Chapter 1

I was watching the sunset over western Virginia from the Penthouse function room of the Archer Hotel in Tysons Virginia. I rented the Penthouse to celebrate mine and my wife’s silver anniversary, twenty-five years together and here I am a glass of Macallan whiskey on ice in my hand; pondering how we made it to this point.

My name is Sean Miller and I’m fifty years old, my wife Anna is forty-nine. We met in 1993 on a stretch of Interstate 5 between San Clemente and Camp Pendleton where I was stationed at the time. I was on my way back to base after visiting a friend who attended the University of California, Los Angeles. My friend had scored tickets for a Dodgers game on Saturday night.

I stayed the night and most of the day on Sunday and was heading back to base in the afternoon when I saw a taxi on the side of the road, hood up and steam pouring out of the radiator. I slowed down and pulled over to see if I could be of assistance. The cabbie informed me that he had already radioed for help.

He thanked me for stopping and I turned to head back to my borrowed car when I heard the most angelic voice shout out to me. Turning back I saw the most gorgeous young woman I had ever seen standing inside the open rear passenger door of the taxi. She stood about five foot four inches tall, a slim but full figure where it counts. Her piercing blue eyes looked towards me as her long strawberry blonde hair blew in the cool southern Californian breeze.

She ran towards me and I couldn’t help but notice her bountiful breasts bouncing in her tank top, nipples proudly standing at attention. It was quite evident that she had no bra on and I was quite happy to enjoy the incredible show before me. She smiled as she stopped before me and her cheeks flushed as she seemed unsure of herself.

Then she finally spoke, “Uhhmm, excuse me, sir. I was wondering if you might be willing to give me a ride back to my college. We have a curfew for the dormitories and I don’t want to be late or I will get reprimanded.”

“Where do you school?” I asked.

“University of California San Diego,” she replied.

“Well I’m on my way back to Camp Pendelton, so I’m not going as far as San Diego. But I can at least get you part way there,” I offered her.

“Are you sure there is no way you can take me to San Diego? It’s not that much further for you,” she pleaded.

I could see the desperation in her beautiful blue eyes. She pouted her lips a bit and I could see tears starting to form. How could I possibly say no to her?

“Alright, I’ll take you all the way to school.” She looked me straight in the eyes and the biggest, prettiest smile crossed her lips. Her bright blue eyes screamed appreciation and with that, she stole my heart. On the way to San Diego we chatted up a storm, she told me she was a sophomore going for a bachelor’s degree in teaching.

I told her I was serving my second year in the Marine Corp. By the time I pulled up outside her dormitory it felt like we were old friends. She beat me to the punch when she asked for a phone number to reach me. I gave her the base number as well as the pager number that I had for my unit in case we got called in for deployment, I was in a recon unit and we could be called to action at any time.

She gave me the phone number to the dormitory phone. I then escorted her to the front door of her dorm, she took my hands in hers and thanked me for bringing her back. Then she reached up and pulled my head down to hers and gave me a fairly long but chaste kiss on the lips. Breaking our kiss she turned and opened the door and told me she would call me soon.

Five years later in late July, we were married in her hometown of Willow Creek, North Carolina. She was happy to be married there as I had left the Marine Corps. for a government job in Virginia. I had no family as my parents took off and left me with my grandparents, they didn’t even come back after my grandparents passed. So the wedding party was all from Anna’s family. We had bought a home in Great Falls, Virginia where Anna got a job teaching at the Elementary School and it wasn’t that far of a commute for my job.

Life was great for us, we were extremely happy and three years after we were married we had our first child; Roger. Then one year later we had a daughter Danielle, followed by Heather and Aaron; twins. Thankfully my job only had me travelling once a month for a few days. So I was home with my wife and kids more than most fathers were.

We raised some great kids and enjoyed doing it as well. Our oldest Roger is engaged to his high school sweetheart and works as a computer programmer. Danielle is in law school to become a lawyer, she wants to practice family law. Heather is also in college to become a teacher like her mother and Aaron is going to school to become an engineer.

With our twenty-fifth anniversary approaching in about three months I decided to book us a Caribbean cruise. Since my wife has a summer job when she is not teaching I had to make sure that she could get the time off from work before I booked the cruise. As we ate dinner one night, I brought it up.

