Wind of Fortune

Perhaps the most iffy part of the whole operation was getting a dancer and waiter position at Rudi’s, a gay club on the Via Port Alba off the Piazza Bellini in Naples, Italy, before the Wind of Fortune sailed. I wasn’t a pole dancer, but I had to convince the manager at the club that I was. I was a fit and young, blond American, posing as a Canadian to lessen scrutiny, which helped, and I was introduced as a dancer and male escort to the manager by one of the rent-boys at Rudi’s who had been paid handsomely to vouch for me, which helped. But I had to sell myself on the pole and sell myself on my knees and in bed to the manager to be taken on staff. Fortuitously, I managed that, so I was in place, first on stage, and then waiting the table when the Italian billionaire of secret means, Luigi Castrano, brought the guests who were going to sail with him on the Wind of Fortune to the club a couple of nights before the boat sailed.

I did what I had to do to get Castrano to want me—and then to enjoy me.

At that point, it was Castrano’s Naples factotum, Howard Brinkley, who was really one of ours, who got me set up. He was the one who got Castrano and his party to the club once I had been established there and was on duty. And it was Brinkley, seemingly noticing the man’s reaction to my flirting, who cajoled Castrano to engage my services for the night and, subsequently, to offer me the job of waiter and escort on his sail around the Mediterranean on the Wind of Fortune, doing whatever he was suspected of engaging in that attracted the interest of the CIA.

It was Howard Brinkley who came to me as I was leaving the stage and arranged for me to wait on Castrano’s table, which included other guests, three men of Castrano’s age and a young, redheaded woman, who looked familiar to me and who was good-looking enough that I would have known she was the German movie actress, Gilda Gund, if I were into women, which I wasn’t. On the way to the table, me wearing just a red sequined jock strap because I was just coming off the pole, Brinkley repeated that Castrano was an Italian billionaire with his hand in a whole bunch of companies and that there were two international bankers at the table, Lars Blumfeld of Austria and Cedrick Strang from the UK.

“Blumfeld is gay; as far as we can determine Strang isn’t,” Brinkley confided in a whisper.

The other man, obviously connected to the young movie actress, was Salvitore Boccelli, an Italian movie director. I’d been told before who these people were and they’d be yachting in the Mediterranean, but Brinkley repeated everything sotto voce as we approached their table.

He told them I was Conner Taylor and would be serving them—any way they liked, he said, giving me a pointed look.

I served them the drinks they wanted and when Castrano wanted me to sit in his lap while one of the gay male sex acts was going on on the stage, I served him in that capacity too, letting him fondle me, run his hands all over me, and eventually unzip himself, pull out his erection, and raise and lower me on his cock right there as we watched the sex performed on the stage. It was that kind of club—sex right at the tables while watching the stage shows.

Lars Blumfeld wanted me too at the table, and I rode his cock as well, facing him. The other two men cuddled with Gilda Gund. She wasn’t penetrated by either of them, but it came close.

Eventually, it was Brinkley who determined that Castrano wanted to continue having me around and who negotiated for me to sign on to the crew of the Wind of Fortune as waiter and bed warmer for Castrano’s coming Mediterranean cruise. I agreed, since that was the plan to achieve all along. And it was Brinkley who, after Castrano’s party had left the club, stayed on to, as he said, “give instructions to the young man on coming on board the Wind of Fortune.”

Castrano and company, though, had no idea what those instructions would entail. They’d have been shocked to have heard what happened between Brinkley and me when they left.

“Well, that went just as planned,” Brinkley said as he escorted me to the hotel next door to the club and up to the room that had already been reserved. “It went more smoothly than I hoped it would,” he added.

“Will you tell me now what the operation is and how I fit in?” I asked.

“When we get to the hotel room,” he said. “You didn’t need to know if inserting you in the ship’s crew didn’t work. We’d have had to go with the backup plan then, which would have been more difficult.”

“A backup plan?” I asked.

“We already had someone on board.”

“You, right?” I asked.

“No. I stay here. I run Mr. Castrano’s life when he’s in Naples. Not anywhere else. No, we have someone on board who will handle communications between you and the Candy Store.”

“If you already have someone on the ship, why do you need me at all?”

“Here we are. You can clear that up with Sam.”

