Racing with the Devil

Chapter One: Welcome to the Gulf, Chris Carter

The combination of knock-out pills, which didn’t completely work, and liquor, on the run from Frankfurt to the Arabian Peninsula would have had me staggering off the plane onto the tarmac even if the oppressive desert heat hadn’t done the trick. I had to lift my arm to cover my eyes against the glare off the steel and glass monolith of a terminal building that rose like a displaced iceberg in front of me. Westerners like me were being piled into one of two airport buses at the bottom of the jet stairs. The buses had already taken all of the Arabic men to the terminal—those having been permitted off the plane first—and then had returned for the rest of us. These Arabs, dressed in the white robes the country book the Agency had doled out to me shortly before I left Washington called thawbs or dishdashas, evidently were local potentates. The handbook told me not to bother to try to distinguish a thawb from a dishdasha.

I wasn’t in much condition to tell much of anything from the other—although it was obvious that, no matter what order we deplaned in, the men in the robes were going to get to the terminal before the rest of us.

The heat of the Gulf emirate, showing in waves of heavy air coming off the sand beyond the runways, that we’d landed in was still building when we finally reached the terminal and were hit with a blast of cold air conditioning inside what I’d already named The Iceberg. Then, as we slowly cleared immigration control—me clearing last, because third-world satrapies just loved to hassle Americans with diplomatic passports—everyone seemed to disappear. When I stumbled out into the main terminal, it was like I was the only one in a gigantic air hanger that just soared up and up. It took a while to focus in on the direction I was to go to get to baggage claim. The terminal seemed empty—so deserted that the sound of my shoes clipping along as I walked across the terminal floor echoed off the glass walls and steel frame of the terminal. All of the signage was in Arabic. That alone didn’t defeat me, as I spoke and read Arabic fairly fluently. But none of it seemed to relate to airport functions. Pithy blurbs from the Koran are all very nice—in fact I found them inspiring and helping to steel my resolve in what I had agreed to do—but they don’t tell me where to find my suitcase.

Stumbling onto the baggage claim area at last, I could see my bags circling the metal carousel as I approached and disappear through strips of black rubber back into the bowels of the building before I could reach them. Of course, it took them an age to come out the other side again—and of course my bags were the last to be picked up and I was the last to clear customs. Material was sticking out of the seams of the suitcase; despite having diplomatic immunity, my bag had been searched and there would be no apology forthcoming for that. I was a bit surprised to discover that they were every bit as “in your face” with American diplomats here as they were in Israel.

In one last moment of frustration and confusion, the customs agents linked arms to deny me access to the exit everyone else had used and to direct me over to a door at the side. They were smiling now, their job of putting the American in his place finished. Who would have known that at this late stage of the process, there would be a diplomatic lounge and separate entrance to depart the terminal—to a covered waiting area for limousines rather than right out onto the “teeming masses” street. In the lounge, tapping her toes impatiently, a look of irritated impatience on her face, was the last person in the world I wanted to either see or to be made to feel delinquent by.

I had met Penny Haskell in Langley a couple of times during my abbreviated training for this post, where I was to engage in covert tech support while pretending to be a State Department logistics officer and where even that had an element of pretense. Haskell was the chief of station in this emirate—the top American spy in the country. Each time we had briefly met and spoken at CIA Headquarters across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., Haskell had been abrupt and cold. She always seemingly needed to be somewhere else in the next ten minutes and was dealing with me only on sufferance—although it had always been a case of me sitting and cooling my heels, waiting for an appointment with her that I hadn’t been the one to schedule.

Today was no different—other than that she’d been waiting for me, and she wasn’t at all pleased by that fact. At my obvious confusion that I had been met at the nearly deserted airport in this postage-stamp sized emirate on the Persian Gulf by the COS herself rather than by some embassy foreign national flunky, she told me, in clipped tones, that the COS always met her incoming staff members. But she went on to say that my plane had been late and I’d come out of customs late—and she managed to say it in a way that suggested I personally was responsible for the delays—and that she was expected at an event. There wasn’t time to take me to my hotel or the embassy; I’d have to go to the event with her.

Wonderful, I thought. Just what I wanted to do, having traveled a quarter of the distance around the globe without sleep—although I could fall down in a stupor now—with the makings of a hangover and nearly drooping with heat exhaustion.

“Where?” I started to say.

“We’re going to the horse races,” Haskell said.

God, yes, I thought. Just the thing for the condition I’m in—outside at the rails in the heat of the desert day with horses kicking dust into my face. Lovely.

The horse races turned out to be at a fancy track across the city, the emirate’s capital being a compact collection of impossibly tall and wildly shaped skyscrapers set on obviously manmade islands poking out into a harbor on the shores of the Gulf. Haskell told me that, from the air, the whole complex fanned out in the shape of a palm tree. I believed her. She also told me that the city was only for the wealthy rulers—that the lower classes lived in slums hidden on the other side of manmade hills surrounding the central city and only came into the modern city to serve the upper class. I believed that too. I was so tired and hung over I was willing to believe anything she said.

I balked a bit when she told me that the horse race we were going to would feature this year’s winners of the Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes, racing each other—the horses having been shipped here just for a race that would last less than eight minutes. But it turns out she was right about that too. Mercifully, though, the track was too fancy for us to be standing at the rails. We were in some sort of large, air-conditioned skybox overlooking the track. I would have thought that there would be quite a crowd out to see such a race, but it was only being run for those of us in the skybox.

It was here where I saw him and he perked up and gave me a speculative full-body inspection with his hooded eyes when Penny Haskell introduced me to his father, Prince Sayeed el-Basir, the holder of every vestige of functional power in this small emirate. Haskell emphasized in the terse introduction that I had been an intercollegiate tennis champion. That’s when Amir el-Basir moved out of his father’s shadow and asked her to repeat that.

