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.