Last Call Ch. 04

Would Fazil be this naïve, I wondered. Somehow I couldn't force myself to believe that this was just my good luck. I was locked in a room, once more on solid ground, in the heart of Istanbul. The room was in an upper story of a building high enough that I could see out over the city through a window protected by latticed ironwork, which, considering the unbroken drop to the ground, must have been designed to keep someone in rather than someone out. At the moment, I was the someone it was keeping in.

Fazil's mistake, if it was a mistake, was that the vista from the window was expansive enough that I could see the minarets of Istanbul's signature mosque, the Hagia Sophia, and the curve of the Bosporus that connected the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Perhaps—just perhaps—he thought I would not know Istanbul well enough to get my bearings from what I could see. Or perhaps he thought I didn't know where to go from there to safety should I be able to escape.

But I did know where to go. I couldn't see it from there, but I knew enough about the ground floor of the building that I'd know my bearings as soon as I got out into the open—and I'd know exactly where to go.

And I knew that soon I'd have to make my move. Fazil hadn't fucked me in three days. I could tell that his struggle for safety was beginning to win out over the needs of his dick.

The night after Fazil had taken me in the grape crate in the afternoon and Axel had come to my cabin in the night en route to the waters south of Corfu, I was left alone, locked in my room. I had assumed that would be the case as soon as I felt the engines close down and heard the hull of another ship scraping against ours and the sounds of the reverse process of loading, as the fruit-camouflaged crates of arms were lifted out of the hold of the fantail yacht and onto another, unseen ship in almost total darkness.

Then for three days the yacht had plied the waves back toward Istanbul. A couple of times each day, Fazil had accosted me where and when the urge possessed him and had fucked me roughly and swiftly—and totally. And each night the hulking German bodyguard, Axel, had stolen into my cabin and made long and languid love to me.

There was no question which I preferred. It was the danger of Fazil that aroused me to the heights and his masterful, overpowering fucking that left me panting and blissfully exhausted. But Axel was my possible salvation. I had to make Axel love me.

But when we reached Istanbul, Fazil maintained a painful distance—painfully visible for him and me alike—during the day, and it was only Axel who continued to spend the nights in my bed, moving his meaty buttocks between my spread legs and his long, ever-hard, quickly rejuvenating dick stroking in and out of my channel.

When my opportunity came, it was by chance—I hadn't planned it other than being ever ready to take advantage of any possibility, any weakness in Fazil's security arrangements. We were nearing the end of the two-week window I had painted for Fazil on when my intelligence service would start looking for me. And I increasingly could see that wanting me was losing out in Fazil's struggle to protect himself and his arms smuggling operation.

It was midafternoon, and Fazil was entertaining some eastern European Muslims. I had no doubt these were important current or prospective clients for his arms business, but Fazil never discussed business during his meals. He was permitting me to attend the meal—indeed, I think he was showing me off to his guests, perhaps even telling them who I really worked for and how cleverly he had caught me in his web. I knew, though, that as soon as the meal had ended, Axel would take me back to my luxurious prison at the top of the house, and perhaps have his way with me, and Fazil would withdraw to the study to discuss his business with these men.

Security at the front of the house was total. Fazil's own goons were there, but so were those of the visiting eastern Europeans. No doubt Fazil felt he was safe in putting me on display during the meal.

For the first time in over a week I was fully clothed, in trousers and a polo shirt and actual footwear—ill-fitting loafers without socks. I suppose Fazil thought his deal would be endangered if he brought me to the meal naked and fucked me on the table between meal courses. The thought that he might do this, however, was ever present in my mind and kept me in heat. And from the way he looked at me from across the table during the salad course, I felt that he was struggling to keep himself from doing just that. He had been visibly in pain the last few days in which he had not assaulted me. And I wantonly had been doing everything I could during those days to make him want me.

Resisting the looks I was giving him across the table was driving him to distraction and making him irritable. The servants weren't being nearly fast or competent enough for him in their service.

"Bread. I asked for more bread," he growled. And indeed, the Turkish servants hadn't anticipated well the appetite of eastern Europeans for starches.

