House Justice: DeMarco 5, page 20
“You’re a liar,” DeMarco said. “I think you’re the one who suggested he tell the media. Did you arrange for Dale Acosta to impersonate a CIA agent?”
“No. I swear. I never met Acosta. I didn’t know anything about him until I read in the papers that he was dead. Look, you have to believe me. I had no idea...”
“I’m not going to kill you today,” DeMarco said, “but if you don’t resign from Congress by the end of the week, I will. And before I kill you, I’m going to beat you half to death, the way they beat Mahata. You’ll die as hard as she did.”
DeMarco backed up to the door of the tavern, opened it, and stepped into the twilight. As the door swung shut, he could hear Rudman retching.
“Rudman did it,” DeMarco said.
“Goddamnit,” Mahoney muttered. “Sometimes it’s a bitch to be right.”
DeMarco had wanted to show up at Mahoney’s condo in the Watergate complex in his Iranian-killer disguise and scare the hell out of Mahoney, but he realized that would be rather childish. Instead, he went back to the Sheraton where he and Angela were still staying and spent an hour scrubbing his face with soap and hot water until he was his handsome Italian self again.
By the time he arrived at Mahoney’s it was almost midnight but his boss was still awake and waiting for him. Mahoney’s wife, Mary Pat, was a sane person who valued her health and was already in bed. And unlike her husband, she didn’t ingest half a bottle of bourbon before going to bed, so the next morning she would wake up looking daisy-fresh, as opposed to Mahoney who would look like a day-old corpse.
After he finished telling Mahoney about his encounter with Rudman in Middleburg, DeMarco asked, “What are you going to do if he doesn’t resign?”
Mahoney pondered the question for a moment. “My gut says ol’ Ray ain’t gonna resign. He can’t tell anyone he was threatened by Mahata’s brother because that would lead to speculation that he leaked the story. But what he’ll probably do tomorrow, after he stops shaking and throwing up, is go to the Capitol police and tell ’em a tale about someone threatening him, and the cops will provide round-the-clock protection for a while.”
“So, like I said, what are you going to do if he doesn’t resign?”
Mahoney shrugged. “The party will support some other Democrat when his term’s up. And since every district adjacent to his in Orange County is held by a Republican, there’s a good chance he’ll be replaced by one—but I can live with a Republican more than I can live with Rudman.”
“I recorded what he said. I could send the tape to the media.”
“No way. I’d end up with a fuckin’ circus on the Hill. Rudman will say that he confessed only because you held a gun to his head, and he’s not going to get expelled, much less convicted, based on a forced confession. But the media won’t believe Rudman and they’ll punch me silly, saying that Congress can’t be trusted with a secret, and every spook outfit in town will have a permanent excuse for not telling us what they’re doing. So I don’t want anyone hearing that tape, but tell your little CIA buddy that I’ll make sure Rudman doesn’t serve another term. That’s the best I can do.”
“Yeah, well, my little CIA buddy and her boss have another idea. Unless you stop them, they’re going to send the recording to Rulon Tully.”
Mahoney tilted his head and made an I-hadn’t-thought-about-that face. Then he nodded, as if, after thinking about it, that didn’t sound like a bad idea.
“Did you hear what I said? If they send the recording to Tully, there’s a good chance he’ll have Rudman killed, and that’s not what I had in mind when I made him admit that he talked to Tully. I mean, I know if Rudman’s exposed that’ll be embarrassing to you and the party, but do you want—”
Mahoney interrupted him and made one of the longest speeches DeMarco had ever heard him make. “Did it ever occur to you,” he said, “that this isn’t about me being embarrassed? I’ve served this country my whole life. I’ve fought for it. I’ve been wounded fighting for it. And in spite of some of the things I do, I’ve never betrayed my country, and I despise the people that do. And you know that old cliché about how you can be shot for treason? Well, it’s bullshit. When was the last time somebody in this country was executed for treason? If they catch somebody giving away secrets to the Chinese or the Russians, they send ’em to jail, but that’s all that happens. And when it comes to rich bastards like Marty Taylor and Rulon Tully ... well, you can forget about them even doing time. But these people betrayed their country and they got an agent killed. And this agent, like LaFountaine said, was providing us intelligence on a regime that wants to give nuclear bombs to terrorists. So, Joe, if these guys kill each other, do you really think I give a shit?”
