Fever

The staff certainly didn't tone down their idea of entertainment because a new doctor was there. It was clear to me from the beginning that Christophe—and possibly Assane as well—had let them all know I was a player. Christophe made no bones with them that he'd had me—and that he was happy to share me.

Soon after we settled in the canvas chairs around the campfire, and someone had cranked up the gramophone to produce crooner—both male and female—background music, the staff began to unwind. Julie London was singing "Cry Me a River" when I saw that Dr. al-Saadi had taken Assane into one of the backlit tents. I clearly saw, by their shadows, Al-Saadi shoot Assane up with a syringe, Assane kneel in front of Al-Saadi and suck his dick, and Al-Saadi fuck Assane on a bed, with Assane playing the crab, hovering over Al-Saadi's body, facing up at the ceiling of the tent, arms and legs holding him over Al-Saadi's body, while the Saudi held Assane's waist and raised and lowered the young Fila tribesman on his cock.

I could see Christophe watching the tent with some irritation, but as the cook, Ahmad, was kneeling between Christophe's spread legs as he sat in the canvas chair at one side of me, and, with Christophe guiding the cook's woolly head as Ahmad gave him a prolonged blow job, Christophe hardly had room to complain.

Lines of cocaine had been laid out on a low table by the fire. Christophe had already taken a line. So had I, and so had Ken Kelso, a burly redhead, who sat in the canvas chair on the other side of me and was flirting with me.

Gretta Schmidt, blonde, petite, top heavy, and the other side of forty, sat cross-legged at the table and was taking lines of the cocaine. Squatting behind her, the giant Mandinka orderly, Moussa, was embracing her from behind. He opened her blouse and cupped and squeezed her ample breasts. Intent on the white powder on the table in front of her, Gretta didn't seem to notice and certainly not to mind. I knew he was going to fuck her and she was going to welcome him. I couldn't imagine how a small woman like her was going to be able to take the cock of a man the size of him, though. Not very far into the night, though, he had carried her into one of the tents and was doing just that, giving quite a shadow play. She was on top of him, riding a huge cock that came almost all out of her before she squatted and took it all again. It was clear he would have crushed her if he'd been on top.

Baba, the other Mandinka, was mixing and distributing drinks—that is until I'd gone off to the separate bathroom facilities. On the way back, where I was in sight of the center fire pit area and of Al-Saadi fucking Assane in one tent, Moussa fucking Schmidt in another tent, Ahmad sucking Christophe's cock, and Kelso kneeling down at the table now, snorting another line of coke, Baba grabbed me from behind and pressed me into the trunk of an umbrella tree.

Why not, I thought, as I arched my back, jutted my buttocks into his crotch in blatant invitation, and moved my arm back to where, when I extended it as much as I could, I could cup the back of his neck and bring his face down far enough for us to kiss. I almost found out why that wasn't a good idea, though. He fucked me, standing, from the rear, with what might have been a foot of cock. I hadn't been mined that deep since the night before, by Christophe, and I sensed that Baba didn't have it all inside me.

After stopping at the table for a snort when Baba was done with me, I hobbled, bowlegged, to my canvas chair between Christophe and Kelso. Both had been waiting for me. Ahmad was gone. As I sat in the chair, both men turned their faces toward me for three-way kisses, and both put a hand on my cock and started to stroke.

My head was spinning, and I remember saying that I needed a breather and standing up from the chair and brushing their hands off. Then I remember being in one of the tents, and I remember Christophe holding up a syringe. After that, I remember sitting in Christophe's lap, facing him, as he sat on the side of a bed. I was gripping his shoulder blades and, for some reason laughing and babbling to him about all the pretty colors. He was cupping my buttocks in his hands and pulling me in to him. His cock was entering my soft, vulnerable zone and I was panting and melting to him. My mind drifted off to all the pretty lights flashing around me.

