Silas's Choice Expanded

And of course Silas Collins was right. We only found nineteen Palestinian refugees, in three families, who were willing to get on the bus in the trust that their faraway relative who worked for the Americans in some unspoken way somewhere beyond the Levant knew what was best for them. Seeing the conditions in the camp, the filthy-covered narrow dirt streets between makeshift hovels and the lack of sanitation and safe water use, made me wonder why they didn't all jump at the chance to get out of here. But to them this was their land, and they were afraid that if they ever left it, they would never get back to it.

But to my surprise—Silas always had yet one more surprise for me—he had come prepared for not being able to fill the bus with those listed. We stayed there in the camp, almost beyond the time allotted to us, until Silas had found someone willing to fill all of the empty seats in the bus, and he'd come prepared with primitive, but effective, means to document each and every one of them as someone whose name was on the original list so that we all could get back through the checkpoints and to Beirut, where they were put on a small ship to be smuggled into Cyprus and somehow resent somewhere safer in the world from there.

There would only be three of our Palestinian colleagues that night who would think America had done enough "give back" to them for the intelligence services they were rendering. But Silas would say that three was better than none.

And just as the Israelis had warned us, they invaded and flattened the Nahr al-Bared camp as a hotbed of terrorists just two days later.

Imagine my surprise after we managed to get back to Beirut without being gunned down between all of the independent armies stretched out between Nahr al-Bared and the Lebanese capital when Silas told me this wasn't the mission I'd been called to Lebanon to carry out.

* * * *

"Hi, Seth, how's tricks?"

With this cheery statement, Silas Collins, the man who had changed my life forever, walked back into my life two weeks before the mission to the Lebanese camp. I was sitting in the embassy canteen in Amman, Jordan, and he just greeted me for the doorway and came over and sat down beside me.

He was as intimidating and arousing as he had been on that night back at the Farm in Williamsburg when my life had taken a totally unexpected turn. And, typical of the impression I had built up of Silas in the intervening months, there was no "I'm sorry" or "Has it been too, too difficult?"

Because of Silas, because he had come into my bed during the Agency physical training course and demonstrated for the hidden cameras that I was legally unfit for Agency employment, I had had no choice but to take the only offer that didn't push me out on the street with, essentially, a dishonorable discharge. I had become part of the Agency's "special" unit, informally known as the candy store, and, although not dishonorably separated from the Agency, I now was called on to use my body in the service of intelligence on demand.

So far it hadn't been too onerous—I was a regular agent doing a regular job when my special "talent" wasn't needed—but I sure as hell wondered what happened after this, where my Agency career went when I no longer was desirable to men.

And here, sitting by me, was the man who had engineered my "coming out" while still in basic training. There was nothing else to do in these circumstances than take him back to my Amman apartment and let him fuck me silly.

"I'm sorry, I hope this didn't jam you up too much," Silas said when we were in my apartment, which, of course, threw my whole built-up perceptions of him a kilter. We had stopped just inside the door, and he was standing close to me and running the backs of his fingers across the hair on my forearm. I shivered. Somehow he instinctively knew that was a turn-on for me.

There it was. The apology he hadn't made back in the canteen. I hadn't known we'd end up fucking when we were going to my apartment. I thought maybe there'd just be a confrontation of some sort. But now he had apologized. And now I knew this would end up with his cock inside me.

"I hope you realize they have me by the shorthairs too," he continued, "and I don't think you would have gone long at all without being outed. If you really want to be in the Agency, this may have been your only choice."

I didn't tell him it was OK. I couldn't go that far, even though I've thought it all out myself and I knew he was right. There was just something about them photographing it and him knowing and me not. That plow belt. I'd never done it like that. Somehow that made it different, wanton. Even though I'd melted to it.

"Can I fix you something to drink?" I stammered out.

"Not now, not yet," he answered in a low, husky voice. "Maybe later. If there's a later. If you want there to be a now."

I shivered under his touch on my arm, and when I raised my face to him, he was there, ready to take my lips in his. And I let him.