Mahoney jerked his big chin at the door and said, “Keep me posted.”
Chapter 30
“Why did you do it? I’m not going to ask you again.”
“Because he hates Marty Taylor! I just figured Tully would like to hear that Taylor was doing something illegal and later on he’d get in trouble for it. I never thought he’d leak the story to the press.”
Xavier Quinn hit the stop button on the recorder. “What would you like me to do?” he asked.
Quinn said these words without the slightest trace of emotion— and this, as usual, annoyed Rulon Tully. It annoyed the shit out of him. It would be nice if just once Quinn could at least pretend to care about his employer’s welfare. He despised Xavier Quinn.
But he despised everyone.
It was a case of which came first, the chicken or the egg. As a boy, Rulon Tully was shorter than most other kids his age and had a head that was incredibly large in proportion to his narrow-shouldered, scrawny body. He had rubbery lips that were the color of earthworms, protruding eyes, and a small, red lump for a nose that provided an unsightly perch for his glasses. At the same time, he was smarter than everyone—including his parents and his teachers. He had an incredible memory—not quite photographic, but almost—and a facility for math and science that was preternatural. By the time he was twelve, he was doing differential equations while the rest of the morons in his class were struggling with elementary algebra. The end result of all this was that he was disdainful of his peers because they were stupid—and they made fun of him because of the way he looked. He hated them when they wouldn’t accept him—and they hated him because he was unattractive, smart, and obnoxious. But which came first? Did the other children turn Rulon Tully into a misanthrope or was he a misanthrope the day he emerged from his mother’s womb?
And he was a misanthrope. He knew this because a very expensive psychiatrist had told him so. He had seen the psychiatrist three times a week for a six-month period when he was in his thirties, each hourly session costing him nine hundred dollars. At the end of six months he had learned the clinical name for his condition but he learned nothing to change his view of his fellow man. He simply added the psychiatrist to the long list of people he hated.
Xavier Quinn, on the other hand, wasn’t misanthropic. He was simply disinterested in anything not directly related to his job and he didn’t sympathize or empathize with anyone—not even his employer. He also rarely showed joy or anger. Rulon Tully’s expensive ex-psychiatrist probably had a name for Quinn’s condition, too, but Tully didn’t care. He wanted his head of security to be competent, brutal, and loyal—and Quinn met all those criteria.
But Rulon Tully still despised him.
“I suppose Rudman could die,” Tully said, “but at this point that would be too risky.”
Quinn just stood there; his employer had neither posed a question nor given him a task.
“And you still don’t have any idea who killed the reporter?” Tully said.
“No,” Quinn answered.
Just “no”—the word uttered with no indication that Quinn was sorry he was unable to answer Tully’s question—and Tully wanted to scream at the man. He knew from past experience, however, if he started screaming Quinn would just stand there, his face completely impassive, as Tully ranted.
Quinn was ex-military, and maybe that was why he was impervious to Tully’s rages. He had short, dark hair; was good-looking in an unremarkable way; and had a compact, muscular body—a body he maintained in the million-dollar gym that Tully had built for his ex-wife, that adulterous bitch.
“And you have no idea who made this recording?” Tully asked.
“No. But there are other things we do know. We know that Mahata Javadi didn’t have a brother—I still have a few contacts at Langley— so whoever talked to Tully was lying. We also know this person didn’t send the recording to the press or the Bureau—they just sent it to you—which leads me to believe that whoever is behind this doesn’t want to publicly expose Rudman. Finally, we know that the recording can’t be used to convict Rudman of a crime because it was a coerced confession, so convicting Rudman isn’t what they want.”
