Chapter 5: The Two Lovers Talk

I would have contacted Janet bright and early the next day. But, I had gotten the sense that Murphy had a few more bombshells tucked up his sleeve. And I was afraid that those might turn out to be even nastier than fucking my wife. So before I got around to dealing with my marriage issues, I wanted to first reassure myself that all of Murphy’s latent mischief had been identified and handled.

Thus, my first visit on Monday morning was to my system manager. He had his team working all night to go through the logical places where Murphy might have hidden malicious code and sure enough they found a back door. That little bit of grief was promptly exorcised.

He said that Murphy had attempted to access the system and then tried the back door for two hours, from about 3 AM on. Mr. Murphy must have been getting progressively desperate from the number of attempts he had had made.

The piece of shit had then tried to hack-in through any available access point. Since my guys in the network control room were monitoring his attempts, the night crew played with him by offering him an open door and then slamming it in his face. Apparently I was the only person in the Company who DIDN’T know that Murphy was a total asshole.

THEN I dropped around to brief my security manager. He was drinking coffee in his office, joking with some of his guys. They were watching one of the monitors. All of my security people are either ex-special operations, or Blackwater operators. They are big tough men with a lot of intelligence. But they are not exactly refined when it comes to sense of humor.

What they were laughing about was Mr. Jim Murphy’s early morning visit to our place.

He had come screeching up just before sunrise and tried to bluff his way past the lobby guards. They had heard me loud and clear about the ten-foot rule. And they implemented that dictum by throwing Mr. Jim Murphy face first out the front entrance.

According to the guys he had then dusted himself off and disappeared around the back of the building. They were watching him in the pre-dawn darkness, using the night-vision monitors. When he got to the place where his former office had been, he picked up a big rock and threw it through the window.

Since that legally constituted trespass the guards felt justified in releasing the three Belgian Malinois we keep around to discourage such practices. Apparently Mr. Jim Murphy was a WELL KNOWN asshole.

We particularly like that breed for guard dog purposes. They are as smart as shepherds, as aggressive as Rottweiler’s, and as ruthless as Dobermans but they are a lot faster and more athletic than any of those breeds, and just a tad more vicious.

Once a Malinois is tasked on somebody there is no escaping them short of shooting them. And although rigid military discipline is bred into them, they have a creative sense of humor when it comes to how they execute their assignments. This was one of those instances.

I saw what my guys were laughing at. We all watched Mr. Jim Murphy headed toward the woods. Two of the Malinois were hustling him along by each arm, while the third appeared to have his fangs sunk in his ass. That dog actually looked like he was smiling at the camera.

The dogs dropped him at their proscribed perimeter. Murphy’s agitation as he hot-footed it into the woods behind our building was indeed comical. I told the guys that they were going to love their bonus. But I cautioned them to continue to be vigilant since Mr. Jim Murphy apparently had stashed something really juicy in his office.

An hour later I found out exactly what.

I was just beginning to address the question of how far into the Kim-Chee Murphy had dragged us when the audit report showed up. The fucker had been skimming accounts to the tune of about $2 million. I asked the audit guy if he could trace the money and he said that it was wired to several accounts in the BCC, which is the National Bank of Cuba.

I was puzzled. It looked like Murphy was feathering his nest in a place where we couldn’t extradite him. That made some sense, but why Cuba? Murphy might have been good at seducing and fucking my wife but he was a total novice when it came to cyber-espionage. The first hint of what he was ACTUALLY up to came from my system guys. They said he was poking into files that were strictly off-limits to anybody but people with Yankee White clearance.

Those files are so far out of Murphy’s league that I knew they were his target. For an outrageous fee we guarantee secure hot-site backup of national security files. The secrets are locked down in our virtual safety deposit boxes. And we DO keep some heavy duty secrets.

The whole thing is a win-win. It is cheaper for the government to outsource national security backup operations to us. And assuring confidentiality of national secrets is one of our most profitable services. Most of what’s in the lock boxes comes from the White House, or DoD. Their stuff is delivered through secure pipelines. We just capture it in real-time as it is piped over from the source and then we guard it. We are not authorized to access that data; let alone read, or copy it.

My system manager’s revelation provoked the original “Holy Shit!!!” reaction from me, which was followed by a panicked scramble down to Murphy’s former office. The maintenance people were JUST putting in the new window. So they were in the way. But it didn’t take an eagle eye to spot the laptop and high capacity portable hard drive lying on top of his desk.

It appeared that Murphy had graduated from a simple felony, all the way up to his rendition to a Country with less liberal views about human rights. I just didn’t want to join him on that trip.

My system guys got permission from the Feds to look at the files on Murphy’s laptop and thumb drive. None of us had the clearance to know that they even existed, let alone read them. But since the government had to know ASAP what Murphy was trying to steal, we got their go-ahead to do an immediate forensic examination. Needless to say, we were only permitted to look at what was on the laptop. Touching any of their other stuff would have gotten us our OWN all-expense paid vacation at a SuperMax.

If Mr. Jim Murphy wanted to get himself fitted for a CIA headbag it was up to him. I just didn’t want any of my employees to end-up riding next to him in the nondescript white van. So I told the system manager to inform our Federal friends that I was going to do the forensic examination in isolation; all by myself.

