Adultery Cheating and Rivals by xleglover-COMPLETED

[Ramesh_Rocky]

Jen gawked at the ex-CIA agent. "How dare you Lou," she said angrily. "You don't even know me. You don't know Mike. Maybe what we do, it helps him think. It inspires him. To be the freaking Phantom. Did you think of that?"

Lou was about to respond when he saw commotion at the front of the room. Worried looks. Urgent conversations. Around the President. "Something's happening," he said, suddenly concerned.

"What?" Jen said, turning to look where Lou was looking.

*******************

Mike stood startled as big men in dark suits jumped out of the SUVs and ran towards him. Leading the way was a balding man in a wrinkled polo shirt and khakis. "Allen, what are you doing here?" he asked, both surprised and relieved to see the older man. Allen was Chief Scientist of CATF.

"Mike we've been looking all over for you!" Allen yelled frantically. "We've got to get to CATF!"

Mike's body tensed. "Allen what has happened?" he asked.

"The Twins!" Allen said, panicked. "They've got the President's daughters! The terrorists! They've got them!"

Cheating and Rivals Part 76

The Secret Service cleared out the ballroom. The huge ballroom was empty now, except for the President and his team at a hurriedly organized command center at the front, and Jasmine's team mingling around the periphery.

"What's happening?" Jen asked Leo.

"The President's set up a war room here," Leo said gravely. "Every second counts. He doesn't want to lose time flying back to DC."

"What should we do?"

"Jasmine knows the First Lady. She's with her now."

Jen nodded slowly, thinking about what the First Lady and the President must be going through with their 2 daughters kidnapped by terrorists. She said "I should go home."

"It's up to you," Leo said. "But your husband's probably at CATF by now."

"You know who my husband is?" Jen asked. She meant his role at CATF.

"The Phantom? Yes."

"Am I the only person who didn't know his codename?" Jen lamented. She was joking, but not joking. Yes, she lied to Mike about LA and other things. But he kept a lot from her too.

"Don't worry about it," Leo said with a sympathetic smile. "They're trained to be secretive. The spooks. Not many know. I do only because I used to work at CIA."

"Oh," Jen said, looking over at Lou. How did he know?

Leo followed Jen's eyes. He said "Lou used to work for me at CIA. I recommended him to Frank."

"Leo, are we going to be able to get the girls back?" Jen asked worriedly.

"I don't know," Leo said honestly, looking resigned. "Every minute - every second counts. We need a break now. In the next hour. Otherwise, we'll never see those girls again. Alive anyway."

A little later, Ricky sidled up to Jen. "We need to talk."

"You need to leave!" Jen hissed in a low voice. "If Anna sees you ..." She was so fucked if Anna recognized Ricky and then told Mike. He'd think she planned this rendezvous. Her thighs felt moist as he continued to slowly leak from her pussy, making her feel even more wicked and shameful.

"I'm sorry about before," Ricky said regretfully. With a boyish grin, he added "I can't control myself when I'm around you."

"Anna's here Ricky!" Jen said with exasperation.

"I know. I'm a total asshole. It'll never happen again," Ricky promised. "But she's okay, right? So I learned my lesson and everything's okay."

"It never happened!" Jen said urgently. "You can never tell Mike!"

"I won't, I promise," Ricky swore.

"I'm such a fuckup," Jen lamented, cursing herself. She looked nervously at Anna. She was with Deidre. "We're over Ricky. I promised Mike."

"It's not just up to you."

"It IS just up to me!" Jen insisted.

"There's a reason you didn't tell Mike about LA," Ricky told her. "There's a reason what happened before happened. We can't resist each other Jen. It's not just the sex. We love each other."

"We are NOT having this conversation here!" Jen hissed in a low voice.

"Okay, okay, I'll be cool," Ricky said, reluctantly relenting.

**********************

Allen rapidly filled Mike in during the flight to CATF, and as they hurried through the CATF corridors to the Bunker (the Bunker was CATF's command center). Getting to the Bunker required going through a number of automated doors that opened only with voice recognition or other biometrics, like eye or finger print scan. These automated doors were monitored and controlled by CATF's sophisticated security system. The security protocols and level of biometric checks increased the closer you got to the Bunker.

Allen hurried into the Bunker but Mike paused at the doorway, taking it all in. The Bunker was packed and ablaze with activity. It was total chaos though. Mountains of information was coming in and people were scrambling to make sense of it all, trying to find leads to locate the girls.

Mike saw Maria Fernandez desperately working on software to help analyze the information. Maria led the search and rescue component of CATF. Most of the burden of finding the girls fell on her shoulders and Mike could tell she was feeling the pressure. She looked desperate and almost in tears as she frantically worked with her team to pull leads from the information. But it was like a needle in the haystack given the massive amount of information, from public and private CATV cameras throughout the Washington DC area, security officer and FBI reports, witnesses ...

Mike was able to monitor Maria's work on the big screens above her team's computer terminals. He saw she was trying to adapt the software he wrote to find Willy to help sift through the data. Mike shook his head, immediately knowing it wouldn't work. With Willy, Mike figured out Willy liked beer and Taco Bell; he'd been able to focus on Willy's location using that information, which he thought of as a "tell." But Maria didn't have any tells for the terrorists. So, trying to use his Willy software wasn't going to work.

Mike saw Abraham and Brent on the other side of the room in a fierce debate. Many of the other Young Turks and Brain Trust were there too. Mike looked at the big screens above their heads. What the fuck? They were working on the Q program! Mike shook his head in disgust. Sure, a quantum computer would be real handy right now. But they'd been working on the Q program for months (years for Abraham and others of the Brain Trust) and there was no way they were going to solve the X factor problem in the next couple hours. And Allen had made it clear. They needed a solid lead to the girls' location in the next one or two hours, or the chance of finding them were dim.

Mike shook his head as he scanned the room. It was bedlam. People wasting time on dead ends. And they were scattered and uncoordinated, working as individuals instead of a team. No one had even bothered to pick up the yellow tennis ball.

To Mike though, the solution was obvious. Scientists and computer science geeks were always looking for the "elegant" solution. That's what Maria, Brent and Abraham were doing. But there was no time for that. Sometimes you had to brute force it. Sometimes you just had to take a hammer and fucking pound that square peg through the round hole.

But Mike couldn't write the code himself. While the solution was obvious it was going to take a lot of work, and it had to be done immediately. There were dozens of skilled programmers in the room. They were all working on different things: Maria on the Willy code, Abraham and Brent on the Q computer, clusters of people working on other ideas. Mike needed to corral everyone in and get them working as a team. On his idea.

Mike knew what he had to do. He needed to take control. He needed to lead these people. But the prospect was daunting. It was the PTSD. He suddenly felt distressed and scared, and had the urge to run away. Behind him someone shouted and Mike cringed, as if scared he was being attacked. His head clouded up and he found it hard to concentrate. Then came the anxiety. The overwhelming anxiety that was so debilitating Mike wasn't sure if he could keep breathing or take a single step forward, much less take control and lead all these people.