The name on the placard I was raising at the Larnaca international airport arrivals area in meeting the Egyptair flight said Samir, but that wasn’t who he really was. He was known to us as Hamid al-Salim, one of the inner circle of the Sayf Allah–Sword of Allah–terrorist group operating out of who knew where? We thought maybe Aden. We hoped to find out where and who was at the head of it, a shadowy figure only known at Alsayf–The Sword. The bombing and assault rifle attacks in the name of Sayf Allah, had been increasing: two in Germany, three in France, three in the United States, one each in Luxembourg, Belgium, and Liechtenstein, and now even one in St. Petersburg, Russia. It was time to step up to getting those stopped.
His eyes lit up when he saw me behind the ropes at arrivals. I had recognized him instantly as he came out of the gate, but I had to pretend like I didn’t. He thought he was being clever. He’d made all of the arrangements himself through a travel agent in Cyprus–in Nicosia–which many of his ilk used for travel. What he and they didn’t know is that we ran the travel agency ourselves. He didn’t know me, so I had to suppose that his reaction was because he was attracted to me. So far so good, then.
He was meeting someone here in Cyprus but had wanted to do it in privacy and at leisure. Through the agency, he’d rented a remote, serviced holiday villa on the southern coast, near the village of Zyyi, eighty kilometers along the southern Cyprus coast and a forty-minute drive, from the airport; a nondescript gray Mazda6, and a rent-boy. I was the rent-boy.
That was were so many of these terrorists slipped up–with sex. More often than not it was with women. Sometimes it was with men, though, which made everything a bit easier for us. Needing sex from a woman was natural for a male terrorist. Needing sex from another man automatically put the male terrorist into the blackmailable category. I was such a man brought to bear in such instances. I had the necessary Mediterranean good looks, I was young-looking at twenty-five, gay, and this is what I did for my government–let men fuck me in exchange for getting what we wanted out of them. I worked for what the CIA called its Candy Store unit, combining the age-old activities of spying and prostitution to serve U.S. intelligence needs. What we wanted from Hamid–I mean Samir–was a name and a location.
All of this complex and expensive operation was meant to do was just that–obtain a name and a location. Thus was what the bulk of intelligence work amounted to.
He thought he was off the grid for this meeting, but, thanks to our control of the travel agency, we’d picked him up in Barcelona on a passenger freighter to Alexandria, Egypt, and there had been a couple of our agents on the plane with him from Cairo to Larnaca. There were others who would be monitoring the holiday villa and who could be contacted in Zyyi, as warranted. What was maddening was that he didn’t come on our scope before Barcelona. How had he gotten there from wherever he had been before? And were the rest of his central Sayf Allah planners, including Alsayf, in that same place? Why had the group been so allusive while still able to mount operations in Europe and the United States? All of the suppositions were that they were in Aden. But we hadn’t been able to originate Hamid there at the beginning of this trip.
He was presentable enough, wearing navy-blue slacks and a tan sports shirt. All of the photos we’d gotten of him–only available because he had been the sole face of the terrorist group in media–had him in the traditional white Arab robe, the thawb, with white headwear, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that he wasn’t fat. He seemed quite fit for the forty-plus-year-old we gaged him to be. His facile features, quite Arab, were handsome enough. He had piercing dark eyes under bushy black eyebrows and over a black mustache that was more dense than his close-cropped beard. The nose was slightly hawk like, an Arab trait, but not prominently so. The hair of his beard continued down his neck and into the neckline of his sport shirt, indicating that he was hirsute. The hair on his head was close cropped, indicating that he probably was balding there. He had an athletic build. He walked with command.
In all, I wasn’t disappointed in what I saw. That had meaning to me, as I was going to have to let the man do what he wanted with me and act like I enjoyed it and couldn’t get enough of it. So far, that didn’t look like it would be a problem. Sometimes I had to grit my teeth and slather on the acting to be able to get through an operation letting some fat slob fuck me. That didn’t seem to be an issue this time. I wasn’t in this business because I wouldn’t let a man have his way with me or that I couldn’t handle casual sex–or that I didn’t like to have it rough. I had willingly been a rent-boy for the rough trade before having been recruited by the Agency.