Within my first hour of arriving in my new country of assignment in the Persian Gulf, I not only got to see Belmont whip the Kentucky Derby in a brief flash, but I also was engaged to play tennis with a prince’s son at the royal palace.

It was only as I was being driven to my hotel in Penny Haskell’s embassy car that she told me that she had preplanned all of this—that she wanted me to get close to and to cultivate the prince’s son and that she had known that my tennis talents would be the station’s entrée to that. Little did she know that Amir el-Basir and I would have found each other without her machinations.

My life of espionage had already begun.

Chapter Two: So This Is Life in an Emirate

My head was still swimming a bit, but it was done now and couldn’t be taken back. I pulled my knees in together with a groan and slipped the plump pillow from under the small of my back. I lowered my feet to the marble floor below the edge of the large lounge bed in the pool house facing the open wall to the terrace-surrounded swimming pool, light reflecting brightly off the slightly waving water under the blazing sun. He hadn’t told me I could adjust my position, but he’d been so long at it in this position that I was cramping.

I turned my face toward one side and watched the slim-waisted, berry-brown body of Amir saunter off to the bathroom. His buttocks were plump orbs, but the hollows at the sides below the hips—which I had just had the heels of my hands buried in as my fingers were flared over his butt cheeks, helping to guide his thrustings—were deep. Turning my head in the other side, I looked at the used condom, plump from his prodigious cum, laying there like a bloated slug, proof that I’d let him fuck me. Beside that were the bottle of lube and another couple of condom packets. He had said nothing about how I’d done with him, but he apparently was prepared for a marathon.

When he’d left me he’d just said he needed to piss—and that I wasn’t to go anywhere. He acted like I was there just to serve him. He obviously was spoiled that way, which was a given considering who he was, where we were, and what I knew I had to do. But then nothing I was doing could be taken to contradict that he could have anything he fancied from me.

This was all just a bit surreal. I hadn’t let a man fuck me since graduate school—not that that was very long ago. I doubt if Amir would have cared even if I had told him that I hadn’t, though. And, on his turf and, given the bodyguards, it was rather a moot point. As he was fucking me, my eyes had gone to the ceiling over the studio bed and I saw the frame that could be lowered on the bed and the four corner posts with the restraint attachments. If I hadn’t given into to him willingly, chances were good that he would have taken me anyway—and his bodyguards would have provided the muscle.

I’d wanted the job with intelligence, using my natural skills at the technical aspects of audio surveillance and serving my political interests and so that I’d be well placed in the thick of things and could fulfill what I believed in. I’d restrained myself, behaving myself, so that I could pass the stringent background checks and scrutiny of my life—and I’d managed to get through all that and to my first posting, here, in this small Gulf peninsula enclave emirate, strategically important for its size not only because of the subterranean ocean of oil it sat on but also because of where it was positioned in relationship to its neighbors and to the Strait of Hormuz passageway into the Persian Gulf.

Amir el-Basir, the pampered and spoiled son of Prince Sayeed el-Basir, wasn’t thick, but he was long, his cock curved up so that the bulb could punish the prostate as he pumped. And he had stamina. He was thin and wiry, but he was well-muscled and strong. I had resisted a bit, but I’d been tired from our tennis match on the palace courts and confused and sluggish from whatever was in the drinks he was plying me with as we sat in the pool room after the match to cool down. I had stopped putting up any kind of a struggle at all after he’d gotten his dick inside me and just went with the fuck. He was cruel, taking long, deep, rapid strokes. Fisting my knees and working my legs back and forth, thrusting as he pushed the legs out and withdrawing as he pulled them into my body.

He never asked me if I liked or wanted what he was doing to me—but I didn’t use my hands to try to push him away, I grabbed his buttocks and helped guide the stroking—and when I felt him ready to blow, I held him to me, wrapped my legs around his waist and took over the stroking with my channel. So, I guess he knew I wanted it. I think he was at least a little disappointed he wasn’t ruining a virgin.

I had let him have his way. There wasn’t much else I could do. The embassy had told me to cultivate the royals and had virtually thrust the two of us together when they learned I’d played intercollegiate tennis—and I’d known there would be an Amir here, waiting for me. Amir was a tennis nut. He’d seen me play and had expressed interest in wanting to play me. I’ll bet the embassy didn’t know what he really wanted, how he wanted to play me, though—what it meant to cultivate his goodwill, to let him have his way.

Between sets he had told me that his fetish was young blonds. He said it as if he already knew I—a young blond—would take cock. Not taking him all that seriously at that point, I asked him how hard they were to come by in this Arab emirate, and he just laughed and said there was a market for them. I didn’t really understand at first what he meant by “a market for them,” and then when he explained what he meant, I didn’t necessarily believe him, but his eyes weren’t laughing when he said it, so I didn’t call him on the statement.

Once here, I couldn’t very well refuse him with those armed guards standing at the corners of the pool house, ever vigilant, but seeing nothing. Just standing there, as we sat by the pool after, skinny dipping at his suggestion, and he plied me with liquor. Neither of us was able to hide our arousal in the circumstance; I did what I could with a towel; he didn’t bother to hide his interest, that long cock of his curving up, rigid, from his groin like a Saracen scimitar. It was his idea that we move into the shade, onto the lounge bed in the pool house. He had already kissed me and held and squeezed my cock by the pool, so I knew what was coming in the pool house. He pushed me onto my back there, where, my torso propped up on my elbows, I could see the frame above me and contemplate it with some trepidation, as he knelt between my spread thighs and gave me nominal suck. We were both hard—and both had been so for some time—so there was little preliminary preparation, before, telling me he couldn’t wait longer, he rose over me between my thighs, forced a pillow under the small of my back, and thrust inside me.