And then we were at that hotel room, and there, sitting on the end of the bed, stripped down to briefs, was my boss—Sam Winterberry. Winterberry was the chief of the CIA’s Candy Store Unit, an operations unit that combined the world’s two oldest professions—spying and prostitution—to glean intelligence and cooperation from targeted foreigners who gave up the secrets of their countries in exchange for sex they couldn’t do without. I was one of several agents providing the candy, some straight, some gay, and some, like me, bi, as necessary.

As always, I sucked in my breath and my sphincter muscle gripped when I saw Sam Winterberry. That wasn’t because he repelled me. The sexual attraction of him was just the opposite for someone like me who had come to want it rough. He wasn’t young. He probably was in his early fifties. But he was a magnificent, sexy specimen for his age—tall and wiry, perfectly proportioned, ruggedly handsome, and having the presence of a Marine general who kept himself in tip-top condition and was evermore in growling command. What took my breath away was that he controlled his agents through sex and he was a demanding, masterful, and cruel dominator.

I was very much aware of his command and intent when I took off the trench coat I’d worn from the club next door, knowing I would just be in a red-sequined jock strap.

“Hello, boys,” he said as Brinkley and I entered the room. “How did it go? Yes, take the coat off, Cory. I’d like to check whether you’ve been keeping in the shape you need to be. Ah, yes, very nice. You should do well in this caper.”

During this operation, I was going to be Conner Taylor. Around the Agency I was Cory Bradford. But even that wasn’t my real name.

“It worked,” Brinkley said. “Our boy here is signed on to the crew of the Wind of Fortune, which sails the day after tomorrow, ports as yet unknown.”

“Very good,” Sam said. Turning to me, he said, “I suppose you want to know what your assignment is.”

“Yes, please,” I said. “I was just told we already have someone on board. Why do you need me?”

“The ‘we’ who have someone on board is the Agency, not a Candy Store agent. I want my own agent there. What we highly suspect these Wind of Fortune cruises around the Mediterranean are engaged in is not only the personal pleasure and business interests of Luigi Castrano and people he wants to impress but that he’s also transporting Arab terrorists from one place to another outside of usual commercial transportation controls. There has just been a terrorist operation in Hamburg. You may have heard of it. A bombing in a crowded holiday open-air market. Nearly thirty dead and a lot more wounded. We think this sailing of the Wind of Fortune is to pull one or more of those who planned and executed this out of mainland Europe and sail them back to somewhere safe for terrorists in the Middle East.”

“OK, but why do you need me if someone already is on board?”

“We know something of the man who was in charge of the bombing. We know he’s a gay top . . . and we know he has a specific tattoo by which he can be identified. He has to be seen naked to see it. Combining those two—a gay top and a tattoo—we need someone on board who will take a man’s cock and be intimate enough with him to identify him by the tattoo. The man we now have on board can’t do that. You can.”

“I see,” I said—and I did see. This was exactly what I did for the Candy Store Unit. I was about to ask other questions when Sam let me know he had other plans.

“Howard will leave us now for a bit and come back later to give you detailed instructions on what to do and how to communicate it back to us. We can pull a raid at sea to take the terrorist when you have identified him—and probably Castrano, as well, but we want to know where the terrorist is going. But, for now, I think you know what I want from you. I want to assert our lines of control. Come, lie on your back on the bed here. Open your legs to me.”

Just like that and Sam was hovering over me, penetrating me, fucking me.

* * * *

The 172-foot luxury yacht, Wind of Fortune, wasn’t a new, sleek, curvy mega yacht. It had a solid, “this is really a working ship” look to it. It was first launched in 1981, constructed by the Italian shipyard CRN, and refurbished within the last two years, when Luigi Castrano bought it and began a series of Mediterranean cruises with friends and associates that usually touched on ports like Benghazi, Libya; Latakia, Syria; and Beirut, Lebanon, none of which normally came up on sailing tourist itineraries. That list of destinations alone piqued the interest of international crime-fighting agencies. With three white-painted decks above a dark-blue hull, the ship had amenities aplenty, from seven double-occupancy staterooms, two of them quite luxurious, to crew accommodations for eleven in seven additional tiny, barely functional cabins in the hull. The refurbished ship included a gym, a movie room, a Jacuzzi in addition to a small pool, a billiards room, a sky lounge, three boat tenders, and a small fleet of jet skies. Everything in the guest areas was sheathed in teak and gold-plated piping. Everything in the crew areas was not.

