It was amazing how time can move so slowly in the heat of danger—or to be more specific, how much fucking Fazil Fikret was able to fit into such a short span of time. It took Chaz and his team longer to bring me back around to consciousness than it had taken Fazil to meet me on the third-floor landing of his Kyrenia harbor building and fuck me both there and in his flat on the same floor into unconsciousness.
Although I refused to believe him, the chief of station insisted that he and his find-and-retrieve team hadn't waited the full thirty minutes I had specified before storming the building to attempt to capture the notoriously slippery and dangerous international arms smuggling king pin.
"We didn't hold off at all, Jack," Chaz declared. "By the time we got here, we were only about ten minutes short of your timetable for us to enter the building, and we came in straight away. You were taking on too much danger, and we didn't want Fikret to slip through our fingers again."
"So, where's Fazil?" I asked weakly, as I sputtered back from unconsciousness. I was sitting on the edge of the dining room table of the darkened flat in Fazil's building and rubbing the tender thumb-print bruises where Fazil had applied pressure and put my lights out after he had double fucked me with his thick dick and a dildo.
"Gone. He's slipped through our fingers again." No laugh at the irony of Chaz's statement, but no wringing of his hands, either. This cat and mouse stuff was precisely what international intrigue as made of. To a certain extent it was all a game. If you didn't win today, there was always tomorrow—except that sometimes the stakes were so high there actually might not be a tomorrow. Thus far Fikret and his gun-running operations to Muslim ethnic "cleansers" in the Balkans didn't fit the bill for direct danger to my country, though, which made his capture more of a "very nice to have" than a national necessity. That was until Fikret found a nuclear bomb to peddle.
"How could he have done that?" I asked. "I heard your guys on the stairs while I was immobilized and being choked unconscious. You were swarming all over the exits to this building from Fikret's glassed pied-à-terre at the top of the building down to the subbasement. There are no balconies and probably not even any unbarred windows in this building. How could he have just vanished on us?"
"Sometimes the simplest explanations are the best," Chaz said. I blessed him for sitting there and talking normally, one intelligence agent to another, without commenting on how they had found me—naked, trussed up, with a gag in my mouth and with a dildo up my ass. Chaz's team was crawling all over the place, but the chief of station was just calmly sitting there in his don't ask/don't tell mode and going over the case at hand with me. And I harkened back to my own thought on this when I was kicking myself for not taking into consideration that Fikret occupied more flats in this building that just the small glassed retreat on the top floor.
"We found a door at the back of a closet in the bedroom to this flat that leads into the building next door." Chaz said in a matter-of-fact voice. "I'll bet we find he owns both buildings. His escape plan couldn't have been simpler. He just walked out the quay-side door of that building while we were deep in trying to hunt him down in this building."
We sat there in silence, both appreciating Fazil Fikret's excellent use of tradecraft, but neither of us wanting to voice our admiration aloud.
"I don't suppose you remember what he was wearing," Chaz said in a careful tone. "He probably changed clothes, and he's probably hopelessly in hiding again—Turkish Cyprus is his environment, not ours. But it might help."