Tully spun his stool around. He liked the drafting stool for that reason: he could spin it all the way around and if no one else was in the room, he liked to see how many revolutions he could make it spin with a single push. He even oiled the mechanism to make it spin faster. His record was four and a half spins, although no one knew that but him.
“So why do you think they sent the tape?” Tully asked, although he already knew the answer to this question.
“I think,” Quinn said, “that the person who sent this recording has deduced that you had Acosta killed and would like for you to kill Congressman Rudman.”
“I agree,” Tully said. “And I think that tells us who sent us the recording.”
“Who?”
“The CIA. They want somebody to pay for the death of their spy.” Tully spun the chair around again, then continued. “And you know what that means?”
“No,” Quinn said.
“It means they’ll be coming after me next.”
“So what are you going to do?”
Tully smiled. “I’m not going to do anything. Rudman may have confessed with a gun to his head but he’s not going to testify in court. He’s not going to implicate himself and he’s too afraid to implicate me. And the cops can’t prove I had Acosta killed. So I’m not going to do a damn thing.”
After Quinn left, Tully’s anger—which was always smoldering at some level—swelled to the point where he felt like breaking every object in the room. This whole mess had started because of Marty Taylor and now, because of what he had done to destroy Taylor, he was being targeted by that vengeful prick who ran the CIA. He shoved off as hard as he could with his short right leg and his small right foot, and did a three-turn spin on his drafting stool. He spun around and around and around—hating Marty Taylor.
The drafting table and stool were well-publicized affectations. He had used a drafting table for a brief period when he obtained his first patent and he told reporters that he still used the table because it helped him think, because it reminded him of his roots. That was all bullshit, of course. A PR gal he had hired said he needed a few quirky things to set him apart, to make him colorful—as if his appearance wasn’t enough. The drafting table had been one of those quirky things. His Japanese garden planted with exotic bonsai plants, the ponds surrounding his house filled with butterfly koi, his position on the board of the children’s cancer foundation—those were all part of his manufactured image, too.
He didn’t give a damn about the koi, the dwarf plants, or the bald-headed kids.
He didn’t even care about making money anymore. He had more money than he could possibly spend and it had been a long time since simply buying something—a piece of art, a mansion, the most expensive car in the world—thrilled him in any significant way. What he really cared about, what he really loved, was power.
He had discussed this with his psychiatrist when they explored the subject of what made him happy and why he was so unhappy. It was then that he realized the thing that made him happiest was knowing thousands of people worked for him and he could, any time he desired, disrupt and even destroy their lives by firing them. He loved that the arrogant, high-powered executives he employed cowered around him, like obsequious priests kissing the cardinal’s ring. It thrilled him that powerful politicians danced to his whimsical tune, terrified if they offended him he would use his wealth to run them out of office. And there was absolutely nothing he liked better than swooping down on a company and taking it over, knowing everybody in the company was just sick with anticipation, realizing that their fate was in his hands.
His therapist couldn’t cure him and had shown him that he would never be truly content, not the way normal people were. But were it not for one thing, he could have been almost content, or at least as content as it was possible for a man like him to be. He had wealth, he had fame, and, most important, he had the power of a wrathful god over a large segment of the population on several continents. The one thing that prevented him from reaching his own distorted version of bliss was Marty Taylor.
What he felt for Taylor was something beyond hate. Hate, he reserved for the human race. His feelings for Taylor went so far beyond hate that there wasn’t even a word for it, at least not one he knew. He could have had Taylor killed, and had thought many times about doing just that, but killing him wasn’t enough. Killing him, no matter how slowly and painfully it was done, was just too quick. It would be over too soon. He didn’t want Taylor to die; he wanted him to suffer, and suffer for years, and not just physically. He wanted to humiliate him and strip him of his wealth and put him in a cage. Yes, he loved that image: some tattooed skinhead making pretty Marty Taylor his prison bitch—over and over and over again.