He grabbed the hair at the back of my head, arched my torso back, positioned his cock with his other hand, and drove hard inside me. In an instant I was completely undone.

I had murmured before he began giving me suck that I wasn’t sure, knowing from my slurred words that the liquor had impaired my reactions, and, after it became evident that he was going to carry through, that it had been some time and could he go slowly? But, no he couldn’t—and didn’t—go slowly. The initial thrust caused me to gasp and try to jerk away from him, but he just laughed and held on tight, his fist buried in the hair at the back of my head, reared back, and thrust again, deeper.

I looked toward one of his guards in panic, perhaps thinking there would be intervention from that quarter, but of course it was a nonsensical thought. The man was watching us with slitted eyes, but he remained standing at watchful attention. There was no hope for me from that direction—not that I didn’t know subconsciously that it would come to this.

I briefly thought about how this would be for some young man here against his will, not wanting this. And it caused me to shudder. After his dick was inside me, though, I was lost. I gave in completely. This was what I wanted.

“I knew you were just teasing,” he muttered, but his voice sounded like he perhaps was disappointed that I had given in so quickly.

But I hadn’t been teasing. It had been long enough for me to forget how much I wanted it.

It was like old times in college, and then, if ever so brief, in graduate school with Josef, when I had finally decided to immerse myself totally in Muslim studies.

Amir’s cocking was so arousing and reminiscent of Josef that I melted to it immediately. I encircled Amir’s slim waist with my legs and held onto his sides under his armpits, the heel of my hands rubbing his nipples, as the head of his dick found my prostate and worked me there. I ejaculated and collapsed as he worked my channel, and he grabbed my legs, bent them, with my heels dug into the edge of the studio bed. He pumped my legs back and forth to the rhythm of the pumping with fists on my knees, while I arched my back, reached for holds on the brass rungs of the headboard behind me, and moaned my acceptance of the cocking.

I came again, and he noted, with pride, how easily he could coax the cum out of me.

Once again I told him, “It’s been years,” to which he retorted that I was a liar—that he thought I was a pro. He fucked harder, mercilessly, to his own ejaculation then.

I didn’t tell him that it was so easy for him only because he reminded me so much of Josef—and because I fully expected there was someone, like Amir, waiting here for me—waiting to control me and bend me to his will.

I watched him return from the bathroom, dark-skinned, thin, wiry, his cock in upcurved erection again, so much like Josef, his hands busy rolling a condom onto the long, thin staff.

I wasn’t drunk anymore. There were no excuses anymore. But there was nothing to fight anymore either. It’s not like I hadn’t done this before. It wasn’t like I didn’t expect to be doing this here, in the emirate.

Neither of us said anything. He was so cocky, so sure of himself. As if this was his kingdom and he could have anything—anyone—he fancied. The attentive but rigidly standing guards at the corners of the terrace, unmoving throughout his assault on my body, emphasized that. My mind went again to what he’d said about being able to buy young blonds and do what he wished with them, whether they wanted it or not. I had no doubt he could—and probably did, with his bodyguards standing there just as they did while Amir was fucking me.

I asked him then, what happened to those purchased blonds? Did he turn them over to those burly bodyguards sneaking looks at what Amir was doing to me after he was finished with them?

“Sometimes,” he answered.

I shuddered at that terse, cold response. But, no matter, as far as I was concerned now, he could fuck me at will and then do with me what he wanted. I suppose the time for diplomatically pulling away and leaving would have been as we were leaving the tennis court when he put his arm around my shoulder and gave me that hungry look. I had known that look in my university days, but I had thought myself beyond those youthful follies since I’d gone out into the world from the university. I wonder if I knew at that moment on the tennis court that he was going to fuck me. I suppose it’s a waste of time to think about it, though, as he did fuck me. And having done it once . . .

I watched him roll another condom on and lather it with lube. Then I raised and separated my legs, leaving no doubt that I would docilely receive the cock again. He moved between my thighs, pushing the pillow back underneath the small of my back, grasping my ankles and hanging them on his shoulders. He leaned over me, bringing his face down to mine.

“Be good to me this time,” I begged in a whisper. “Last time you—”

“I know what you want,” he growled as his lips possessed mine and his hands grasped my wrists.

I lurched and tried to open my mouth in a scream as he thrust up deep inside me, but his tongue was occupying my mouth cavity. He immediately began pumping hard and deep, and I groaned and grunted. Taking him. Taking all of him deep and hard.

Within moments knowing it was what I wanted. That didn’t matter anyway. He was the son of the prince of the kingdom. This was what he wanted. This is what I got.

The worry kept pounding in my brain. How did he know? How did he know I’d take the cock? What gave away the desires I had that I thought I’d successfully hidden? Or maybe he didn’t know. Maybe, here, in this primeval enclave of power and selfishness, it wouldn’t have mattered at all what I wanted or didn’t want.

But of course he knew. He knew I’d come to him, that I’d open my legs to him.

I rose up against him, struggling with him, he wrestling with me—but laughing when he realized what I was trying to do. I pushed him to the side and rolled with him until I was on top and he was on his back on the bed. It was me now lowering my face to his, taking his lips in mine, putting my pelvis in motion rising and falling on his cock. No longer was there any pretense that he was taking me without my consent, that he had liquored me up and was inside me against my will because I was impaired or intimidated by the situation and the guards watching us and just doing the minimum until I could get out of his trap. My sexual surrender to him total, although he would demand more than sex from me—and I was so lost to him now that I would give him anything he wanted, do anything for him that he demanded of me. I had known there would be an Amir here to send me to paradise.

