Chapter 1

My head was down and my center of focus was on the scotch neatly sitting in the sparkling clean shot glass from the Hotel Continental. Their logo was distinctly advertised on the side in an obscene display of commercialism that was a far more simplistic way of retaining their inventory, than in drumming up new business.

The hotel bar was sparsely populated at only two in the afternoon.

There was a new bartender. It looked like they were breaking in a female for the position and using the afternoon slack period to give her some breathing room. The service girl was none too happy about the competition; even though it was unlikely any of the bar-flies, including yours truly, were interested in pussy this early in the day. I was there for one reason only and that was sitting in the pretty glass right in front of me.

I hadn’t touched it yet, but there was a reason for that.

Yep! That’s right; I was one of those reformed booze-hounds that had to have it, no matter the time of day or night. Sometimes, I would just order a drink and look at it for a long time, before walking away from it, like I had just won a victory of some uncertain nature.

I recognized the service girl from a previous trip into the war-troubled country. My memory was not as sharp as it used to be, but I remembered that she hadn’t objected to taking it from behind. That put her in my memory book because most of the gorgeous dames that worked in these jobs were looking more for husbands, than for making a quick buck on their back. They mostly steered clear of me, because I exuded that spoor of a disillusioned man with the female gender on my shit-list of people to avoid. It didn’t matter to me, because these days I was more in tune with completing the mission, than in romantic relationships, that never seemed to go anywhere.

The service girl’s name-tag gave her the name of “Miss Phu”, but in my hazy memories that didn’t sound right at all. I seemed to remember her using the name “Belle” and pretending to be of French heritage, despite her lovely Eurasian beauty. I knew she had recognized me, but pretended that I was a perfect stranger in a polite and respectful manner. It was quite a difference than when she was pleading with me to stop spanking her resolutely, whilst I had her stretched in perfect tautness across my knee in the presidential suite.

I didn’t care if she wanted to be a “Miss Phu” or to be the mysterious French filly called “Belle”. My only concern was that she was only a coincidence and not some part of an opposition plan to cause me physical harm on my assignment. It was difficult to assess, because she was being tight-lipped and inscrutable. I never was very good at reading deviousness on the part of females. Because of that fact, I made it SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) to presume all females to be duplicitous and not to be trusted under any circumstances. I know it sounds terribly paranoid, but my checkered past was mute testimony to my lack of resistance to feminine wiles. I tended to fall victim to the urges of my raging libido and shameful ready acceptance of close personal relations without the benefit of proper “vetting”. I knew it was a weakness and a chink in my armor that put me at a disadvantage time and again, but it took painful losses to accept it as a fact no longer to be ignored.

Belle was one of those weak moments, but, at least, she hadn’t managed to bite me in the ass as yet. Lately, I had kept my sporadic trysts to female members of my own unit or other cleared personnel from one of the bases I worked on from time to time. Civilian pussy was out of the question on this assignment, because the mission was one of those high-profile deals that had the high mucky-mucks watching every development with nervous trigger fingers.

My self-described drinking problem was a pain in the ass, but I guess a lot of the people doing my line of business succumbed to the ordeal at some point in their life. Mine had snuck up on me after my crazy marriage to a mixed-blood nurse with an addiction to morphine and a yen for booze that made most men look like a bunch of cunts with no balls.

I realized I sunk down as low as possible, when I woke up in the car with a can of beer in my hand. Shortly after that, I shit-canned my crazy second spouse because she refused to go to rehab with me and get rid of the habit that was destroying the both of us. The last I heard she was living with some black ex-con that was keeping her under control with her morphine supply. It was a sad story but one that I was happy to be out of the picture once and for all.

That was almost five years ago and it seemed almost like yesterday. The past five years were a blur of different women that never lasted more than a weekend and that was just fine with me. I came close to getting serious with a courier from MI-6 in some Godforsaken province on the edge of Sahara desert, but she was put down by a stray bullet from friendly forces. At least, that was according to the after-action report from the official MI-6 party line. Personally, I had my doubts about that, because those pricks were the type that apologized just before they put a third eye in your head on their way to tea and crumpets.

Anyway, here I was in the hotel Continental, sitting at the almost deserted bar, staring at the scotch in the glass and not lifting it to my lips in abject surrender to my former addiction. The pretty bartender looked at me with visible pity in her eyes. She probably had seen it all and knew the torment in my closeness to my downfall. I gave her the once over on the Q-tee taking in the sweeping curves of her nubile buttocks and her cleavage showing lots of skin on the top. Her badge gave her name as “Miss Oh”, bringing a smile to my face, because it brought the thought of anal antics to mind at a time, when I was merely trying to blend in and maintain my cover.