Rulon Tully was in his forties when he married for the first and only time. Prior to that time, he had had many, many women. He paid a good number of those women to sleep with him, but there were others, beautiful women, who gave themselves to him even as stunted and ugly as he was. The problem was he knew that these women didn’t love him and only wanted him because of the lifestyle he could give them, and he never allowed himself to be seduced by some grasping gold digger with an angel’s face and a perfectly sculpted body. Being a misanthropic genius, he was incapable of deluding himself into thinking that any of those women really loved him or wanted him for who he was.
And then along came Shelly. She had been his masseuse. Because of the body that God had so cruelly given him, he needed daily massages to loosen knotty muscles, to relieve the pain of aching joints, and to make bearable a spinal column that felt like a bony snake gnawing at the flesh surrounding it. And that had been Shelly’s job, to use her wonderful, strong hands to treat all those ailments, and she’d been good at it.
Shelly was pretty but she wasn’t beautiful. She was short and somewhat stocky; she reminded him, physically, of the gymnast Mary Lou Retton. “Cute” was the word most often used to describe her. Right from the beginning, he sensed that she wasn’t repulsed by his looks. She was a simple person with a good heart and he could tell she genuinely enjoyed his company. The fact was, though, and he was objective enough to realize this, she enjoyed everyone’s company; she was just one of those perpetually optimistic, good-natured souls who liked 99 percent of the people they met. So, the fact that she liked him wasn’t unusual, but what was unusual was that she was the only person he’d ever met who liked him for who he was and not for what he owned. She didn’t laugh at his jokes because she wanted a bigger tip; she didn’t flatter him outrageously to pump up his ego; she even kidded him for being just as short as she was, and nobody—absolutely nobody—dared to make jokes about his size.
Five months after he met her, he convinced himself he loved her— although it’s hard to be sure you’re in love when you’re a misanthrope— and he asked her to marry him. And for a brief time, for almost two years, it was as if his misanthropy went into remission, as if he were afflicted with a cancer rather than a mental illness.
Then handsome Marty Taylor stepped in and destroyed his life.
He and Shelly had attended the film festival in Cannes that year, and Marty was there. He didn’t like Marty Taylor, of course, but he’d met him on several occasions and had to admit that the man was as charming as anyone he’d ever known. Shelly, of course, thought he was delightful. Then, as luck would have it, he had to return unexpectedly to California because of some business disaster, one that could have cost him millions had he not reacted, but Shelly wanted to stay in Cannes. She loved seeing all those movie stars. Before he left, he made the mistake of asking Marty to make sure his wife had a good time while he was gone—and Marty made sure that she had a very good time. And as bad as her unfaithfulness was, he learned of the affair via a front-page picture in a tabloid newspaper. So not only did he have to suffer her betrayal and the agony he felt when he lost the one person in the world that he thought had genuinely loved him, but he also had to endure the humiliation of the entire world knowing he was a cuckold.
There was just no word to describe how much he hated Marty Taylor.
Rulon Tully considered himself to be a ruthless man, but he was hardly the most ruthless man that Xavier Quinn had known. Quinn was a West Point graduate and he had the military skills to be a good officer but not the political ones. Realizing this, he resigned his commission in his early thirties and became a military consultant—a mercenary, in other words—to some men who were truly ruthless: African dictators and Russian oilmen.
At the age of forty-two, Quinn looked at his bank account and the scars on various parts of his anatomy, and accepted a job as Tully’s head of security. And although Tully had never resorted to mass murder as some of Quinn’s previous employers had done, he had asked Quinn to do a number of illegal things on his behalf. Quinn had blackmailed Tully’s competitors. He had stolen industrial secrets. He had bribed politicians and IRS investigators and, if bribes didn’t work, he blackmailed them, too. But the things he did for Tully were not as risky as what he had done in the past, and the benefits were enormous.