* * * *

When I drove back into the embassy compound and turned the keys of the embassy car over to the garage supervisor, he told me, “The ambassador has requested that you go see him when you’ve returned. Word came down some time ago.” The look he gave me seemed to indicate he thought I should have known about the summons the instant it was given.

I was afraid of this. In fact, this was much of the reason I had let my defenses down to Amir el-Basir and then, after he’d first gotten his dick inside him, had just given way, letting all of my defenses shatter on the marble floor of his pool house. I had been walking gingerly around like I was trodding on broken glass since I’d arrived in the emirate, knowing that at some point I’d meet up with the ambassador—knowing too, as a matter of fact, that I would meet up with an Amir.

“In the ambassador’s office?” I asked, hoping.

“No, in the residence.”

Shit.

Hunter Sean Caldwell II. He hadn’t been the ambassador when I’d first received my assignment to this country—or at least I hadn’t even known he was in the running for the position. The assignment had come as a surprise to me, while I was still training in tech craft, mostly audio surveillance, at Warrenton, Virginia, after finishing my masters in Muslim studies. I wasn’t exactly at the head of my class at Warrenton, and some of my fellow students weren’t that pleased that I’d gotten an embassy assignment so early. But then most of them were still struggling with languages. My Arabic was fluent already.

I had already sublet my apartment in Rosslyn, near the Pentagon, and sold my Mustang convertible when I’d read that Caldwell would be the new ambassador. Hunter Sean Caldwell II, the first man who had fucked me. Before Josef in graduate school and Amir just now, the only man who had fucked me. The man who I thought was a master at cocking until I encountered Amir and found what a really experienced, virile man could do.

Caldwell had been both the direct ancestor of the founder of Caldwell College, a university prep junior college for jocks—my sport being tennis—and its president at the time I came to his attention. I was on a work-study scholarship to augment my sports scholarship and I served drinks and hors d’oeuvre at his cocktail parties.

He was having a rough time in his marriage. I didn’t know it then, but his penchant for young blond men was the crux of the problem. One night after a cocktail party, when his wife wasn’t in evidence because she had flounced off to Europe, I was still cleaning up when all of the rest of the servers had left. Caldwell came into his living room, his tux tie undone and his shirt open to show a well-muscled chest covered in salt-and-pepper, curly hair, and sat in a wing chair, one leg slung over the arm, watching me under drooping eyelids and drinking scotch from a bottle. I could tell that he was keyed up.

He told me I could stop and that he wanted me to sit with him and talk with him. I sat in another wing chair, facing him, a distance of only about four feet between us. We passed the bottle back and forth while he told me of all his problems with his wife and the school and life in general. He also told me what a fine-looking young man I was and how well I could do in the university on the basis of a good recommendation from his school.

“I’ve heard you’re gay,” he said suddenly.

“Yes, I think so, although I’ve never . . .” I admitted, sheepishly. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he responded. That was my first inkling of where this was leading.

He could hold his liquor better than I could. I have no idea at what point he was kneeling between my thighs, with me unzipped and my cock out, and him giving me the first blow job I ever had from a man. Before it had all be wishful thinking and fumbling.

He fucked me in the backseat of his Mercedes in the garage, saying he didn’t feel right about doing it in the house. But that was a one-time taboo. He had no trouble fucking me in the house for months afterward. The backseat of a Mercedes in a closed garage was a hell of a place to lose your male-male virginity, but I was drunk, he was the college president, he was a pretty good-looking and trim man, and I was barely making it through on combined scholarships—scholarships that he controlled.

He was gentle and patient with me under the circumstances, my first ejaculation occurring while he was still sucking me and working my body with his hands as I was on my knees encasing his thighs, facing him, in the center of the backseat of his Mercedes. My ineffectual murmur of objection as he pulled me down into his lap and I felt the hard insistence of him had no affect on him. I can still hear the unzipping of his trousers in my then liquor-clouded mind as he had my torso bent back toward the front seat and was sucking on my nipples. I remember shuddering and moaning for him when he wrapped his hand around my cock.

I remember murmuring that I’d never done it before and then the feel of the bulb of his cock at my entrance. The long, slow, painful journey of my channel down that pole, which wasn’t unusually long but, I didn’t know it at the time, was unusually thick, seemed like a fireplug to me. And then, once I felt the curly hair of his pubes mingling in mine, the rocking back and forth on his cock, one of his arms around my waist and the hand of the other between our bellies, stroking my cock hard again. The pleasure rising up to overlay, and then overpower, the pain. My second ejaculation, and his bathing of my channel. He hadn’t worn a condom. And the kisses and his apologies of having been so seized by want that he hadn’t taken precautions left me in awe of how much he wanted me as I continued to rock on the cock and it withered inside me.

The apologies didn’t prevent him from fucking me bareback again, though, and over the next few months again and again and again. And until Amir el-Basir fucked me, I thought that Caldwell was an expert at it and that I was lucky to have him servicing me.

After I’d moved on to Stanford to major in Muslim studies under Assistant Professor Josef Garfeh—in more aspects than one—with a full tennis scholarship, I left that behind and managed to forget what I’d had to do to get through junior college.

But that wasn’t really fair. Much like having given in to Amir el-Basir once he’d gotten his dick inside me that first time, once the awkwardness of the backseat of the car and the first breaching of my ass ring by a cock was over, I had nothing left to protect, and I had enjoyed Caldwell’s cocking. He must have enjoyed cocking me, because, though we parted amicably enough when I went off to Stanford—and into the arms of Josef—and Caldwell presumably moved on to other young blonds, he’d obviously kept track of me and had requested my assignment to his embassy when he was tapped to be an ambassador.