I introduced myself as Costas, his for the weekend, showed him the car he was renting, and drove him from the airport. I supposedly was the local, knowing my way around. I’d come a week early to learn my way around. The villa had been prepared for a week too, with surveillance cameras and microphones that were well hidden. We spoke in English as, presumably, my native language would be Greek and his Arabic, although I could understand Arabic as well as he could. I could also handle Greek just in case he checked. There was no way I was going to let him know I was multilingual, though, until I wanted to–until it had been planned.
As we drove, me at the wheel, I talked about the island and what he could do here, pretending that I assumed he was here on a tourist vacation–like it was routine for me to play tourist guide and temporary sex partner for some rich guy visiting the island from one of the supposedly puritanical Arab states–and he countered all of that with having a few meetings to conduct but other than that just enjoying the villa, the sea… and me. He made quite clear that this was to be a sex weekend for him. There was nothing unusual with that. Cyprus was a “let it all hang out” haven for rich Arabs. As I drove, he felt me out, touching me here and there, discovering I had silver bars in my nipples and a silver ring in my navel and that I could achieve an erection with a man. He moved my hand to his crotch to assure myself he could achieve an erection, as well–and that he was hung.
“You have good endurance, no?” he asked.
He was asking if I could take it rough. “Yes, I have good endurance,” I answered. He smiled and sat back into the passenger seat.
We stopped in Zyyi, as a marina-side seafood restaurant open to the Mediterranean, for lunch. He obviously was not too keen on being seen in public, although I didn’t think he gathered any suspicion of our two men sitting in the restaurant and observing us, but I assured him that this would be the only meal we’d take at a restaurant, if that was his desire.
“We may spend the whole time in bed,” he said, giving a little laugh at his witticism.
“The villa has a swimming pool. I like to be fucked in a pool,” I responded and enjoyed the intake of breath he met that with.
“The villa comes with catering and linen service,” I continued as if I hadn’t said anything unusual. “There will be a local woman who comes in for two hours in the late morning to prepare lunch and a dinner as well, which she’ll leave in the refrigerator for me to finish for the evening meal. I’ll prepare breakfast. She’ll do whatever cleaning that’s require in those two hours and be gone the rest of the time. She’s paid not to see anything or ask anything. This is Cyprus. You can be who you want and do what you want here. Sexual services from her don’t come with the deal, although, once you see her, I don’t think you’ll be interested. If you want a woman or a transvestite, I can find one for you.”
That seemed to placate him on the arrangement. “The housekeeper–she won’t be there in the evening?”
“No.”
“Good. And you. There will be someplace in the evening where you–?”
“It’s a one-story villa, but there is a flat under it, reached from the outside,” I said. “I can certainly go there in the evening. There are two bedrooms down there. I can sleep down there, if you want.”
He snorted. “Not for what I’m paying for you, you won’t. But I have meetings in the evening. I wish them to be private.”
“Anything you want,” I said. I was well prepared to say “anything you want” to anything he said he wanted until we’d gotten what we needed. I didn’t really have to be told about his evening meetings, though. I knew about as much as he did about them. He was meeting with two men with Russian names, Viktor and Serge. I didn’t know why yet. Viktor and Serge didn’t know why yet, either. That was what “Samir” presumably would be telling them. All that was important was that both the Russians and we knew that Samir had as much of interest to both of us that was needed to be able to lure us to him. With the hardware used in the massive Sayf Allah-claimed attacks across Europe and the United States that had already taken place, it was assumed that Samir might be shopping for weapons support from the Russians. That was our guess what these meetings set for tonight and tomorrow evening were about. That remained to be discovered.
From the restaurant and the sighting that had been arranged to assure our people that Hamid was here and that it, indeed, was Hamid, calling himself “Samir,” I drove on to the isolated seaside villa.
The villa was small, isolated from its neighbors and almost directly on the water, the beach of which was approached by a wooden staircase descending a rocky cliff some fifteen feet from the stone terracing-surrounded oval swimming pool at the back of the house. There was a central living and dining room section. To the east of that was the master bedroom, with a bath at the back of the villa with a smaller room, set up as a study with a studio coach in it on the front. To the east of the central core was a kitchen, facing the sea, with a utility room and small sitting area for the cook on the front. The living area, master bedroom, and kitchen all faced the sea, with a deep, covered porch running across the entire back of the villa. The basement, which was hard to discern from outside the villa, lit by window wells, was entered via an external stairwell on the west side of the house. There was no internal staircase. Our procurement office had had that as a priority. We didn’t want the target wandering downstairs undetected. On the lower level were a living area, a kitchen, a bathroom, and two bedrooms. The holiday villa could be rented as two separate units.