“No. I swear. I never met Acosta. I didn’t know anything about him until I read in the papers that he was dead. Look, you have to believe me. I had no idea...”
“I’m not going to kill you today,” DeMarco said, “but if you don’t resign from Congress by the end of the week, I will. And before I kill you, I’m going to beat you half to death, the way they beat Mahata. You’ll die as hard as she did.”
DeMarco backed up to the door of the tavern, opened it, and stepped into the twilight. As the door swung shut, he could hear Rudman retching.
“Rudman did it,” DeMarco said.
“Goddamnit,” Mahoney muttered. “Sometimes it’s a bitch to be right.”
DeMarco had wanted to show up at Mahoney’s condo in the Watergate complex in his Iranian-killer disguise and scare the hell out of Mahoney, but he realized that would be rather childish. Instead, he went back to the Sheraton where he and Angela were still staying and spent an hour scrubbing his face with soap and hot water until he was his handsome Italian self again.
By the time he arrived at Mahoney’s it was almost midnight but his boss was still awake and waiting for him. Mahoney’s wife, Mary Pat, was a sane person who valued her health and was already in bed. And unlike her husband, she didn’t ingest half a bottle of bourbon before going to bed, so the next morning she would wake up looking daisy-fresh, as opposed to Mahoney who would look like a day-old corpse.
After he finished telling Mahoney about his encounter with Rudman in Middleburg, DeMarco asked, “What are you going to do if he doesn’t resign?”
Mahoney pondered the question for a moment. “My gut says ol’ Ray ain’t gonna resign. He can’t tell anyone he was threatened by Mahata’s brother because that would lead to speculation that he leaked the story. But what he’ll probably do tomorrow, after he stops shaking and throwing up, is go to the Capitol police and tell ’em a tale about someone threatening him, and the cops will provide round-the-clock protection for a while.”
“So, like I said, what are you going to do if he doesn’t resign?”
Mahoney shrugged. “The party will support some other Democrat when his term’s up. And since every district adjacent to his in Orange County is held by a Republican, there’s a good chance he’ll be replaced by one—but I can live with a Republican more than I can live with Rudman.”
“I recorded what he said. I could send the tape to the media.”
“No way. I’d end up with a fuckin’ circus on the Hill. Rudman will say that he confessed only because you held a gun to his head, and he’s not going to get expelled, much less convicted, based on a forced confession. But the media won’t believe Rudman and they’ll punch me silly, saying that Congress can’t be trusted with a secret, and every spook outfit in town will have a permanent excuse for not telling us what they’re doing. So I don’t want anyone hearing that tape, but tell your little CIA buddy that I’ll make sure Rudman doesn’t serve another term. That’s the best I can do.”
“Yeah, well, my little CIA buddy and her boss have another idea. Unless you stop them, they’re going to send the recording to Rulon Tully.”
Mahoney tilted his head and made an I-hadn’t-thought-about-that face. Then he nodded, as if, after thinking about it, that didn’t sound like a bad idea.
“Did you hear what I said? If they send the recording to Tully, there’s a good chance he’ll have Rudman killed, and that’s not what I had in mind when I made him admit that he talked to Tully. I mean, I know if Rudman’s exposed that’ll be embarrassing to you and the party, but do you want—”
Mahoney interrupted him and made one of the longest speeches DeMarco had ever heard him make. “Did it ever occur to you,” he said, “that this isn’t about me being embarrassed? I’ve served this country my whole life. I’ve fought for it. I’ve been wounded fighting for it. And in spite of some of the things I do, I’ve never betrayed my country, and I despise the people that do. And you know that old cliché about how you can be shot for treason? Well, it’s bullshit. When was the last time somebody in this country was executed for treason? If they catch somebody giving away secrets to the Chinese or the Russians, they send ’em to jail, but that’s all that happens. And when it comes to rich bastards like Marty Taylor and Rulon Tully ... well, you can forget about them even doing time. But these people betrayed their country and they got an agent killed. And this agent, like LaFountaine said, was providing us intelligence on a regime that wants to give nuclear bombs to terrorists. So, Joe, if these guys kill each other, do you really think I give a shit?”
