LITTLE BLACK BOOK

by Nivek Grub

Contact Nivek

PAGE UPDATED FEB-15-2019

Copyright © 2015 Kevin Berg, All Rights Reserved

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Davos Heist

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Little Black Book

Over the Horizon

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LITTLE BLACK BOOK

A story about Millie losing her little black book of secrets.

John Parker’s flight was cancelled due to weather on the east coast and he would have to wait at the hub in Denver for about 4 hours. He would be getting in very late to NYC for his meeting the next morning, that’s if he made it at all. He was checking the time, it was 6 pm Denver time. He used his phone and sent an email to the client to inform him of his status.
John owned a computer consulting company that specialized in banking security and preventing data hacks. His current road trip was to demonstrate how he had developed a method to defeat the new credit card embedded chip. That’s what his consulting game was all about, detect and prevent any new hacks to new technology. Today, he is managing to stay ahead of the hackers, tomorrow he will be playing catchup.
John was waiting at a sandwich shop near gates 50-58 and was sitting where he could see outside. He noticed a smaller private jet pull up, a group emerged and headed towards the gate under his view.
A few minutes later he noticed some commotion and noise around him. People were talking more loudly and some were a little adjetated. John stood up and saw some men in black suits clear out an area of the gate waiting area. Millie comes out the door and takes a seat. Two security men stand by her while two
others keep the regular people out of the area. Many were ‘told’ to get up and move to another area.
There was a shelf higher up above where I was sitting, I set up my Cannon camera and linked it to my android tablet so I could view through the tablet. In my travel case I always carried my camera as I liked to take pictures on my down time. I had built a small base for the camera to sit upon. This base was a platform that could pan and tilt via an app on my tablet. The cannon camera app allowed me to zoom the lens and either take photos or video. I also had a directional microphone clipped onto the camera hotshoe that gave me very good sound of the target I was filming.
I saw some heated talks between Millie’s staff and airline personnel. Soon the airline person went to the podium desk and made an announcement on the pa for this gate. She said the flight has been cancelled and another aircraft is being prepped at another gate. Please move to gate 15. All of your luggage will be moved to the new aircraft and any connections will be held up at your destination.
The crowd gets mad about rumors that Millie is taking their plane to meet her schedule. People start to make a fuss about what if they missed their connections. Then insults start to be made towards queen Millie.
Millie has more angry remarks to her staff while the big security guards lined up to keep the other people from getting closer.
Millie could be heard on John’s audio. She told her handlers to get her away from these fucking people. She gathered her bag and coat and stood up. A small black booklet fell out of her pocket
or bag and was caught on the legs of the bench chair. John could see it on his screen. Millie with her staff, airline reps and security headed through the door of the jet way to get on the commodered airline.
Some people in the crowd were very upset now and airport security arrived to clear the crowd out to the other gate. Only a few people remained in the bars and snack shops as this was supposed to be the last flight out of this gate tonight. Laughter and rude comments about the happenings died down after a few minutes.
Gates 50-58 were deserted now except for a few people and some workers. John packed up his camera along with his computer gear and walked over to sit in Millie’s seat. He wanted to feel the power and laughs to himself. An airline person doing some work at a desk asks if he needs help as there will be no more flights from these gates this evening.
John says he missed his connection due to the weather problems on the east coast and his rescheduled flight is in about 3 ½ hours. They talk a little about what just happened. The airline person just shook her head and said just wait until the news gets this one. She said, Millie’s security people pulled out some strange rule that forced the airline to provide a jet for queen Millie. John asked where they were headed. The airline girl said Charlotte. She left and headed back down the hallway to another gate.
John looked around and then pulled out some papers and books to do some reading. He managed to drop some on the floor and when he bent down to pick them up he retrieved the black book.
Conceiling the book he placed it into his carryon bag. While he was sitting there, a TSA agent was making his rounds and asked John what he was doing in this section of the gates as there were no more flights from this area tonight. Basically being a nosy pain in the ass brown shirt.
John explained that he was waiting in a quite area to get some reading and work down while waiting for his rescheduled flight. The TSA person asked to see his ticket. John protested a little and then handed over his ticket. The TSA person just smirked and said, don’t get pissy with me or we will do a thorough search in the back room. We’re the power at the airports and we like looking for trouble makers. The TSA officer scanned the ticket into his portable device and dropped the ticket on the floor in front of John while pretending to hand it back. Have a nice flight he said then turned and left.
John was pissed but knew better than to make a stink. Getting his name on the no fly list would affect his job. He thought in his mind just how far the country had slipped into such a bad state of affairs. He wished he could chuck it all in and search for a better place to live. If things went well, maybe he could bail out of the system in 10 to 15 years. It was getting harder and harder to find a place in the u.s. where the government would just let you live and work without sticking their nose up your ass.