When we sailed from Naples, Castrano was set up in the primary cabin, with the other larger cabin held free for, I was told, a special guest being picked up in another port. I immediately assumed this was the target we were honing in on. The movie director, Salvitore Boccelli, and his redheaded German starlet, Gilda Gund, were in a guest cabin; and the two bankers, the Austrian Lars Blumfeld, and the Brit, Cedric Strang, each had a guest cabin. Another woman, an Italian brunette, Maria, who rivaled Gilda Gund in youth and beauty, was supposedly occupying another guest cabin, but, from the first night, she was bunking with Cedric Strang. She was supposedly a secretary and personal assistant for Castrano, but the only dictation I saw her taking was of another kind from Castrano and Strang on various lounge beds. Her main duty seemed to be to keep Strang saying “yes” to whatever suggestions Castrano made.

The captain, a Norwegian named Olaf, had a crew cabin of his own, as did the only female crew member, Julie, an English girl functioning as waitress and, as called upon, bed partner, and the logistics and commo guy, an Australian named Hershel Curtis. The rest of us were doubled up—or we would be when we picked up the final two crew members I was told we’d take on in Marseille, France, on our second day afloat. The two mates, Serge and Benj, the first a Slav and second a Nigerian, shared the largest of the crew cabins. The cook, an Arab named Hassan, would bunk with the assistant cook we’d pick up in Marseille; one of Castrano’s bodyguards, a Serb named Nelo, would bunk with a sailor coming in board in Marseille; and I was bunking with the other bodyguard, a hulking Nigerian named Abeo.

I wasn’t told who my monitoring Candy Store go-between on the crew would be before I got aboard the Wind of Fortune, but soon, the logistics and commo guy, Hershel Curtis, who wasn’t really Australian and quite probably wasn’t named Hershel either, was at my side asking me if I didn’t think the Wind of Fortune was one sweet ship, “just like a Candy Store,” he asked while giving me a pointed look. That was the signal. He was my backup on this tub.

“I haven’t received an itinerary beyond picking up additional crew in Marseille and a Yemeni sheik in Tunis,” he whispered to me.

“So, maybe it’s the sheik?” I asked.

“Probably so,” Hershel answered. “All of the guest passengers have been checked out and no terrorist-connections were found. I was told the Yemeni would be in the second primary cabin and, when I asked about adding you to the crew, I was told you were being taken on to entertain him. So, it seems he’s our guy. I’ll let you know where he’s being taken when I get more of the itinerary. So, get in bed with him and check him out when he’s taken on board. Castrano has to give the man’s destination to me so that I can register arrivals with the ports. Meanwhile, watch out for that Abeo you’re being bunked with—unless you want to take it big. I couldn’t help but matching you with a power top. I presume Castrano will want you in his bed at least until the Yemeni embarks, though. You’re gonna be a busy little guy.”

“Thanks,” I responded, grimacing, although I had no trouble tumbling in bed with a man who was good at it.

And that was all I was told as we sailed from Naples up the Italian coast and along the Italian and French Rivieras. Avoiding Abeo was useless, though. Once we were out on the water, his bodyguard duties were suspended other than standing in the bow and scanning for any ships that might be showing an interest in us, and the guests were getting settled in on the sky deck above.

A footloose Abeo cornered me in our small-bunk cabin and overpowered me to show who was boss and what would be what in our cabin. He pinned me to the lower bunk, under him, slapped me around a bit to get me under control, pushed his knees between my thighs as I arched my back and reached up to grab the slats of the headboard, and penetrated and fucked me. I gasped at the thickness of him and moaned as he took his time to sink in before beginning the relentless pumping action. He didn’t ask me my permission but I didn’t give him any indication I’d say “no.”

Murmuring “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Fuck, yes, just like that, screw me,” as his dick head found and worked my prostate, I relaxed to him, spreading my legs and grasping his beefy butt cheeks with my hands, holding him to me, as my body jerked and shuddered to his thrusts. He verified the rumor that Nigerians, in general, were world champions contestants in cock size.