Mahoney jerked his big chin at the door and said, “Keep me posted.”
Chapter 30
“Why did you do it? I’m not going to ask you again.”
“Because he hates Marty Taylor! I just figured Tully would like to hear that Taylor was doing something illegal and later on he’d get in trouble for it. I never thought he’d leak the story to the press.”
Xavier Quinn hit the stop button on the recorder. “What would you like me to do?” he asked.
Quinn said these words without the slightest trace of emotion— and this, as usual, annoyed Rulon Tully. It annoyed the shit out of him. It would be nice if just once Quinn could at least pretend to care about his employer’s welfare. He despised Xavier Quinn.
But he despised everyone.
It was a case of which came first, the chicken or the egg. As a boy, Rulon Tully was shorter than most other kids his age and had a head that was incredibly large in proportion to his narrow-shouldered, scrawny body. He had rubbery lips that were the color of earthworms, protruding eyes, and a small, red lump for a nose that provided an unsightly perch for his glasses. At the same time, he was smarter than everyone—including his parents and his teachers. He had an incredible memory—not quite photographic, but almost—and a facility for math and science that was preternatural. By the time he was twelve, he was doing differential equations while the rest of the morons in his class were struggling with elementary algebra. The end result of all this was that he was disdainful of his peers because they were stupid—and they made fun of him because of the way he looked. He hated them when they wouldn’t accept him—and they hated him because he was unattractive, smart, and obnoxious. But which came first? Did the other children turn Rulon Tully into a misanthrope or was he a misanthrope the day he emerged from his mother’s womb?
And he was a misanthrope. He knew this because a very expensive psychiatrist had told him so. He had seen the psychiatrist three times a week for a six-month period when he was in his thirties, each hourly session costing him nine hundred dollars. At the end of six months he had learned the clinical name for his condition but he learned nothing to change his view of his fellow man. He simply added the psychiatrist to the long list of people he hated.
Xavier Quinn, on the other hand, wasn’t misanthropic. He was simply disinterested in anything not directly related to his job and he didn’t sympathize or empathize with anyone—not even his employer. He also rarely showed joy or anger. Rulon Tully’s expensive ex-psychiatrist probably had a name for Quinn’s condition, too, but Tully didn’t care. He wanted his head of security to be competent, brutal, and loyal—and Quinn met all those criteria.
But Rulon Tully still despised him.
“I suppose Rudman could die,” Tully said, “but at this point that would be too risky.”
Quinn just stood there; his employer had neither posed a question nor given him a task.
“And you still don’t have any idea who killed the reporter?” Tully said.
“No,” Quinn answered.
Just “no”—the word uttered with no indication that Quinn was sorry he was unable to answer Tully’s question—and Tully wanted to scream at the man. He knew from past experience, however, if he started screaming Quinn would just stand there, his face completely impassive, as Tully ranted.
Quinn was ex-military, and maybe that was why he was impervious to Tully’s rages. He had short, dark hair; was good-looking in an unremarkable way; and had a compact, muscular body—a body he maintained in the million-dollar gym that Tully had built for his ex-wife, that adulterous bitch.
“And you have no idea who made this recording?” Tully asked.
“No. But there are other things we do know. We know that Mahata Javadi didn’t have a brother—I still have a few contacts at Langley— so whoever talked to Tully was lying. We also know this person didn’t send the recording to the press or the Bureau—they just sent it to you—which leads me to believe that whoever is behind this doesn’t want to publicly expose Rudman. Finally, we know that the recording can’t be used to convict Rudman of a crime because it was a coerced confession, so convicting Rudman isn’t what they want.”