“Darling, can you request two weeks off from work starting the day after our anniversary? I want to book us a Caribbean cruise for our anniversary.” I asked her.

“Oh, Honey. That’s so sweet,” Anna said with a smile. She paused and the smile disappeared, “Unfortunately I can’t. I already requested a week at the end of June. I am going to Atlantic City with Veronica, Emily, and Denise.”

“What? Why? How am I just hearing about this now?” I inquired.

“We just booked it two weeks ago. I was going to let you know about it when it got closer to the time of our trip. I know that you have had a lot going on at work with all the new hires you have been training. I didn’t want to bother you with it right now.” My wife explained.

“Why though? You knew our anniversary was coming up and you didn’t discuss this at all with me.” I asked as I wanted to know the reason why our anniversary was not as important as it seemed.

“The girls and I wanted to take a little trip to watch some shows and gamble a little at the casinos as well as go to the beach and check out the boardwalk.” Answering me with a bit of a perturbed voice. “Besides, it’s not like we ever do anything more than go away for the weekend for our anniversary. We can still do that.”

“We only went away just for the weekend because of the kids. They are all grown up now and we can take extra time to celebrate our anniversary now.” I stated, now irritated both with my wife’s attitude and how she would not think of the fact that we could do more things now with the kids all out of high school.

“Well there’s nothing we can do about it now, you should have thought about this cruise months ago!” She exclaimed. She had never in the thirty years that we have been together ever raised her voice to me like this. I found this very disconcerting.

“Maybe you should have discussed this trip to Atlantic City with me before deciding to go.” I retorted as I stood up and cleared my dishes from the dining room table. Anna said nothing as I walked by her and into the kitchen where I rinsed off the dishes and put them in the dishwasher.

I went to my den opened up the liquor cabinet and poured myself a tall glass of Chivas. I walked out to the back porch and sat down to contemplate what had just transpired.

My wife’s behavior at dinner tonight deeply disturbed me. Her reactions were completely out of character and she always told me of her planned outings with her girlfriends from work. This had all the signs of turning out to be something bad. Could my loving wife of almost twenty-five years be planning to cheat on me?

Or worse could she already have cheated on me? Anna and her girlfriends started having girls’ nights out about five years ago. They would go out every other Friday night for dinner, drinks, and either a movie or some presentation at a local community center.

She was never out late on those nights, always home before midnight. Never came home intoxicated or worse for wear. She never acted any differently than at any other time. I played golf on Saturday mornings with the girls’ husbands. We had all become friends as the girls all worked together. None of the other husbands had mentioned anything out of the usual when we would play golf.

I would have to ask the guys if they knew anything about this Atlantic City trip when we golf this weekend. My mind is trying to be analytical without getting too far ahead of myself. If she had been cheating it was certainly after the kids were born because they wanted to check our family genealogy and the results proved that they were my offspring. So that is some comfort.

I will have to investigate this, thankfully investigations are what I do for a living. My family and friends don’t know what it is I really do, they just know that I am a senior data analyst for the government. Which is partially true. I am a data analyst of sorts, but the government entity that I work for is the C.I.A.

I was never allowed to tell anyone what my real job was and what it entailed, honestly, no one ever questioned it after they heard the words data analyst. They just assumed that I crunched numbers looking at budgets and stuff, no one ever thinks that there are other types of data that need to be analyzed.

My wife never really knew what I did in the Marine Corps. when we were dating. She just assumed I was a plain old soldier, when in fact I was a sniper, tracker, and an analyst for a recon unit. My recon unit was one of the few that ran black ops in conjunction with the C.I.A. which is why I was recruited by them when my enlistment in the Marines was up.

To me it was a no-brainer to sign up with C.I.A. they wanted to make use of my analyst and tracking skills more than my sniper abilities; which meant less time in the field doing dangerous work and they promised to have me working domestic assignments instead of foreign. Before I ran black ops with the C.IA. I was under the impression that they only operated on foriegn ground, I soon learned that that was far from the truth. The C.I.A. was very prominated in running investigations within our own borders. This allowed me to be a good father and husband.

