What you do in the dark will come to light, the Bible said, and Jules Meredith had descended on Benjamin Jowett like the Wrath of an Avenging God, shining the harsh spotlight of public scrutiny on all of his wicked ways and devious dealings.
Benjamin Jowett sat at his desk in the New World Trade Center and scowled. Here he was—fifty-eight years old, with a $3,500 haircut, a $50,000 dark blue, immaculately tailored Kiton K-5 suit, a $35,000 Hublot Big Bang Ferrari King Gold 45mm 18k Rose Gold Limited Edition watch. He was still handsome and still had all his hair, which was currently coiffed and colored a tasteful light blond. He still had perfectly capped teeth, which gave him a dazzlingly bright, movie-star smile. He was the proprietor of one of the largest privately owned hedge funds on earth, and yet despite all of his money, power, good looks and accoutrements, that muckraking bitch, Jules Meredith, could cut through his high-tech, anti-hacking security systems and his expensively produced, elaborately crafted gentlemanly façade like a chain saw screaming through steaming hot … shit. She could and was exposing all his most avaricious secrets to the mocking, sneering media, making him one of the most despised and derided billionaires in the world.
One of his more lucrative sidelines, for instance, was his so-called Weather Derivative Funds. In effect, it placed bets on the weather, which any outsider would have previously viewed as harmless, until, that is, Jules C. Meredith got her arching, needle-sharp talons into the story. She proved that he had his complex of subcompanies, whose sole job was to systematically buy and sell grain commodities during periods of acute water shortage, and thereby drive up the prices during commodity-market bidding wars. Jowett, thus, elevated food costs to heights far above anything that any protracted dry spell could have accomplished, all the while making him billions in derivative grain profits. An unfortunate by-product of their “business” was to put a subsistence diet beyond the reach of those already starving on the margins in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Mideast, South Asia, India, China, and Southeast Asia.
That Meredith bitch had described his financial instruments as “famine derivatives” and argued that Jowett was profiteering off the kinds of climate-change-inspired, famine-producing droughts that emaciated and murdered indigent peasants and Third World slum-dwellers by the hundreds of millions.
Many on Wall Street believed that his artificially induced price inflation of basic grains—and the famines that inflation aggravated—had in 2012 driven millions of people in the Mideast into the streets in protest of the skyrocketing food prices. These demonstrations led to the infamous “Arab Spring,” a spate of revolutions that incited the overthrow of several authoritarian rulers. Most of these secular despots were replaced by fanatical Islamist tyrants who supported terrorism, fomented regional civil war, set the Mideast aflame and proved to be even more brutal and oppressive than their predecessors. Many economists held Jowett responsible for that Arab Spring and the pervasive anarchy that followed, a dubious achievement in which Benjamin privately took an almost narcissistic pride.
Not that he bragged about it in public. His “famine derivatives” were a highly profitable but dirty little secret he attempted to keep under wraps. He’d lavished scores of millions of dollars on PR firms all over the world over the last twenty years in an attempt to conceal that enterprise. And all the obfuscation and subterfuge had worked. He’d kept his grain-price manipulations below the media radar screen and had, in fact, successfully branded himself as a philanthropist, a patron of the arts and a commodities markets guru. He’d gone to New York’s most celebrated charity balls, donated incalculable sums to Lincoln Center, PBS and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For twenty years, he’d been there for every opening night at the Met opera and had been treated like a deity on the different financial networks, in newspaper and magazine interviews and on the national talk shows.
No more.
What you do in the dark will come to light, the Bible said, and Jules Meredith had descended on Benjamin Jowett like the Wrath of an Avenging God, shining the harsh spotlight of public scrutiny on all of his wicked ways and devious dealings.
She had sullied his reputation forever. Instead of referring to him as “a philanthropist, a patron of the arts and a commodities markets guru” she had renamed him “the Planet’s Number One Famine Pimp” and “Our Preeminent Impresario of Global Malnuitrtion.”
Then that madman, Danny McMahon, had taken to running news clips of his comings and goings, narrated by McMahon’s own scathing commentary, in which he quoted Meredith or made up vicious attacks himself, denouncing Jowett as “America’s Grand Panjandrum of Mass Famine” and “our Generalissimo of Genocidal, Baby-Murdering Greed,” accusing him of “killing people with food deprivation the way Hitler killed them with gas chambers and Stalin killed them with hunger and cold in the Siberian death camps.”
Damn it, he needed tonight’s diversion, anything that would get his mind off that bitch Jules Meredith and her asshole friend, Danny McMahon. No less a personage than President J. T. Tower had called him up, saying that he’d been sickened by what Meredith and McMahon had been doing to Jowett, their friends and himself, announcing that he, J. T. Tower, was “settling Jules Meredith’s and Danny McMahon’s hash once and for all.”
“As my number one campaign contributor, you deserve a celebration, Ben, instead of all that public ridicule,” President Tower had said to him, “and I am personally setting you up with the hottest young woman I have ever had the privilege to debauch, and you can take my erotic recommendations to J. P. Morgan Chase. I am the gold standard when it comes to bodaciously hot beauties. In fact, I picked this one out special for you. For years, you’ve told me about your fellatio fixation. Well, I too share that particular enthusiasm. I’ve had head all over the world—from the street girls of Rio to the sex goddesses of the Hollywood Hills, from Bangkok brothels to the supermodel penthouses of London and New York. I’ve had it in Hong Kong’s royal palaces and in remote Sherpa villages high up in the Himalayas. When it comes to oral sex, I’ve been up, down and all around, here, there and back again, but I’ve never had anything remotely approaching what this young girl does. She could suck the chrome off an eighteen-wheel diesel-rig trailer hitch. I swear on my balls and my eyes she’ll give you the wildest barracuda blowjob of your young life. Screaming skull? She’ll give you a hummer that’ll hammer your eyeballs right out of your head and send you shrieking like a banshee into the night. In fact, she’ll do anything! Talk about having dollar signs for eyeballs, she’d let you burn her at the stake in a snuff flick if you laid enough scratch on her. And best of all, she’s my personal gift to you, free and gratis.”
“J. T.,” Jowett said, strangely and surprisingly moved. “You’re too kind, too generous. How can I ever thank you?”
“No thanks necessary. We’ve all suffered hideously at the hands of Jules Meredith and Danny McMahon, but their reign of terror is about to come to an end. I have Mikhail Putilov’s personal word on it, so let your own personal celebration begin tonight!”
“God bless Mikhail Putilov,” Jowett said. “I don’t know what else to say.”
“By the way, this young fellatrix may be … underage. I’ve never checked her ID. That’s not a problem, is it?”
* * *
Remembering his conversation with Tower, Jowett got so aroused he became light-headed. He had to walk to his bathroom and splash cold water on his face.