* * * *

A slightly built Filipino manservant, wearing pristine-white shorts and T-shirt, opened the door of the residence, which was a wing of the recently constructed American embassy complex, built like a fortress in a compound that could withstand a siege or a rocket attack. No one looking at the building from the courtyard would even know what was office space and what was the ambassador’s residence as well as the residences of other senior embassy officials.

I obviously was expected, as I only had to give my name to be ushered to a central, two-story foyer with a huge skylight overhead and a staircase sweeping up to a second-floor landing. The manservant gestured toward the stairs and looked at me expectantly.

“I’m to go upstairs?” I asked. “And then where?” I’d just arrived in country; I hadn’t been in the residence yet. I’d only been in the country for two weeks and most of that was on leave in a hotel, busy trying to set up new living circumstances. The embassy admin officer was the one who actually arranged for housing. Mine hadn’t been set up yet, and he seemed to be dragging his feet on getting me settled. I was still in the hotel.

“Excuse me, sir,” the manservant said. “Yes, up the stairs, down the corridor, and the last door on the right.” He gave me a look that seemed peculiar, but what did I know about the looks that Filipinos gave? And what did it matter anyway? Filipinos, like the Thai, were favorites as house servants for the wealthy in the region for their ability to fade into the wallpaper and to take anything going on in the house in their stride—not judging, at least overtly, just serving, and serving well. After giving me directions, the Filipino houseboy withdrew as if evaporating into the air.

I knocked on the door and heard Caldwell’s voice, bidding me to enter. The room I entered obviously was his bedroom—large, elegantly decorated, and with a commanding four-poster bed. I can’t say I was surprised.

I also couldn’t say I was surprised that he was standing at a full-length French door out onto a narrow balcony and overlooking an interior garden courtyard. Even though the courtyard was enclosed, mostly by the blank walls of other areas of the embassy, the view was distorted enough for me to know that the glass was thick and bulletproof. Nor was I surprised that he was in a robe of a gauzy material thin enough for me to tell, with the backdrop of the sunlight streaming into the window, that he was naked underneath. He was still in superb condition, these six years later, for a man in his late fifties—solidly built and somewhat stocky now, but not fat. And he was half hard, not long, but as thick as I remembered.

I stood inside the door, which swung shut on its own behind me. We said nothing for half a minute, during which he gave me a sardonic look and took a couple of swigs of whatever he was drinking out of a brandy snifter. Liquor. My softening-up vulnerability. He had made me drunk before fucking me at college. Amir had made me drunk before fucking me in his pool house earlier in the day. Josef had used opium.

Caldwell didn’t offer me a drink. We were way beyond that.

“So, here you are. I understand you were playing tennis with Prince el-Basir’s son.”

“Yes.”

“Went on a bit long.”

“Yes.”

“I put the word out two hours ago that I wanted to see you.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know you’d call for me today. I’ve been here a couple of weeks and you hadn’t called for me. As you surmised, the tennis went on a little long.” If I had meant how long he’d left me cooling my heels as a criticism, he didn’t show it. If he hadn’t mellowed, he didn’t really care all that much what I felt about anything. What my statement did establish, though, was that I believed I was here to answer whatever summons he made.

“And what happened afterward? Did he fuck you after tennis?”

I didn’t answer. There probably was no need, in Hunter’s mind, for me to answer. But that was a bit unfair. After Hunter, there had been only one other—until earlier today. And no one for a couple of years. Hunter obviously thought otherwise.

“I suppose for U.S. purposes that’s just as well. Did you enjoy him?”

Instead of answering that question, I introduced another topic. “I didn’t know you were to be ambassador here.”

“I didn’t want you to know. Does that bother you?”

“A bit, yes. I wasn’t up for an assignment yet. May I assume that you arranged that?”

“Muriel has left me. I’m on assignment alone. It’s a tense assignment, and I have needs.”

“I see,” I said.

“I like the familiar. I knew of your schooling and training and that you’d fit this assignment. I didn’t want to take risks, to establish new arrangements here. I knew that, with you—”

“I said that I understood.” And I did understand. I’d worked hard to fit this assignment.

He had put the snifter down on a table next to the window and was undoing his robe. He parted the robe, which showed that he was in full erection now. He was beefy, but hard bodied. I knew that he was an avid squash player and worked out with weights. He probably still could break me in two. “It’s been a long time, but I haven’t forgotten. Have you?”

I knelt in front of him at the window and gave him head until he growled that he wanted me naked and on the bed.

He fucked me swiftly, missionary style, to an ejaculation. This I remembered before too, there was little passion in his fucking. It was like an exercise routine he needed to do regularly to keep in shape. He had said he had basic needs, and it was clear that I was to serve those here clinically and without emotion.

Then we lay on the bed, our bodies stretched out against each other and our hands exploring, reacquainting ourselves with the hardness and suppleness of each other’s bodies. Caldwell had never had much stamina; he never could last long at a time. Still, he and Josef having been my only reference points, I had thought that sex with him was quite hot. After Amir, I wasn’t sure. With Josef, it was more that he possessed me and that I was little more than a possession, which was similar to the way Caldwell took me. Having had two that way, I thought it was the norm—“wham, bang, go get a shower and then be gone until I need to get off again.” It was different with Amir, though. He’d taken me to the heights and then worked me there, prolonging the pleasure and the arousal—and the realization that he could finish me whenever he wanted to—and, ultimately, finishing me long after I’d made a fool of myself begging him for it.