In the bedroom, as we were slowly undressing and neatly folding our clothes—just as we'd been taught in basic training—he opened the gym bag he had with him and took out the black leather belt sling. Probably the same one he'd had in Williamsburg.

He held it up and gave me a questioning look.

I gulped and answered in a quavering voice. "Yes, please."

I was laying on my back on the edge of the bed, the plow belt stretched out under the small of my back, my legs spread and raised, and he was crouched between my legs. He worked my cock and lathered up my hole while working his cock up until he was ready. Then he rolled a condom on his cock, and as I gasped and groaned, he worked himself up into my ass.

When Silas was fully impaled, he grabbed each end of the sling by the hand holds, and brought me up by the small of my back, as he stood tall. I was arched back, with my shoulder blades and the back of my head resting on the bed and my hands fisting up bunches of the bedspread on either side, as, holding my midsection up to his pelvis, he, at first slowly and then more rapidly, plowed me deep.

Afterward, we had that drink I'd offered him previously. Then I was stretched out on the sofa in the living room and he, his body under mine at a full stretch and embracing me, masturbated me to a second climax.

"What are you doing in Amman?" I murmured as he relentless stroked me off.

"I came for you."

"Aren't you assigned to South America? Aren't you working Colombia?"

"Yeah, sometimes. But this time I came for you."

"For me? I don't understand." For a brief moment I thought he was saying that he had chosen me, had decided to come live with me. But that hope was quickly dashed.

"We have a 'special' assignment, you and I," he whispered in my ear.

"But the station here—?"

"Has been informed, and you are now assigned to work with me until I return you."

"But . . . but where? What?"

"Lebanon," he said, answering the first question. He didn't answer the second question, because then I was writhing under his attention, close to coming.

"I'm going to come," I struggled out with a gasp. For me that was a warning.

"Yes, yes you are," Silas said. From him, it was a statement of fact.

* * * *

"That wasn't it?" I asked incredulously. "Pulling what Palestinian asset relatives we could out of the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp before it was wiped out by the Israelis wasn't the mission?"

"No," Silas said. "The mission we were sent to do is just beginning."

We were sitting at an outdoor café on the Beirut corniche, enjoying a late morning coffee and brandy, joining the world of Beirut in utter disinterest that internecine warfare was going on all around the capital and that we were living a brief fantasy of Parisian-like life before the inevitable destruction.

"But, what we just did? Pulling the Palestinians out of the camp?"

"Off the books. Favors called in. I was coming this way anyway."

"And Beirut station?"

"Doesn't even know about it."

"God, Silas." And that was all I could say for a few minutes. When I was able go on, I continued, in a low, intense voice, "You live dangerously, buddy. You may not last long in the Agency."

"Probably not," Silas answered. "But I make my own choices."

"Back to the hotel," I said in a husky voice. "I want to go back to the hotel now."

Once inside our room, I undressed him and pushed him onto his back on the bed, and I crouched over him. I kissed him then, followed by moving down his body and kissing down his sternum and belly and through his pubic hair. And then I possessed his cock in my mouth and made love to him that had him groaning and moaning. And, for that brief time, I made him all mine.

And then, as he came off the bed and opened the door to the nightstand and pulled out the black plow belt and held it up for me to see—and then use . . . then I was his.

* * * *

"So, this is it, then," Silas said as we stood in front of the innocuous-looking storefront in a busy Beirut market. "You know what you are to do?"

"Yes," I said. "We want to know when and where his next shipment of cannabis is coming from the Beqaa Valley. And I have two weeks to find out."

"Yes, and you know I'll be working on the same information from another angle. Remember, it must be this shipment. This shipment pays for the arms we don't want delivered."

"Got it," I said. "But how will I know he even wants me?"

"He's already picked you out of a catalog. All we had to do was make all of the other choices significantly inferior. And that wasn't hard to do, as alluring as you are."

"Silas . . ." I started to say, and then I paused.

"Yes?" he asked.

"Oh, nothing. Let's go on in and get this started." I just wasn't brave enough to tell Silas what I thought of him, how much I wanted him—how important it was that he was here for my first really risky candy store operation.

