen terrorism to him more fully, in more detail and then have him … cas-trat-ed. “We have specialists in that,” he’d told the reporter.
The look of horror on the man’s face still made the Russian tyrant smile.
That was another journalist he planned on meeting again one day.
Perhaps Putilov’s favorite hit of all had been his longtime political opponent and nemesis, Boris Nemtsov. Putilov had given him a fair warning. He’d jailed him several times, and Nemtsov’s own mother had told him Putilov would kill him if he continued his crusade against the Russian president. The man wouldn’t listen though. He was throwing large-scale political rallies and preparing to expose Putilov’s invasion of Ukraine and seizure of Crimea for the war crimes they were. Well, those sorts of spotlights Putilov could not countenance. He’d had Nemtsov shot to death in front of his girlfriend under the shadow of St. Basil’s Cathedral in the Kremlin.
What you put out, Boris, baby, Putilov thought grimly, you get back.
But while Putilov enjoyed reminiscing about all those enemies whom he had shuffled off this mortal coil, lately, Tower had taken to ruining even that small diversion for the Russian dictator. Whenever the idiot, Tower, heard about a Russian reporter or political opponent or human rights activist whom Putilov had had ingloriously eliminated, he’d call Putilov and congratulate him on “a job well done.” Tower was even stupid enough to express on the phone his heartfelt wish that he, Tower, could “dispatch unfriendly journalists and opponents as expeditiously as you do, old friend.”
“Why not announce on CNN that I killed all those people and you wish you could do the same?” Putilov had shouted at Tower. “Phones can be tapped you know? I tap them every day.”
Tower had immediately apologized for his indiscretion and his lapse in judgment, but within a week he was, once again, on the Skype phone, complimenting Putilov on another journalist he’d “neutralized.” Nothing Putilov said or did could make Tower shut up about it.
Human rights activists especially incensed Putilov—and he’d had any number of them eliminated—but Tower wouldn’t even let him enjoy those murders in peace. The nitwit had been especially ecstatic at the murder of the beautiful and charismatic activist/reporter, Anna Polikovskaya. She was bent on exposing everything Putilov had done. So he’d had her tea poisoned on an airline flight, and after she’d survived that attempt, he’d ordered her shot to death in the elevator of her apartment building two years later in 2006. Some things, he’d thought at the time, you don’t leave undone.
Tower had been insanely aroused over that one.
“Damn, Putie, that Anna P., she was some kind of gorgeous. That bitch was smoking-hot. So right here I have to ask you a personal question. I mean, we’re men. We both know about these things, right?”
“What things?” Putilov asked, suddenly apprehensive.
“Let me put the pistols on the table, boy. Were you tappin’ that ass?”
A jolt of pure violent rage hit Putilov like nothing he’d ever felt in his life. It was as if he had a live volcano in his bowels, and it was welling upward through his abdomen, stomach, chest, esophagus, then hitting his brain like an explosion of molten boiling magma.
For a moment, Putilov blacked out and fell off his desk chair. When he came to, he was on his back, and he could hear Tower on the Skype’s speaker phone, bellowing:
“Putie, where are you? Where did you go?”
Putilov might well have cracked and gone terminally insane at that very moment, but for the last week he’d been meeting with an anger management psychiatrist, who was helping him deal with his homicidal hatred of Tower. The man practiced something called “Eidetic Therapy.” He’d taught Putilov to visualize himself and Tower in situations that reduced his rage and then concentrate on those images.
Well, the only images he had of Tower that gave him any relief were images of himself, Putilov, killing the imbecile … painfully, painstakingly.
Instantly, he pictured Tower standing there in his office. In his mind’s eye, Putilov had an AK-47 in his hands and a bucket of plastique at his feet. Empting the AK’s magazine into Tower’s stomach and gonads—guaranteeing that his death would be horrifyingly slow, not quick and merciful—he then bent over him and shoved handfuls of plastique up his ass, into his groin and then his mouth. He inserted pre-wired blasting caps into the explosive, hid behind his desk, and with a smile on his face, big as St. Basil’s, he pushed the detonator’s plunger.
The blast was frighteningly loud, but it was worth the horrendous ringing in his ears.
For when he stood up, Tower was … gone.
Tower would never come back to haunt him.
The man would never bother Putilov again.
The realization brought tears of joy to his eyes.
Putilov was free! Free!
* * *
“Comrade,” Tower was shouting into the speakerphone, “are you there? You disappeared.”
Slowly picking himself up off the floor, he sat back down at his desk.
“Yes, I’m here. What was it you asked?”
“I asked if you were doin’ Anna P.? Were you banging that booty? Man, she was scorchin’. You sure as shit should have gotten some of that before you had her hit. It’s a code of honor with me. I never let good pussy to go to waste. Hell, I’d have thrown a fuck into her—just to give her something to remember me by—and then had her aced. She could have thought about that final hip action just as she was staring into her killer’s ice-cold eyes and watching the hammer fall. I would have liked that. I would have wanted her last memory—just before the lights went out—to be of my dick. In fact, Putie, that thought is getting me turned on right now, even as we speak. Maybe I ought to go and, you know, as we say in the States: take care of business. Strike while the old branding iron is … hot. And, boy, Putie, the old Jim Iron is hotter than hellfire and brimstone right now.”
Tower was truly unendurable, utterly relentless and would never let up. When Putilov had KGB General Oleg Erovinkin murdered, Tower would not stop with the calls. He never missed an opportunity to broadcast that one on his Skype, thundering his thanks and congratulations on a fucking phone line!
But then come to think of it, Erovinkin had pissed Putilov off as well …
* * *
Erovinkin had been in charge of discrediting Tower’s political opponent during Tower’s last presidential election, and the general had succeeded brilliantly. Even though the woman handily won the popular American presidential vote, Erovinkin had stolen the election from the former secretary of state in those swing states like a thief in the night.