Then it was Ken Kelso's lap I was sitting in. His cock wasn't as long as Christophe's but it was appreciably thicker. He also was gripping my buttocks, but whereas Christophe had been slowly sinking inside me, Kelso was rapidly pulling me on and off his cock, giving me a pounding. I lost my grip on his shoulder blades and arched my torso back toward the ground, reaching for the ground under me with my knuckles. Kelso continued to pull me hard on and off his cock.

I got an upside view of Ahmad entering the tent. I realized that Christophe was still in the tent. I registered Ahmad's wavering voice saying to Christophe, "You need to come. It's Assane. I think he has the fever." And then, with Kelso still fucking me, I zoned out into another world altogether.

* * * *

"So, they did send someone."

"Yes, they sent me, Father Felix," I answered. "Yours wasn't the only indication that there was something to look into with this fever business."

The priest wasn't at all what I had expected—not as Christophe had painted him. He was American and black, yes. And he was a large man. But if there was any attraction to me in how he had responded thus far, I couldn't discern it. I wasn't dumb. I knew that my type—blond, not-quite medium height, lightly muscled, and young looking—attracted many men. Christophe had suggested that Father Felix had a lover of my type before the young Fila tribesman, Yossibo, the priest had written to Doctors Across Borders about. But I wasn't getting the vibes at all that he had an interest in my "type."

I had come to the mission by myself, taking the yellow Toyota off-road vehicle Assane drove. It was clear Assane wouldn't need the car. Christophe had told me he would introduce me to the priest, but I'd left him having a hell of a row with Dr. al-Saadi, over what, I couldn't tell. Christophe had held Assane in his arms as the young man had gasped his last feverish breath and then he'd lit into Al-Saadi. No one had left for the clinic yet that morning. I needed to talk with Father Felix sooner rather than later, so I'd just taken the Toyota and driven the only road out of the clinic to the mission. We'd passed the mission school on the way to the clinic the previous day.

"You say that this Yossibo told you he was going to die—and that it was because he was a young Fila man?"

"Yes, he did. I of course didn't believe him. And then he caught the fever and died."

"What exactly did he tell you?"

"He said he knew that it was one of the Western doctors at the clinic who was giving the young men the fever. He said it was young men like him. He also said he would die because of the sin he had committed."

"The sin?"

"He said that he had had sex with one of the Western doctors—that he'd let the doctor have sex with him. And that he'd let the doctor give him drugs. He mentioned the Frenchman, Dr. Colbert, and said he needed to tell someone beyond the clinic."

"He told you this because you were having a relationship with him as well?" I asked.

An expression of such astonishment came over the priest's face that I nearly shrank away from him. "Certainly not," he said indignantly.

"Then why would he tell you something like that?" I asked.

"Confession. I was his confessor. I had been his teacher here at the school. He was a promising student. I got him the job as an orderly at the clinic. He said he wanted to learn about medicine—that he wanted to be a doctor himself some day. I believed he was capable of that. And these people deserve doctors of their own kind."

"You don't seem to like the Western doctors at the clinic very much," I said.

He snorted. "No I don't. If you could see the sort of lifestyle these people led . . ."

I'd more than seen the lifestyle those people led. I was still sore and groggy from what I'd more than seen. It was more than I was comfortable with myself—especially the drugs. But I had to be like them if I wanted them to let their guard down to me.

"That Dr. Colbert, in particular. He doesn't keep it to the clinic world. He's been here and tried to undermine my work with the students."

Ah, I thought, so if Christophe has misled me about this priest, the bad blood between them might be the reason. "But why would the Western doctors be any threat to young Fila tribal men, Father Felix?" I asked. "It doesn't make any sense."

"I have no idea. All I know is that Yossibo came to me not only to confess the sins he did but also because he was a very frightened young man. He said that he was frightened of this fever that is striking young men and that he was afraid he would get it—and that the doctors at the clinic would give it to him. I'm just reporting what he told me. He said they would kill him and he's dead. I couldn't just brush that away. I had to tell his story to someone. That's why I contacted Doctors Across Borders in New York. This is their operation."

