It was all happening so fast. I didn't even have time to feel panic. I just felt a dullness and a foreboding—and a creeping sense of being trapped in a web of some sort. No, more like a cocoon, the sticky thread winding around and around me. Smothering me.
"Just a few minutes, Dr. Winthrop, and you can go back to your room. I know this has been a shock to you. We have just a few more questions tonight, but most can wait until tomorrow. I suggest that you try to get some rest tonight."
"I have a lecture . . . a lecture to give tomorrow afternoon," I replied, looking at the police detective, Adolf Stander. He had been very efficient and solicitous—and respectful. He obviously was very good at this. The Swiss, I am sure, have high-level international situations well in hand and quickly, and with the highest level of discretion. The special Einsatzgruppe Tigris arm of the Swiss Federal Criminal Police arrived at the Lucerne Radisson Blu hotel and conference center and took over the investigation within a half hour of the murder.
"You did say that this isn't your room, didn't you? That it was that of the victim, Dr. Pak Jong-hee?"
"Yes, yes, of course. We were conferring on some notes, here in Dr. Pak's room . . . in preparation for delegation talks tomorrow morning before the afternoon lecture sessions. And . . . and . . . the assailant . . . just burst in. He went right for Pak. It was over in seconds."
I had to concentrate, try not to hyperventilate. I had to be careful not to say too much. I felt like I was spiraling down already—being sucked down into a vortex.
"And Dr. Pak is North Korean, right, not South Korean? And you're American?"
"Yes, yes, that's right. Nuclear physicists. Advisers both. We had met before. We leave the political negotiations to the principals. We just advise on technical issues."
Oh, god, if that only were true, I thought. How did I let myself get involved in this? Where was Frank? Shouldn't he just be sweeping in here and handling everything? They'd told me that it was just about over. That Pak wanted to defect.
"Perhaps I should speak with the respective delegation head," Standler said. "After," he continued, "after they've come for the . . . ah, yes, here they come now."
I'd been sitting, quaking, on the bed all of the time that the detective was hovering around me. And the body was there, right there on the floor. I could have turned away. I should have turned away. But I couldn't. The knife was still inside him, in his gut, the handle protruding, his eyes open, looking at me. With such a look of surprise. Accusing me.
But I'd done nothing. This wasn't anything like I did. I don't know why I'd even been caught up in this. Frank hadn't told me that anything like this could happen. But, yes, I did know why.
It was my damning weakness.
* * * *
It had been those years in the Air Force in Thailand. The Thai men were so nubile, brown as a berry, and willing. Always the winning smile, the readiness to please.
I'd thought I had put all of that behind me. I'd returned to the university when I'd left the Air Force and continued my studies in nuclear physics. A good professorship had led to government contracts, work that went ever deeper into government scientific and defense projects. And as the work had deepened, it had grown more secret, requiring ever higher security clearances.
The bubble had burst one evening in the sauna of a Georgetown men's gym.
I had seen him when I was working out on the exercise floor. All smiles, just like those young men years ago in Bangkok. He was Thai, of course, and small, and brown, bordering on effeminate, but perfectly formed. And he moved like a dancer. He was doing some sort of Oriental slow-movement exercises, showing a fantastically flexible body. And he had his eyes on me, giving me saucy looks. Gazes that took me back to the Patpong tenderloin district of Bangkok—and to all those talented and willing young men.
I left the gym floor and took a long shower. I was aroused. I couldn't deny that. And I was remembering those earlier days. But times had moved on. I even was married now. Although when it came to arousal, my desires went back to earlier days.
I wrapped a towel around my waist and went into the sauna room. A young, muscle-bound man in the club's signature shorts and T-shirt was standing by the door of the sauna when I went in. I hadn't seen him there before, but he gave me a friendly smile as if we had met.
"We were closing early tonight, professor," he said. "But the front desk said you could stay as long as you wanted. Just close the outer door when you leave."
I thought that was nice of them—and trusting, which later gave me a bitter laugh. And I did want the session in the sauna.
He handed me another, large and high-pile towel, and I went into the sauna and laid that out on the top bench, opposite the door, and stretched out full length on my back. The heat of the sauna was soothing, and I was drifting between feeling the tension draining from my body and semiconsciousness.