That evening, Julie and I mixed and served cocktails to the guests in the lounge. Hershel put bump and grind music on the sound system, and Julie and I made use of two poles in the salon to entertain the guests in an evening that proceeded with the movie director, Boccelli, fucking Julie; the British banker, Cedric, fucking Maria; the ship’s captain, Olaf, fucking Gilda; and the Austrian banker, Lars, fucking me on the salon couches before Castrano carried me off to his stateroom—or, rather, Abeo carried me off to Castrano’s stateroom, and Castrano watched Abeo fuck me until Castrano took over the honors.

I spent that first night as Wind of Fortune cut through the waters of the western Mediterranean on Castrano’s bed, first being manhandled by Abeo for Castrano’s arousal, then in a double penetration with Abeo below me and Castrano behind and mounted on my ass, and then, for the remainder of the night, with Castrano.

The next day we were anchored off Marseille, France, long enough to take on two young Arabs for the crew, the assistant cook, named Mahmoud, and a sailor, named Samir, and then we set sail for the southern, North African, rim of the Mediterranean, with the second night at sea being much the same in entertainment as the first, with changes in partners.

I spent another night in Castrano’s bed. This time Castrano wanted to spend time working my body before mounting me. He gave me a full-body massage, having me lie stretched out and naked on my belly on a massage table in his stateroom, while he, naked, massaged my body with oil, ending with fingers up my ass, massaging my prostate. When he had me moaning deeply with this, he had me turn on my back. At his direction, I dug my heels in and raised my pelvis to his hand, and he massaged my cock with one oiled hand while penetrating me with two fingers of the other hand and massaging my prostate until I came for him. Then, and only then, he turned me on my back again and mounted me from behind and on top. Lacing his arms under my pits and clasping his fists behind my neck, putting me in a full Nelson and arching my back up toward his chest. He buried his erection in my ass and fucked me to his own ejaculation, rocking my body in a motion that naturally guided the thrusts of his shaft up my anal passage. We showered afterward, and he took me to his bed for another night there.

It seemed the cramping of space in my own assigned cabin wasn’t going to be much of a problem.

* * * *

I decided as the Wind of Fortune cut through the waves from Marseille to Tunis the next day that the movie director and bankers must not be on board just to give camouflage to the transportation of a terrorist. All afternoon, Castrano, Boccelli, Blumfeld, and Strang were closed up in the main salon and in deep discussions.

I joined the women, who were sunning themselves on the sun deck. We were all wearing the minimum of coverage to get the maximum of exposure to the sun, and Gilda and Maria were being chummy enough with each other that if I hadn’t seen each of them in action with more than one man apiece, I might have thought they were only into women. Most likely, though, they both were fully aware of their personal beauty and charms and made the most of them in any circumstance.

The crew members all found excuses to need to be topside from time to time to ogle. Most of the men ogled the women, but some, like the very fit Arab sailor, Samir, who had been taken on in Marseille, and the bodyguard I would be bunking with, Abeo, if Castrano ever released me from his bed in his stateroom, had more of an eye for me than for the women.

It also occurred to me that Samir and the other man we took on in Marseille must have known each other before embarking, because Samir and the assistant cook, Mahmoud, spent more time hanging over the rail within sight of where I and the women were sunbathing and talking with each other in earnest attitude as they watched us.

Julie, the waitress, and I took turns checking the men’s refreshment supplies in the salon and bringing drinks to Gilda and Maria on the sun deck.

I heard snatches of “percentages” and “residuals” when I took drinks to the men in the salon and Gilda clued me in on what was happening there.

“Luigi Castrano has bought a movie script he wants done. Salvitore wants to do a movie with me, but there’s no part for me in the movie Castrano wants to do. He’s brought the bankers in to show Salvitore that the backing for Castrano’s script is already set up. Salvitore will either have to force a two-movie deal backed by these bankers or not put me in his next movie.”

“And you’ll leave him if you’re not in his next movie?” I asked.

“We’ll see. I may leave him anyway.”

For Maria? I wondered, noting how hot the two women seemed to be for each other. When I’d come back from taking refreshments to the men in the salon late in the afternoon, I found the two of them, naked, on the same lounge bed, sixty-nining each other. On the whole, although Gilda wrapped herself around the movie director when he was there, I got the impression that she wasn’t as dedicated to their relationship as he was.

In any case, I soon had left them. The sun was too hot for me. I went down to the crew quarters. I was halfway down before I realized that the sailor, Samir, was tracking me. I wasn’t in the mood for sex, so I decided to check the salon again to see if the men needed anything and to try to shake the sailor there.

