Racing with the Devil

The Silent Servant, Ferdinand

Ferdinand could tell that something was disturbing the ambassador as soon as he’d come back into the room. He knew what the man and his son had been arguing about. It wasn’t because their voices had been loud; it was because he had been just outside the not-fully-closed door, listening to them. It was his business to know everything that went on in the ambassador’s residence. Any good Filipino servant would do so. But for him, it was a special duty.

He didn’t know why the ambassador didn’t want his son to go on this trip, but he clearly didn’t. The ambassador had been on edge for weeks. Before, in fact, that young embassy staffer, Carter, had come to the residence and into Caldwell’s bed. Ferdinand hadn’t minded that so much. The ambassador was so preoccupied with the young man that it almost was as if Ferdinand was in the residence by himself to do whatever he wanted. And Carter hadn’t been much trouble. He was neat, not leaving his clothes scattered here and about and expecting Ferdinand to clean up after him. And, although he took a lot of showers—mostly after sex; there was a lot of sex going on with the ambassador in those couple of weeks—he wasn’t messy. And he didn’t parade himself about. They were discreet about it, and there wasn’t a lot of noise even when they were fucking. The ambassador wasn’t equipped long—although he was thick—or energized enough to give the big strapping blond much to scream about.

Which was fine with Ferdinand.

Then the ambassador’s son had arrived—somewhat unexpectedly—and, Ferdinand knew, because he had a hand on the pulse of everything that happened in the ambassador’s residence, the young man’s arrival was not entirely to the ambassador’s pleasing. Carter had abruptly packed up and moved out of the residence then and into his own apartment. Ferdinand had thought he knew why. Carter and the ambassador had gotten a little frosty about it. Ferdinand thought it was because the ambassador’s son, another hunky young blond, would be sleeping in the ambassador’s bedroom now, being fucked by the ambassador. Carter and the ambassador’s son looked enough alike to be twins.

But this didn’t happen—the ambassador fucking his son. The two were cordial to each other, but they more or less stayed out of each other’s way. Sean Caldwell picked a bedroom well away from the ambassador’s, and there were some nights he didn’t come home at all.

Then life reverted to the way it was before Carter moved in. And that was fine with Ferdinand. It made it easier for him to keep track of what was happening around here.

The ambassador’s son had come to his room and told him that the ambassador wanted him to continue packing Caldwell’s luggage. Ferdinand hadn’t finished packing his own suitcase. He was both excited and apprehensive about this trip to Egypt. He had been in the emirate for several months now, rarely leaving the embassy compound, being very careful when he did, and had waited for something like this to happen, not knowing if it would come today or maybe tomorrow. With a sigh, he stopped packing, went into his bathroom and took a quick shower, and then, in his customary white shorts and T-shirt, padded to the ambassador’s bedroom.

Caldwell was at his desk still, hunched over and scanning and signing papers. He looked sad and a little lost.

“You wanted me?” Ferdinand asked in not much more than a whisper from across the room.

“Yes, I want you,” Caldwell answered. He put his pen away and pushed back from the desk, while Ferdinand padded across the room on bare feet, came around to between Caldwell and the desk, and reached down and untied the sash on the ambassador’s dressing gown. He was naked under the robe and in half erection. Ferdinand knelt between the ambassador’s spread thighs and took the cock in his mouth, barely managing to get the thickness in, but quickly able to take it all in. Caldwell sighed and leaned back in the chair. Ferdinand could feel some of the tension draining out of the man—but not all.

This was his main duty for the embassy, though. This was what Caldwell employed him for. As a tension reliever. There wasn’t much affection between them, really. Ferdinand knew that he wasn’t much more in the ambassador’s thoughts than the wallpaper in the room, but that was OK with Ferdinand. It was just a job and an opportunity for him as well.

He was the ambassadorial tension reliever. He was so much more, but Caldwell wouldn’t notice that.

Having coaxed the cock hard, Ferdinand rose and slipped off his shorts and T-shirt. He’d worn nothing underneath them. He’d known why the ambassador had called him back to the bedroom. He knew from the tension he’d felt in the room when he’d left it that Caldwell would need to be soothed in his own special way. Saddling himself in the lap of the sitting ambassador, facing him, Ferdinand drew the older man’s face into his chest, where the man’s tongue and teeth found Ferdinand’s pert little nipples, and slowly descending his channel on Caldwell’s cock, Ferdinand began fucking himself on the hard staff. Caldwell wasn’t all that big for a strapping blond like Carter, but the thickness of the cock was taxing for the small channel of the Filipino, and Ferdinand moaned and groaned as he rose and fell on the cock, slowly opening to be able to take it in ever quicker motion.