One reason for my sudden, uncharacteristic attack of altruism was the fact that I owned the Company and I needed to limit our exposure. But the main reason was that I wanted to PERSONALLY collect the evidence that would put Mr. Murphy in an orange jumpsuit for the rest of his soon-to-be dreadful life.

The reason why I am so wealthy is that nobody can hide anything digital from me. I didn’t go to school to learn that black art. In fact, no responsible institution of higher education would even consider teaching the things that I know. And I am definitely not a mathematical or any other kind of genius.

It is just that I can follow every one of the virtual footpaths and dive down all the cybernetic rabbit holes in the darkweb. And I can crack and read anything that has ever been recorded on a computer. A normal citizen, even somebody as skillful as Murphy, is absolutely defenseless in the face of my Kung-Fu.

First, I opened Murphy’s laptop to see what I could see. Inside I found the usual shit that you would expect from a juvenile cockhound, including several candid pictures of Janet. Those were obviously taken by a cellphone. They were almost pornographic in that they showed off her tits and camel toe. I probably would have killed her if she had intentionally posed like that. But it was obvious that these were sneak shots of her by our pool, when she thought that she was alone. I had to marvel at how totally hot my wife is.

The pictures and their timestamps made it clear how obsessed Murphy was with Janet and for how astonishingly long. And in reality I didn’t blame him. Looking at the pictures I could almost put myself in his treacherous shoes. But I was after bigger game here, not the detritus of Murphy’s over-prolonged adolescence. I found it buried so far down in his file structure that I would have missed it if he hadn’t encrypted it. To any forensic examiner, encrypting something is like putting a red tab on a file labeled, “Open this first!”

So, I did.

I had to go to the binary level to crack his encryption and then after I had rebuilt the contents I had to spend a little time thinking about what I was seeing. What I saw was that Murphy had copied privileged communication between the DoD and the White House. It mainly concerned satellite surveillance over Central Cuba and some intel reports.

Long-story short, it looked like an un-named Black-Ops agency was doing a latter-day Bay-of-Pigs thing in Cuba; and the Cubans wanted to know about it. They agreed with Murphy to trade that information for sanctuary in Cuba, and more money than he could count.

Murphy is not exceptional in any way. Maybe that is the reason why they chose him. Some external agent, I didn’t know who but I was sure that the Feds would sweat it out of him, had contacted the fool and asked for a clandestine meeting. Murphy was stupid enough to keep the entire message trail and that spelled deep shit for him.

I could understand why they would target Murphy. He was high enough in the company to have the access and he was a trusted underling, at least by ME. He was also clearly living the good life on a lot more money than he made with ME. So if you needed to recruit a willing pawn to steal the secrets from a Company like mine, Mr. Murphy would be a logical place to start.

The thing that enraged me was that he had specifically mentioned that he would be bringing Janet down there with him. Given Murphy’s obvious level of disconnect from reality and his general incompetence as a spook, I was willing to take that statement with a grain of salt. But I was still going to ask Janet about it. And a vigorous bout of waterboarding was not out of the question if I got ANY indication that she knew anything about Murphy’s plans for life in that socialist paradise.

By the end of the day we understood the entire gambit. Murphy indeed possessed very sensitive information, which was stored on his laptop and which he had copied to his thumb drive. The files on the computer were obviously the thing he was selling to the Cubans and the thumb must have been the backup. His up-close-and-personal experience with our dogs must have been a final freaked out attempt to get to the goods, after he had discovered we had shut off his access.

My last meeting on Tuesday was with six Klingons from the FBI. I had called them and told them what we had found. They raced over to our place like their tails were on fire. I gave their SAIC all of the evidence that would be necessary to send Mr. Murphy away for a very long time.

The SAIC was a big red faced guy with ex-military-police written all over his beefy frame. The evidence I had gathered was presented to the Feebs in a tasteful morocco bound folder. I wanted a classy touch when I was sealing the fate of the guy who had managed to seduce my wife.

When the head Feeb saw what we had, he straightaway removed the poker from his own ass and forthwith transferred it in red hot fashion to each of his underlings. He said, “I want this thing sewed up tighter than a mosquito’s asshole by tomorrow morning. And I want James Murphy dressed in orange and in ADX Florence sooner than that. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”

The five minions all nodded enthusiastically. It was in almost perfect harmony. I wondered if synchronized nodding was part of the FBI’s training. I mentioned - merely to be helpful you understand - “He has a big sailboat that can easily reach Cuba.” I didn’t add; “which my wife spent last Sunday parading around on, in a bikini.”

The look of sheer horror that came over the beefy Feeb’s face was priceless. As they left I heard the dude yelling into a phone, “I want Global Hawks and Reapers up and down the coast and if he resists drop a Hellfire on him.” All in all, it was a very satisfying day.

I got back to the Hilton after the dinner crowd had left. The kitchen was still open and I was in the mood for a primo steak and a bottle of their best Cabernet. I ate a great meal in perfect solitude and thought about the past two weeks.

My guess was that the system would not be kind to Mr. Murphy. That led me to wondering about what he might have been planning for Janet. On the surface, it looked like he had been hoping to set himself up like a latter day Hemingway in that Bolshevik’s wet dream. He had two million of my dollars and the other ten million the Cubans would give him for his intel. That country is like they froze the 1950s in amber and twelve million Yankee dollars would be a vast fortune down there.