That didn’t work out either. The bodyguard, Abeo, accosted Samir and called him off. Samir disappeared, but Abeo didn’t. The skin display on the sun deck had revved up Abeo as much as it had Samir, so it now was Abeo following me, and he pulled me away from my intent to go to the salon and down to our shared miniscule cabin. He bent me over the lower bunk, stripped off my Speedo, and held me down while he ate me out. I writhed under him, thinking of nothing else at that moment but black Nigerian cock inside me, as he mounted, penetrated, and fuck me with that huge black dick of his.

I hobbled through the dinner service—but I was humming.

* * * *

We were anchored off Tunis, Tunisia, at dinnertime, and shortly afterward we took on another passenger, a middle-aged Arab, who came with two burly Arab bodyguards. He was taken to the second-best guest cabin, and the two bodyguards were settled next to him in the last of the passenger cabins to be assigned. The logistics crew member, my contact Hershel, and I brushed past each other in a corridor, and Hershel whispered, “I saw his passport. He’s a Yemeni sheik, Anwar al-Tirki. This should be him, the terrorist we’re expecting, but it’s strange he is being picked up in Tunis rather than from somewhere in the Europe. Get close to him. Look for the tattoo.”

I thought it important to ascertain whether he might be connected with the movie negotiations going on among the other passengers—he was intriguing and handsome enough to be a movie star and might also be rich enough to buy himself into a movie production—and, while I was passing around drinks in the salon after the arrival of the Arab was settled, I asked Gilda Gund, innocently, I hoped, whether the Yemeni was another potential financial backer for the movie deal Castrano and Boccelli were trying to put together.

“I have no idea why he’s here,” she said, and I could tell from the inflection in her voice that she probably was at a loss for an explanation, and a little confused that another guest had arrived. “I don’t know what connection to the movie he could have.”

She seemed out of sorts, probably from an argument with a bit of heat in it I overheard her having with the movie director, Boccelli, at dinner.

“It will take the time it takes to sort it all out, Gilda,” Boccelli had snapped at her. “This was your bloody idea to get Luigi to invite us on this cruise and hash out the movie thing to begin with.”

That came as a bit of a surprise—that the actress would have been the one to instigate any of this.

I didn’t dwell on that too long, though, as my brief was to get the new arrival, Al-Tirki, out of his dishdasha—the traditional white robe Arab men wore—and into bed so I could confirm his identity from a distinctive tattoo. So, I was giving the Yemeni good service and alluring eye contact, having already been told he was gay and a seeking top. The connection proved easy to make. Al-Tirki was attentive and interested. It also was evident he expected service and that Castrano was encouraging a hookup between us.

As we’d done before, the other wait person, Julie, and I took to the two poles in the salon to the tune of bump and grind music after drinks had been served, and we entertained the guests with sensuous dancing, showing off our very nice bodies and our flexibility. I had no idea if the evening turned into an orgy for other people, though, because it wasn’t long before the sheik had withdrawn and one of his bodyguards was guiding me to his cabin.

Al-Tirki was a well-muscled, hard-bodied man in his forties, who was swarthy, his skin leathery from extensive time in the desert, and showing hard use from hand-to-hand combat at sometime in the past. He must have been good at that, because he had survived. He was standing at the foot of the bed and pulled his dishdasha over his head as the bodyguard pushed me into the cabin. He waved his hand and the bodyguard withdrew, closing the cabin door behind him.

“You are to serve me, I am told,” he said.

“Yes, sir, I am,” I answered.

“I am demanding.”

“Whatever you want,” I said.

All he had on under the dishdasha was a loincloth, which he now stripped off. He was in erection and of above-average size and length, but not anything I couldn’t handle. He motioned me to kneel to him, which I did, taking his cock in my throat and giving him head.

He did prove to be demanding. He was athletic and vigorous. He wanted me to resist, which I feigned to do. We wrestled on the bed and I lost, as I was destined to do. He fucked me in a close-embrace doggy and then in a missionary, and finally in a side split. He had strength and vigor and cum in profusion. What he didn’t have, though, was a tattoo of a lion high up his inner thigh.

I had no idea why Anwar al-Tirki had been picked up in this cruise, but it wasn’t because he had been in Hamburg setting off a terrorist bomb in a marketplace. He might be a mastermind in that activity, but he wasn’t the particular terrorist we were tracking.

