Do I Know The Woman I Married?

"Yeah, okay, Lindsey, if that's the way you want to play it. We mustn't let the committee know that the chairperson loves her husband, must we?" I said, thinking to myself, "You're in for a surprise; I intend to be gate crashing your little meeting tonight my girl," as I said it.

"Oh, don't be like that please? I know you don't think what I do is important, but it is. I'm doing something important here, you'll be proud of me one day!"

What an amazing thing for Lindsey to say! She's going off for a liaison with her Internet lover and she says that I'm going to be proud of her. Just what did she take me for? I'll tell you now I nearly lost it completely when she said that. I just had to get out of the house before I blew-up. I gave her and the children a quick kiss, said goodbye to the mother-in-law and got out of the house as quick as I could.

It was a short drive to the station where I buried the car at the back of the car park, making sure it was under a security light and the gaze of a CCTV camera. I was losing a wife that night; I had no intention of losing my car as well. Then I grabbed a cab from the rank and headed over to the hotel.

The week's planning was coming to a conclusion. This afternoon I knew was going to be a long one so before booking into my reserved room, I went over to the corner shop opposite and got myself a few cans of beer.

Once settled into my room, I dug out the gear that I'd brought with me. To get the timing perfect I'd purchased a cheap little walky-talky set. Nothing spectacular but from my tests they appeared to function okay between the offices at work, so I should be able to make out what was going on in the room across the hotel corridor. Mind I'd had to wire in external batteries, as the little AA's in the things didn't last that long, when left on transmit.

All I had to do now was get one of them into that room. Not too difficult either, it had been a simple matter of booking the guy's room for a few hours earlier in the week and having the key copied. If you know where to go to get those security keys copied, isn't that much of a problem.

After checking that no one was hanging around in the corridor I let myself into the room opposite and hid the radio on top of a wardrobe. It was only then that I thought to myself that I'd have been clever to have booked the adjoining room. I'd have had the chance to slip the lock whilst I was planting the radio. That would really have taken Lindsey and her lover by surprise, if I entered the room by the connecting door.

But then again they might check that the door was locked and I'd have looked like an even bigger Prat that I was going to do. Look, no matter how much of a brave face you put on things, if your wife decides to bed another man, then you are a Prat. A Prat who can't keep his wife satisfied enough in bed.

So there we were ten minutes to eight, I figured it wouldn't take them much more than an hour to eat their meal. Through the window I'd watched Lindsey arrive in the car park and walk into the hotel. Yeah, I had been tempted to go down and try to spy on them in the restaurant but I figured that it was too risky. I didn't want to give the game away until I was ready.

I spent quit a lot of time staring through that damned little spy hole in the door, through which I could see the door opposite. There seemed to me to be a lot of people going backwards and forwards along the corridor. Damned room service waiter in a white jacket appeared to be busy tonight as well. "Someone must be having one hell of a party in a room further down the corridor," I thought to myself.

Then suddenly there was a lot of talking out in the corridor. Through my little spy-hole I could see the waiter talking to some woman; the pair of them walked off to my left away from the lift. Then I heard a door close somewhere.

I checked my watch it was ten past eight now. "Christ that twenty minutes went quickly!" I thought to myself.

Shortly afterward, two men walked passed, laughing and joking with each other. I figured they were going to join the party, wherever it was, because although I couldn't really hear what they were saying, I just caught a couple of words. I'm damned sure that one of them said, "It'll be a hot time in the old town tonight." I didn't hear all of the phrase ... I think my mind finished it for me.

After that there was complete silence for a little while. Then suddenly there she was. My Lindsey hanging onto some guy's arm. Damn, I wished I could hear what they were saying to each other.

The guy unlocked the door and Lindsey - somewhat reluctantly, I thought - followed him inside. As quickly as I could I went over to the table, turned on the walky-talky and hit the record button on the cassette recorder lying there.

"What would you like to drink?" the guy's voice came out of the radio.

"No, thank you. I thought you were just picking up those photographs," Lindsey replied.

"Oh, we've got time for a quick drink," he insisted.

"Just a minute. What's going on here?" I thought "Collecting photographs? What's all that about?"

Suddenly I heard Lindsey saying, "No! Get off me!"

Whatever I had thought Lindsey had planned for the evening, it apparently wasn't what I or the guy thought. No matter how Lindsey had come to get into this situation, the protective husband side of me switched into gear; in two strides I was at the door and flung it open. Only to be confronted by the waiter and the woman I'd seen him talking to earlier.