There was no servant in the room, however, when Fazil bellowed his demand.

"I'll see to it," I announced sweetly. I rose from my seat and was nearly to the door into the kitchen area, when Fazil tried to stop me.

"No, Jack . . . the servants—"

"It's just bread, Fazil," I turned and called back to him. "I can find bread on my own."

Fazil started to say something, but one of the eastern Europeans just then thought of something he wanted to say to him, and Fazil just waved me on with the trace of a scowl on his face.

I walked straight through the kitchen and into the pantry area and through the storage room—holding my breath for the entire interminable journey—and then I was through the unguarded service entrance, out of Fazil's prison, and headed south toward one of the main bazaars as quickly as I could without raising suspicion from those in the crowded alleyway I was maneuvering through.

I didn't dare turn to check behind me until I reached the main street at the front corner of the house, but when I did, I saw a panicked-looking Axel bursting out of the service door of Fazil's residence like he was being shoot out of a canon. His head was revolving on his thick neck as he tried to see in every direction at once. There was a mean-looking pistol in his hand, tipped with a silencer, and as soon as he realized that the alleyway was teeming with people, he slipped that into his breast pocket.

Our eyes made contact, and I saw the wounded, conflicted look in his face before I turned and plunged into the crowded street, with the crush of people only increasing as I waded through it toward the bazaar, where an elephant could hide if it wanted to.

I reached the edge of the bazaar well before Axel had come anywhere near me, and I knew that barring some fluke of movement, I was safe no matter how good the German's tracking skills were.

I had been to Istanbul before. These bazaars all had a pattern to them, simple enough when you were familiar with them. I plunged into an awning-covered area of the street that had been claimed by a coffee house, and walked quickly through a boisterous collection of yammering old men and into the building behind it that had no façade at all on the first floor of its street side. The light was dim in here and the air soupy with the noxious smoke of Turkish cigarettes and bubble pipes. The crowd of caterwauling men swirling about the enclosure and thumping each other on the back or challenging each other to meet them in the street was no less dense than it was out under the awning.

In seconds I was invisible from the street, and I just kept on walking, just as I had through the service areas of Fazil's residence that he hadn't thought of securing. Even if Axel guessed I had come in here and followed me in, no one would have told a German whether or not another Westerner had cut through the crowded room. If Axel had been Turkish, he would have gotten all the help he needed. But as a German—especially as a German—he was automatically cut off from any help.

I walked into the storage room behind the coffee house and straight on out the rear door—and into another world altogether. Here the houses were silent, turning shuttered windows onto a narrow but largely deserted residential street. Except for the cacophony of sound in the near distance, no one would have guessed that this street was within miles of a teeming Turkish bazaar.

I knew where I was going. The consulate was two, maybe two and a half miles almost due west from here, out the Istinye Dereici Daddesi and across from the Carrefour-SA supermarket on Istinye Mahallesi.

I could walk it easily, even in the ill-fitting loafers. I just hoped that Fazil was surprised enough at my abrupt escape and flustered enough with also having to entertain the east European Muslims that he hadn't, for once, thought two steps ahead of me and sent some of his goons straightaway to the consulate's gates.

But if he had thought of doing that, it had occurred to him too late, because inside an hour I was safely inside our consulate, had contacted my agency's base chief, and had caused a massive assault operation to be launched to close in on Fazil. What I had brought to the consulate was the biggest intelligence coup of the month.

But when the team of intelligence agents reached the villa near the banks of the Bosporus between the consulate and Hagia Sophia, all they found were bewildered servants surveying an unfinished meal on the dining room table, who, upon interrogation, were apparently genuinely totally unaware of the importance of the man they had been working for.

* * * *

My posting to London proved to be eerily timely. The station in our embassy there was the hub for anticipating the coming resurgence of ethnic fighting in the Balkans, and my recent stint as the "guest" of a major arms smuggler to the Muslim side of that near-term war, one who all of the Western intelligence agencies were scrambling to find and shut down, put me at the center of the station's activity.