I had established myself in one of the lower bedrooms. The other one had cabinets that could be opened up to reveal surveillance equipment from which the cameras and listening devices hidden upstairs and on the back porch could be monitored. For most of the weekend, since Hamid showed no interest in the lower level, one of our men was in position in the smaller bedroom in the basement. He could lock himself in a bathroom off that room if the target went exploring.
“Beer or fruit juice?” I asked, as Hamid was standing at the glass doors looking out onto the back porch when we reached the villa. Like most any Muslim visiting outside the Arab world, he opted for the beer. When I came out of the kitchen and handed it to him, he’d stripped off his trousers and sport shirt and was wearing only his briefs. As I had surmised, he was a hirsute man–and muscular, although not muscle bound. Black curly hair swirled around his muscular pectorals and ran in a wide line down his torso to fan out over his belly. Likewise, his thighs and forearms were matted in curly black hair. A gold chain around his neck ended in a gold medallion nestled between his beefy pecs. He dressed right, and the line of his cock inside the pouch of the briefs indicated I would feel him inside me. He was half hard, so I was assured he found me arousing enough. He was a beautiful man, really. I wasn’t going to have any trouble letting him inside me unless he had very kinky needs–and even here, I was ready for some fun in that department.
I was ready to get on with ensnaring him with sex as soon as he wanted. He wanted it now.
He took the beer from me, set it on a side table, pulled me into him for a kiss, and, while we kissed, he unbuckled, unzipped my jeans, and took me in hand. I had no trouble being half hard for him. For the fat, smelly slobs I sometimes had to service, I occasionally needed the help of drugs. Not with this man. I couldn’t wait, really, for the coupling with him. I let him know it.
“Fuck, you’re a sexy man,” I murmured. “Fuck me.”
“Come out onto the porch. Suck me off on the lounge bed out there,” he said.
So, our first sex was on the lounge bed, under the shade of the back porch, overlooking the terrace pool and the sea. Both naked, Hamid holding me on top of him, we sixty-nined to a mutual ejaculation. Afterward, I quickly rose off of him and the lounge bed, grabbed a beach towel, and ran naked, down the stairs. I dropped the towel on the beach, as I ran, and moved directly into the sea, diving into the surf and swimming out a good distance before swimming back, walking, naked, out of the surf, and going to the towel, where I lay on my back, my legs bent and spread. I moved my hand between my legs and fingered my hole, letting him know what I wanted–what he could have.
As I heard Hamid descend the stairs, I pressed my feet into the sand and raised my pelvis, knowing he would come to me, which he did. He knelt between my knees, placed his hands on either side of my chest after he had put the bulb of his long, thick erection in place. He hovered over me, looking down into my eyes to capture the grimaced, half smile I gave him as he penetrated and moved several inches inside me, stopped to let me adjust to him, and then bottomed out and began to slow pump me.
I did what rent-boys are trained to do. I clutched his shoulder blades, digging my fingernails in, and raised my knees, hugging his hips with them as he fucked me, still raising his chest above mine and searching my eyes with his for a reflection there of his mastery, which I gave him. With murmurings of “Yes, yes, like that,” I set my trained passage muscles undulating over the stroking cock as well and moaned, bringing out his groans of pleasure. “Nem fiela,” I whispered, Arabic for “Yes,” and he gave me a surprised look but fucked on.
The use of the Arabic had been intentional, part of the plan.
The stroking intensified, became frenzied, and I moved my hands, clutching his buttocks, holding him close in to me and feeling the cheeks contract and relax with the effort of his thrusts. As I arched my back and shot my load, I cried out, “Nem fiela! Yumris aljins maeia! Tulad li!” I was crying out “Yes, fuck me! Breed me!” in Arabic, again purposely.
