Swiss Exchange

Luca turned his flashlight on in the cavern under Riffleberg Mountain to check one more time on whether he could discern what research was being done here. He knew it wasn’t nuclear. He hadn’t turned the overhead lights on in case they were connected to some sort of alarm system. Failing to gain any clues again, he switched the light off and stole out of the interior cave and into the one before this toward the surface of the mountain, the one backing onto the Hotel Riffleberg, a small ski resort hotel facing the Matterhorn. This cave was used as the hotel’s wine cellar, hiding the larger cavern behind it that housed something far more illicit than wine.

As he reactivated the alarm in the door, having learned the codes from the Iranian researcher he’d let lay him, the door to the back of the hotel opened and the hotel manager, Akhtar Fariba, appeared.

“There you are, Luca. You were supposed to come to my apartment. What are you doing in the wine cellar?”

“The cook needs some French sherry for something he’s preparing for tonight. I said I’d fetch it for him. Here the sherry shelf is right here. Ah, here’s a bottle of Pommer-Xeres. That should do.”

“I didn’t realize you had the code for the door to the wine cellar.” Fariba was looking at the other door—the one to the cavern behind, but he wasn’t seeing anything amiss there. It was only a matter of time, however, before he’d find out that Luca had gotten the code from one of his researchers, Luca knew. The promised exchange needed to be accomplished soon or this whole thing would be blown. Luca resorted to the only distraction he knew had been working with Fariba for weeks now.

“The cook gave me the code to the door. Sorry I got waylaid by the cook’s request. I can’t wait to go up to your bed.” He came in close to the hotel manager and rubbed his hand on Fariba’s crotch. Fifteen minutes later, they were on the bed in the manager’s bedroom, with its window framing the Matterhorn to the west, and the tall, thin, lightly muscled late-forties Iranian was on his back. The small, Swiss, darkly handsome Luca Meier was straddling the hotel manager’s pelvis, leaning back, and palming the older man’s knees, and riding the man’s cock, crying out, “Ja, ja, scheiß auf mich. Du bist so ein Hengst!—Yes, yes, screw me. You’re such a stud!”

Holding the slim young man’s waist between his hands and both lifting and slamming down Luca’s ass on his cock and using the leverage of the heels to thrust up into the young man’s passage, Fariba, lost in the moment, answered, “Take it. Take it. Take my cock!” in Farsi, losing, Luca hoped, all remembrance he’d caught his reception desk supervisor and boytoy in the caves behind the hotel.

Meanwhile, down the valley, in the town of Zermatt, the young man traveling with a Canadian passport and claiming to be a New Zealander, Jeff Reynolds, was standing, naked, at the balcony door looking up the slopes to the Matterhorn. His eyes were trying to pick out the lights of the ski resort hotel on Riffleberg Mountain they were going to the next day, where he was likely, if they were lucky, to be staying for an indefinite, dangerous time. Reynolds was a handsome, blond young man not long having finished his chemical engineering doctorate at Stanford.

Which of those lights were for the Hotel Riffleberg, he wondered. How had he come to this highly dangerous position?

“Come back to bed,” a commanding voice demanded from behind him.

Reynolds groaned. The man traveling as a New Zealander entrepreneur arms buyer, Peter Summerfield, was demanding, dominating, virile, vigorous, and had the aspect of a Marine general who kept himself in prime condition into his fifties. He also had the thickest, longest cock Reynolds had ever taken.

“Now!” the man declared.

Trembling, Reynolds turned from the window, went back to the bed as commanded, climbed onto the mattress, and positioned himself over the hunky man’s naked body. Grasping the younger man’s waist between his hands, Summerfield brutally pulled Reynolds’s hips down, skewering his ass on the man’s thick cock. Even as he was burying his hard shaft up into the young man’s soft passage, he was thrusting, thrusting, thrusting.

Facing the man’s head, Reynolds palmed Summerfield’s bulging pecs, writhed on the thrusting cock, and cried out, “Yes, yes! Screw me! You’re a stud!”

Summerfield answered with a “Take it. Take it. Take my cock!”

As Reynold fucked himself on his master’s shaft he was wondering about the next day. Would their target, the Iranian Akhtar Fariba, be half as virile and cruel as this man was? What sacrifices did he have to make to serve his country?