Caldwell was aroused enough—and distracted enough from his other worries—to lift Ferdinand and move him to his back on the bed, with his legs raised and spread and Caldwell hunched over him and driving hard to finish him there.

It was completed sex, but it was more tension reliever and duty than passion for either of them. As Caldwell pulled out of Ferdinand’s channel and moved toward the bathroom, his mind was already racing ahead to the trip he had to make—to a journey into the den of the devil, he was afraid. And, for his part, Ferdinand was thinking of the clothes he was laying on and whether any would need to be cleaned of semen stains—and how many would need to be ironed again before he could finish packing the ambassador’s luggage.

* * * *

Sharm El Sheikh

Chris Carter was caught in the act of trying to plant a bomb under the conference table in the Four Seasons conference center in Sharm El Sheikh. He was there to set up the commo equipment, and he managed to make it all the way into the meeting room with all the components he needed to splatter everyone around the round table against the concrete walls of the venue when he set it off from a distance. Four Marines who had been posing as the advance team of Secret Service agents charged with protecting the vice president of the United States, America’s representative to the Middle East peace talks, converged on him, knowing what to expect, and he didn’t have the opportunity to assemble and activate the device.

There were six doors into the meeting room and only four Marines. Carter’s reflexes were fast—he had been on his guard from the moment he had been helicoptered into Sharm El Sheikh from the U.S. embassy in Cairo. He had obtained the bomb components from someone in the Four Seasons hotel itself, a Stanford professor who was accredited to the conference as a U.S. political adviser and who had, in turn, been provided a stockpile of explosives and arms from an al-Qaeda terrorist cell in the coastal resort. But the Marines hadn’t monitored the transfer of materials from the professor to Carter’s hotel room the previous evening. All of their attention had been focused on Carter himself and what he would be doing in the conference room beyond setting up communications links.

The Marines entered through four doors, and Carter immediately guessed he was undone. He bolted for one of the doors they hadn’t entered from, propelling himself out through a butler’s pantry, into a kitchen area, through a door out to the garbage bins, and then vaulting over a wall onto the terrace of the hotel pool area. Two Marines had followed him. The other two, however, had taken another route to the terrace.

Seeing the two Marines take a stance, guns drawn, on the terrace in front of him, and hearing the other two pounding the pavement behind him, Carter decided to go out in a blaze of glory. He pulled a plastic gun out of one of the utility pockets of his work pants, raised it, and was given the sendoff he sought simultaneously by all four Marines.

At the same time, fifty miles up the coast, on a landing strip at At Tur, on the western side of the Sinai Peninsula, the door to a private Santag Oil Company jet opened, its stairs were lowered, and, one after the other, Tyler Haskell, Sean Caldwell, and Amir el-Basir emerged, hands shielding eyes from the blinding sun. They were at the bottom of the stairs before they realized that the reception party didn’t consist of oil company drivers and limousines to take them, separately, for appearances, to the Four Seasons resort in Sharm El Sheikh.

Tyler Haskell was the first to lock into recognizing his wife, Penny Haskell, standing there with Marines in U.S. Secret Service uniforms fanned behind her—who had Egyptian army soldiers, machine guns at the ready, standing behind them.

“Penny,” was the most he was able to say before she raised both arms in front of her as if to ward off whatever questions he might have about why she was there. The company limousines, with their embarrassed and scared-looking drivers were standing by, and it was obvious that they’d already told the American officials and Egyptian soldiers that Haskell was to be taken to Sharm El Sheikh rather than visiting the Santag offices in At Tur.

“Don’t say a word, Tyler,” Penny said. “And I suggest you continue not saying a word. But you’ll have to go with these men.” Her hand gestures pointed to the men standing behind her, and when Tyler refocused in that direction, he almost went into shock. Standing there with the Marines in Secret Service camouflage was Tony Jacobs, who Tyler knew was Penny’s boss at CIA headquarters in Langley. The oil company executive was cuffed and marched off to a waiting white SUV without a further word or fight.