After 5 minutes he gathered his items and went to get a sandwich. He ordered and then settled into a corner spot where it was a little private. He was curious to see what was in the black book. John kept his eye out for any cameras but he realized he would not even be able to see half of them so he got as far into the corner, facing out, as he could. After settling in, he pulled his laptop out
and set it up on the table. He picked out more items from his bag to try and block anyone from seeing the little black book when he took that out. John didn’t know why he was being so careful, just a feeling.
The little black book was a nice leather bound index card size booklet. On the cover in gold letters was ‘C Foundation’. It was a little over a ½ inch thick and it had a nice gold pen clipped into the spine. I looked at the pen and saw it really was a pencil, similar to a Cross pencil. The first thing he saw on the first few pages were names of people and companies. Telephone numbers and email addresses, that sort of thing. Some of the names were obvious and were in the news a lot. A few pages back marked with a plastic tab showed a page of 5 letter/number groups, they all started with ‘M’ and they all had a single line crossed through them. The pages that followed were all colored in the corner tab with the color name written at the top. There were 10 pages of these and each had a number on them. The number was broken up like you see on a credit card and consisted of 12 digits. These were in 4 groups of 3 characters. My programming side of me thought it looked like a numeric ip address.
The next few pages after were empty and then the remaining pages were in one solid piece. These had been glued together. I felt with my fingers and could feel depressions inside under the top page. I took a fork that was on the table and peeled off the cover sheet exposing 3 usb jump drives. I picked out the jump drives and put them on the table. I paged over the thick section to show the back cover. I saw a very clean cut next to the spine on the back cover. It had a cloth layer on it. I could feel something under the cloth, about the size of a credit card. I bent the book so
the cloth would loosen and turned the booklet over to see if I could get it out. A couple of shakes and a credit card dropped out. The name on the card said ‘C F’ and was issued by a bank in the Cayman Islands. I felt around more and pulled back the cloth but nothing else was inside the hidey hole. I turned back to the cover and found another slit in the cloth next to the spine there as well. I pulled back the cloth and found a hard shiny piece of card stock. I had to pull the cloth back further to get this one out. I picked it up to look at it but there was no writing on it. I turned it around and looked at it more closely. With the light shining across it I could see some indentation from writing. I felt this with my finger, there was quite a bit of markings.
I tore out one of the blank sheets of paper and placed it over the hard card stock. Using the pencil/pen, I rubbed across the paper to reveal the writing on the card. The rubbings started to show some words and numbers. I could see ‘Cyrus Foundation Color’ after the letters ‘id’. Another line showed ‘M# Color’ after pwd. The last line didn’t show up as the pencil ran out of lead. I shook the pencil to see if it had any more lead inside and I could hear a click inside. I pulled off the top to get the lead, off came the eraser and I turned the pencil over to drop out the lead. Something else came out instead, a flat metal foil strip. I looked at it closely and I could see some surface mounted chips on it. A very worried troublesome feeling came over me. Was this a tracking device of some sort? Quickly I put it back inside the pencil and put the cover on. I got a pencil out of my bag to finish the rubbing. The completed third line was ‘-1 +1 -1 +1 ’. The 4th line said pin and 1379. This had to be the code for the bank cash card.
Food was coming so I quickly put these things into my bag leaving my laptop on the table. I cleared off enough space for the burger and fries. Once the person had left I started up my laptop, while waiting, I took a few bites of food. I pulled out the 3 usb drives and plugged them in. Once they initialized I clicked on ‘view folders’ from the menu. My mouth must have remained open for hours, I was shocked. Video clip after video clip of very distinguished looking men and women, in some very, let’s say compromising positions with other men, women and what looked like lots of underage children. Very sickening. One folder under the name of Bill had quite a few videos in it. A folder named Barry S also had lots of videos with lots of drugs and men. I put in another jump drive. This one had over 200 folders with people’s names and corporations. Some of the folders had an ‘X’ at the beginning of the file name. I looked inside a few random folders, they appeared to have lots of correspondence with the CF Foundation. The ‘X’ files appeared to be names of dead people. One that stood out was ‘XVFoster’. I remembered that one from the past news, suicide, but the rumors were two bullet holes and no blood. The last jump drive also showed many folders of people and corporations. The info inside these folders appeared to be the same but a look at a couple of letters had titles on them from ‘FBI, CIA, NSA, Homeland’. I just started saying ‘shit, shit, shit’ to myself. Holding onto this will get me dead real quick. I could see how Millie could have so much power, this is all black mail stuff and very dangerous to even be near it. I had to get rid of it.
But the cat side of me first wanted to see what was on those colored pages. I turned to the red page and typed the numeric number into my laptop. The numeric url, at least that’s what I thought it was came back with a ‘401 error’. I looked at the
rubbing page and applied the changes ‘-1 +1 -1 +1’ to each of the groups of the url. Again I got a ‘401 error’. I reversed the code to be ‘+1 -1 +1 -1’ and tried again. This time I got a bank in the Caymans, the ‘Island Trust Bank in Georgetown. Under user name, I typed in ‘CFRed’ and the cursor dropped down to enter password. I saw the ‘M#Color’ on the rubbing sheet and remembered the page of crossed out 5 character groups.
I looked at the page of letter groups and then one stood out. All of the other letter groups had a cross out line going in the same direction except for one, ‘MCJB$’. So I typed in MCJB$Red and hit return.
