Operation Gay Freedom - Noah Harris
Chapter 1
Marco Corsini’s first mission was to be a simple extraction job. Go to Tangier, track down agent Cassius Lee, and tell him it was time to report to the head office in London. Pretty straightforward.
Marco was to learn quickly that nothing was straightforward when it came to Cassius Lee.
Cassius had been out of contact for the better part of a month. The head of the Office of Special Operations, Luis Narvaez, was getting worried, as in pounding on his desk and kicking his wastepaper basket around the room worried. Luis had even forgotten to flirt with him, which told Marco that the boss was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
“He always does this!” Luis wailed, waving his hefty arms over his head, his broad, bear-like body shivering with stress. “He’s like the invisible man. How the hell are we supposed to run operations when he disappears all the time! I don’t even know if he’s dead or alive!”
Luis kicked his wastepaper basket again, adding another dent to the already battered metal surface and sending it clanging across the room.
“For an empath, he sure is indifferent to my feelings!” Luis grumbled.
“I’ll find him,” Marco promised.
The Spaniard turned to him. “You studied the Moroccan dialect? I heard it’s pretty different from the Lebanese Arabic you learned at university.”
“All boned up.”
Luis didn’t miss the double entendre and gave his newest agent’s twenty-year-old Italian body a once-over with hungry eyes.
“Madre de Dios, don’t you start torturing me too. You’ve really had enough time to get ready with the language?”
“I’ve been studying for two days.”
“Like that’s… oh, of course, it’s enough time. Go find him. Bring him back here. Beat him up while you’re at it. It would do him good. Hell, it would do me good. Now, where are my antacids?”
As Luis rummaged through his desk, Marco chuckled and headed to Heathrow Airport to catch the next flight to Morocco.
And now he was searching the medieval lanes of the Tangier medina, going to all the places Luis had told him Cassius frequented.
Marco had been in the northern Moroccan port for two days and still hadn’t found him.
He’d spent the entire time wandering the winding streets and back alleys, a bewildering labyrinth of whitewashed buildings, checking on various out-of-the-way cafes and cliffside views of the Strait of Gibraltar. He hadn’t found a single trace of him. Maybe Luis was right. Maybe Cassius really had disappeared.
Lots of people had found Marco, though. The locals, young men mostly, had taken a great interest. They sauntered beside him, all macho in their tight jeans and leather jackets, sizing him up.
“Hello. You lost?”
“No. Just wandering.”
“Where you from?”
“Italy.”
“I love Italy! I have cousin in Italy.”
“That’s cool.”
“Want hashish?”
“No.”
“Cocaine?”
“No.”
“Heroin?”
“No.”
“Kif?”
“What’s that?”
“Like marijuana. Moroccan style.”
“No.”
“Want woman?”
“No.”
Hell no.
All this was said in English. Marco didn’t let on that he understood Arabic.
What they said when they thought he didn’t understand proved far more interesting. Arabic flowed all around him, much of it concerning the lone Italian tourist walking the streets.
“What does that Italian want? He just wanders around all day,” said an older man wearing a traditional hooded robe that made him look like some ancient shepherd out of a Biblical scene.
“Don’t try to understand Europeans. They spend good money to come to another country to look at buildings,” his rotund friend said.
“He won’t even buy kif. They all buy kif,” a younger man leaning against the wall across the narrow lane told them.
“Not all. Some buy women or men, especially men,” the first man said.
“He’s too young and handsome for that,” his fat friend replied.
“Maybe you should try and fuck him then!” a voice behind Marco said with a chuckle.
Marco resisted the urge to look. Some of the Moroccan men were quite handsome. Luis had advised him not to reveal his fluent Arabic and had him practice not responding to people talking about him.
“People let their guard down when they think you don’t understand. You can pick up a lot of good intel,” the old Spanish bear had said.
Well, they certainly had let their guard down, but he hadn’t picked up any intel. He’d been wandering around like some clueless tourist until his feet hurt.
He spotted a little café in the alley ahead. Like most of the cafes tucked away in the medina, it had an unremarkable front that opened into a narrow, long room, almost an oversized hallway. It was nearly filled with little round wooden tables around, at which sat Moroccan men sipping tea, playing backgammon, and watching football on television.
Marco needed