Also meekly handcuffed and marched away was the ambassador’s son, Sean Caldwell. He had told his father’s secretary, Alison, to cancel the plane reservations accompanying his father to Sharm El Sheikh, but he hadn’t asked her to cancel his hotel reservations. He knew he could catch a ride with Haskell and Al-Basir. He was taken to a second white SUV.

For his part, Amir al-Basir blustered about who he was and that he had diplomatic immunity in any circumstance these interlopers wanted to challenge or detain him, and he put up a struggle. But he was no match for two hefty Marines backed up by four Egyptian soldiers and was taken to a third SUV.

As the three SUVs roared off, two in one direction, north, and the third toward the southeast, the pilots of the company jet were just leaving the plane. They looked at the remaining people on the tarmac with confusion and apprehension.

“Shall we?” Tony Jacobs turned to Penny Haskell and asked. “I think we’re within our rights to commandeer the plane and it would save time from going back to Cairo and going on from there.”

“Why don’t you? I’ll need to stay here. I’m afraid we’re not finished here. But I have the authority now to direct the flights of this jet. I’m the Santag regional manager’s wife—at least for the time being—and I know the jet to be quite comfortable.”

Jacobs stopped the pilots as they tried to pass to enter the small air terminal. “Do you recognize this woman? Mrs. Haskell, and a U.S. embassy official in the country where your jet service is registered?”

“Yes, sir,” the pilot answered, still confused and apprehensive.

“You are to return to the emirate immediately,” Jacobs said, “under the direction of Mrs. Haskell here. But refuel first, now, and we wish you to take us—these two U.S. Secret Service agents and me—somewhere else first. The Egyptian army colonel here will go into the terminal with us and help you refile a new flight plan.”

* * * *

Ambassador Hunter Caldwell was working hard to keep himself from shaking as he left Josef Garfeh’s room at the Four Seasons. Garfeh had suggested that they meet to leave together for the start of the conference. Caldwell couldn’t shake the fear that something was going to happen in the conference room, something momentous and quite possibly horrendous. Why had he let himself be dragged into this? Why hadn’t he just come clean on his sexual proclivities and retired into oblivion?

“Uh, I have to make a stop first,” Garfeh said at the door to his room, where they had met. “The excitement of it all. Weak bladder.”

“Tell me about it,” Caldwell answered, with a nervous laugh. He had felt like he needed to piss for an hour or more now, but he was all pissed out. He thought it was because of how important this occasion—the pinnacle of his career, really, to be present at U.S.-brokered Egypt and Israel talks. It had come home to him, as he had spied the separate delegations forming up around their principals in various parts of the resort. The vice president of the United States, who Caldwell had only seen from afar in Washington, and the prime minister of Israel and the new president of Egypt, who he’d only seen in news coverage. And now they’d all be sitting around a round table and he would be sitting behind the vice president and drinking history in.

“Could you take my briefcase here in with you?” Garfeh asked. “I have another hefty one to bring along—all of those heavy files, you know. They won’t let us have any electronic devices in the room, which includes computers.”

Garfeh slipped the strap of the briefcase over Caldwell’s shoulder, not waiting for an assent, and disappeared back in his room and shut the door.

Overwhelmed by the occasion and slightly numb other than the faint feeling he needed to take a piss, Caldwell walked, like a zombie, toward the bank of elevators. One opened while he was a good forty feet off and he took in his breath in a gasp. A young blond man had stepped out of the elevator and looked down the hall at Caldwell and stepped back into the elevator. The ambassador’s first thought was of his son, Sean. But Sean couldn’t be here. He’d been left back in the emirate. Sean couldn’t be here. Whatever may happen here, Caldwell didn’t want his son involved. It couldn’t be Sean. He just must be so nervous that he was seeing what wasn’t there.

He was stopped at the door of the conference room. He could see that the principals were already settling at the circular table and their underlings were milling about the room.

“Excuse me, Ambassador. Could you come with us, please?”

“I’m attending the conference,” Caldwell said indignantly, as he turned toward the burly young man in a black suit. The man had spoken English with a southern drawl. One of ours, Caldwell thought. Probably Secret Service, considering the black suit. There was another man in a black suit on the other side of him, and beyond that . . . it couldn’t be. She had gone to Washington on an early flight today. Penny Haskell. It couldn’t be. Just like it couldn’t be Sean emerging from the elevator and then going back into it and the elevator door being closed before he got to it.