Up flashed a screen showing a balance of $50,000,000.00. I looked around, waiting for the guys with guns to be closing in on me, nothing, just people eating and making regular talk. The TV news was on and it showed a clip about the commotion at the airport with Millie grabbing the jet. People were stating their displeasure at being bumped to another plane because of her majesty. But the news crew managed to find quite a few people that said they didn’t mind because she was a very important person and she was doing the work of the country. The media was doing everything possible to make Millie look good.
I checked one last thing before I logged off the bank website. I looked under the settings for the account holder. There was no information, no contact name, no email address, nothing. That told me one very important thing. Most likely only one person knew about these accounts, well two now, and with no contact info these were very deep dark accounts that could be denied having any connection to them.
John thought to himself, why would she set up a booklet like this? So much information in one place but then he thought of the person that owned the book, very low level tech abilities and a super ego that she was above it all. Anyway, I have it now. John looked at his watch, it had been 45 minutes since she left in the jet. A quick check in his head suggested that he might have about 3 hours before she landed. Who knows when she might realize her little black book is missing.
John packed up everything and thought about his options. What he held was of tremendous value, but also deadly. He could simply drop it on the floor and walk away, but his prints were all over it now. Once they started looking for it using what appears to be a tracker of some sort, it won’t take them too long to find it. He could turn it over to the police or FBI but the recent news has shown how she has the power to stop any investigation she wants. Plus, she would have me killed because I probably looked at the contents. It won’t be hard to use the surveillance video at the airport to find me and the TSA turd had scanned my ticket. So I was 100% sure that they will find me. Sooner or later I will have a visit from some very unkind people. My life just turned to shit, unless I could come up with a plan.
The first course of action would be to completely tear apart the black book to see if any other trackers were inside. Then send them off in another direction while I tried to disappear. How to do that? I don’t even have a clue how to do something like that. Sure, I watched lots of movies and read spy novels, but those were just entertainment and movie plots. Could I use anything from those stories to help me? Maybe, I just need to think clearly and then act.
What if I decided to keep the money, could I get away with it? I have the data in the jump drives. That should be some deterance.
I could contact Millie and make a deal so she gets back her data and I get a finder’s fee? Right, and someday soon I wake up dead. No way, this gang from Arkansas has way too much history of a trail of dead bodies, way too many coincedences.
So any deal I make, I am no longer John Parker, I need to be somebody else and just walk away from my life. He thought now how lucky he was that he never got married and had children to think about. One person can run and hide much easier than a family.
John was thinking of these things as he was walking down the gate area heading back to the terminal. First thing on his list was the need to look different. He stopped at a few shops and bought some oversize shirts and pants, something that would go over his clothes.
In his computer bag he had some items that would help with security cameras, especially facial recognition systems. One of his gimicks he liked to use when demonstrating his hacks on banking systems was to wear dazzler glasses, a turtle neck collar with dazzler l.e.d.s and a cap with a wig. The dazzler l.e.d.s are near infrared flashing lights that totally confuse and block out any image the camera would take. They completely disrupt any facial recognition software and they make it very difficult to view the image. They could not be seen by the naked eye, only through electronic means. By wearing these, he could obscure any video on a bank atm machine. The trouble is they would flash brightly on the screen of a security person watching any live video. It
would be like shining a flashlight into the camera but he would have to be looking directly at the camera. So he would only use them when he stepped in front of an atm.
His next plan was to fake heading back home to San Francisco. Then he would take apart the booklet to find any other trackers and send them off somewhere.
John went to the ticket counter and used his company credit card and id to purchase a ticket for a flight back to SF. With a new ticket in hand he made his way to the gate. The crowds were thinning out a bit and he went through security quickly. The TSA agents looked beyond bored and had had enough crotch and boob grabs for one day. Upon arrival at the gate where his flight would leave in about 45 minutes, he scanned around to find a college student or someone of that age. He found a guy sitting in a corner using a laptop so John made his way over to him to watch a little closer. The student was studying a text on computer science. That was the ‘in’ John was looking for. John started off by saying, ‘I hope you enjoy that class as much as I did when I took it’. That got the ball rolling and soon they were talking about computers and what’s it like on the paying end once you’re out of school. John pretended to receive a call on his cell and acted like he had a call from his boss telling him to head to St. Louis tonight. John finished the call and talked to the student again telling him that’s what happens when you have a boss paying the bills. John pulled out his ticket and said what a waste of money. John handed the ticket to the student and said, ‘here, why don’t you use this one, we’re past security where they check for id’s. You can cash yours in for a refund. Our office accountant, ‘Atilla the hun doesn’t even want it back. She says it’s cheaper to write it off
than go through the hassel of getting a refund. We have all learned to obey Atilla’. The student accepted the ticket and was thinking of the new laptop he was planning on getting soon. John said goodbye, good luck at school and the student said thanks. John headed back to the terminal thinking that his track would show him heading to S.F., with luck.