I returned to humanity to be served with a notice that I was being served with a divorce suit. I had just landed at the airport, and was waiting for my luggage to be spat out of the souvenir breaking service when a guy asked me to hold a folder of papers for him while he tied his shoe lace. When he stood up he walked away a few paces until I called him. I had already rifled through them and noticed they were a legal brief about a divorce; being a nosy bastard was part of my job. I noticed a name: Nicholas Daniel Kestles; that was me, then another Esther Hannah Kestles.
"I'm being divorced?" I asked.
"You've been served!" The guy called back with a shitty smile.
While a few idiots cheered I was white in fury for a few minutes as I considered what crimes I could get away with. Then I settled down in a coffee shop and read the papers. Esther, my wife, was suing for a divorce after fifteen years of marriage. She cited that I was away from home for months at a time, frequently got phone calls from strange women and the disappeared for hours. In my job this was normal practice, she knew that. She had been the strange woman who called men at inconsiderate hours to meet up in confidential places. When she had done that I had not complained because it was her job.
I switched my phone on thinking of telling her this was bullshit, the text message came through before I could call. It was from her, telling me that my number was blocked on her phone and that I should contact her through her lawyer. A second message informed me that she had taken out a restraining order and that I could not come close that three hundred feet of her or my daughters.
I looked through the brief and found the restraining order. It stated that I was prone to sudden bursts of rage and that I had a demonstrated predilection to violence. Attached were two cases of assault, in one three bikers had not taken no for an answer about sharing Esther and ended with well-earned vacations in hospital with rehabilitation therapy session as a complimentary gift. In the other a three hundred pound, six foot six man had pushed our oldest daughter into a baseball pitch fence because she had dared to hit his pitcher son for four home runs. That had quickly escalated to five friends having a go at me and ended with the pitcher's father being castrated (his most minor injury) and three of the friends stuck in special care facilities for issues like brain damage, physical paralyses, and severe visual impairment.
After some thought I got in touch with a lawyer, then a supply vendor who understood that his best customers valued discretion. The supply vendor was faster giving me what I wanted in three hours, the lawyer needed forty eight hours to get out of bed. That gave me two days to play with what the vendor had given me.
A crucial aspect of being successful at my job is a somewhat occasionally conforming consideration of legality. It was not difficult for me to set up an observation post with visual and audio recording capabilities. The nice thing about my job was the vast amount of highly specialized training and no trade union to tell me where and when not to use my abilities. On the contrary we were encouraged to keep our skills up.
I got some lovely pictures of Esther screwing a guy, our daughters looking pissed off about this new dad, and of him threatening to beat our youngest, Nicole who was eleven. I got a few audio recordings of him speaking to our oldest, Cathy, in very rude language describing to a fifteen year old what boys wanted and telling her to put out or get pushed out. Another recording of him telling Nicole that she cost too much money because she wanted a bicycle, and another telling Esther that she should sell her body if she wanted more money were very good to have too.
I slipped into Cathy's room after the lights were out and got an immediate and desperate hug when I woke her up. She told me about how Esther had suddenly brought the guy home and how he wanted to be the center of everything. I got a name, Jerry Shennan, from her and set up an emergency contact system for her. I explained that I was working on getting them out of this and that she should be nice to Jerry because I wasn't going to be. Nicole burst into tears to see me and didn't want to let me go. I told her how to get in touch with me too and assured her that I would get her out. She asked if I would get back together with Esther and gave her a straight answer even though it hurt her.
Esther had been accusing me of having affairs for eight years by the time Jerry appeared. I had never cheated on her despite the temptations and opportunities my job frequently presented. I was through with that. In fact I was through with my job because taking care of my daughters was going to need me to be home.
A quick rummage through our home the next morning informed me that Esther had been promoted and transferred at work and now dealt with mission reviews. A section that reviewed how much our missions cost, whether the operations budgets were suitable, what we used credit cards on and settled them, and where we spent our slush funds. This was the section that gave us trouble when we got back every time. She was now earning twenty thousand dollars per month.
On a month to month basis she out earned me, on an annual basis I still earned more because I got additional allowances when I went operational. I earned, for lack of any better description, a retainer of fifteen thousand dollars per month with a deployment allowance equal to twice my monthly retainer the moment I accepted a mission. I also earned time bonuses for speedy achievement of objectives, and I earned victory bonuses based on which objectives I achieved; and could keep anything we looted from our targets. I had been overseas for four months when I was informed of the divorce, my pay for those four months would equal Sybil's annual income; aside from private income derived from my cover occupation of business investor and speculator.
I decided to focus on Jerry. I found out that Jerry ran a struggling resort hotel he had inherited. Struggling was a generous term, it was on the IRS records as a dormant business. A tour of it showed three old geysers who drove around on lawnmowers pretending to maintain a golf course, dusty beds, an old tart in reception and some drunks in the bar who brought their own booze and hid away from their wives. Jerry himself was a bodybuilder lived a lifestyle that indicated an income of twenty five thousand dollars per month or more with no job or running business to substantiate the lifestyle.
The day before I met my lawyer I bought a house three doors down from Esther and hung a recognition banner in the front widow of the house for Cathy and Nicole to see and know where to find me. They visited me that evening after they were supposed to be in bed. I had basic furnishings only, Very basic, but they could see me doing something and took courage from that. I gave them a basic self-defense class and showed them an observation skills game to play, then sent them home. They left happily knowing I they had a place for them to run too if needed.
The lawyer whistled at the restraining order. You seldom found a guy who would pick a fight with three bikers. I told him to draw those court files and he would find that the verdict in each had been self-defense and that the entire story would be in the dockets. He agreed to appeal the restraining order if the court cases matched what I said. He explained that the restraining order was illegal anyway because I had not been informed of the hearing before the event; that was only allowed if there was physical evidence of abuse.
"She has compelling reasons to divorce Mr. Kestles."
"No, she knows my job; she works at monitoring what I do."
"What is your job?"
"I work for the DOD. I work in the section that goes overseas first. She works in the section that sends us and sees to it we have things we need like passports, actually she did when I left. Now she works in the section that sees to it our credit cards work."
"Who? Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence? And aren't you guys based in Virginia?"
"You don't need to know... Believe me you don't want to either."
The lawyer looked at the restraining order. He learned quickly. Instead he decided to look at my evidence and shuddered at the thought of what was going to happen to Jerry. He took his mind off it by discussing how divorces worked. There had to be a visible attempt at reconciliation, that meant a marriage counselor would either be selected by her and I or the court would appoint one.