“Where is Professor Garfeh?” the women who couldn’t be Penny Haskell but who obviously was, said to him. She wasn’t smiling. Her voice sounded hard. She shouldn’t be talking to him like that. In an embassy a COS was subordinate to the ambassador. President Kennedy had declared that fifty years ago—although, god knew, it was difficult to enforce. “You asked for his room number at the reception desk. We thought he’d be coming down with you.”

One of the black-suited men had taken the briefcase Garfeh had given him off his shoulder and was opening it.

Before Caldwell could answer the woman who couldn’t be Penny Haskell but was, the black-suited man was backing off and in a near-panicked voice was saying, “Need to pull all of this away from the room and call the bomb squad, Ted. We got ourselves a bomb here.”

That man hustled in one direction while Haskell and the other black-suited man pulled Caldwell in another. Caldwell’s mouth was flapping in the breeze. A bomb. Garfeh had given him a bomb to carry into the conference room. Now he knew what this all was about—what Garfeh had wanted him here for.

* * * *

Sean Caldwell, the ambassador’s son, knocked on the hotel room door. That had been a near thing seeing his father here. He’d barely been able to get out of the way. Luckily for him, his father had looked like he was deep in thought.

Josef Garfeh answered the door and pulled Sean into the room. He poked his head out into the corridor and looked both ways before he shut the door.

“I came as soon as I could,” Sean said. “You told me to find you as soon as I got to Sharm El Sheikh.”

“Are you ready to race with the devil—no matter what?” Garfeh asked.

Sean could see that the professor’s suitcase was open and on a luggage rack. It was still filled with clothes. He hadn’t unpacked. He wasn’t planning on staying for the conference.

Not for the first time, the thought ran through Sean’s mind that one man’s devil was another man’s ally. “Yes, whatever you want—but could we—again? I want it bad. And there may not—”

“Very well,” Garfeh answered, half in irritation, but Sean was already pulling his shirt over his head, showing the Arab the beauty of his young, blond body. Garfeh had his own weaknesses. He couldn’t resist the young hunk, who already was pulling his pants down.

Garfeh was dressed in a dishdasha, with nothing under it, and he only had to hike up the material of the robe to his waist and sit on the side of the bed to be ready for Sean, who sank on his knees between Garfeh’s spread thighs and began servicing the professor’s cock. From there, it was but a short movement for Sean to be saddled in the Arab’s lap, facing him, his torso arched back toward the floor, propped up with fists on the carpet at the foot of the bed while Garfeh pumped him with his cock.

Fifteen minutes and they both had ejaculated. Sean rose back up and embraced the professor’s chest, holding the older man’s cock inside his channel, while Garfeh directed the young blond’s attention to a duffle bag in the corner of the room and gave him instructions on where to place it by the French windows from the hotel’s conference room leading out onto the pool terrace.

Sean didn’t need to ask what was in the duffel bag.

“I understand,” he said in a tremulous voice. “But first, please, once more.”

Garfeh was weak for Sean in the respect of sex and, with a sigh, laid back on the bed and let Sean hunch over him, holding Garfeh’s wrists above his head in his fists, as he began to ride the hardening cock again.

Thus Garfeh was both totally surprised and incapacitated when the U.S. Marines posing as Secret Service agents burst into the room, held him down, and handcuffed him as Sean rose off him.

Sean was nearly dressed again when Penny Haskell entered the room.

“I expected you much sooner than this,” Sean said to her. “I was about to run out of opportunities to hold him here.”

“We encountered an explosive situation downstairs. What did he ask you to do?”

“He says there’s a bomb in that duffel bag over there. He wanted me to—”

“Jezuss S. Christ,” Haskell exclaimed. “God, this man has been busy. Bomb. There,” she called out in a commanding voice to another set of Marines who were entering the room, their eyes following the direction Haskell’s arm was pointed in. “Rest of us, out of here.”

As they trooped down the corridor toward the elevators, a struggling terrorist spat out, “You can’t stop this. There are too many—”

“Chris Carter is dead, not having completed the mission you gave him. And we have your cousin, my husband, and Ambassador Caldwell. Who else have you put out there?”

Garfeh couldn’t disguise his shock.

“Just as I suspected; we have them all. And as you can surmise, you never did have Sean Caldwell here.”