* * * *

It isn’t every ski resort hotel whose doorman carries a Kalashnikov rifle or that is devoid of women either on the staff or among its guests. So, the Hotel Riffleberg, within the afternoon shadow of the Matterhorn and pressed into the side of the Swiss mountain of that name southeast of the ski town of Zermatt, was a very special type of hotel. It wasn’t just the skiing that attracted international entrepreneur Peter Summerfield and his boyfriend, Jeff Reynolds, to the small, fourteen-guest room hotel or even the privacy it afforded for them to shack up together, but it also was declared to be to find a venue for some wheeling and dealing in arms sales and delivery without attracting the attention of the world’s terrorism fighters.

As the two entered the Alpine-theme front lobby of the hotel, two watchers, Pavel Sokolov, an associate of Russian arms supplier Gennadi Ivanov, and Kabr Zeidan, boyfriend of Greek shipping magnate Christos Diakos, folded their newspapers and slid off to inform their respective bosses that the New Zealander had arrived and the talks could begin.

As those two left to report, others came out to mark the arrival. Those traveling on New Zealand passports were greeted at the reception desk by a handsome young Swiss reception clerk, Luca Meier, whose attention went immediately to the commanding figure of Peter Summerfield, a man approaching middle age, but doing so with a strong hold on authority, charisma, and fitness. The manager of the hotel, tall, trim, late forties Iranian, Akhtar Fariba, came out to the desk from his adjacent office to bow and scrape to the last of his important guests’ arrival, while looking a bit disturbed at his desk clerk, Meier. The hotel’s ski instructor, the Iranian, Farzin Ahmadi, also came out of his adjacent office to observe—as did three young Iranians of indeterminate status, Basir, Milad, and Naseem, who had been in the bar and had heard the New Zealanders arrive.

None of these men had to tell Summerfield or Reynolds that they were Iranians. The new arrivals already knew that. They knew who was running this “safe haven for illicit contacts” hotel on the snowy slopes in the shadow of the Matterhorn. They knew the doorman with the Kalashnikov, Iman, and both the day and evening bartenders in bar, Darius and Ghazi, were Iranians.

And they knew that everything they said and did here would be reported back to Tehran, to the extent that the Iranian listeners and watchers understood what was happening here. But their mission was so important that they came into the jaws of the Persian lion anyway.

“Welcome to Hotel Riffleberg,” the manager, Ahktar Faribar, said. “I have the Zermatt conference room on the third floor on the mountain side reserved for your meeting today in two hour’s time after the noon meal is served in the dining room here, in back of me. The other gentlemen know that was the projected time. I hope it gives you enough time to freshen up. The conference room is yours to use for as long as you need it.”

“That will be fine, thanks,” Summerfield answered. He looked at the young Swiss desk clerk, Luca Meier, and gave him a smile. Meier’s attention had been focused on Summerfield even while he appeared busy checking them in and making keys for the two-room suite for both Summerfield and Reynolds to occupy in the three-story wing on the western side of the hotel. That wing contained two suites and two regular rooms each on the first-and-second floors and six regular rooms on the third floor. The older man’s interested smile transferred over to Meier. The desk clerk of course knew what it meant for Summerfield and the much younger—about his own age—Reynolds to be roomed together. It signaled something about Summerfield that piqued Meier’s responding interest.

And thus the dance of the meeting on Riffleberg Mountain and the Swiss Exchange operation commenced.

* * * *

The handsome and hunky ski instructor, all winter-suntan, big smile, and sexiness, Farzin Ahmadi, apparently was the hotel’s activities director too, with the openly promoted activities being skiing, eating, and drinking, and the one all of them were eventually to learn was dominant being sex. Right there in the lobby and during lunch, he established that the afternoon activity for all but the three senior guests here to consult with each other, would be skiing. He would take the inexperienced skiers out and would direct the expert one to the appropriate slopes. The only ones to defy him were the Russians, who just stared at him and gave him a snort.

