Operation Gay Freedom - Noah Harris Page 0,1

a break. He entered.

“What’s he doing here?” someone asked the man sitting beside him.

“Tourists sometimes wander in,” said his friend, fidgeting with his prayer beads, “He won’t stay long.”

Marco pretended not to understand. He stood for a second, as if unsure of himself, the nervous tourist in a local café where everyone spoke a strange language.

Then he spotted him.

Cassius sat at a table with his back to the wall and facing the front, a glass of mint tea at his side while seemingly staring at the television.

Despite having studied the agent’s appearance in several photos, Marco almost missed him. He was dressed similarly to many Moroccan men. Not in the traditional djellaba and hooded robe, but the more modern uniform of faded jeans and a black leather jacket open to reveal a tight t-shirt. He also had the same posture as the other men, a bored but macho slump as if nothing in the world either frightened or concerned him.

Luis had told him Cassius was the best agent he had at blending in.

“We think it’s a paranormal ability,” his boss had said. “Like his empathy. Our scientists are studying it.”

The tourist comment Marco had heard tipped him off that these guys hadn’t even noticed Cassius was a foreigner, even though he was obviously not Moroccan. He looked like the American he was, with a square jaw and bright blue eyes. Marco also noticed that he looked ten years younger than his actual fifty. Perhaps it was his obvious physical fitness or the solid hairline without a touch of gray. The face did have some worry lines, though, as opposed to Marco’s smooth features.

There were no free chairs next to Cassius, so Marco strolled to the nearest available one, a little more to the front of the café. Just as he approached the free spot, Marco scratched his nose, then let his hand stray to his pocket, where he hooked his thumb in a seemingly casual gesture.

It was an O.S.O. sign of identification from one operative to another.

Cassius gave no indication that he had seen.

“Nice ass,” one of the older Moroccans said in Arabic as he passed. His group of friends laughed.

“Oh, you want to ride tourists now? You’re too old. They won’t hire you.”

“I’d give him a good welcome to Tangier. He’ll be limping all the way back to Europe.”

Marco couldn’t suppress an eye roll. The guy almost certainly had a wife and kids at home—Moroccan society didn’t accept men over thirty being single—and here he was talking about having sex with another man, openly and in public. It was a strange quirk of Arab and North African culture he’d discovered in his travels through the region. While the culture was homophobic on the surface and being gay was illegal across the Muslim world, there was plenty of gay sex before and even after marriage. Before marriage, it was mostly horny young guys letting off steam in a culture that didn’t allow them women. After marriage, many men kept up the habit, whether because they were actually gay or simply because those early experiments had imprinted themselves on their minds as something pleasurable.

But they all pretended they were straight. They figured if they were on top, they were still being a man. That put bottoms at a premium, something Marco had taken advantage of in several nations.

The problem was, he was versatile. Marco wanted everything a man had to offer. But as soon as he tried to get on top, his partner for the evening would flip him over. It had gotten so frustrating he’d stopped seeking out sex in Arab nations.

He sat at a table and, to add a bit more flair to his cover, pulled out a guidebook. The café owner, a grizzled old light-skinned Berber with a cigarette hanging from one side of his mouth, walked up to him.

Laboriously, making as many mistakes as he could while still making his order understandable, Marco slowly read from the guidebook, “Atay, min fadlak.”

“OK, understand,” the waiter said in heavily accented English.

“Oh, listen to that beautiful Arabic,” his aging admirer said. “He should be reciting the Koran in the Sidi Bou Abib Mosque.”

“Careful, Mohammed, he probably understood what you said about his ass. You’ve frightened the poor young thing.”

“If he understood, he’d be sitting in my lap right now.”

That sort of thing never ceased to amaze Marco. If he was in some working-class bar back in Italy, no man would ever talk like that. But in an even more macho