But it didn’t really matter that Hunter Caldwell had a quick trigger. He was the man in control. I knuckled under easily to a man in control. Each of the three had been like that, in their own way.

When Caldwell had engorged again, I rolled over on top of him, saddled myself on his cock, and rode his dick cowboy style, rocking back and forth on his tool, as I knew he liked. Still, there was a businesslike, perfunctory air about it. There would be no emotional entanglements. He had tensions with his job. My major job was to be to help relieve those—without fuss or demands.

“You have kept in good form,” he whispered when we were laying, entwined again.

“There hasn’t been anyone else for a couple of years,” I murmured. “I want you to know that. I couldn’t have gotten this job, if there was. And I probably won’t be able to keep the job if—”

“I know there was another man after me and I can smell another man on you even now,” he said. “An expensive cologne. Amir el-Basir? You didn’t answer me before.”

“I haven’t lied about there being no other man since I left Stanford—up to today,” I answered. “But knowing you were here . . . I just was riddled with worry and confusion. And vulnerable. And he’s the son of a prince. I didn’t get the impression I had much choice.”

“I understand,” he said. “But you are with me now.”

“Yes,” I said. “I am with you now.” I didn’t want to tell him that I had already arranged the next time I would be with Amir—that it was too late to tell me not to let the Arab control me. And, indeed, I was to meet and lie under Amir at least twice a week thereafter. And Amir would take much more from me than just sex and a tennis workout. He controlled me with sex in a way that the ambassador never had and never would, and I could deny nothing that he asked of me.

“I will have your things moved from the hotel.,” the ambassador said. “You will be staying with me here. The Marine guards think it would be safer if there was someone else staying inside the residence—one of the younger male staffers. The Marines are already overstretched on duties. Your bedroom will be just across the hall, but . . .”

At least now I knew why the admin officer had been dragging his feet on finding me an apartment.

But that too didn’t last very long. Two months later I received a note in my mail slot at the embassy that an apartment had been assigned. It was only later that night, after Hunter had fucked me like a dog at the foot of the four-poster bed, swiftly and with little emotion, that he told me that his son would be arriving by the end of the week and that I would be housed separately now, although I was still expected to attend him when he felt he needed it and could arrange it.

The introduction of the ambassador’s son into the equation changed much and nearly spoiled everything.

* * * *

Hugh and I arrived at the chief of station’s house in the embassy compound together for the reception of Tony Jacobs, the chief of Mideast Ops from back in Langley. We were both a little blurry eyed that we were being included, as we were just about the lowest men on the totem pole at the station. We were essentially “it” as audio surveillance techs at the embassy went, but neither of us had done much in the way of that work since I had arrived at station nearly three months earlier. After getting me hooked up with the prince’s son and asking me occasionally what intel I had gathered from him—which obviously didn’t include reports on him fucking me—the COS pretty much lost interest in me.

Hugh had been so busy before that they’d opened up another slot, and then when I arrived, the business went dead. I had all but been reassigned to be the ambassador’s gofer, which the station wasn’t opposing because the Agency had little for me to do and was happy to garner the goodwill of Caldwell.

But Penny Haskell, the hard-as-nails COS, had insisted we be there for this reception, so there we were.

Our presence was somewhat explained when she stopped us in the foyer of her embassy compound residence as we arrived and said, in low tones, that we were to stay around after Jacobs had been taken back to his hotel. This meant she had some actual surveillance work for us to do, evidently something she didn’t want to discuss at the station in the chancery. I was a little nervous about that. As well as putting bugs in and monitoring them, our job was to find and take bugs out at the embassy. If Haskell didn’t want to give us an assignment in the office, perhaps, I thought, she believed we hadn’t swept the station well enough. On the other hand, she seemed willing to talk to us in her residence, which was also on the embassy compound.

I stewed about what we might have done wrong or if Penny had discovered that the ambassador wanted me around because he was fucking me—at least until I saw Sean, the newly arrived ambassador’s son, Hunter Sean Caldwell III, at the reception. He was being called Sean at the embassy to distinguish him from his father.

“Who’s he?” I had asked Hugh, a canapé half way to my mouth and tugging at Hugh’s sleeve with the other hand.

He turned his eyes toward where I was pointing, where Penny’s husband, Tyler, who ostensibly was the reason the Haskells were in this country—he was an oil company regional manager—was talking with a young man.

Hugh laughed. “You thought it was a mirror at first, didn’t you?”

Indeed, I did. The young blond man was the spitting image of me.

“That’s the ambassador’s son, Sean—at least that’s the name he’s going by here. The two of you could be twins.”

Yes, we could. And that sent me to wondering about what it might be that Hunter saw in me that was desirable and what deep, darker secret it surfaced about the man. As I grazed at the food table, I worked on dredging up in my mind the young men I’d known Caldwell to show interest in in college, and they all came up as blonds with good bodies and model-handsome faces. None looked more like the ambassador’s son than I did, though, and it had been me that Caldwell had been mostly fucking back then—and had been sleeping with here until Sean Caldwell arrived.

Hugh went over to meet the ambassador’s son, but I held back, wandering around the various entertainment rooms in the COS’s house, nodding here and there, but not really getting into any conversations. I was nervous here among my embassy and station colleagues, wondering whether any knew or suspected that I was fucking the ambassador—even though that had tapered off since his son had arrived in country. I wasn’t much less nervous that some of them might know that Prince El-Basir’s son was fucking me too.

And now I had a whole new line of thought on the presence of the ambassador’s son to cogitate. I wondered, naturally, since there was such a close resemblance between us, if the ambassador was fucking his son—and that I’d just been some sort of substitute for that. I hoped the son wouldn’t complicate my life, but there was every reason to believe he might.

