“Turn it off!” I yelled, startling Ben. To hear her talking like some sort of sex-crazed slut to another man was simply more than I could bear. My Ginny, the woman I’d loved and worshipped, had betrayed me! Without that recording I would never have believed it. Having to listen to it in front of my boss and his director made the whole thing just that much more humiliating. I closed my eyes, wishing I could crawl under the desk and hide.
Ben looked at me with concern. “Are you alright, Thomas? Can I get you anything?”
“No,” I said quietly, shaking my head, still trying to process what I’d just learned. “Just give me a minute – I’ll be alright.” Then a thought popped into my head and my pain turned into anger. “Wait a minute! What were you doing tapping my wife’s phone calls? You had no right to do that!”
The director stepped forward, his hands held up placatingly. “Things are not that simple, Thomas.”
I interrupted him. “Yes they are that simple. You had my wife under surveillance. She’s a citizen and she doesn’t even work for the government. You had no right to do that!”
“Thomas, we didn’t have Ginny under surveillance. Our computer got a hit on the voice pattern of her, um, partner, and that’s why we grabbed the conversation.”
I looked at him and shook my head in confusion. The director ran his hand through his graying hair. “Thomas, I don’t know how to tell you this, but your wife’s lover is on our terrorist watch list. We think he’s an agent of Al Qaeda or ISIS – these days it’s hard to tell them apart.”
I thought I’d already had the worst shock of my life; now I realized that conclusion was premature. “Ginny may be a cheater but she isn’t a terrorist!” I gasped. “She’d never help those people. When the news about the latest terror attack came out, she was outraged. We talked about it several times.”
“Relax, Thomas, no one thinks Ginny is directly involved with any terrorist organization. We think this fellow targeted her.”
At first I felt a little better. It wasn’t Ginny’s fault; some Middle Eastern James Bond had set out to seduce her. But I couldn’t get around the fact that she’d given in to him. Why was she seeing this guy, why was she flirting with anyone but me? I thought we had a strong marriage; when did she stop loving me? But I put that problem aside to try to comprehend everything else I’d just been told. “I don’t understand – why would some terrorist group target Ginny. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Ben gripped my shoulder. “Think about it, Thomas. They don’t care about Ginny, they want to use her to get close to you.”
“Me? Why would anybody want to get close to me?”
“We can’t be sure, but we think they want to use Ginny to get to you, and to use you to gain information about the NSA. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
I slumped in my chair and glanced idly around the office as if something there might make sense of this madness. I spotted a Christmas wreath hanging from Ben’s window and the sight seemed incongruous to me. Christmas was a thing of the past now, in more ways than one. I didn’t think there would ever be “peace on Earth, good will to men” for me again.
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