Unfortunately for Putilov, the asshole general had gotten an attack of conscience and had ratted his boss’s entire operation out to the English Secret Service. When the general had sent former MI6 agent Conrad Stillman an explosive dossier on Putilov’s political disinformation campaign against Tower’s female presidential opponent, he’d also thrown in shocking sexual materials—including photographs and DVDs—that Putilov had compiled on Tower during the moron’s business/political trips to Moscow. In bed, Tower was a pervert of near–Hannibal Lecter proportions, and he’d had the deplorable judgment to indulge his insane tastes in Russian hotel suites with Russian prostitutes … who worked for Putilov! Tower had, among other things, ordered leather-clad diesel dykes to ram his derrière with strap-ons, had paid hookers extra to treat him to face-first, open-mouthed “golden showers” and had participated in certain sadonecrophilic debaucheries that left Tower oinking like a pig and bleating like a sheep, bestial perversions so horrifyingly vile, so indescribably deranged, that even Putilov had never heard of them.
Putilov was still in shock. As a KGB operative, he thought he’d seen and heard of anything—everything that was disgustingly and sexually sick. But no one had ever heard of anyone anywhere who matched Tower for pure concentrated unmitigated degeneracy.
Well the good news was that Putilov had in his possession digitized audiovisual recordings of every twisted repulsive second of Tower’s perverted sex acts.
Still Putilov was outraged that the general had gone public with the Russian president’s own personal file on Tower. He had deemed Tower’s sex file to be his own exclusive property and had grown attached to it. Putilov had whiled away many a lonely sleepless night studying those pathologically pornographic photos and watching DVDs of that cretin being humiliated in bed by leather-masked prostitutes of indeterminate gender, ethnicity and even species. Putilov had rollicked with laughter, his spirit soaring with pure transcendent delight, each time Tower abased himself in plain view of Putilov’s hidden cameras. But an indispensable part of Putilov’s thrill was the secret singularity of his experience. Putilov—and no one else—got to watch as Tower revealed himself to be the demented deviant and ludicrous lunatic that he truly was. Only Putilov knew the sheer excitation of seeing Tower so unmistakably unmasked and so grossly and grotesquely exposed.
He did not and would not ever, ever share it with the world.
But then the general double-crossed him—giving it to a retired MI6 spy who had leaked a description of the materials to the press.
That the cowardly London news organization reported only the substance of the story and refused to release the photos or DVD of Tower in full flagrante delicto in no way alleviated Putilov’s rage. Putilov knew that because of Erovinkin, the truth would one day get out, and then everyone would know—not just Putilov.
When Putilov first learned of the general’s betrayal, he had immediately had him killed and seen to it that he died a particularly painful death in the backseat of the general’s own Lexus. Putilov had him killed with poisons so diabolically lethal, so awesomely agonizing, so impossibly difficult to detect that he doubted anyone would ever accurately determine the man’s cause of death—only that the general had suffered hell’s most hideous and terrifying tortures before he’d finally and gratefully succumbed.
Had Agent Stillman not immediately gone into hiding, Putilov would have taken care of him too, former MI6 agent or not. In fact, he was still committed to finalizing that piece of unfinished business. Some things you just don’t let slide, Putilov thought to himself bitterly. In Putilov’s line of work it was imperative that people knew no one was beyond his reach.
That asshole comic, Danny McMahon, was learning the hard way that fucking with Putilov and his good friends Kamal and Waheed was terminally … unwise.
And terminally was indeed the operative word.
He could not wait until the day came when he could take care of Tower too.
* * *
Putilov poured himself a cup of tea. It didn’t help. His hands still shook, and he still ground his teeth in fury. Would he ever again know peace? No, J. T. Tower had robbed him of any bit of serenity he might have had, was filling him with an implacable anger that he could no longer contain, which was drastically distorting his judgment, finally forcing Putilov into the jaws of the krok. Desomorphine was the only thing that calmed his jangled nerves and soothed his savagely troubled soul.
At times like this, he actually wanted to kill Tower with his bare hands—strangle him and at the very end snap his neck or maybe just beat him to death with a shovel like he’d done so many times to those rats in that slum apartment.
But with Tower, he’d make the beating slower, more excruciating, more … unbearable.
Where did Tower get off with that know-it-all attitude? How could Tower ever comprehend what it was to be Mikhail Ivanovich Putilov?
Once again Putilov found himself returning to that small slum tenement overrun with its armies of rats. What could Tower ever know about fighting hordes of rodents in four crowded rooms? The endless hours spent stalking them, waiting for them, hitting them with shovels, cracking their necks with his bare hands? What could the spoiled rich kid J. T. Tower ever know about that kind of world, that kind of childhood, that kind of life? Tower would never understand one single thing about Mikhail Ivanovich Putilov.
Walking over to his desk, he took out a bottle of desomorphine tablets, two tablespoons, a razor blade, his bong and a lighter. He reached into the big bottom drawer and took out the gasoline flask, the ether can and a liter bottle of Everclear—the 190-proof corn liquor distilled by the American firm Luxco, and the strongest commercially made liquor in the world.
Damn, he’d developed a real fondness for the krok.
He was starting to dream about getting high off the beast.
Was that a bad sign? Putilov wondered.
He began crushing the pills two at a time between the tablespoons, then chopping up the granules with his razor blade. Filling the bong with the powder, he poured in the Everclear, added some ether, a splatter of gasoline for that extra jolt, and heated the mixture to a rolling boil.
Man, those fumes smelled good!
Putting the stem to his mouth, he sucked the steaming drug deep into his lungs.
Putilov’s eyes rolled back into his head until only the whites showed.