The waiter pushed me back into the room.

"Police officers, Mr Shingle. Not yet; we need the other two in the room before we hit them." he cryptically said to me.

"But that man's attacking...!" I tried to shout. But the man in the waiter's uniform put his hand over my mouth to silence me.

"That's what he thinks." The woman commented. "But Lin will kill the bastard, once the other two show their hand."

I was completely confused and I think very frightened at that moment. The man and woman appeared completely relaxed but alert. I got the feeling that they thought they were completely in control of the situation, but I wasn't convinced.

"Interesting set-up." The man said looking down at my recorder and radio. "Crude but adequate. I assume you planted a sister to that radio when you entered the room earlier."

I didn't even think about replying I could still hear Lindsey protesting. But suddenly I realised that there was more than one man's voice coming from the radio.

As I did so, someone in the corridor shouted. "GO, go, go!"

Then all hell broke loose. Through the still open door to my room, I caught sight of at least half a dozen men charging into the room opposite.

"Police! Stay where you are!" yet another voice shouted.

There were sounds of a pretty nasty struggle going on in the other room.

"I've got this bastard. He ain't going anywhere!" I heard Lindsey's voice come from my own radio."

"You all right, Lin?" a voice asked.

I couldn't make out Lindsey's reply, there were too many people talking and shouting to understand what anyone was saying. The next thing, three men are marched out of the room in handcuffs and led away down the corridor.

"Lin, you've got a problem, girl." I heard a man say through my radio. "Jean thinks it's your husband in the room opposite."

"Oh, Christ, what's Gary doing here?" I heard Lindsey ask.

"I hate to think," the mail voice replied. But before he could say anymore, the woman who'd entered my room had joined them.

"He's got this room bugged," I heard her say.

"Oh, Shit! Well, It stood to reason I'd have to face the music sometime. Where is he, Jean?" I heard Lindsey say in a surprisingly calm and relaxed tone of voice.

"Do you want me to talk to him?" a male voice asked.

"No, thanks, Roger. Maybe I should have told him years ago."

"What? He doesn't know you were in the service?" I heard Jean ask with a shocked tone to her voice.

"No reason to ever tell him. I was invalided out of active service before we ever met," Lindsey replied.

Then Lindsey - looking only slightly dishevelled - appeared in the doorway of the room opposite. She had a very contrite expression on her face as she crossed the corridor and entered my room. It was only then that I realised the guy in the waiter's jacket was still hanging onto me. He disentangled himself from me, gave me a kind of embarrassed look, and left the room without a word as Lindsey entered.

"Am I in trouble?" Lindsey asked, at the same time a coy smile coming over her face.

"Well, I thought we were in real deep trouble. But now, I haven't got the foggiest idea of what the hell's going on, or why you are involved," I replied.

"Sorry, Gary, it was a sting operation. The short explanation is that those guys had been meeting married women on the net, and then gang raping them," Lindsey said in a rather nonchalant tone.

"So! What the hell are you mixed up in it for?" I demanded.

"Well, I'd heard some reports about their activities; then one day I was monitoring a chat-room on the net and I spotted this guy talking to a woman. I just had a hunch about the guy. We tracked the woman down quite easily, but tracking him was a different kettle of fish completely and that appeared to confirm my suspicions. I took over the woman's on-line persona and I've been playing him like a fish for the last few months waiting for him to bite."

"Lindsey, who's the we and why you?"

"Ah, I'm sorry but there we are going to get into uncharted territory." Lindsey said sitting herself down on the bed and patting the bed beside her, in an invitation for me to join her.

"Close the door on your way out, Jean. He might be angry with me, but I don't think he'll do any harm," she said to the other woman who, I hadn't realised, had followed Lindsey into the room.

"Jesus, Lin, I'm not worried about him hurting you. I've seen you in action, remember? But that's one good-looking fella you've got yourself there. I wouldn't want you to mess him up too much."

"You keep your hands to yourself. I found him first," Lindsey replied as Jean closed the door.

To be honest this was an extremely confident Lindsey, one that I'd rarely seen before.

"Darling, when we met, what did you think I did for a living?" she asked turning her attention to me.

"You weren't working. You were convalescing, recovering from a road accident. When you were fit, you went back to work as a clerk in Whitehall somewhere, until you had the children."