I thanked him and told him I'd get to the bottom of this one way or the other. I left thinking that someone was trying to lead me in a false direction, either Christophe or the priest. I didn't want it to be Christophe who was lying to me, but this priest hadn't been at all what I had expected. He didn't even watch me walk away. Men who were interested in "my type" always watched me walk away.

When I returned to the clinic, Christophe, Ken Kelso, and Moussa were digging a grave for Assane. He was Muslim and thus needed to be buried before sundown.

"There you are," Gretta Schmidt said as she came out of the clinic's entrance when I'd driven up in the yellow Toyota. "I wondered if you men were going to leave me completely alone to handle all of the patients today." She looked frazzled.

"I see that Christophe is over in the clinic's cemetery digging a grave, but I don't see Dr. al-Saadi over there," I answered. "Isn't he working in the clinic?"

"No, I haven't seen him at the clinic at all. I've had to carry it all myself so far today."

When we checked, no one had seen Dr. al-Saadi for hours. That evening he still hadn't returned. I walked a bit of a distance from the camp and called the Doctors Across Borders office in New York. I told them they needed to send three fresh doctors out to Kongoba. I assured them that the fever issue would be resolved, but I told them I couldn't say what the issue was and it was going to be resolved yet. After I rang off with them, I called Naples.

The next morning, at my request, Christophe walked with me down toward the river. He made love to me in an animal wallow next to a pond in a stand of elephant grass. The grass was a good five foot high, and where we lay, him on top of me, with me thrusting my buttocks up and leveraging off my feet, meeting him thrust for thrust as we desperately fucked, was where the grass had been matted down by animals watering at the pond and resting here. Our fucking was passionate and frenzied in keeping with me knowing it was our last time. I think he suspected that as well.

He might even have suspected that when we both shot up to enhance the fuck, what I put into his vein was a mixture of a sedative and truth serum rather than our favorite, relatively safe, sex enhancer. After we fucked and when I was laying on top of him, pinning him to the ground, and asking the questions I didn't want to ask, he answered without hesitation. I don't know if it was from the drug I gave him or his need to confess, the death of Assane having hit him a decisive blow. It may have been a combination of the two. He didn't even hesitate to tell me where he had put Dr. al-Saadi's body—down in the rushes by the river with the hope that wild animals would carry it off.

After I injected him with the other drug I'd brought with me, I lay with him in my arms until he closed his eyes and his breathing had gone shallow. I was the only one to walk out of the elephant grass and back to the staff tents. I told Dr. Schmidt where they could find Dr. al-Saadi's body, apologized to her for leaving her in the lurch but that replacement doctors were on their way, and assured her the case load would decrease as there would be no more patients with the mysterious fever.

I also told her where they could find Christophe. "He'll be passed out for several more hours, I think. It's up to you and him on how you deal with the authorities on Dr. al-Saadi's death. My guess is that Doctors Across Borders will be just as happy if it was an accident and if Christophe is on the next airplane to New York. I can tell you that Al-Saadi's death possibly has saved literally millions of lives. Beyond that, I have nothing to say but that the organization has called me away from here."

I packed my bags, took the yellow Toyota, and drove to the Bamako airport to catch the next available flight to Rome.

* * * *

The view from where I was standing, leaning forward into a stone balustrade on a terrace south of Naples, overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea, would have been spectacular if my face wasn't being directed skyward by Count Orsini's hand cupping my chin and turning my head up. His other hand was palming my lower belly, pulling me away from the railing at the top of the cliff. His dick was in my ass, pounding me hard. I had already come, splashing my cum out over the abyss. He was near to his climax. This was his way of both saying, "Welcome back; I appreciate that you came back alive" and asserting that he was my handler as well as my lover.

This was always what Orsini expected, demanded of me, immediately upon my return to him. It was an assertion of control. I had come to both expect and appreciate it. He was a strong-cocked man, both in size and vigor.