At the initial lunch, it became established by seeing who was seated in the main dining room, that the guest rooms would only be half occupied. The New Zealand buyer, Peter Summerfield, and his boyfriend, Jeff Reyolds, ate at one table and would occupy one of two suites on the first floor of the guest room wing. The Russian supplier, Gennadi Ivanov, and his two associates, Pavel Sokolov and Sergei Popov, were seated at another table. Ivanov occupied the other suite on the first floor. Each of his two associates were assigned a room in the six-room third floor. The Greek transporter, Christos Diakos, and his boyfriend, Kabr Zeidan, sat at a separate table and had been assigned one of the suites on the second floor.

At lunch the latecomers found there were three Olympic skiers, a German, a Frenchman, and an Italian, the three being acquainted with each other, already having been in residence for a week. They and the boyfriend of the German and claimed brother of the Frenchmen sat together at lunch. The Italian was there alone. The German skier, Maximilian Bauer, and his German boyfriend, Jonas Koch, occupied one of the two double rooms on the first floor and the Italian skier, Matteo Caputo, had the other. The Frenchmen, Lyam Beaumont and Alois Durand, having different surnames although claiming to be brothers, each occupied one of the two double rooms on the second floor.

This left one second-floor suite and four double rooms on the third floor unoccupied, although they were soon to understand that the ski instructor, Farzin Ahmadi, was holding the second-floor suite as a party room. The ground floor of the guestroom wing, the wing to the south of the hotel structure, housed a business center and a gym, both very well equipped.

The central lobby, facing the Matterhorn to the east and the downslope of the Riffleberg Mountain, was only a story and a half high. The wing to the north was the service wing, behind the reception desk, with the dining room on the first floor, kitchen and storage rooms on the ground floor, and hotel staff living quarters on the second and third floors. Behind the lobby and pushed into the mountain slope on the hotel’s west side were the hotel bar and offices for the manager, ski instructor, and head chef, with a corridor between them leading back to a door facing the surface of the mountain. The second floor of this wing housed the lounge, the third floor included meeting rooms and a library, and there was a fourth floor, where the senior hotel staffers had small apartments. The hotel was pretty much snowed in much of the year and the hotel staffers either lived in the hotel or near enough to it to ski in. All of the employees were men, most of them doubling as brothel rent-boys, as needed. And it wasn’t too long before it was apparent to the guests that there were several more employees on the hotel staff than there were guests—or accommodations for them.

The door down the corridor off the lobby and to the surface of the mountain the hotel was pressed into led to a distinctive feature of the building. The door opened into a warren of caverns inside the mountain that had been constructed to hold a defensive Swiss military unit during World War II. Switzerland was neutral in the war, a country surrounded by belligerent forces, at one time all Axis powers. Switzerland, which was maintained as a safe haven and somewhere where the diplomats and spies of the opposing forces could meet to negotiate, was not supposed to have defensive forces. But they were realistic and maintained some form of protection for themselves. The caverns in the bowels of Riffleberg Mountain, now accessed through this hotel, once were a military outpost on the Swiss-Italian border. Now, when guests asked what was back there, they were told it was the hotel’s very, very well-stocked wine cellar.

It was at lunch that it became apparent the hotel had a very large staff—larger than necessary to run a boutique hotel. The dining room was split between two areas, one for the guests and one for the staff, the guest area, of course, being much better appointed. To the side of the main banquet room, where the twelve hotel guests now in residence, the hotel manager, the ski instructor, and the reception clerk, Luca Meier, who had checked the New Zealanders in and who rather obviously had some sore of intimate relationship with the hotel manager, were dining, the staff dining room was seating a bit more than a dozen men, most of them young and fit. In addition to these, there were others floating around the hotel—the kitchen staff and waiters, hotel cleaners and reception desk staff members on duty, and that Iranian doorman with his Kalashnikov.

Most curious for those guests who were curious, and it was certainly the business of those meeting here to arrange a private sale and delivery of a large number of weapons, were three young men sitting off to the side in the staff dining area. When queried who they were, the hotel manager breezily said they were researchers, and when pressed on what researchers would be researching here, he said it was something about climate change and they were here so long-term that they were housed and treated like staff. The three men consulting here should have no worry about those three young men. They wouldn’t get in anyone’s way. They worked back in the cave most of the day.