A clerk met us inside the storefront. He was young and willowy, dark complexioned with black hair and eyes and eyelashes that were much too long and curly for a man. His eyes latched on Silas and got wide as saucers when we came in. He possibly had never seen a man this tall and well built and muscle hard this close up.

The clerk went behind a curtain at the rear of the store to report our presence, and then he came back and asked us to sit and wait for a few minutes. The clerk looked shyly at me from time to time, but his attention was mostly riveted on Silas, who had sat down and taken a sketch pad and a pencil out of his shoulder bag and was drawing something there. He occasionally looked up at the clerk, so I got the impression that the clerk was who he was sketching.

After a little while—Silas always worked quickly and expertly and with bold strokes in his artwork—he tore the sheet off of the pad and, with a smile, leaned over and gave it to the clerk.

The clerk melted on the spot. He blushed and looked down and seemed very confused and embarrassed, which I thought was a bit much of a reaction to a quick sketch of him. He looked up, with a gleam in his eye, and started to say something to Silas, but just then we heard a clap from the other side of the curtain, and the clerk bounded up and motioned for us to go through the curtain into a rug-lined and pillow bedecked room. The merchant himself, somewhat roly-poly but all smiles, was sitting on pillows beside a low, bronze tray-topped table.

Nearly an hour later, Silas's roundabout discussions with the merchant came to a head.

"Yes, yes, very nice, Mr. Roper," the meaty merchant in his flowing robes was saying as he put his cup of Turkish coffee down on the brass tray. "A two-week's lease, yes?"

"Yes, two weeks, as already agreed," Silas, posing as Mr. Roper, French pimp for the day, said. He was sitting next to the Lebanese importer, Rashid Khoury, in the room curtained off from Khoury's main shop area. Khoury's young clerk was standing where the curtain was flapped up between the two spaces and staring wide-eyed at Silas.

I, trying to appear as demure as possible, was standing beside the table where they were taking coffee. I was completely naked, Silas's hand cupping one of my butt cheeks.

It was all part of the transaction, where the merchant decided whether he wanted me for two weeks in his bed at the price he had agreed to with who he thought was just a high-class French pimp.

"It's a high price, and two weeks is a long time," Khoury said. "What if, upon trial, I decide I don't want him, that he doesn't please me?"

"Once paid, I cannot make refunds," Silas said, in perfect Parisian French. And then he smiled and leaned closer into Khoury. "But I am so sure you will like him that I'm willing to give you an hour free, now. If you like him, he will stay. If not, I will take him away, no charge. But, of course, I will not supply another if you turn this one down."

Khoury sat there, contemplating.

"Of course . . ." Silas said, almost as an afterthought, and then stopped and smiled a little smile.

"Of course what?" Khoury asked.

"While you are enjoying your free introduction, I should be permitted to try your sweet little clerk here. Perhaps I might then make an offer of my own."

The clerk gasped and immediately began trembling. He, however, did not withdraw or voice any objection.

Silas knew that Khoury was fucking the lad; Silas had cased the circumstances here quite well. Placing me in Khoury's bed was only half of the candy store plan. At the same time Silas planned to take the clerk and twist him to Silas's purposes. If anything, the information we needed would be easier to extract from the clerk than from the merchant.

The merchant led me behind yet another curtain into what obviously were his private living quarters. There were a few veiled women in that room, but Khoury motioned them away and they scattered to the winds.

He was easy to handle. Just from his inspection in the other room, he'd almost gone beyond the pale. He ejaculated on my inner thigh even before he could enter me, missionary style, on the edge of his many-pillowed, low bed.

I pretended it hadn't happened, though, and drew him down on top of me, as if I had to work him into arousal for the first time. I embraced him and offered my lips to him, and then I nudged him to stand, between my legs, at the edge of the bed, and I made love to his cock, bringing him to some semblance of hard again without too much time elapsing.

When he entered me this time, I arched my back and cried out as if he was splitting me, almost as if I was virginal—although that would have been a hard tale to sell—and I writhed under him and groaned and grunted as if he was a magnificent lover. I buried my nails in his back and cried out that I'd never, ever been taken so well, and when he came again, I jerked and lurched and sobbed my undoing.

