After cocktails, dinner and dancing afterwards, the bankers and other guests started back to their rooms in pairs. Not only in pairs, there were a couple of other combinations and swap-rounds happening in those hotel rooms, which raised some eyebrows in our suite and encouraged Max to rub his hands together Fagin-like. Apparently, his website was divided up into several different categories and some of the videos would apparently fit more than one area of interest.
Sure enough, Maisie and Marshall-Hobbs retired to his suite after dinner and I'm afraid there was nothing I could do to stop them. Adrienne worked my Mac computer for me and the precise moment when the scene reached, what Max termed as the "money shot", then one of the photographers, Barry, broke the fire alarm round the back corridor of the building where there were no CCTV cameras.
Everyone was ready in place with their cameras to get stills and movies of couples emerging together from their rooms in various states of undress, without making their capture too obvious. In the panic, the subjects of our attention were too intent on finding safety to notice the cameras. Lots of people ended up milling around in the vicinity of the assembly points. The fact that it was raining heavily was an added bonus.
Gordon and I got out of the hotel quickly down the back stairs and along the street to a bus shelter I had scouted out earlier, to avoid being recognised. We sneaked back to the edge of the car park, when the rain eased off, and Gordon took a series of shots of my wife and lover, with their arms around each other, as they waited in the cool and damp night air for the fire service to give the all-clear.
After the Fire Brigade had checked the building out thoroughly, everyone was allowed to file back in and once again we all took photos of the couples two by two, or whatever combination they returned in.
Looking at the resumed transmissions from the pinhole cameras, showed a number of couples whose ardour had been dampened by the alarm, but others managed to provide feedback as further fodder for Adrienne's editing talents and Max's thorough satisfaction.
My Mac worked overtime as my wife and the double-dealing double-surname continued to add to Max's revenue stream.
We set the second alarm off about three in the morning, which the camera group were all expecting, and got more movie and still evidence of the barely-clothed couples, multiples, etc. Again, Gordon and I made ourselves scarce while the rest of the guests shivered at the edges of the car park. After filing back into the building we dozed in shifts until first light.
It was amazing the footage we got in very good lighting conditions early in the morning. Some of the couples were even hard at it during the day, while the bankers were supposed to be attending the conference and training meetings.
Adrienne had managed to grab a few hours' sleep for the latter part of the night and Max scooted back to open the shop with his assistant and to cope with the usual Saturday rush.
When Adrienne stirred, I asked her who was looking after the children and she said with a smile that it was Gavin that was staying in the house. He was without transport, as Adrienne used the family car to get to the hotel. She laughed as she said her parents were also keeping her sister on a short leash.
"What does Gavin know about this sting operation we are running?" I asked.
"Nothing," she said, "he thinks I am having a weekend away with some girl friends, which is what I told him. He also knows that, when I get home on Sunday morning, he'll have to get his butt out of our house again!"
Adrienne laughed when she finished saying, "By now, Gavin must have heard from my Mum about the rude man who was at the house on Thursday, because they are both curious about you. Gavin quizzed me about whether I would be seeing any male friends and had got quite heated when I said there was a distinct possibility of that happening."
"What did he say to that bombshell?"
"Gavin asked straight out if I would be sleeping with anyone, while trying to contain his jealousy. I had replied that I might doze for a while but I wasn't expecting to be doing much sleeping!"
We both laughed at that little joke at Gavin's expense. We talked about her marriage and what she wanted for the future of her family. She had three young children with Gavin. She still wanted Gavin back in the family but very much on her terms, to ensure he kept on the straight and narrow. Gavin seemed to be genuine in promising that he would do anything to put his past behind him and be the family man that Adrienne was looking for. But then he was saying all this before his affair with Adrienne's sister came to light. So Gavin seemed to have a chasm to cross as far as honesty was concerned, if Adrienne was going to be confident in allowing his return.
Adrienne wondered what my plans were, following Maisie's exposure.