By the end of the lunch, Farzin Ahmadi had the skiing parties for the afternoon all set up. The German Olympic skier, Maximilian Bauer; the Italian, Matteo Caputo; and the Frenchman, Lyam Beaumont, would tackle a difficult slope and the German’s boyfriend, Jonas Koch; Summerfield’s boyfriend, Jeff Reynolds; and Christos Diakos’s boyfriend, Kabr Zeidan, and the Frenchman, Alois Durand, would takes lessons on a beginner’s slope from Ahmadi.

The Russian’s two associates would stick with the supplier, buyer, and transporter during their negotiations in a third-floor meeting room.

It became suspiciously likely that Ahmadi had set everything up for his personal enjoyment and that he was a man on the prowl. He had corralled off the three young men he could be reasonably assured were there as the boytoys of men older than they were. Ahmadi was a randy hunk. They had their ski lesson, but later in the afternoon, all four of them found themselves in a Jacuzzi in the hotel’s gym, wearing nothing more than skimpy Speedos, and Ahmadi was shopping for a sex partner—or two or three.

The Iranian was a god of man, and he hadn’t been wrong about any of the three—Jeff Reynolds, Kabr Zeidan, or Jonas Koch—being approachable for sex. There was kissing and fondling and flirting in the Jacuzzi, and Ahmadi made a date for them to meet in the bar after dinner while the three principals in the arms negotiation were meeting. He’d gather up any of the other men who were interested there and there was a very nice suite they all could adjourn to from there to party.

All was moving along nicely as several of the men involved had planned.

* * * *

In addition to a safe meeting place for the underworld, the Hotel Riffleberg was known among the powerful and gay as a male brothel. It was there just for men and the men who went there knew precisely what sort of men went there. There was no question that the men going there could be had or were being had by other men. Guests could bring their own bedpartner; if they didn’t bring their own, they knew that everyone on the hotel staff was a player and that there surely would be willing company available. There was a question of who was a top and who was a bottom, who was owned and to what extent, and what price, if any was involved. The question was not whether any other man encountered there was gay or not or a player or not. They all were. That made moving into intimacy as the men in the Jacuzzi did that afternoon easy and quick. They had sorted themselves out by eye contact, murmurs, and touching while on the ski slopes or earlier in the hotel.

The commanding Iranian ski instructor, Farzin Ahmadi, invited those he’d been instructing on the slopes, Alois Durand, Jeff Reynolds, Kabr Zeidan, and Jonas Koch, to join him in the Jacuzzi. All did so, except for the Frenchmen, Durand, who had been flirting with the Greek shipping magnate earlier and was funneled off to the bar and the Greek’s suite before reaching the gym. The Greek’s boyfriend, Kabr Zeidan, had flirted with the Italian skier, Matteo Caputo, earlier, and, although he entered the Jacuzzi, when the Italian came out of the business center and looked into the gym, their eyes met, and Zeidan left and went with Caputo. Similarly, Jeff Reynolds, who had been sharing interest with the hotel manager, Akhtar Fariba, went into the Jacuzzi, but when Fariba came to the gym door and gave Reynolds the eye, Reynolds left and followed him away.

None of this really mattered to Farzin Ahmadi. When he entered the Jacuzzi, he pulled the German skier’s boyfriend, Jonas Koch, into the Jacuzzi and onto his lap. The two kissed and fondled each other, and it wasn’t long before their Speedos were off and the hunky Farzin was holding Jonas in his lap, facing him, sheathing his cock, and being raised and lowered on the ski instructor’s cock while they nuzzled and kissed.

The German skier, Maxmilian Bauer, and the French skier, Lyam Beaumont, were in Bauer’s room doing what they’d come to do. The Russians, the arms supplier, Gennadi Ivanov, and his two associates, Pavel Sokulov and Sergei Popolov, were roving the hotel, determining where everyone else was.

The hotel manager, Fariba, didn’t have to worry about where his usual bedpartner, the head clerk of reception, Luca Meier, was, because he had noted already that Meier had made an “interested” contact with the New Zealand buyer, Peter Summerfield, and was now in Summerfield’s suite, lying on his back at the foot of the bed, legs raised and spread, and Summerfield was crouched between his legs, hovering over him, and demonstrating that, though in his fifties, Summerfield was a big-cocked, very virile and vigorous man. The relationship between Fariba and Meier had become rocky, mostly because the young man had become a bit snitty with his man, and as long as Fariba was getting tail, he didn’t mind Meier being used by a guest.

