Pictures Never Lie: a Love Story

Our villain gets his just deserts here (and later on) and those of you who like scorched earth will now have a bone to chew on. Nevertheless, I sincerely believe that a married relationship between two good, but fundamentally human, people is never a matter of black, or white. So now it is time to explore the forces at play in this story. As usual, thank you for reading this and for your kind comments.

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I would have contacted Janet bright and early the next morning. But, I had the feeling that Murphy had a few more bombshells tucked up his sleeve; which 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 any of Murphy's latent mischief had been identified and handled.

Therefore, my first visit 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 evil 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 more desperate from the number of attempts he had had made.

The piece of shit had then tried to hack in through any available access.

Since the nerds 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 talk with 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 at 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 my 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 "got" 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 that was.

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 dollars.

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 was provided by 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 for both parties. It is cheaper for the government to outsource national security backup operations to us. And assuring the safety and 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 guard it. We are not authorized to access any of 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 thumb drive lying on top of his desk.

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

We 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 wanted to know ASAP what Murphy was after, 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 head-bag 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 horrible life.

I was thinking grimly, "You fucked my wife so now I am going to totally fuck YOU!"

I am wealthy because 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 am able to follow every one of the virtual footpaths and dive down all of 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 helpless in the face of my Kung-Fu.

First, I opened up Murphy's laptop to see what I could see.

Inside I found the usual shit 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 what they showed of her beautiful tits and pussy.

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 some kind of latter day Bay-of-Pigs thing in Cuba; and the Cubans wanted to know all 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 legitimately. So if you needed to recruit a willing pawn to steal the secrets from a Company like mine, Mr. Murphy would be a tempting 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 his new life in that tropical 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. He 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 on Mr. Murphy, he straightaway removed the poker from his own ass and forthwith transferred it in red hot condition to each and every one of his underlings.

He said, "I want this thing sewed up tighter than YOUR momma's pussy by tomorrow morning. And I want James Murphy dressed in orange and in a SuperMax 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 socialist 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.

Worse he looked like he had been very close to pulling it off. He had already stolen the intel. So all he had to do was tuck the laptop under his arm and then take a leisurely cruise down the East Coast and the 90 miles across the Straits of Florida.

He would have made it too, if he hadn't over-reached with Janet.

I could see why he wasn't afraid of me. He was clearly planning on leaving for the People's Democratic Republic of Cuba without bidding me a fond adieu. So it was immaterial whether I found out that he had framed me with her.

On the other hand, Janet was obviously just too irresistible to him and that's where his plans unraveled.

Looking at the situation rationally, it is completely crazy to think that he could get her to run away with him.

Notwithstanding her buying his ploy with the pictures, Janet is an intelligent and level headed woman.

Consequently, there is no scenario in the sane universe where she would say, "You are such a stud Murphy that I would love to abandon every vestige of my life and run away with you to an un-named communist paradise".

That was a totally laughable idea, particularly if you knew Janet. But it did indicate how far out of touch with reality Mr. Murphy had gotten.

Nevertheless, she is a beautiful and truly sensual woman. So I could see where Murphy could be arrogant and delusional enough to hope he could just fuck her into coming with him.

And if that didn't work, I was sure that plan B was to drug her long enough to get her to a place where she couldn't get back. THAT concept made my head explode.

But what Murphy had NOT counted on was my spitfire wife.

He had expected her to just go in the house, confront me, and then come stomping out into his slimy embrace. He had not expected her to allow me to see the evidence, which just goes to show you how much he really understood about our relationship as husband and wife.

Janet is totally forthright and honest and it would never occur to her to hold anything like that back from me.

I might add that Murphy ALSO should have known that if I HAD admitted cheating on her Janet would have spent a leisurely afternoon staking me out over an ant-hill while she lovingly spread honey on my balls.

She would never have just gone with him.

Janet had realized that she had been played the instant that I showed her how her "evidence" had been manufactured. Most women would have clammed up like the Sphinx, since at that point I didn't suspect anything.

Instead she tried to scratch his eyes out and remove his testicles. Her trying to kill him let the cat out of the bag for HER. But if she had NOT done that, Murphy would have probably skated down to Cuba with her tied up in a bunk and with me and my company on the hot seat with the Feds.

So in an ironically twisted way Murphy screwed himself by screwing Janet. I slept very well that night.

I picked Janet up from our house at 8:00 AM. She had gone all out. She looks gorgeous in a pair of sweats just lounging around the house. But she is incredible when she has done all the things that women do to enhance their looks.

When I say that Janet is beautiful I have science on my side. Janet's face is right on the golden ratio, also known as Phi, or 1.618. It has something to do with the proportional harmony of her facial features. That ratio has been the geometric index for beauty for 3,000 years

She had her dark brunette hair pulled back from her perfect oval face. She had done the thing with her remarkable eyes that make them look like deep hazel pools of intelligence. And the rest of her was artfully made up in the unpretentious way that gives you the impression that she is the world's most beautiful girl next door.

I interpreted from how she was dressed that she was telling me that she was ready for a solemn discussion, not sex. We had serious issues to resolve; the prospective end of a marriage is always a troubling time. So I appreciated the fact that she was not trying to use her sexuality as a lever.

We didn't talk much on the way to the boat. She just sat there staring pensively out into the slowly passing fields and woods.

It was one of those classically beautiful sunny midsummer days on Long Island, when the insects buzz, the leaves are frosted by the bright sunlight and the fresh smell of the grass and fields just seems to wrap you in an embrace of peace and contentment.

The fourth of July was a couple of days away and the holiday crowds were starting to get thicker as we neared the water. I kept rehearsing what I was going to say and each time it came out different.

I was dealing with my feelings here, not my ability to rationalize the situation, so I didn't have the words.

I was aware that it was how I FELT that was the problem. The fact was that I just couldn't get my emotions around to a place where I was truly comfortable with her any more.

My head had thought the whole situation through and decided with absolute assurance that she was well within acceptable boundaries when it came to fucking the guy.

I truly believed that she was as much a victim, as she was an active participant. She had been tricked, manipulated and put through emotional hell. So, it was almost a foregone conclusion that a passionate woman like Janet would finish the week flat on her back with him inside her.

And although I was enraged short-term at the thought of Mr. Jim Murphy stealing into the part of her that has been my exclusive domain for the past seventeen years, I was willing to get over it.

The crucial, and in most respects the ONLY real problem was that I didn't feel like she was my lover, friend, or companion anymore; or perhaps had EVER BEEN. In short, I didn't think of her as my wife.

There was an emotional wall between us that I recognized I couldn't break through. But I couldn't put it into words. That barrier was there because she had been SO willing to become SO emotionally intimate with the cocksucker in such a short time.

The images of her flirting with him and dancing with him and kissing him and cooking for him and her clinging to him and his holding her tenderly protectively while she cried just killed me.