"Not exactly Whitehall, darling. I apologise. I was a little conservative with the truth there. I actually worked at a rather large building on the embankment. You know the one the terrorists had a go at some years ago!"

Lindsey had me quite confused for a minute; the only place on the Thames embankment that I could remember the IRA having a go at was MI5's building. They fired a rocket at the place some years back.

Then it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks. Lindsey had a rather strange shaped scar on her back that she had always claimed was the result of her accident. Now it's not the sort of thing you think about everyday, but she also had a blemish in her skin just bellow her left breast. For some reason now my mind suddenly decided to put the two marks together; suddenly I realised the obvious cause of those two marks and the implications hit me like a brick.

"Jesus Christ, Lindsey! You didn't have an accident at work, did you, Lindsey? Someone shot you, didn't they!" I gasped out.

"How perceptive of you, darling!" she replied with a smile on her face.

"How the hell didn't I realise that before?" I asked myself but out loud.

"Because you don't come across gunshot wounds everyday and I wasn't going to give the game away. When I got shot, I thought I'd had my chips at first, but I survived and I was just beginning to think it was time to get out of the business. Then, whilst I was recovering I met you and that convinced me where my future lay. I came off of active service and settled down to a nice cushy little number, sitting behind a desk pushing papers about."

"But you never told me. Why?"

"Because you didn't need to know, my love. That's how it is in intelligence. We don't advertise what we do. You only needed to know that I was a civil servant. I wasn't doing anything dangerous after we met."

"Okay, I think I can understand where you're coming from. But all those police seemed to know you quite well."

"Yes, well, we worked together a lot in the old days. With the IRA running around the country we often worked with the local police. When I spotted that guy on the Internet I called up an old friend and we planned it all from there."

"But I still don't understand why you never told me about it."

"Oh, yeah, after seven years of playing the helpless wife, I could see you standing for me playing bait in what we believed was going to be an attempted rape."

"But why you? Surely a policewoman could have done it?"

"For a start, I'm better trained in self-defence than your average policewoman, and secondly we weren't sure whether they'd already looked me over. I'd had to develop the guy for some time before I called the troops in; they might have spotted a switch.

"Now am I forgiven for not telling you all about it?"

"I'm not sure. This is a lot to take in, in a very short time. I'm going to have to think about it."

"Well, while you think, I'll take a shower; I assume you've booked this room for the night. It would be a shame to waste all that money. Perhaps when you've had your little think, you'll come and scrub my back. Or I could scrub yours."

Lindsey got off the bed and began to remove her dress as she walked towards the bathroom.

"Damn it," I thought to myself, "Do I know the woman I married?"

But by then she was standing in the bathroom doorway removing her bra and smiling back at me.

"I'm buggered if I know her!" I thought, "but she sure knows me."

I fell over whilst I tried to remove my trousers and join Lindsey in the bathroom at the same time.

---------------------------

I'm not sure what time it was when I woke up. Lindsey was lying in her side with her back to me. In the moonlight I could just make out the odd shaped scar on her back. Slowly I ran my finger around it.

"Hmm, that's nice," Lindsey whispered.

"Lin, who did shoot you?" I asked.

"A bloody Yank. We were after some Irish guys who were smuggling drugs to finance the purchase of weapons for the IRA ... well, that's what they claimed. Personally I think they were just normal villains hiding under the IRA's skirts. That's the biggest trouble with all these so-called freedom fighters. They make nice places for the crooks to hide.

"The bloody Americans were after the same guys for smuggling the drugs. Neither of us knew that the others were onto these guys. When the shooting started, the Yanks were on one side and we were on the other, with the bad guys in the middle. I caught a stray bullet from one of the American agent's guns. The Yanks were pretty good; they sneaked in a helicopter and flew me out to one of their aircraft carriers. That saved my life. You see, neither the Americans or us were supposed to be on that island in the first place."

"Just like that, you were sneaking around on an island where you weren't supposed to be?"

"Part of the job, my love. Someone has to do those kind of things."

"So what was your code name - 008?

"Don't be silly. James Bond is only in stories. We don't have numbers; we have letters. Mine just happened to be SYG."

"Is that where Sexylegs1972 came from?"

"You cheeky man, you've been reading my emails."

Lucky I did, or I might never have known who I had married.

Life goes on.