Tully spun his stool around. He liked the drafting stool for that reason: he could spin it all the way around and if no one else was in the room, he liked to see how many revolutions he could make it spin with a single push. He even oiled the mechanism to make it spin faster. His record was four and a half spins, although no one knew that but him.
“So why do you think they sent the tape?” Tully asked, although he already knew the answer to this question.
“I think,” Quinn said, “that the person who sent this recording has deduced that you had Acosta killed and would like for you to kill Congressman Rudman.”
“I agree,” Tully said. “And I think that tells us who sent us the recording.”
“Who?”
“The CIA. They want somebody to pay for the death of their spy.” Tully spun the chair around again, then continued. “And you know what that means?”
“No,” Quinn said.
“It means they’ll be coming after me next.”
“So what are you going to do?”
Tully smiled. “I’m not going to do anything. Rudman may have confessed with a gun to his head but he’s not going to testify in court. He’s not going to implicate himself and he’s too afraid to implicate me. And the cops can’t prove I had Acosta killed. So I’m not going to do a damn thing.”
After Quinn left, Tully’s anger—which was always smoldering at some level—swelled to the point where he felt like breaking every object in the room. This whole mess had started because of Marty Taylor and now, because of what he had done to destroy Taylor, he was being targeted by that vengeful prick who ran the CIA. He shoved off as hard as he could with his short right leg and his small right foot, and did a three-turn spin on his drafting stool. He spun around and around and around—hating Marty Taylor.
The drafting table and stool were well-publicized affectations. He had used a drafting table for a brief period when he obtained his first patent and he told reporters that he still used the table because it helped him think, because it reminded him of his roots. That was all bullshit, of course. A PR gal he had hired said he needed a few quirky things to set him apart, to make him colorful—as if his appearance wasn’t enough. The drafting table had been one of those quirky things. His Japanese garden planted with exotic bonsai plants, the ponds surrounding his house filled with butterfly koi, his position on the board of the children’s cancer foundation—those were all part of his manufactured image, too.
He didn’t give a damn about the koi, the dwarf plants, or the bald-headed kids.
He didn’t even care about making money anymore. He had more money than he could possibly spend and it had been a long time since simply buying something—a piece of art, a mansion, the most expensive car in the world—thrilled him in any significant way. What he really cared about, what he really loved, was power.
He had discussed this with his psychiatrist when they explored the subject of what made him happy and why he was so unhappy. It was then that he realized the thing that made him happiest was knowing thousands of people worked for him and he could, any time he desired, disrupt and even destroy their lives by firing them. He loved that the arrogant, high-powered executives he employed cowered around him, like obsequious priests kissing the cardinal’s ring. It thrilled him that powerful politicians danced to his whimsical tune, terrified if they offended him he would use his wealth to run them out of office. And there was absolutely nothing he liked better than swooping down on a company and taking it over, knowing everybody in the company was just sick with anticipation, realizing that their fate was in his hands.
His therapist couldn’t cure him and had shown him that he would never be truly content, not the way normal people were. But were it not for one thing, he could have been almost content, or at least as content as it was possible for a man like him to be. He had wealth, he had fame, and, most important, he had the power of a wrathful god over a large segment of the population on several continents. The one thing that prevented him from reaching his own distorted version of bliss was Marty Taylor.
What he felt for Taylor was something beyond hate. Hate, he reserved for the human race. His feelings for Taylor went so far beyond hate that there wasn’t even a word for it, at least not one he knew. He could have had Taylor killed, and had thought many times about doing just that, but killing him wasn’t enough. Killing him, no matter how slowly and painfully it was done, was just too quick. It would be over too soon. He didn’t want Taylor to die; he wanted him to suffer, and suffer for years, and not just physically. He wanted to humiliate him and strip him of his wealth and put him in a cage. Yes, he loved that image: some tattooed skinhead making pretty Marty Taylor his prison bitch—over and over and over again.