He did that, releasing his cum inside me. The man was full of cum and he pumped it in me in three jerks and long spurts. Then he held, clutching me so close I could hardly breathe. Giving me a sharp look, holding deep inside me, he said, “‘Ant tathadath alerabiuth. ‘Ant last Yunani–You spoke Arabic. You aren’t Greek.”
“Shaebiin filastini. Laqad jawuu ‘iilaa huna fi althamaninat–My people are Palestinian. They came here in the 1980s.”
“Ah, la hubu lilkufaar algharbiiyn m’iidhn.”
“No, I have no love for the Western infidels,” I agreed, establishing the comfortable link that I had sought to form.
Satisfied, he gathered me up into his arms–he was significantly larger than I was–mounted the stairs, took me to his bedroom, mounted me again, and got his money’s worth in sex for the rest of the afternoon. My mind went back to his comment that we might spend the entire time in bed. As he fucked me, recovered, changed position, and fucked me again, I was thinking that maybe he would be capable to delivering on that. He was a master cocksman. I enjoyed this part of my job–to a point.
One thing was clear. The Agency had made a good pairing. He couldn’t get enough of me. And, truth be told, I couldn’t get enough of him either. He’d paid enough and we’d both gone through the necessary medical hoops for barebacking, so we fucked raw and, holding him against me as he came each time, he breeded me again and again. For me, this wasn’t a risk; the Agency had developed pills to take the threat away.
* * * *
I was lying on my back on the bed, Hamid crouched close beside me, the ankle of my right leg hooked on his left shoulder. His left forearm was pressing my throat down on the bed, my head was arched back, and I was panting heavily and groaning. I gave a little cry and began to whimper as the knuckles of his heavily greased right hand breached my sphincter muscle and he began fist fucking me. This was beyond enjoyment, but I had to admit that it had me hard and going. I grasped my cock with my left hand and stroked myself off. I had had no warning he’d be this cruel with me.
“Khudhiha! Khudhiha!–Take it! Take it!” Hamid growled. I took it.
After I came, Hamid extracted his hand, rolled over on top of me, between my thighs, penetrated me, and fucked me quickly to his own release. When he’d come, he rolled off me and the bed and, tossing over his shoulder, “Time for a shower,” went into the bathroom and closed the door. I waited for the shower to start and then, with a groan left the bed myself and started to search.
Letting the Arab terrorist brutalize me had been worth it–at least to my government. Hamid had been careless. He hadn’t destroyed the stub of a boarding pass I found in his trouser pocket–for a flight from Rabat, Morocco, to Barcelona, Spain. So that added a leg of travel to what we knew of his journey from wherever to here. I found indication that he, indeed, had been in Morocco for a spell and that he planned to be there again, I found a folded wad of Dirham banknotes, the currency of Morocco, in the back pocket of his trousers.
I managed to get back in the position he’d left me in when Hamid came out of the bathroom. He came over and flopped down on his back on the bed. Within minutes, he was zonked out, evidently exhausted from the travel he’d done that day followed by the sexual athletics.
When I was sure he was asleep, I went into the bathroom and closed and locked the door. I quickly cleaned myself up and then went exploring in the leather kit bag Hamid had left in there. Once again, he’d been sloppy. In the zippered compartment on the side of the bag, I found a card from a gay bar in Tangier, Morocco, where there was–and had been for many decades–a large gay male presence. The bar was named the Legionnaire and the image on the front of the card was of a muscular Roman gladiator. The most interesting find, though, was on the back of the card. Written there in pen was the name “Phillipe” and a telephone number.
I memorized the bar information, the written name, and the telephone number. Leaving the bathroom, I went to the kitchen, wrote it all down on a post-it-note, which I pasted to the inside of a kitchen drawer, drew a glass of water for an excuse for having gone to the kitchen if Hamid was awake when I returned to bedroom, and padded back to the bed.
Hamid wasn’t awake then, so I lay on the bed beside him and dozed off myself. He was awake later, though, as the light coming into through the window was diming. I woke to him turning me onto my belly, putting an arm under my waist to lift me up onto my knees, mounting me, penetrating, and fucking me silly.