I didn't hear him enter the sauna. The first indication I had that I wasn't alone was when I felt his hands on my calves, below my knees, gently spreading my legs. I looked down in surprise. It was the berry-brown, nubile Thai, and he was looking up between my legs, under the towel, and he was smiling.
"Umm, so big," he said, fluttering his eyelashes. "Me like. Me like a lot."
He was moving his hands on my legs, gently massaging. I was frozen there, in shock. All, of course, except for my cock, which was engorging.
"I saw you in the exercise room," he whispered. "And I tell myself that one handsome man. I bet he has big cock. I bet I like to fuck with that man. And the look you gave me. I knew you want to fuck with me too. You fuck Thai men before, I bet."
I moaned.
"So I stay behind when they close up up front. I know you still back here. We fuck fuck, OK?"
"Sorry, I think I'd better . . ." I started to say, and I sat up, ready to leave—or at least try to. But he already had the big toe of one of my feet in his mouth, and the palm of a hand high up and inside my thigh.
I tried to gather my strength, knowing I needed to leave. But the hand was tantalizing. My brain was screaming its want, its need for the hand to rise higher. And then it did, encircling my cock, and I laid back with a groan, letting every sensation point inside me race to my penis. His hand worked me for a few minutes while I closed my eyes and covered my face with an arm and fought with my desires. When I felt the wetness of his lips and mouth pull me inside him, I groaned and gave up any struggle, giving myself fully over to the pleasure of the suck.
When I opened my eyes, he had reversed himself on me and his sweet little buttocks and a pert cock and balls were right there at my face, ready for my attention and preparation. I ran a hand between his legs, pulled his cock back through, and moved between licking and sucking on his pulsing hole and on his cock.
He wound up on his tailbone on the top step, legs splayed, and me between those legs and rising and falling on the balls of my feet on the lower bench as I fucked him in a slow, slow, fast, slow, slow rhythm that had him murmuring "fuck me, fuck me, fuck me," in a singsong little voice.
They let me cum before the two men—one of them the young man who handed me the towel when I entered the sauna—burst into the room and flashed their federal government badges in my face.
The young Thai man at least had the decency to tell me he was sorry and that he'd thoroughly enjoyed the fucking. He said I had the biggest cock of anyone who had plowed him.
They sweated me for two days on the dire consequences on my career and private life of what I had been caught doing. On the third day, they informed me that there was an out. I was scheduled to attend U.S.-North Korean nuclear proliferation talks in Beijing as a scientific adviser later in the year. I could save my career by helping them convince a North Korean nuclear physicist who had a proclivity for men of my age and physique—and an extra big cock, as I had—to defect to the United States.
"When we approached him, he asked for you by name," one of the interrogators said.
They would arrange the encounters. I wouldn't even have to seduce him. All I would have to do is service his sexual needs and act as a go-between. He would know that I was there to service him when we first met. A piece of cake. Very little to do to save my career. And I'd even enjoy it. He was a well-turned-out small-stature Oriental. And I had already proven my weakness for such men.
I wracked my brain trying to figure out who this might be. I had been at a few meetings with the North Koreans—and the last time we'd met in Beijing, any of the men who wanted to could go to a traditional Turkish bath, where we were naked, and there were some North Koreans there. But, again, I don't remember any of them showing particular interest in me—other than that I did get attention for the size of my equipment whenever I was in a communal shower or locker room. I had grown accustomed to that, though.
When we next met in Beijing, I had no trouble picking him out. His name was Pak Jong-hee, and although he was a senior scientist and was shown extra deference by his North Korean delegation during the meetings, he was young and small, lithe, and brown—and he made my cock harden knowing that I was meant to fuck him.
I don't remember having seen him at an earlier conference—especially at the Beijing session where several of the men were naked together in the Turkish bath. This was surprising, because he was strikingly attractive to me. Of course, until my handlers had forced an encounter in the sauna in Georgetown, I had pretty successfully suppressed my desire for men—even small, boyish ones like Pak.
He obviously had noticed me. As Frank, my handler had promised, it was fairly obvious that arrangements had already been made with him—and most likely that he had picked me. He frequently looked at me and lowered his eyes demurely in a signal from young Oriental men indicating that they wanted to be mastered.
On the third day of the negotiations, which weren't going well and from which the North Korean delegation had absented itself, Frank told me to prepare myself well, which I did. I was conducted to the same steamy, decorative tile-covered Turkish bath chamber that I had been entertained in during a previous Beijing conference.