And the hotel manager was getting tail. He took the far younger declared New Zealander, Reynolds, young, fit, handsome, blond, and blue-eyed, to his apartment on the fourth floor of the hotel’s middle wing, which had perhaps the best view of the Matterhorn from the hotel, and after some preliminary pretending that they were there to enjoy the view and share a beer, he had the young man naked, on his back, on a bearskin rug in front of a smoldering fireplace, and was doing pushups on the beautiful, young, willing, and rocking body, with his thin, but well-muscled frame.

Clutching the hotel manager’s undulating buttocks with his hands, moaning deeply, and whimpered, “Yes, yes, just like that. You’re such a stud,” Jeff Reynolds was taking cock from the Iranian just as the plan as specified he needed to do. It had been much easier than the plan had been assumed to be—as was his boss’s covering of the hotel manager’s bedpartner in one of the hotel suites.

In fact, all of the liaisons that had quickly developed and were being consummated were going well to Peter Summerfield’s overall plan.

Falling into the plan, as well, when Summerfield had totally fucked Luca Meier and pushed him off to the side of the bed to lie, belly down, with an arm dangling off of the side of the bed, smiling to himself and mumbling and blowing bubbles, was what ensued when he answered the suite door to admit the Italian, Matteo Caputo, and the Greek’s boytoy, Kabr Zeidan. Room was cleared on the bed for Summerfield to lie on his back, holding Zeidan stretched out on his body and skewered on his cock, while Caputo saddled up to Zeidan from behind and New Zealand and France fucked claimed Palestine in a double penetration skirmish.

Two aspects of “The Plan” were advanced during this afternoon playtime. As the hotel manager and Jeff Reynolds cooled off after sex, Reynolds, carefully not querying why so many of the hotel staffers, including Fariba, were Iranians, did query the hotel manager about the hotel itself. He asked quite a few questions about the hotel and its history so that the questions about the cave behind the hotel didn’t seem to be the focus, although they were.

“Yes, the cavern is large, but we just use the closest section of it now—to store our wines,” Fariba answered to one question and then, when the questioning continued, “Yes, yes, you may see it while you are here—the wine cellar. Open your legs to me as you just did, I will show you anything you want.”

Thereupon Reynolds opened his legs to the man and they fucked again.

Meanwhile, in Summerfield’s suite, the Italian, Caputo, had taken the reception desk clerk, Luca Meier, away to his own room for further one-on-one games while establishing Summerfield would fuck Meier again later, and Summerfield concentrated on the Greek’s boytoy.

“I know you aren’t Palestinian and I know that Christos Diakos doesn’t know that,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” Kabr Zeidan said. A look of fright floated across his face and he attempted to roll off the bed, but the larger, heavier Summerfield had him in a close embrace. His cock was still buried in the young man’s anal passage.

“You are Israeli. You are working for the Mossad, and you are spying on the Greek shipper for your country, keeping track of arms and other supplied to Mideast terrorist organizations. No, don’t bother to deny it. My country is working to the same purpose as the Israelis. We don’t want to expose you—but we will if you don’t cooperate with us—we just want you to supply us the same information you gather while living with Diakos that you are giving the Mossad—without letting the Mossad know.”

“Who are you? You aren’t a New Zealander, are you?”

“No. I run a unit of the CIA, and we have you by the shorthairs. You can work with us—by staying in place with the Greek—or we can expose you to him. We don’t have much time here, so don’t play coy with me. In or out? You won’t be hurting Israel by including us in whatever you find. But we don’t want Israel to know you are a double agent. In or out? Which is it?”

“I don’t really have a choice, do I?” Zeidan asked.

“No. In or out. And if you are in, I will be checking directly with you occasionally and I will be controlling you by fucking you.”

If anything, that helped Zeidan decide to become a double agent for the Americans—and Summerfield, whose real name was Sam Winterberry and who headed the Agency’s Candy Store Unit, collecting intelligence through sex, knew that he was dominating and mastering enough to keep control of his stable of agents this way.

And thus unfolded one—but not the only—operation at play by Sam Winterberry at the Hotel Riffleberg.