After Al-Tirki had gone to sleep, I stopped at Hershel’s cabin. He was still up, as he was waiting for me to report.

“He’s not the man we’re look for,” I reported. “No tattoos at all, and no evidence one had been removed from his thigh.”

“Shit. Maybe the intel on the tattoo is wrong,” Hershel said. “I know something is happening. I’ve gotten the next two port of calls: Latakia in Syria and Limassol in Cyprus. No yachts port in Latakia. It’s too dangerous. But terrorists would use that for a destination. Limassol makes sense in that it’s neutral ground politically. Terrorists could go there to meet their controls on coming activity. But a stop in Latakia—I was sure that this Yemeni sheik was going there and that he was our man, although I couldn’t figure out why we’d pick him up in Tunis.”

“So, what now?” I asked.

“We continue being vigilant and wait for it to all become clear—or we mark it up to bad intel and go on to the next operation.”

It didn’t take that long to start unraveling the issue, though. As I was heading back to the crew cabins in the hull of the ship, the sailor we’d picked up in Marseille, Samir, grabbed me and pulled me into one of the ship’s storerooms. Like Al-Tirki, he was stronger than I was. I didn’t feign struggling with him; I fought him until he had slapped me around and punched me enough that he subdued me. In surrender, I lay back on sacks of rice, opened my legs to him, and let him have his way with me. He wasn’t nearly as refined in technique as Castrano or Blumfeld or Al-Tikri were. He was crude and forceful. But he was young, hard-bodied, and fucked with vigor.

He also had the tattoo of a lion high up on his inner thigh. The terrorist we were looking for had been picked up in Marseille.

All Hershel had to say when I finally managed to break away from Samir and report to him was “Of course. That makes sense. He’s being dropped off in Syria.”

Within a couple of days, the mystery of the Yemeni sheik, Anwar al-Tirki, was solved too, with our operation dovetailing with one ongoing in Cyprus. After the Latakia stopover, we sailed to Limassol, Cyprus, that being the last port before returning to Naples. There Al-Tirki was dropped off west of Limassol on a deserted beach at night and into the arms of a reception committee composed of Iranian terrorists who had been detected in Cyprus. While keeping tags on the terrorist, Agency analysts had been trying to discern what the Iranian cell was up to. By putting Al-Tirki in their arms, they were able to decide it was a terrorist organizations meet-up and they took tracking of Al-Tirki from there. It was further proof that Castrano was engaged in transporting terrorists around the region, though.

Before the Limassol drop-off, though, we had drama of our own operation to experience off Latakia, Syria.

* * * *

“Find someone who will alibi you for the next hour,” Hershel said, pulling me aside between the salon and the kitchen where I was clearing away an earlier closed-down evening party than the previous ones we’d had on the Wind of Fortune since leaving Naples. “Someone other than me,” he added. “We can’t be alibiing each other and I have two new-arriving crew members to document. That will be my alibi.”

“What do I need an alibi for?” I asked. “And where will we bunk two more crew members?”

“You don’t want to know. Just do it,” he hissed.

“I guess I could go down and see if the bodyguard I’m bunking with, Albeo, wants to ball me.”

“Good plan. But if he’s not there, find someone else. Don’t be alone for the next hour.” Hershel said, and he was gone. He hadn’t answered my question about why we were taking on more crew here and where they’d be bunked.

“Here” was off shore from the night lights of the Syrian port, Latakia, Syria, and “now” was the hour after midnight.

I started for the stairs to go down into the hull to see if I could find Abreo, but he found me as I hit the stateroom deck.

“Castrano wants you in his cabin,” he said, grabbing me by the arm.

“Perfect,” I said, following him down the passage to the owner’s cabin. And it was perfect for my need. Castrano was neither as demanding nor built as big as Abreo. He would be the perfect alibi for the next hour.

It was only forty-five minutes, though. He was naked and in his bed when I got there. I stood at the foot of the bed, stripping for him and doing sensual moves as I did so. He sat on the end of the bed and I went down between his thighs and sucked his cock. He didn’t want to get off that way, and when I got him too hot, he cooled off by lying me on my back on the bed, sucking me and eating me out, and then working me with his hands until it was me who was getting too hot. Then he went on his back and I saddled myself on his hips and rode him in a Cowboy both facing his head and turned away. We cuddled after he’d come, and when he was asleep, I slipped out of bed, took a shower, dressed, and left the cabin.

