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.