I was naked, stripping for him on demand as soon as I'd walked out on the terrace while he was having his breakfast. The young Italian man who was serving him didn't bat an eye as I stripped down. I'm sure the count was covering him as he covered me. Each time I had come here, there had been a different young man in service to the count. This one's name, I believe, was Guido.

Orsini was fully clothed—more formally so than one would expect of a man having breakfast on the terrace of his own villa. He was decked out impeccably in his usual all-white suit. Just his fly was open, which was all he needed to be undone to unreel a long cock and put it inside me. I couldn't see him from where I was positioned, but I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd been able to keep his white Triliby fedora hat on the entire time he was spiking me. He certainly had it on when he was finished and went back to the breakfast table to wait for me to recover and join him to give my report. "The sun," he'd simply said when I looked quizzically at him for wearing it at the breakfast table.

He, of course, kept me naked. It was his way of making clear who was in charge.

"So, you didn't have the stomach for it in the end—with Christophe," he said, his voice including an edge of censure to it.

"We've always operated on not doing more than was necessary," I answered. "I ascertained he wasn't completely in it, and he had stopped it himself before I intervened. It has nothing to do with any relationship we'd had."

"So, he didn't fuck you?"

"Yes, he fucked me, and I let him shoot me up with drugs to enhance the fuck. But it's what brought him to opening up to me." I didn't add that drugs of my own had done that.

The count seemed satisfied with that explanation. "So the Saudi doctor was doing some sort of experimentation? Or did just not like that particular African tribe."

"Experimentation, but it was going to go much further than that. Christophe filled in the blanks for me. It wasn't just experimentation, but it was that. Al-Saadi was in contact with Iran as well as various Mideast terrorist groups. He was trying to develop a specifically targeted virus. He had conquered that. Drugs were being given to all at the clinic through injections and he had reached the stage of zeroing in on young Fila males to test the virus in injections on. Only the young Fila males were susceptible to that particular serum. Al-Saadi was going to change to another group his potential clients would want targeted. The Fila targeting was to show potential clients what was possible. Christophe said that Al-Saadi was going to move on not only to tailor the targets to clients' needs but also to be able to dispense the virus via drinking water. The potential of terrorists to wipe out whole segments of populations they wanted to even when embedded in populations not affected is staggering.

"It was only when it became obvious to Christophe what the ultimate plan was—that it wasn't a demonstration of what was possible unless the world paid attention to the danger—that Christophe had begun to balk at helping with the project. When Al-Saadi infected a Fila man he'd promised Christophe he wouldn't infect, and the young man died, Christophe snapped and killed Al-Saadi—saving me the trouble of doing so myself, incidentally."

"Very impressive, Wade," the count said. "You have deserved a rest after this. Do you wish to go to New York and check on how Christophe Colbert is doing?"

"No, thanks," I answered. "I didn't choose to meet up with Christophe again. I don't choose to do so now."

"Good answer," the count said, smiling. "Perhaps you would like to rest up here, then. I would be happy to host you. Of course, as big as this villa is, only one of the rooms has a bed in it. If that doesn't—"

"That suits me fine," I answered. It was rather a ritual with the count. He always fucked me for days after I'd come back from an operation. I hadn't realized how worried he'd been about my relationship with Christophe. I had found I wasn't over Christophe, and, indeed, when it had come to the point of eliminating Christophe for his part in Al-Saadi's experimentation, I didn't do so. I knew now that the count would have preferred that I had.

I would, at some point, hook up with Christophe again—in New York or elsewhere. But the count didn't have to know everything, and I needed to keep on the good side of the count. Those who didn't keep him pleased had a habit of disappearing without a trace. It was a long, rocky way down from this terrace to the churning sea below.

"It's not yet 9:00 in the morning, but I have an urge to retire to the bed now," Count Orsini said, looking intensely at me over the rim of his coffee cup. "Perhaps you'd care to join me for an hour or two."

"Yes, of course," I answered. That "hour or two" was also just a ritualistic saying of his. He'd be fucking me all the fucking day long.