Maybe it didn’t allow me to be a good enough husband. Even with all my training I never saw any signs of possible cheating until now. Perhaps I was truly blinded by the love I have or had for my wife and that’s why didn’t see any of the signs, either way; I would get to the bottom of this.

I finished my glass and then went inside to the kitchen to clean the glass. Taking note of my wife’s presence, she was in the living room grading school work like she always does in the evening. I then went to my den and put the glass away. With my mind still going a mile a minute I retreated to our bedroom and I started to get undressed and ready for bed.

As I was changing, I decided that I was going to sleep on the sofa in my den tonight. I just couldn’t shake my feelings enough to remain totally rational around my wife. So I grabbed a change of clothes for work tomorrow, my pillow, and then went down to my den.

I locked the den door behind me and then set up camp so to speak on the sofa, set my alarm on my phone, and plugged it in to charge. Sleep did not come quickly especially when Anna went to bed and found out I was not there. She banged on the den’s door and yelled about not sleeping in our bed. I just ignored her, she eventually gave up and at some point, I managed to fall asleep.

5:00 a.m. came way too early. Thankfully a lack of sleep was something that I had been trained to deal with in the Marines so it was more of an inconvenience than anything else. I used the downstairs bathroom to get cleaned up and avoided going upstairs to not wake up the wife.

I made my usual cup of black tea, skipped making breakfast, and headed off to work before Anna got up. My normal 20-minute commute to work took about half the time as usual since I had an earlier start than normal, but I wasn’t complaining because it gave me that much more of a head start on my preparations for my new investigation.

I arrived at work just before 6:30 a.m. a full hour before anyone else normally shows up. Once I was settled in my office and my computer had cycled through its starting procedures, I sent an email to my division head. I asked him to let me know when I could have a meeting with him today, as I had a serious personal issue that I needed to address. I hit send and then started making a list of all the items I would need to conduct my investigation.

While making the list I received a text message from my wife, telling me she didn’t appreciate how I had treated her last night and how she thought my not joining her in bed was disrespectful. I chuckled at the message she sent, which was quickly followed up with another message saying that we would be talking about it later tonight.

I chose not to answer and went back to my list. It wasn’t too long after 7:30 a.m. that my desk phone rang. “Sean Miller speaking,” I answered full well knowing who was going to be on the other end. “Yes, sir. I will be there in a few minutes.”

After logging out of my computer, what should be a common practice for anyone before leaving a computer unattended? For us at the C.I.A. it was a mandatory policy to prevent data theft. I then walked out of my office closing and locking the door behind me, garnering the attention of my team from their bank of desks arranged in a way that they were all looking at each other. But also allowing them to be able to watch each other’s six.

I had a team that I built to operate in an efficient and self-supporting way. Each member complimented the others as it should be in their devotion and dedication to each other, myself, and to the C.I.A. There is no other team that I would rather be beside in the thick of things than these men and women.

“Got in early today boss, something big going down?” Asked Marc the most senior member of my team.

“That has yet to be seen,” I offered. “I’ll be back in a while.”

Knowing well enough not to pry any further they went back to work. I made my way out of our suite and down the hall to James Loring’s office, head of our division. I opened the door to his suite and was greeted by his secretary Mary. “Good morning Agent Miller, you can go right in.”

“Good morning, Mary,” I replied as I walked past her and let myself into my boss’s office.

“Morning, Sean. Take a seat.” My boss said as he motioned to a chair in front of his desk.

“Good morning, Jim.” I acknowledged as I took a seat. He closed his laptop pushed it forward on his desk, clasped his hands together and settled his elbows on the desk, and brought his chin to his clasped hands.

“I’m guessing that this is not going to be a pleasant conversation.” Jim states, “What’s going on?”

I paused, somehow feeling like if I said nothing that it couldn’t possibly be real, and when I do say something my world will completely fall apart. Apparently, my pause was too long because my boss gave me a bit of a cough to draw my attention.

“Sorry Jim, this is difficult in more ways than one. I think that Anna is cheating on me or is going to cheat on me,” I said. Relaying that information to my boss was almost therapeutic and it felt like the weight of the world had been lifted from my shoulders.

“I see,” my boss says as he shakes his head a little. “Tell me everything you know so far.”