The only real problem I had, other than the occasional, self-indulgent twinge of cheering Fazil Fikret on in his game of hide and seek, was that I still was hearing of problems with one of my old cases in Cyprus that I had assumed would cease with the passage of time. Fazil's nephew, Tahir, just wasn't taking to the control agent who had taken over from me. Tahir had proved to be a very delicate case. The information he was passing on about the Turkish Cypriot prime minister's office was quite valuable—and keeping him from revealing that he had been doing this was becoming even more important. And, as a possible link to his uncle, the station on Cyprus had to delicately work with him, trying to keep him happy—and clearly when I left he became, and remained, unhappy. It was becoming increasingly chancy trying to get him to spill information on his uncle's movements without him realizing we were even more interested in his uncle than in him.

But mostly my work was concentrated on the Muslim organizations operating out of the UK, thanks to its lenient restrictions on their political activity. And I was very good at my work. I continued to walk into the lion's mouth almost daily, going to places and speaking to people who no one else in the station had the balls to approach—and coming away almost always with yet another puzzle piece to the larger question of where ethnic animosity was leading violent action across the world.

And I easily made friends in my new environment. Some embarrassingly so. There was one junior agent, Steve, who was on his first—and to listen to his controllers, most likely his last—assignment, foreign or otherwise, with the Agency. He was brilliant and we couldn't have asked for a better analyst putting all of the pieces we were assembling together. But he insisted beyond endurance that he would be a field agent. And, as a person, he was just too obvious for words.

We were functioning under a "don't ask/don't tell" policy, and many agents, like me, were having all of their talents and proclivities put to use in the service of country without ever directly acknowledging that certain kinds of asset running required certain kinds of candy. But Steve was just too, too obvious.

Steve swirled around me like a love-sick puppy dog almost from the first day I arrived in the London station. Sniffing and simmering and wagging his tail—oh so obviously wagging his tail—and signaling for all to see that he wanted me and was mine for the plucking.

I felt sorry for him—not only was he as far away from being arousing to me as a man could get and not be a woman, but he also was so obviously a bottom himself. We just didn't fit.

But the longer I knew him the more it became clear to me that he could be very useful, and so, when I heard that his controllers were just about ready to lower the boom on him and send him home, I went to see the station chief.

"They tell me he's untrainable, that he never could be a field agent," the station chief said.

"I think he may be ideal for a specific role," I said. "It's a circumstance that is probably down to its last-ditch effort, and it's an important one. It might help us in netting one of our primary targets even. And he's perfect for it. How many can we come up with like him when that's just what we need?"

"Not many, thank god," the station chief said with a snort.

"And yet we pride ourselves in having the perfect agent for every situation, don't we?" I countered. I was trying to remain calm, analytical, convincing.

That made the station chief stop and think. "Well, I don't know."

"Let me contact the COS in Nicosia and see what we might try to arrange," I said.

"And you would take charge of him and prep him for the assignment?" the station chief asked?

"Yes, certainly." I was trying to sound more confident and willing than I really was. I didn't relish what I would have to do to prep Steve for the assignment.

"Well, all right then," the station chief said. And I felt the jaws of the vice of responsibility and accountability close over me. It had to be done, though. I didn't like loose ends, and, to a great extent, I felt responsible for that loose end.

And so it was, two days later, that I took a delighted and tail-wagging Steve to lunch at a Turkish restaurant near the embassy compound.

"I'm being reassigned to Nicosia, Cyprus, and you are taking me there to help me work into actual running of foreign assets?" Steve asked. He was incredulous. And I also could feel him shuddering under my touch. We were sitting side by side on a booth bench, and I had moved in close, thigh touching thigh, and my bare forearm rubbing against his. I thought he was going to melt on the spot.

"Yes, I asked for you, Steve. I think you'll do very well in Cyprus. And I'm personally looking forward very much to our time together as we travel."

"I . . . I don't quite know what to say. I had no idea that—"

"Just say yes, Steve. It would mean so much to me." I gave him "that" look, and I felt him trembling beside me.

"Yes, yes. Of course yes." And then I heard him switch gears with a "Uh, yes, may we help you?" I looked up at Steve's change of voice, almost an angry, protective tone to his voice.

