Racing with the Devil Ch. 01-02

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.