She turned to point to Sean, who had been fast on her heels coming down the corridor, but who had stopped several paces back and was showing signs of being in shock himself.

“I’m sorry, Sean,” she said. “I couldn’t tell you. Your father got wrapped up in this too. But I’m sure he didn’t know all that he was involved in—unlike my husband. He was doing this because he thought you had been caught up in Garfeh’s trap. He was trying to protect you. It won’t go as hard for him as for the others.” She hadn’t been truthful about what she knew of Ambassador Caldwell’s involvement in the terrorist conspiracy—and the reasons he had been caught up in it. But Sean wouldn’t know if she could help it. He had come to them when Garfeh first recruited him, back in Sanford, and had been working with the Agency on this ever since. She would protect Sean from the truth as long as she could. She only wished there was someone who would and could protect her from the truth about her husband, Tyler.

Garfeh was deflated and quiet as they waited for an elevator. But in a whisper, he asked, “You have Amir?”

“Yes, we have your cousin.”

“But his father . . . Amir has immunity.”

“No one has immunity from my people,” Haskell answered, her voice hard. “No one will even know where to start looking for him.”

“Where have you taken him?”

“The same place we’re going to take you. Someplace where you won’t know where you are. Someplace that almost no one else will know where you are. You have a long, painful journey ahead of you, Professor Garfeh. There is so much we want to know from you—so much I’m sure that you’ll tell us . . . eventually.”

* * * *

Standing, unnoticed by anyone passing by, in the lobby of the Sharm El Sheikh Four Seasons hotel, was the Filipino houseboy, Ferdinand. He kept a hand in his pocket, cradling the plastic gun that had been delivered to him in his room in the night. Since then he’d moved around the hotel at will. He was just a Filipino servant. Nobody saw Filipino servants. They were just like the wallpaper—there when needed, but unseen.

He knew he was needed now. He’d stood by and seen the various men hustled here and there by mean-looking men wearing black suites that, impressively, he thought didn’t need to be pressed despite how forcefully the men were moving about. The men they were pushing around included his own employer, Ambassador Caldwell. Hunter Caldwell was in handcuffs and his head was hanging low as he was manhandled through the hotel lobby. Ferdinand had never thought he’d see the day of the ambassador being brought so low. It sent a little chill of pleasure through his body. The man was a cold fish. Just a user. Just like all of the rest.

Ferdinand has been indoctrinated well by the Islamist extremist Abu Sayyaf terrorist group back in the Philippines, a group with close ties with al-Qaeda. Abu Sayyaf had sent Ferdinand to the Middle East to help support an important al-Qaeda operation. Ferdinand hadn’t been told the full objective here, but he was no fool. He’d heard the ambassador say who would be here—the vice president of the United States, the prime minister of Israel, and the president of Egypt. It didn’t take more than a mere servant to know who were the targets here.

He knew that he probably would not survive beyond the first break taken by the leaders meeting in the conference room. And he knew that he wouldn’t be able to take them all out before he died. But he also knew that getting just one would make this operation a success and that his own name would be emblazoned across the sky as a Muslim martyr of note. What was it his cell leader had told him before he had left to worm his way into the service of the ambassador? Ah, yes, he had told Ferdinand that he would be racing with the devil. That’s who he was racing with—the devils of the West. It would be a race he would win to a lesser or greater extent—as soon as those in the conference room started coming out to take a break from their talks.

What Ferdinand didn’t know, though, was that this was a sham conference. A conference was being held, sure enough. There would always be rumors flying around about such a conference. For believability, there needed to be a conference. It just wasn’t here. It was close by, certainly, but still a world away. The U.S. vice president was brokering talks between the Israeli prime minister and the Egyptian president, but it wasn’t the Egyptian president who was hosting the conference in Sharm El Sheikh. It was the Israeli prime minister who was hosting it at the Israeli resort city at the top of the nearby Gulf of Aqaba—where the CIA’s Middle East chief, Tony Jacobs, had had the Santag Oil Company’s jet fly him earlier in the day.

The men posing as the leaders here in Sharm El Sheikh were body doubles. And it was, indeed, possible that one or more would lose his life at the hand of Ferdinand—the wallpaper terrorist who had been overlooked—but there would never be a whisper in the media or, if the United States could help it, in the intel talk around the world, of anything that had transpired here in Sharm El Sheikh.

- FINI -