Rulon Tully was in his forties when he married for the first and only time. Prior to that time, he had had many, many women. He paid a good number of those women to sleep with him, but there were others, beautiful women, who gave themselves to him even as stunted and ugly as he was. The problem was he knew that these women didn’t love him and only wanted him because of the lifestyle he could give them, and he never allowed himself to be seduced by some grasping gold digger with an angel’s face and a perfectly sculpted body. Being a misanthropic genius, he was incapable of deluding himself into thinking that any of those women really loved him or wanted him for who he was.
And then along came Shelly. She had been his masseuse. Because of the body that God had so cruelly given him, he needed daily massages to loosen knotty muscles, to relieve the pain of aching joints, and to make bearable a spinal column that felt like a bony snake gnawing at the flesh surrounding it. And that had been Shelly’s job, to use her wonderful, strong hands to treat all those ailments, and she’d been good at it.
Shelly was pretty but she wasn’t beautiful. She was short and somewhat stocky; she reminded him, physically, of the gymnast Mary Lou Retton. “Cute” was the word most often used to describe her. Right from the beginning, he sensed that she wasn’t repulsed by his looks. She was a simple person with a good heart and he could tell she genuinely enjoyed his company. The fact was, though, and he was objective enough to realize this, she enjoyed everyone’s company; she was just one of those perpetually optimistic, good-natured souls who liked 99 percent of the people they met. So, the fact that she liked him wasn’t unusual, but what was unusual was that she was the only person he’d ever met who liked him for who he was and not for what he owned. She didn’t laugh at his jokes because she wanted a bigger tip; she didn’t flatter him outrageously to pump up his ego; she even kidded him for being just as short as she was, and nobody—absolutely nobody—dared to make jokes about his size.
Five months after he met her, he convinced himself he loved her— although it’s hard to be sure you’re in love when you’re a misanthrope— and he asked her to marry him. And for a brief time, for almost two years, it was as if his misanthropy went into remission, as if he were afflicted with a cancer rather than a mental illness.
Then handsome Marty Taylor stepped in and destroyed his life.
He and Shelly had attended the film festival in Cannes that year, and Marty was there. He didn’t like Marty Taylor, of course, but he’d met him on several occasions and had to admit that the man was as charming as anyone he’d ever known. Shelly, of course, thought he was delightful. Then, as luck would have it, he had to return unexpectedly to California because of some business disaster, one that could have cost him millions had he not reacted, but Shelly wanted to stay in Cannes. She loved seeing all those movie stars. Before he left, he made the mistake of asking Marty to make sure his wife had a good time while he was gone—and Marty made sure that she had a very good time. And as bad as her unfaithfulness was, he learned of the affair via a front-page picture in a tabloid newspaper. So not only did he have to suffer her betrayal and the agony he felt when he lost the one person in the world that he thought had genuinely loved him, but he also had to endure the humiliation of the entire world knowing he was a cuckold.
There was just no word to describe how much he hated Marty Taylor.
Rulon Tully considered himself to be a ruthless man, but he was hardly the most ruthless man that Xavier Quinn had known. Quinn was a West Point graduate and he had the military skills to be a good officer but not the political ones. Realizing this, he resigned his commission in his early thirties and became a military consultant—a mercenary, in other words—to some men who were truly ruthless: African dictators and Russian oilmen.
At the age of forty-two, Quinn looked at his bank account and the scars on various parts of his anatomy, and accepted a job as Tully’s head of security. And although Tully had never resorted to mass murder as some of Quinn’s previous employers had done, he had asked Quinn to do a number of illegal things on his behalf. Quinn had blackmailed Tully’s competitors. He had stolen industrial secrets. He had bribed politicians and IRS investigators and, if bribes didn’t work, he blackmailed them, too. But the things he did for Tully were not as risky as what he had done in the past, and the benefits were enormous.
