The Ambassador's Son

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. As you surmised, the tennis went on a little long." If I had meant how long he'd left me cooling my heels before summoning me 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 nobody—until earlier today. Hunter obviously thought otherwise. 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 until after it was impossible for you to back out of your assignment. Does that bother you?"

"A bit, yes. I wasn't up for a foreign 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."

He had put the snifter down on a table next to the window and was unbuttoning 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, opened my mouth wide, by necessity, 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, and 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 was thick but not particularly long, and he never could last long at a time. Since he'd been my only one before Amir, I had thought that sex with him was quite hot. After Amir, I wasn't sure. But that didn't really matter. He was the man in control. I knuckled under easily to a man in control.

When he had engorged again, I rolled over on top of him, saddled myself on his cock, and rode the cock cowboy style, rocking back and forth on the cock, 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.

I'd never really heard of a man having a male mistress, and now it seemed that I was to be one.

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

"There was no one after you," 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 can smell another man on you," he said. "An expensive cologne. Amir el-Basir? You didn't answer me before."

"I haven't lied about there being no other man—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. 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. 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. For propriety sake, your assigned 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, to live with him in the ambassador's quarters, and that I would be housed separately, 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 deputy 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 prior. 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 chief of station—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 residence in the embassy compound 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 representative—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 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 hoped he 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 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 drawn 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 in view of his background. 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.

"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 chance 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. 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 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.

* * * *

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 bollixing 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 to the embassy in Cairo 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.

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 leapt 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 lounge bed in the pool house. 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 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. But Hugh wasn't a dummy—unfortunately. He seemed sure it was Sean Caldwell.

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.