* * * *
After warming up the dinner that the housekeeper, Stella, had left for us that evening, Hamid told me I should go downstairs and stay there until he came down to tell me to come up. That was no problem with me. I heard the car arrive. I knew who it would be. They’d come under the name of Viktor and Serge. They’d stay to hear what Hamid had to say, but we all knew they’d be back the next evening if there was something to talk about. They were only empowered to listen to his pitch. He knew they’d have to consult. If they couldn’t come back the next night, he’d do this all over again when they signaled they were ready. He wasn’t going to spend more than two nights anywhere like this.
We were lucky we got him this far into our clutches.
After they left, he came and got me. He was being introspective and suggested we swim in the pool with the underwater lights on. “You said you liked being fucked in the swimming pool,” he said.
We did swim in the pool, naked, but it resulted only in a blow job. He sat on the side of the pool while I sucked his cock. When he was fully erect, he pulled me out of the pool, dried me and then him off, carried me into the bedroom, and fucked me again there.
“I hope that went well,” I murmured afterward as we lay in an embrace. I wanted to see if there was any more I could get from him. “You don’t seem–”
He gave a low laugh.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“Not so much funny as ironic. People get something in their minds and they can’t see beyond that,” he said. “Has your family readjusted to Cyprus from wherever they were displaced?”
“Lebanon, the last time,” I said. “From Palestine and then Lebanon–my Palestinian name is Nabil, but for my business I need a Greek name, so I am Costas.”
“Can I start calling you Nabil?” he asked. “You don’t want to forget where you came from, do you?”
“I would like you to call me Nabil, yes. And my people–they never forget. They never stop hating.” I said this to keep in his head what side this character I was playing could be on–that he could find me sympathetic and could talk to me. “But they have a good life here too.”
“And why is that?”
“We are industrious people,” I said. “Palestinians are good workers. We don’t forget, but we rise above it and take care of ourselves.”
“So, sometimes you can hold off on your hate as long as you can create a good life for yourselves.”
“I guess so,” I said after a pause. “Work can be hard, though. And being what I am isn’t necessarily a good life.” I had to throw in a little “pity me” there.
“You love being fucked and you make good money at it. Don’t pretend otherwise.” He laughed again.
“I suppose,” I said.
“I am an Arab,” he said.
“Yes, I understand that,” I answered.
“Do you see anything beyond that in me?”
“What else is there to see?” I asked. “You want me to tell you that you fuck well? You do. You fuck well.”
“So, you see in me an Arab who fucks well–and maybe one with grudges and a violent ideology.”
“You had strong words to say at dinner about the treatment of Palestinians,” I said. “Words I agree with.” If he was going to try to recruit me, this would be the point. Would the controllers have an interest in going on that tangent? Would my future be as an infiltrator into the Sayf Allah? Could I live that deception and danger?
I didn’t have a chance to find out. He laughed again then and, curiously, said, “Those Russians tonight couldn’t see beyond it either.” Then, before I could pursue that, he rolled over on top of me and fucked me again.
Hamid was getting full value out of his rent-boy contract.
He went into a deep sleep then from exhaustion of his flight and the multiple times he fucked me–and probably from the tension of his meeting with Viktor and Serge. When I was sure he was asleep, I left him, gathered the note I’d written from the kitchen drawer, retrieved the bicycle from the storage shed at the kitchen side of the house that Hamid had no reason to know was there, and peddled quietly into Zyyi.
I met Viktor, who I knew as Harvey Johns, and Serge, who I knew as Thomas Gains, at an open-air all-night tavern by the Zyyi marina. Stella, the holiday villa’s housekeeper was there too.
The three greeted me, with surprise.
“The meeting wasn’t what we expected,” Harvey Johns said. “It wasn’t negotiations for support or an arms buy. It was a shakedown.”
“A shakedown? Of the Russians?”
“Yes,” Thomas Gains said. “We weren’t giving enough consideration of that claimed Sayf Allah attack in St. Petersburg. We should have wondered why they’d do that if they wanted help in any way from the Russians.”
“So, what was it?” I asked.
“Sayf Allah isn’t a political terrorist group, although the effect is the same,” Johns said. “It’s an extortion group. Hamid hit us for ransom for not attacking in Russia again–and for more money they’d attack where the Russians want havoc created. It’s a mercenary army, not an ideological one.”
So that was what Hamid was hinting to me about assumptions made because he was an Arab and not looking beyond those assumptions.
“But we’re still interested in closing the Sayf Allah down?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, as much as ever,” Gains said.