* * * *

The table occupancy was readjusted that evening. The three principals in the now-suspect arms transfer negotiations, the Russian supplier, Gennadi Ivanov; the supposedly New Zealand buyer, the allegedly Peter Summerfield; and the Greek shipper, Christos Diakos, were dining together—for the last time. The reception desk clerk, Lucas Meier, was sitting close by Summerfield, and the Frenchman, Alois Durand, was at Diakos’s side. Diakos’s wayward boytoy, Kabr Zeidan, was absent, as was Summerfield’s boyfriend, Jeff Reynolds, who was still in the hotel manager, Akhtar Fariba’s, apartment and bed, having lunch with him there and being devoured by Fariba.

The exchange of submissives between Fariba and Summerfield had gone smoothly.

The Iranian ski instructor, Farzin Ahmadi, and the German skier’s erstwhile boyfriend, Jonas Koch, were cooing at each other at another table. Ahmadi seemed completely smitten with Koch, which also was going to plan. Absent from the room were the German, French, and Italian skiers, Maximilian Bauer, Lyam Beaumont, and Matteo Caputo.

The Russian supplier’s two associates, Pavel Sokolov and Sergei Popov, had latched onto two of the Iranian researchers, Basir and Milad, and were dining with them in the staff’s dining area.

After lunch, the hotel manager and his newly found lover, Jeff Reynolds, showered and dressed, and Fariba, as promised, was showing the young, claimed New Zealander around the hotel, including into the cave into the Riffleberg Mountain at the back of the hotel. The cavern they entered, indeed, was being used as a vast wine cellar, but what Reynolds was really interested in was what was going on in the caverns behind that one. Before he could devise a way of finding out, a door at the rear opened and the third Iranian researcher, Naseem, came out, wearing a white lab coat and goggles.

He said something to Fariba in Farsi, which Reynolds, who, unknown to Fariba, spoke Farsi, heard Fariba addressed as “senior doctor,” and Fariba quickly sent the young man back into the rear cavern and shut the door—but not before Reynolds, who fully understood the world of chemical development, was able to discern that chemical research was under way in the back caverns under Riffleberg Mountain. This confirmed what intelligence analysts in Langley had already now surmised and had been the reason why Luca Meier was being exchanged with Jeff Reynolds.

At that point Fariba called off the tour of the hotel, saying he was unexpectedly needed elsewhere. This was fine with Reynolds, who needed to be elsewhere just then as well. Reynolds went back into the hotel, noting that Fariba went into the chemical lab behind the wine cellar.

That afternoon, while Jonas Koch kept Farzin Ahmadi occupied, the Russians kept two of the Iranian researchers distracted; the German, French, and Italian skiers completed their work on the “Swiss Exchange” operation; and the Greek shipper, sensing something was not as it should be here and finished with his dalliance with Durand and looking for his boytoy, Kabr Zeidan, prepared to leave the hotel, Sam Winterberry met with Zeidan and Reynolds in his suite to coordinate the exchange in the second of his espionage operations here.

“Luca was right,” Reynolds said, “I got a peek into that back cavern. The Iranians are doing chemical warfare research here, not nuclear.” Luca Meier had originally been salted here to determine what was going on, but he had a nuclear research background. When he reported it wasn’t nuclear, Winterberry’s operation became to substitute him with an agent with a different background. Reynolds’s background was chemical engineering. The exchange was necessary and it seemed to be working a charm.

Both operations went well. The Israeli agent following the Greek shipping magnates terrorism-support activities had been successfully suborned by the Americans, with Kabr Zeidan added to Winterberry’s stable of Candy Store Unit operatives, and now the exchange was being completed in Akhtar Fariba’s bed, the chemist Jeff Reynolds for the nuclear physicist Luca Meier.

“Fariba is, indeed, the chief scientist here,” Reynolds said. “I heard one of the Iranian researchers call him that. But it’s chemical warfare, not nuclear development, that he’s engaged in.”