Just when it seemed the reception was going to go on forever, it was breaking up, with Tyler Haskell accompanying Tony Jacobs back to his hotel in an embassy car and those from the embassy leaving en masse to return to their offices as if everything had been staged and they all had something else to go on to—which was pretty much the case with these embassy parties.

And then it was Hugh and me sitting on the other side of a mahogany desk in the COS’s study. I looked out the window and realized that the first-story study looked out onto the same embassy-enclosed courtyard that the ambassador’s second-story bedroom did. As the top-ranked spook in the country, Penny Haskell’s house was yet another appendage on the chancery.

“I wanted to speak with you because I have a delicate surveillance operation for you two to perform. It will require hours sitting in a safe house apartment.”

“That’s what we’re here for,” Hugh said.

I could hear both Penny and Hugh, but I felt like it was at a distance. I was sitting there, staring out of the window, up at the ambassador’s bedroom window. The glass of that was tinted and was so thick that it would have to be night with the lights on in the bedroom and the curtains open for anyone to see anything from down here. That just made me think of nighttime instances that might have been like that with me up there in that bedroom—with the ambassador.

“The matter is delicate because it concerns his son,” Haskell said.

I was tuned into that, but still at a distance.

“The national security adviser fought him being permitted to come here at all because he was running on the edge back in the States—pro Muslim and associating with some pretty dicey characters. This just wasn’t the place for him. And he’s already hooked up with someone on our watch list here. I want to set you up to listen in for a few days to see if Sean Caldwell’s visits to the palace have any terrorism implications.”

“The palace?” I asked, suddenly tuned back into the conversation. “Whose palace?”

“Prince Sayeed el-Basir’s palace,” Haskell answered.

Hugh whistled. “We suspect that Prince El-Basir has connections to terrorist elements?”

“No. His son. Amir el-Basir.”

My blood froze at the sound of his name, and I suddenly was all attention. My meetings with the ambassador may have tapered off recently but my meetings with Amir el-Basir had not. Did the COS know about that? She was the one who brought us together in the first place.

“We want to know what, exactly, the ambassador’s son is doing with Amir el-Basir,” Haskell continued. “And the matter is much too delicate to coordinate with the ambassador. That’s what Tony Jacob is here for—to give us the go-ahead in person, coordinated with the secretary of state, who had little choice but to cooperate after the national security adviser was on board. The operation is so delicate that we couldn’t put any hint of it in the diplomatic traffic.”

I suspected that I knew exactly what the ambassador’s son and Amir el-Basir were doing in the palace. I briefly wondered whether the young blond fully realized the risks of having any contact with El-Basir. And then it hit me, and I had difficulty swallowing much less asking what I had to ask.

“The bugs,” I asked Penny. “Do we need to put them in place? How and where?”

“That’s already taken care of,” Haskell answered. “And we’re concentrating them around the sports area of the palace compound. Amir appears to spend most of this time there—the locker room by the tennis and squash courts and the pool house.”

“The bugs are already in place?” I asked, trying not to let my voice sound like I was strangling. “When?”

“Yesterday. A grounds cleaning crew goes in once a month. This time it was local assets of ours. I couldn’t see any way of getting you two in there to set the devices.”

I found that Haskell was giving me an intense stare, and I did what I could to cover my consternation.

I could think of a way of getting in the palace, of course. I got in there twice a week to be fucked by Amir. But I wasn’t going to volunteer that information here. Penny Haskell was being lax about not knowing it already. But maybe she did, and maybe this would be some double sting. I’d been incredibly stupid. The bugs were put in the previous day, she’d said. I hadn’t been to the palace in the last three days. I let out a deep breath. Still, as delicate as this operation was for Penny Haskell and the station, it would be like walking on eggs for me—unless I’d already been compromised.

* * * *

I hung around after Hugh had gone and tried my damndest to convince Penny Haskell that I could handle the surveillance myself—that we didn’t need two men to do it. Everything was taped, and I could go through those quickly myself, I said. I tried so insistently that she gave me a hard look and asked, “Are you saying that you don’t trust Hugh?”

“Let’s just say that I think I can handle it better alone than with him,” I answered, which was completely unfair for me to say, but I was panicked about what he might learn from eavesdropping on Amir el-Basir’s conversations before I could get to the Arab to warn him he was being bugged.

Having the ambassador’s son in the picture now was bolloxing everything up. There were several reasons why I would be better off not having him here—and so would Amir.

Haskell overruled me, though, and ordered us to go straight to the surveillance apartment. “If it could be a one-man operation, I’d assign it just to Hugh. You’re scheduled to go on TDY for a special op in Egypt the week after next. I’m just hoping we can wrap this up here first.”

That stopped me dead in the tracks. Worse than Hugh and me doing it together would be Hugh doing it by himself without me knowing what he was picking up. And there was no way I was going to pull out of that trip to Egypt.

I had no time to do anything or say anything to anybody before we were riding up the elevator with our duffle bags and a box of foodstuffs and bottles of cold beer on our way to the safe house surveillance apartment.

We had been in the apartment in the high rise across from the palace and were moving through checking on the bugs in various parts of where Amir el-Basir liked to hang out for several hours without honing in on anything of interest. I was off in the apartment’s kitchen getting us each a beer, when Hugh called out, “Come on back, Chris. I think I’ve got something.”

My heart leaped into my throat, and the two glass beer bottles I was holding by the necks in one hand started clinking together as my hands started to tremble. I quickly and quietly pulled drawers out until I found what I wanted—what I didn’t really want, but what I needed to have—and I slowly walked back into the room.