“Our other assumptions might be off then too,” I said. “We’ve been thinking they are located in or near the Persian Gulf. What if they are somewhere else altogether?” And that’s when I pulled out the tidbits of information I’d gleaned from Hamid’s effects that connected him with Morocco.
“We’ll check that out,” Johns said. “You’d better get back to the house now, though, before he wakes and misses you.”
The next morning, Stella pulled me aside while she was at the house.
“Our people were busy last night,” she whispered to me. “You were on to something. Hamid lives in Tangier and this Phillipe you found reference to owns the Legionnaire bar. And that’s a clue too. He’s French and a former French Foreign Legionnaire. He seems to have gathered a lot of his old comrades. We think this Phillipe is Sayf Allah and he heads an extortion mercenary force posing as a Muslim terrorist organization. Hamid is probably the only Arab involved, and that’s why he’s the only front man we’ve seen in the media. We think the attacks in France, Germany, and the United States were demonstrations and that the smaller countries–Luxembourg, Belgium, and Liechtenstein–just paid up after the first attacks there, Harvey said. Russia was Phillipe getting too greedy and bold.”
It all was making sense now.
“He’ll be extracted this evening when the men meeting with him again. In the meantime, hang tough with it.”
* * * *
Hamid didn’t pitch me to join the Sayf Allah that afternoon, which only confirmed for me that the organization wasn’t a Muslim terrorist group–that it was a mercenary extortion army using the cover of politics and religion. Instead, after lunch we went down to the sea naked and I swam and then we fucked on the beach. Then we came back up to the pool, and I gave him a massage on the lounge bed, both of us intending on that leading to another fuck. I wanted him to keep his mind on that rather than anything else he could be thinking of before my compatriots lowered the boom on him.
He dozed off while I was massaging him. I heard noises from the direction of the beach and looked down there. At first I thought our guys had moved up their roll-up operation. A small trawler was hovering off the beach and two rubber rafts, each with five or six guys in military gear were coming into the beach. I pretty quickly realized these weren’t “my” guys, though. We hadn’t brought nearly that many to the party for one and no one had told me about a trawler being used in the extraction for another.
These were someone else’s “guys.” Moving low, so they didn’t see me, I went around to the west side of the house and down into the basement. The guy on duty in the listening room was named Frank. I had him send up a distress signal to our forces in nearby Zyyi.
By the time our forces arrived, though, the rafts were on their way back to the trawler, and Hamid was gone. They might have checked inside the villa for others but they didn’t take the time to realize there was a basement.
Harvey, Thomas, Stella, Frank, I, now with a pair of shorts pulled on, and a couple of others who had been further in the background stood on the terrace of the villa, helplessly watching the rafts reach the trawler and then the trawler steam off.
“My guess is it was the Russians for real,” Harvey said. “After St. Petersburg, they must have gotten royally pissed and launched a track-down operation of their own. Hamid was the most public image of Sayf Allah, so they must have concentrated on finding him and now have.”
“I checked the bedroom,” I said. “The stuff related to Morocco is still there, so maybe they won’t be too fast in figuring out where to go from here. It won’t go easy for Hamid, though.”
“Are you sorry for that?” Stella asked.
“Not in the least,” I answered. “I saw the after photos of some of their attacks on civilian targets. I just regret that the Russians might get to Phillipe before we do.”
“That won’t happen,” Harvey said. “We got the news out last night. An operation in Tangier has already started.”
“So, we can clean up here and go home,” I asked.
“Sure. We’ll just–”
“Just one more trip around the park for you,” a deep male voice sounded from in back of them, in the doorway into the villa’s living room.
We all turned to see that the head of the operation–of all Agency operations including prostitution work–Sam Winterberry, was standing there.
“You did very well, Toby,” he said, directing that at me. Of course I wasn’t either the Costas who I had been introduced to Hamid as in my Greek rent-boy identify or the Nabil of the secondary Palestinian refugee persona I’d later laid on the Arab. I was the American, Toby Kline. “I would like to consult with you in here before you leave, please.”
I knew what “consult” meant and where “in here” would be with Sam Winterberry. He was a very controlling boss. He took my hand as I entered the villa through the glass doors, led me to the master bedroom, and shut the door behind us.
Submission time.