Chapter 3 – Chapter 3

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.