For the next half hour or so I recount the events of last night to my boss. All of my thoughts on how and when things might happen and how and when things might have happened already. Jim was clearly processing the information I gave him as a superior in the C.I.A. would, but how he did it was more of that of a friend.

I worked on his team when I first started here, so he knew me just as much as I knew him. We spent a lot of time working cases together and you could probably say that he is my best friend, even though we seldom see each other outside of work as it is better that way in this line of work.

“First of all Sean, I certainly hope that Anna is not cheating on you.” Jim conveyed with sincerity, “However, this must be fully investigated solely for the fact that your wife could be compromised. If for any reason a foreign government has suspicions as to your true employment and they are using your wife, this could have the potential of a security breach.”

“I’m aware, that is why I came to you as soon as I could today. I need to lead the investigation, I have already started planning.” I suggested in hopes that he would allow me to take the lead.

“Sean, you know that you can’t be a part of this investigation it’s standard protocol,” Jim noted. I felt disappointed and my posture went slack in defeat, my boss obviously picked up on this. I don’t know if that was the real reason or not for his next decision and I’m fine with that. “That being said, you and your team are the best investigators we have. So I am making an exception, so don’t make me regret it!”

“I won’t. I will keep you in the loop every step of the way Jim, as soon as I know something you will know about it.” I declared with the utmost confidence.

“Very well then, you have all our resources available to you and your team. Have any assignments your team is currently working on passed over to Drake and his team,” my boss said with his authoritative tone.

“Understood,” I replied and excused myself.

It was now a little past 8:00 a.m. as I strolled back into our teams’ suite. Every member of my team stopped what they were doing and gave me all their attention. I closed the door behind me and then walked over to the coffee pot. Grabbing my mug I poured some sugar and then some creamer into the mug followed by coffee.

I turned to face my team, leaned back against the counter, and took a sip of my coffee, letting the warmth and the caffeine take hold of me. This was going to be a long couple of months. I took another sip and then cleared my throat.

“Stop what you are working on, pack it up, and organize everything for transfer. Once everything is ready to go, give it all to Drake’s team and brief them on its status. Then join me in my office to be briefed on our next assignment.” I commanded.

“You got it, boss,” my team replied in unison. They quickly ignored me and got to work, I went into my office sat down, and continued outlining the plan for the investigation into my wife’s possible cheating.

Working on the plan and making lists helped my concentration as I was in a work mentality. The pity, loathing, anger, and doubt had vanished. I was now solely focused on my job and treating this just like any other assignment, detaching myself from my home life like always.

As I lost myself in my work, time passed as normal. But to me, I had no perception of time; that is until a knocking on my office door snapped me out of my work-obsessed trance. I looked at the clock on my wall, it was now 11:25 a.m.

“Enter,” I bellowed.

The door opens and my team walks in. “Take a seat and we’ll get started,” I state. Two of them sit in chairs already in front of my desk as the other two grab a couple of chairs along the wall and set them in place next to the others. All four of them have legal-sized notepads and readied themselves to start taking notes.

“What do we got boss?” Asked Marc.

“We have an agent whose wife may have or is about to cheat on him, this may or may not compromise the agent and the company. We have been tasked to investigate this situation fully and make sure if cheating has, is, or will happen that all players involved are vetted. We must ascertain if any foreign or domestic enemies are involved.” I informed my team.

“So who is the poor cuck whose wife is cheating on him?” Inquired Marc.

“I am,” I answered without hesitation. I should be angry at being called a cuck. I should be angry at the entire situation. But the past three hours of not having any emotion whatsoever, made me realize that detaching myself from my home life and focusing on the job; was the only way I was going to make it through this.

“Shit! I’m sorry boss!” Marc apologized, “I didn’t mean ta...”

“ENOUGH!” I shouted cutting him off. “Don’t you dare apologize. Everyone else was thinking the same thing. It may or may not be true, but that doesn’t change the fact that we have been assigned to figure all that out.

We will follow our standard protocol for this situation. Marc and Justin, you will gather all we need for bugging my house. Microphones, cameras the works. Load everything into the Electrical Van, the two of you will be electricians looking into a couple of faulty breakers in case my neighbors get nosey. Bring along the flash drives I need to hack and clone my wife’s laptop and cell phone.