Chapter 1

I hate my cell phone. My peak signal area is about the size of a small basketball court and far from getting 'four bars' I'm lucky to ever get two, even in the middle of the city. Out here in the boonies I'm lucky to get one, depending upon the phase of the moon, how I hold the phone and what Gods names I invoke while slowing moving my phone around a room until I can pickup a stray signal from the nearest tower.

My boss, Joel Woodlake, the majority owner of our business and the managing partner, has a Blackberry that could probably pick up a good signal on the far side of the moon. The bastard can run his entire life with that little gizmo - and does. He watches sporting events on it, day trades stocks, does all of his banking, and even plays the ponies all online. Oh yeah, he sometimes even does a little bit of work when he's not playing his golf game on it. It's good to be the boss, I guess. He owns apparently 66% of the company; the rest is apparently controlled by some 'old neighborhood friends' from Philadelphia that put up the original money for the venture. I've never met them, but I've heard some scary stories through a friend of a friend that strongly suggest that they have mob connections. Not nice folks to know if a business deal goes south. Apparently "Whoops, I'm sorry" just doesn't cover it. They don't know me from Adam ... and I'd like to keep it that way.

Me? I'm strictly a salaryman living paycheck to paycheck and waiting for the odd moments when I get to sit up and beg to get my sales bonuses or a tiny annual profit sharing check. As the chief tech guy and resident gear head of the company I'm supposed to be getting a small bonus from each original sales commission every time I help one of the sales guys out with a pitch – if they close a deal, but it's funny how those checks are few are far between.

Our company installs fairly high end computerized alarm and household automation system. It's a pretty good product and usually demonstrates well to a knowledgeable client, especially working couple young professionals. With micro cameras in every room, a young mother could go back to her job and still watch everything the nanny or house maid is doing on her computer screen at work. The only drawback is that we don't exclusively own the rights to this product, nor do we manufacture it. Someday, some smart well funded competitor is going to come along that can buy these units in bulk and squeeze us out price-wise. Not my problem, hopefully when that day comes I'll be working somewhere else ... or even for the new competitor.

Yeah my job sucks and I should quit, but the economy is a bit sluggish right now and no one is beating down my door waiting to kiss my pinkie ring this week. I've quietly been looking for something better but for now I'm content to wait. Having some money regularly coming in the door is better than having none. Terri, my wife, works as well and we do okay for ourselves in my opinion, but that's not the way she sees it. We both make about the same amount of money, but she can sure spend it a lot faster than I do! She's a very attractive woman and always likes to show her assets off. She likes to dress up to the nines, even just for work and she enjoys turning heads and attracting admirers everywhere she goes. She's also a bit of a flirt and could easily get the full attention of anyone she wanted to. Things aren't perfect in our marriage but I was pretty sure that I couldn't ever upgrade to anyone better than her, at least in the looks department, if we ever were to separate. That helped to keep my thoughts (and hands) from straying on the fairly regular occasions when we fought or went through a rough patch.

Terri works as a senior bookkeeper for a fairly good-sized accounting firm. It's a pretty decent job with a well regarded local company with a reputation for treating their employees much better than their competitors. Her salary isn't top-notch, but they offer a good benefits package, paid training, annual bonuses, lots of parties and other functions and an extremely flexible work schedule. They work a lot of flex-hours so her work schedule is erratic and she gets lots of compensation time off instead of overtime pay. She also has to travel a few times a month usually just overnight but she enjoys it. She's also often allowed to work from home and she telecommutes usually at least one day a week.

This would have been ideal for us if we had had any children, but it hadn't worked out that way until about four months ago when she announced she was finally pregnant for the first time. This surprised me to no end since I assumed that she had remained on the pill and we hadn't discussed starting a family lately. Still, being in your early thirties isn't bad for just starting a family and if you keep waiting for the timing to be perfect you could end up waiting forever. She seemed happy about it, so I decided I would be too.