I either convinced him that I was in love with his cocking, or he was good at convincing himself. In any event, there seemed no question that our two-week use deal was settled.

When I returned to the middle curtain chamber to let "Mr. Roper" know that the arrangement was settled, he was still occupied with the wide-eyed small clerk. Silas was standing, half crouched, in the middle of the room, naked, and the gasping and groaning clerk was plastered to his pelvis, his torso arched away from Silas, and suspended by the black plow belt held tightly under the small of his back. His eyes were swimming in cum, and I assumed that he was already well into his second fill-up. Regardless, he was obviously Silas's now for whatever information Silas could wring from him in fuckings over the next two weeks while his master was otherwise occupied with me.

After accompanying Silas through the outer shop area and to the street, I turned to come back to the inner rooms. My eyes caught the sheet of paper on the top of the desk where the clerk had been sitting while we waited upon Khoury. It was the sketch Silas had drawn earlier. I picked it up and then smiled. The sketch wasn't just of the clerk; it was of the clerk and Silas, both naked, and Silas fucking the clerk using his black leather belt sling. I laughed at his directness, which, in this case, had worked to his advantage. The clerk no doubt had fairly climbed Silas's legs and thrust his channel on Silas's cock when given the chance after being prepared like this. I had told myself that Silas used bold strokes in his artwork. But it didn't stop there. Silas used bold strokes in everything he did in life.

* * * *

The caravan entered the pass through the Anti-Lebanon Mountains near dawn not more than two days after Rashid Khoury reluctantly gave up his two-week lease on my ass canal, having repeatedly, but to no avail, tried to renew the lease and even to buy me outright.

I'd been good to him, and he had been good to me. I had managed to extract from him the timing and route of the cannabis caravan out of the Beqaa Valley and to his warehouse outside Beirut, where the drugs would be exchanged for guns to feed the terrorist cells in the valley. The information I had received had matched what Silas had simultaneously been fucking out of the very willing clerk.

I pitied Khoury when he tried to telephone through to the number "Mr. Roper" left him to beg for more services. The number went to the religious council offices of the national mosque.

Wearing stolen Syrian army uniforms, those of the forces that struck the greatest fear into the lives of Lebanese living any distance from the border with Israel, our little band of Agency operatives swooped down on the caravan. Those driving the World War II-vintage jeeps loaded down with sacks of the drug, scattered like geese as soon as they saw us descending the slopes of the pass on either side of them, making as much fearsome noise as we could.

We burned the drugs, jeeps and all, right where they stood, using the flame throwers we'd brought for that purpose. It wasn't our concern that the debris would block the road until the metal cooled and could be hauled to the side. It was part of our message to the drug and terrorist gangs running seemingly unchecked in this region. Life here would never again be the same—as safe as it had been—as long as they kept shipping drugs out of the valley to support terrorism.

At the same time we were flaming the drugs thirty miles from Beirut, Rashid Khoury's warehouse at the edge of Beirut was being raided by the second half of our team. This was actually a dicier operation, as we wanted the guns intact and functional for our own use in operations world wide wherever an untraceable gun would be useful. But we were lucky there, in that to assuage his frustration at my leaving, Khoury had taken his clerk off on a fuck holiday to Tripoli and none of the men he'd left behind could think for himself. The guns were taken without casualties on either side.

Two days later we were back in Amman and in my bed, and Silas was making thick and deep love to me through the night.

When I awoke, he was gone, leaving only a message.

"Again, sorry," it said. "You are better without me."

I cried for the first time since my mother had died. It was not the choice I would have made.

Chapter Five

I didn't volunteer to be in any sort of action triangle. In fact, I didn't volunteer to be out here in the Colombia scrub jungle at all, ready to put my ass—quite literally—on the line to capture this Emilio Delgado drug lord dude. I didn't owe any explanations or apologies or anything to Ward Spano. It wasn't my choice to be out here, and it wasn't my choice to be out here with Silas Collins. And it certainly wasn't my choice when Ward happened on Silas fucking me in his tent, me suspended in front of him by that black leather belt sling of his he called a plow belt and him just fucking away in me.