Fazil Fikret, the international arms smuggler, was standing at the side of the table, and, looking past him at the door, I saw that he wasn't alone. But his bodyguard of the day wasn't Axel.

"Do you mind if I join you for a moment?" he asked.

"Why . . . who . . .?" Steve was sputtering.

"You may sit . . . for a moment, Fazil," I said. "But you should know that this restaurant is crawling with embassy muscle. One raised word from me and—"

"That's quite all right. I didn't come here to harm you," Fazil said. I wasn't bluffing this time about help being present. There were several of the embassy's Marine guards scattered around the tables. This was a favorite embassy luncheon spot.

"If I'd wanted to harm you, I would have done so already," Fazil said, his tone matter of fact. "I found you here weeks ago."

As Fazil folded himself into the booth on the bench across from us, Steve had built up his courage. "If you are going to threaten us—"

"Shut up, you little weasel," Fazil growled contemptuously. "I came to see Jack—if that's what he's still calling himself. Not you." Steve fell silent, stunned by the dismissal.

"Why did you come to see me, Fazil? Oh, but excuse me, I haven't done introductions. Steve, this is Fazil Fikret, the arms smuggling mastermind we are working so hard to locate. It would appear that he might be in London, at least for the moment. Fazil, this is my very good friend, Steve."

Fazil snorted, and Steve shrank into the corner of the booth in abject fear. He knew quite enough about Fazil Fikret to know the personal danger he represented.

"I came for you, of course," Fazil said. "I have learned that I am obsessed with you."

I looked over at the door and then looked back at Fazil. "Where's Axel?" I asked.

"Alas, Axel is no longer in my employ," Fazil answered. He had reached across the table and taken my forearm in his hand. I looked down at the hairy knuckles on his fingers and once again almost let my engorging cock speak for me. Almost.

Fazil saw both the brief spark in my eyes and the dying of the embers.

"Ah. You have not suffered as I have," he said.

"I have suffered," I said in a low, halting voice. Sorry almost immediately that I had opened to him.

"Then come with me now," Fazil said.

"No. I have done too much damage to you," I said.

"Nothing that means more to me than you do," he answered.

"Did you let me walk away in Istanbul on purpose?" I asked. I was challenging him on what was more important to him—what was more important to him then. I had gotten my bearings and broken free all too easily. I had eluded Axel all too easily too—but I had seen the gun Axel had burst out of the house with—and the silencer on its barrel. Spirals within spirals. International intrigue was just so . . . intriguing.

Fazil looked away, obviously not wanting me to see his eyes, afraid, I thought, that I'd see truth therein, no matter what it was.

"If even remotely true, then whatever you did to Axel wasn't deserved."

There was no answer from Fazil. And then it dawned on me.

"You didn't send Axel to me at night, did you?"

Fazil was still looking away from me, but the resetting of his jaw told me what I needed to know. When he looked back, his eyes were hooded, in control, protected from me. "Last call," he said in a small voice, almost a whisper.

The ensuing silence was painful for both of us. This was quite possibly the first chink I'd ever seen in his armor. He was bluffing, and we both knew he was bluffing. I had not dared believe he was genuinely desperate for me—for my body being worked by his—until that very moment.

"Ah," he said after a moment, as he withdrew his hands. "Perhaps not yet. But someday. Someday you'll return to me. Maybe on Cyprus."

I didn't answer. I looked down at the surface of the table, not trusting myself not to be lost in his eyes again. And when I looked up, Fazil was gone.

I looked over at Steve, cowering and trembling in the corner of the booth, and I reached my arm around him and pulled him to me. It was time to get started.

"Have I told you what beautiful blue eyes you have?" I asked.

"No. No you haven't," he stammered. And I slowly saw him forget the visit of Fazil and fall irrevocably under my spell.

"Could you . . . would you come back to my flat with me now?" I asked. And I gave him my best entreating smile.

Steve was quite a cute little piece when in the altogether. He was several years younger than I was—and he looked several more years younger than he actually was. He was slight of stature, but perfectly formed, more beautiful than handsome, his body completely hairless and shining like translucent marble, and with pert little Statue of David-like cock and balls.