“And he’s not the one in charge of what’s going on here,” Winterberry said. “We’re lucky that the supposed ski instructor, Farzin Ahmadi, is so randy. Jonas Koch is keeping him occupied nicely so that he doesn’t notice the meaning of the exchange in Fariba’s bedpartners. This was an expensive operation, requiring a lot of agents—the supposed Russians, Germans, Frenchmen, and Italian—but it was worth it in payoff in two operations. It’s time to wrap this up and pull out.”

“What will happen with the fake arms shipment operation?” Reynolds asked.

“With luck, we’ll wrap up one of the conduits of arms into terrorist hands,” Winterberry said. “And with any luck the Israelis will do that for us. The Greek thinks we’ve struck a deal. He thinks I’ve bought a shipment of arms from the Russians. They will be given over to him for shipment to Beirut through Crete on his ships, but the arms will be inoperable. The Israelis will be poised to intercept the ships, based on information given to both them and us by Kabr Zeidan, and they’ll close down that shipper and that route. They will be surprised that the arms don’t work, but they won’t care that they don’t and they will assign Kabr Zeidan to another Mossad operation that we then will have a look inside. All and all, a very satisfactory result.”

The evening at the Hotel Riffleberg was set off by a raucous happy two hours in the bar with two of the young hotel staffers dancing the poles in skimpy bikini bottoms and the remaining guests mingling and mixing with each other and with accommodating hotel employees. The Greek shipper, Christos Diakos, and his boytoy, Kabr Zeidan, had already checked out; the supposed New Zealander, Peter Summerfield, was in his suite fucking Luca Meier to bring him back into the CIA Candy Store fold; and the hotel manager/senior chemist Akhtar Fariba was fucking Jeff Reynolds in his apartment. But the rest were there in a tension-relieving party mood. The drama of the espionage operations that had been going on under the surface had been lifted. The operations had been successful.

Projecting the raucous evening on, and with Winterberry’s extensive crew still engaged in distracting the Iranian ski instructor/chemical research manager Farzin Ahmadi and the Iranian researchers from understanding they’d been had, the Russian, French, German, and Italian guests had happily taken Ahmadi up on the suggestion to retire to the spare suite, with its beckoning beds, along with the pole dancers and other rent-boy hotel staffers, to engage in an all-night orgy.

During the night, various guests withdrew from the party room. By morning, all of the Russians, Germans, French, and the Italian guests along with the supposed New Zealander, Summerfield, taking Luca Meier with him, had checked out and were filtering out of Switzerland.

When Summerfield departed the hotel, he turned at the entrance and smiled at and saluted Iman, the doorman, standing there, peering into the early-morning mists swirling around Riffleberg Mountain, his Kalashnikov at the ready. Iman, little knowing that Summerfield was laughing at him inside for dutifully looking for danger outside of the hotel when it had just been playing to a resolution behind the doorman’s back inside the hotel, saluted back, but he did not smile. His duty was clear to him—the results of the last two days not so much.

A bleary-eyed Jeff Reynolds arrived belatedly for breakfast in the dining room to encounter a somewhat bewildered but completely nonunderstanding hotel manager, Akhtar Fariba. The Iranian ski instructor, Farzin Ahmadi, who should have been maintaining awareness of what was happening in the hotel, was still abed in the spare suite with two of the Iranian researchers. He hadn’t noticed when the German, Jonas Koch, and left him and checked out with the German skier, Maximilian Bauer, his job of keeping Ahmadi distracted successfully accomplished.

“They’re gone. He’s gone with them,” Fariba said, as Reynolds sat at his table.

“Who’s gone?” Reyolds asked, fully aware of who had cleared out.

“Most of the guests. But one of my employees, Luca Meier, is gone as well. The man you came with, Peter Summerfield, is gone.”

“Summerfield is gone?” Reynolds asked, feigning concern. “Leaving me?”

“Apparently so. As Luca Meier has left me. Is it such a loss for you that your man has deserted you with my boyfriend?”

“That depends on how it affects you,” Reynolds asked. “I don’t mind the exchange if you aren’t going to desert me too?”

“Would you like a job on the reception desk here—the desk supervisor’s job? It’s open now. You would, of course, be housed in my apartment.”

“That sounds like a good plan,” Reynold answered with a smile. His smile meant so much more than Fariba realized, though. Two good plans had been executed right under the man’s nose and he hadn’t even realized the successful Swiss exchange that had been accomplished.