It hadn’t been an hour—only about forty-five minutes. I didn’t think it mattered. The man was snoring when I left. He’d have no idea when I’d left the bed.

I probably should have done the hour, though, as I heard the grunting and the low cry from the open main deck, as I started down to my cabin. The muffled commotion pulled me out onto the deck, where I saw Mahmoud, the cook’s assistant, hanging over the railing, his white cook’s shirt covered in blood. If he wasn’t dead, he was on his way to that state. He wasn’t alone. The sailor, Samir, was in a standing embrace with the German starlit, Gilda Gund, or was until he slipped to the deck in a terminal groan and Gilda pushed him away with the hand that wasn’t holding a bloodied knife. Turning to Mahmoud, she changed the balance of his body on the rail and he went over the side and splashed into the water below.

I stood there, in shock, my eyes meeting Gilda’s, a hard look in her eyes, as she lifted Samir’s body over the rail. A hand gripped my arm and pulled me back into the interior of ship. Hershel hustled me to his office, which was also the communications room and where two young Arab men were sitting in front of his desk and filling out paperwork.

“Stay calm,” he hissed into my ear and then he introduced me to the two men like that was an important thing to do at the moment. He managed to work a look at the clock from all of us into the introductions. One of the men was introduced as a cook’s assistant, who would be bunking with the cook, and the other one as a general sailor, who would be in the bodyguard, Nelo’s, cabin. So, the ship was picking up two here in Syria to substitute for Samir and Mahmoud. “Please show these men to the galley, Conner,” Hershel said. “The cook is expecting them. He has some food to give them and will make sure they get to their cabins. Then come back here for a few minutes.”

I controlled my shaking enough to get the new crew members to the galley, and I managed to get to the darkened billiards room that looked out onto the section of the deck where Gilda had knifed Samir and Mahmoud. I looked out onto the deck through the room’s window, but there wasn’t anyone there now.

When I returned to Hershel’s office, I announced the obvious. “The German actress killed them and pushed them overboard,” I said.

“Yes.” Hershel was taking that observation well.

“You knew that she was going to kill them? We weren’t just tracking them? Who the hell is Gilda Gund?”

“She’s really a German actress, but she’s also an agent of the German intelligence service, the BND,” Hershel. “And, yes, I knew that if you were able to identify the terrorist before he got delivered wherever he was going—which obviously, now, was here in Syria—the German’s would take action. The one with the lion tattoo and the other man, who assuredly was part of his operation, were preparing to go ashore. They were waiting for a boat that now they won’t meet.”

“That was the plan—our plan, the one I didn’t know about—all along? They were to die?”

“Yes, they were to die—but not at our hands. The operation was in Hamburg. We agreed to work with the BND. We agreed their agent could dispatch them if we identified them. We did, and I told Gund about Samir. She established that Mahmoud was a terrorist as well. She took care of the issue”

“But won’t Castrano know the men didn’t make it to shore?”

“Eventually, yes, which is why I told you to alibi up and I did as well. You did establish an alibi, didn’t you, although not for as long as I told you to?”

“Yes. I wound up in Castrano’s bed.”

“You can’t have a better alibi than that, except for it not being long enough, if timing becomes a factor.”

“He was in deep sleep when I left him.”

“Go back there, then, be there when he wakes. We have alibis, but we’re at greater risk now. I’ll disappear in Naples if we make it that far without being blown.”

“What about me?”

“You draw the short straw, Conner. We want to run this Wind of Fortune operation for as long as possible, finding out the who and where of Castrano’s regional terrorist delivery service. We’ll give you connectivity, either personally or by bringing someone else in when I’m gone, but this is your assignment until we roll him up or the operation collapses. We’ll pull you out when we need to.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. I can’t say I was surprised, though. This wasn’t my first Candy Store assignment.

“You know how it works, Conner. You’re actively gay and you’re keeping your Agency job, with its cushy benefits. As long as you give Sam Winterberry what he wants, you get to have your candy from the Candy Store and eat it too. Now, it looks like we’ll be dropping the Yemeni sheik off in Cyprus. See if you can get into his bed before we get there and find out whatever you can on what he’s up to.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, with a sigh. It was the job.