I told her, "I've resigned my job and am in the process of selling up all our assets. I'll have to split them between Maisie and myself, of course. Then, I expect I will move abroad, probably to France, somewhere warm and sunny."
Adrienne carried on running through editing more videos, which were coming in all the time. She was building up files for each cheating couple, as well as feeding them through to Max to deal with. Gordon had prepared spreadsheets, with a printed copy on a display board, so we were able to tick off whether we had still, films and completed files foe each person, cross-referenced to their respective partner or partners. Gordon was running a slick operation, leaving me more or less as a spectator.
Max returned early Saturday evening and he checked through and uploaded the files that Adrienne had provided. From the complimentary comments they were paying each other, it looked like the pair of them had negotiated some rates of pay for the work she had done and for future work. Lucrative business, the porn industry, apparently.
Saturday night was much like Friday night, although we didn't bother with the fire alarms any more. Every hotel room taken by the bank staff was an individual studio set for the biggest porn shoot ever. Mind you, no-one for a moment considered contacting the Guinness Book of Records!
Mr M-H and Mrs Cox managed to excel their exploits of Friday night and were worthy of star bidding on the web site. They produced three excellent long clips, so they tell me, I couldn't bear to watch. Adrienne worked her magic with piecing the feeds together and started outputting CDs and DVDs of each couple, for labelling up and passing onto their spouses and the bosses at the bank.
The majority of the photographers melted away home during Saturday night and Sunday morning, including Gordon, who received heartwarming thanks from me. After all, the fantastic organisation of this massive sting operation was down to him. I wished him all the best with his wife Josephine and promised I would definitely see him at Kylie's birthday, if not before.
Yawning madly, drinking black coffee as if it was about to disappear from the shelves, I stuffed CDs and DVDs in pre-addressed padded envelopes for mailing off later. That was Operation Wallop and we were keenly waiting for the inevitable fallout once these were received by the partners of the guilty parties and their bosses on Tuesday.
We had a nice file of non-X-rated stills of couples emerging from hotel rooms in dressing gowns or otherwise on Friday night and this was loaded as a slide show on the bank's own website. I hacked into that site on Sunday morning, thanks to some passwords that Gordon had managed to secure earlier in the week. I rigged the slideshow of images as a default to the home page. That was the culmination of the exercise which I had termed Operation What A Picture!
Adrienne called it a wrap as far as she was concerned at that point. She hugged Max, now her business partner, and saved a special hug for me, enquiring if I was all right with what we were doing.
Of course I said I was, even though I wasn't, and sent her off with a playful smack on her bottom and wishing her well for her coming event next Saturday. For a while she had forgotten all about it, and said now thought that Gavin would be allowed to stay on the sofa for the rest of the week and she would play the outcome of Saturday night by ear.
She was looking forward to that night with a positive attitude for rebuilding her marriage. I was looking forward to the coming week being the total destruction of mine.
During the morning, the bank contingent started to drift away. Max used his skeleton key to enter the empty rooms and remove his cameras. While he was doing that we called him on the mobile, advising who else was on the move through reception, so he managed to get them all out in a surprisingly short space of time.
We checked out, when we were ready to. I settled all the outstanding food, drinks and calls bills using our remaining joint credit card. I noted with some humour that none of the rooms I had rented, for the comfort and refreshment of the camera club, had watched any of the porn channels available! I posted off all the bulky envelopes of CDs and DVDs at several post boxes in the area before heading home.
My mobile phone received a call on the way back home, from Maisie. I answered. She was home and opening the mail and was surprised to receive confirmation from the bank that the limit on her credit card had been increased without her knowledge.
"Yes," I replied, "that it was my doing, honey. I wasn't expecting the notification to come through yet. I didn't want it to spoil the surprise."
"But why increase the limit? We always pay the balance off every month."
"OK, it was meant as a surprise for you, sweetheart and I wanted to use one of the cards that we didn't usually use, to ensure that what I'm getting for you, is going to be the surprise of a lifetime."