“You think you’ve got something?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm. “This soon? It’s about time for your break. Maybe you should turn the surveillance over to me before you get too tied up in what you’re listening to. It’s recording, isn’t it? I can tell you if there’s anything of interest on it—my Arabic is a lot better than yours. If you feel you need to, you can play it back later.”

Hugh gave me a strange look. “It’s what we’ve come for, I think. Right off the bat. It’s Amir el-Basir and the ambassador’s son. I hear them through the bug in the pool house. It sounds like they’re about to have sex. El-Basir is saying he wants to spread-eagle bind the other guy on a bed, and the guy isn’t objecting. Gonna get pretty kinky, it sounds like. And it’s the ambassador’s son. Come on and listen in.”

“How can you tell it’s the ambassador’s son and El-Basir?” I asked, trying to make myself sound skeptical. I didn’t doubt for a moment, though, that it was them.

“I talked to Sean Caldwell at Penny Haskell’s reception,” Hugh answered. “I can tell it’s him from his voice. They’re speaking English. And the ambassador’s son is calling the other man Amir.”

Shit.

“OK, OK, let me listen too,” I said, as I crossed the room, handed him a beer, and put the other pair of headphones on my ears. It definitely was Amir doing the controlling. The other guy was grunting and groaning now, presumably the restraints having already been applied. My mind went to that frame I’d seen hanging above the studio bed in the pool house—with the restraints at the four corners that pulled down. It didn’t require any imagination for me to know what was happening there.

Amir was making the sounds he made after he managed to get his dick inside me, and the ambassador’s son was panting and begging Amir to go slow with him. Yeah, right. I knew how little Amir paid attention to such requests. I went hard—which I hoped Hugh wasn’t noticing—just from thinking about what stage of the fuck they were in and the feel of Amir’s cock, now working inside the ambassador son’s channel. I even envied the guy the restraints and use of the frame. I’d have to ask Amir to do me that way the next time I was there just so I’d know what it was like. I didn’t know if it was the ambassador’s son or not; I hadn’t talked to him at the reception, although he’d given me the eye and I thought once or twice he was working his way to me but just was pulled off in other conversations before he got there. But Hugh wasn’t a dummy—unfortunately. He seemed sure it was Sean Caldwell.

And Sean Caldwell was a young, good-looking blond—just what Amir liked.

What was Amir doing, I wondered. And how did the ambassador’s son fit into this? And then my mind went back to the whole reason we were doing this surveillance—that the Agency thought that Sean Caldwell was collaborating with Mideast terrorists and, further, that Amir el-Basir was on the government’s terrorist watch list.

Shit. This was all moving too fast for me. It was all happening too fast to me.

“Wait. There’s a third voice,” Hugh said, his own voice full of excitement. “And he’s being invited to enter right in. A gay sex threesome. We’ve really stumbled onto something here. He’s mumbling. Can’t quite . . . no, now he’s talking more distinctly. Telling Sean how to position himself—how to accommodate two men fucking him. God, I know that voice. Oh shit . . . it’s . . .”

Tyler Haskell, the COS’s husband and oil company representative, I thought. I knew the voice as well as Hugh would. And I wasn’t surprised at hearing it, as Hugh had every reason to be. I was too panicked to say anything, though.

“It sounds like . . . yes, it’s Ty Haskell,” Hugh said. I could hear the disbelief in his voice. More disbelief than I was able to muster.

“They’ll be at the sex for a while, Hugh,” I said with a weak voice that didn’t really even convince myself. “It will be some time before they can say anything that we want to hear. We’ll have to decide what on the tapes to give to Penny. This is all so . . . going to shit so fast. It involves both the COS and the ambassador. We both could get so screwed if we don’t handle this right. Go ahead and take your break now. I’ll signal if and when they get into talking about anything that should be of government interest.”

“The COS’s husband double fucking the ambassador’s son with a suspected Mideast terrorist?” Hugh asked in consternation. “Why wouldn’t that be of government interest?”

“But the people involved, Hugh. This is a powder keg. There isn’t anyone who is going to reward the messengers of stuff like this. Why don’t you . . . ?”

“Wild horses couldn’t pull me away now,” Hugh answered, stubbornly.

We sat there, Hugh licking his lips, a sloppy grin on his face, and me listening in dismay as I heard Amir going through his usual long, totally dominating, routine of taking the ambassador’s son, accentuated in arousal and licentiousness now by the adding of Tyler Haskell. Sean Caldwell was being quite vocal on how totally he was being taken in a double penetration. It was all I could do to keep my hand off my cock in trying to share the experience with him. I was afraid I was letting out a moan or two of my own and worrying that Hugh would zero in on how this was affecting me. But Hugh seemed lost in listening to it—and he didn’t seem as reluctant as I was to touch his cock through the material of his shorts.

I started to sweat—almost to hyperventilate—when, during the sex, the three began talking about matters going beyond the sex. That damned ambassador’s son. His appearance had changed everything, might ruin everything. He was bringing everything to a head.

“Fuck,” Hugh said. “Do you hear that, Chris? They’re talking of an operation now. An al-Qaida operation. Two weeks. Someplace in Egypt. Fuck, Chris, did you hear that? I think they’re planning an attack on the American Embassy in Cairo. We’ve got to . . . Chris! What’s that? What are you . . . ?”

“As Allah is my witness, I’m sorry you heard that, Hugh. I tried to push you out of it, but . . .”

“Chris! Why? Don’t!”

The strong beams of sunlight coming through the window of the apartment glinted off the surface of the sharp blade of the knife I’d taken from the kitchen drawer as it rose and fell.

I hated to do it. But it had to be done. I’d done everything I could to get him to pull away. And it was just the beginning anyway.