Overall I thought we had a pretty decent marriage. Sure we fought fairly often but I didn't think it was a serious problem and in comparison with most of our friends, our relationship seemed to definitely compare favorably as one of the better ones, but Terri was a hard woman to satisfy, let alone make content. We somehow just barely lived within our means. Terri didn't like to live 'economy' and she sure liked to keep up with the Jones'. This meant that we were paying for a nice late model car for her to drive, an expensive wardrobe (with frequent updating), regularly scheduled maintenance at the spa and hair salon, and a house that was bigger than we needed and took nearly every bit of my base salary just to manage the payments. Usually though, I thought it was all worth it.

My illusions that we were doing 'ok' as a couple vanished when I borrowed Joel's Blackberry to make a routine call while we were out on a sales trip together. He was having an important business meeting with a large residential home builder out on a golf course and didn't want any interruptions for any reason so he could close the sale, and so he parked his cell phone with me. The potential customer was old fashioned and would likely demand 100% of Joel's face time for the next three hours, which would more or less leave me hanging in the wind bored, but it beat a day stuck in the office.

This deal would be for providing and installing over one hundred full security and home automation units for inclusion with the builder's current housing project and would definitely improve this quarter's sale figures. Maybe, I'd even see a small bonus check from this one. For the next few hours, I was very much stuck at the 19^th hole, the country club bar, nursing iced teas while waiting until they finished their round of golf and business discussions. I wasn't quite sure in the first place why I was even needed for this sales meeting, but I guess Joel just wanted me nearby to handle any urgent tech related questions the builder might have.

I was starting to think about calling back to the office to get some hypothetical delivery figures for Joel when my own cell phone suddenly chirped at me to eagerly announce that it had finally locked down a tower signal out here and I could use it instead. And I did ... there would be no problem with promising delivery of the units in about two weeks, with at least three full crews available then for handling the installations. The bastard would be pleased ... and in my opinion he now owed me a small favor. I decided to collect it myself by sneaking a peak onto his Blackberry and see what hot stock tips he had been receiving lately. It seemed like his stockbrokers were always texting him with the latest hot market advice and he constantly bragged about how great his brokers were!

Instead of scanning his old emails, I somehow hit the wrong button and got into the wrong set of menus entirely. I've always hated the tiny buttons on a Blackberry, it's why I don't have one. I have fat fingers ... I admit it. Trying to back my way out, I instead hit Redial, and things suddenly started to get very interesting. The last number Joel had dialed, a bit earlier this morning, was my wife's cell phone. How the heck did Joel have my wife's cell number? And why? I quickly cut the connection before she could answer it.

Now I was a man with a mission. After a bit more fussing, I finally got into his email archives and found some folders of saved text messages and emails from his brokers (three of them), his other business friends and associates, his silent partners, and last but not least ... a folder containing stuff from his more intimate partners, which included my wife.

The text messages alone made it quite clear that they had been having an affair for some time, perhaps nearly a year. The candid phone camera images removed any remaining semblance of lingering doubt. Heck, my wife never sent me any naked pictures of herself, let alone ones as explicit as these!

I was amazed and dumbfounded. Really, I had had no clue at all that this was happening right under my very nose. They had been extremely careful, cautious and clever. Without my accidental access to Joel's Blackberry there was probably no way that I would have discovered what they were up to. They had been exceedingly cautious and smart, but now I'd get a chance to prove that I could be smarter ... or at least a little nastier.

I had about two hours of assured privacy with which to act and I needed nearly every minute of it.

Dealing with cell phones, especially Blackberry's, was at the edge of my tech comfort zone. For what I wanted done I'd need the skills of a specialist. I didn't know one ... but I knew someone who certainly would. Oscar the Grouch. Not the green talking carpet sample on Sesame Street, this one ran a spy toys shop near a suburb mall not too far away from the golf course. This Oscar was also a lot grumpier and harder to deal with. We bought a lot of our ad hoc extra materials and supplies from him and he knew and tolerated me pretty well. I also had an ace up my sleeve.

"Oscar, oh great and wise one." I began my preamble to him. "You are shrewd and all-knowing, let your wisdom bring joy to the heart of this poor cuckolded fool! Teach me, magnificent one, the arcane secrets of cloning a 'crackberry' that I might wreak vengeance upon my unworthy adversaries!"