Call Waiting

If there’s one thing that gets my head, and heart, racing, it’s when someone misses a meeting. Mother always taught me, if you’re not fifteen minutes early, you’re late.

Generally, for face to face meetings, I’ll arrive at the specified location much earlier than that to check for surveillance and to make sure my escape routes are mapped out. For internet meet-ups or phone calls, other than making sure you’re on a secure line, there’s nothing much more to do than sit and wait for your contact to arrive.

Now that my Bulgarian Operation has, for the most part, been wrapped up, I’m looking for another target on which to focus my skill set. I’ve done a good job of establishing my corporate cover. I’ve gained trust, built relationships and delivered results consistent, exceptional results to all of my corporate business partners. Because of this success, I may have the ability to gather more intelligence in other parts of the bank.

With this perspective, I was awaiting a phone call last night from one of Mother’s people who may have a way to interject me into their operation. We had met in person previously, but with Marcel currently residing on the Left Coast, we struggled through time zone differences to set up a contact time: 21:00 EST.

By 21:09 a myriad of what-ifs were running through my mind. What if he couldn’t get away from his corporate responsibilities? What if he couldn’t find a secure line? What if, unlikely as it may be, he forgot? What if he was tied to a metal chair in the basement of a Tijuana flat, bleeding, hoping the power goes out so the electrodes will stop while his captors repeatedly ask who he was meeting and what it was about?

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Staying Dry

It’s been raining in Delaware for about three or four days. As such, this has been pretty much been a good parallel to what my operative life has been like lately. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing however, as it means that no one has tried to kill me lately.

The life of an operative isn’t as glamorous as Sean Connery led us to believe in James Bond. Rarely, unfortunately, do I spend my time walking the bikini clad boardwalks of Miami, as Michael does in Burn Notice. Down time, in my perspective, is a blessing. My line of work entails persevering through a series of calculated risks. The more down time you have, the fewer chances you take on rolling the dice. This means that I’m essentially procrastinating until it lands on black, when I’ve put my free breathing future on red.

Begrudgingly, I’ve been surviving the daily commute. The grind, as it is, seemingly just as much relates to the coffee dust that gets me through my day as it does to the worker bee lifestyle I’m currently entertaining. I biggest fear is that the lack of action will lull me into a state of complacency. This, of course, can have dire consequences. Coming in at a close second, though, is the apprehension surrounding the potential that I may grow accustomed to this molasses lifestyle and become hesitant to reengage when Mother’s call comes.

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TGI Lunchtime On Friday

Friday was a pretty typical day at the office. A meeting here, some work there, and most importantly, a lunch break. I met Heather Erinovic a contact for lunch at a place downtown. We were in on a previous operation a while back and haven’t seen each other since. Each of us ordered the grilled ahi tuna caesar salad. Nothing to report really.

However, on the way to the restaurant, a panhandler asked me what time it was. “Quarter to twelve,” I responded. Then he asked me if I could spare a dollar. I wonder how successful he is with opening up communication with misdirection.

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Going My Way?

What to do when you have to transport a body? Well, there are a few different types of bodies to transport.

First, you have a dead body. They’re easy to conceal in the trunk of a car and don’t make much noise. But, they are quite hard to explain if you’re talking to a customs agent who decides it would be a good idea to take a peak in your trunk.

Second are the alive but hostile bodies. The best part about this type is that they’re alive. When sitting in a car they don’t look dead and when given the proper motivation, or threat of physical violence to either them or someone they care about, they will generally sit still and can even say helpful things like, “No officer, there isn’t a problem here at all.” The worst part about the alive but hostiles is, well, they’re alive. They’re under duress and can be total wildcards. They can be a complete pain in the neck, alert law enforcement and get stressed enough to think that exiting a vehicle while bound at eighty five miles per hour on a busy highway is a good, safe way to attempt an escape.

Lastly are the alive and friendly type. For this kind, you can set up an arranged meeting time and place. Around lunch works well because it is a common time to leave the office. You get to the parking lot, pick up your friend Carson, take him to where he needs to go, acquire what information you need, and avoid information you don’t, like what is in that backpack, make sure you’re not being followed and return to work just in time to make that enthralling conference call you were scared you might miss.

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I Am Not Your Mother

Okay, I’m really tired and I’m having trouble making accurate sense of my observations.

- The guy at work who turned on a dime as soon as came around the corner while taking my lunch to the microwave was not avoiding me, just probably someone who forgot something at his desk.
- The telephony services van driving through the parking lot, occupied by two males, was probably not a tactical team meant to stalk me, but rather just doing work on the building.
- The guy at the grocery store moving the pallet jack of A&W Root Beer was not trying to impede my movement, he was traversing the soda aisle.

Of course I took all of these potential threats seriously, as you would if your life depended on it. But typically my point in time judgment is a bit more accurate.

Speaking of the grocery store, I’m making pasta carbonara for dinner. I sort of lied in the comments section of that link. I couldn’t wait until the weekend to try the dish. And I don’t know Carla personally, but anyone who lists sharp knives, cast iron, and small dogs for cleaning as topics of interest wins a spot among my blog bookmarks.

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Majenta Feeling Taken Shelter In Base Of My Spine

This corporate gig has kept me working pretty hard recently. The only positives I see from this whole work thing are the pay check and the fact that the café stocks Cherry Coke Zero.

I’ve managed to profile our customer population into groups that may have been impacted by the Bulgarian credit card squeeze. Of the millions upon millions of accounts we have, I could immediately dismiss the ones that don’t owe anything. From there, it was a matter of modeling transaction behavior to determine who is involved in the Bulgarian scheme.

I segmented the population into buckets of accounts based upon the modeled probability that they were impacted. Before sending the file of leads to Mother for review, I discussed the separation logic I used to create the statistical stratification. Because some of the variables I incorporated weren’t the most operationally identifiable, I need to go back in and tweak it a bit.

More snow is expected again tonight. Next time I’m requesting assignment somewhere significantly warmer.

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Fine Tuning Banjo

Treasa's office has an operational scanner. Here’s Banjo Jim’s letter:
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Stealing A Paycheck

Today was boring.

Nothing going on at work. Leftover homemade pizza for lunch. And the leftover red sauce that was a primary ingredient in the leftover homemade pizza topped some rigatoni for dinner.

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Top Of The List

As you know, because I mentioned it, everything you do within corporate walls is being monitored. They may not necessarily be actively monitored, but there’s a good chance if you do something quirky it’ll ring a few bells in corporate security or wind up on some monthly report. These are good ways to draw attention, and attention is not good.

But, one of the attributes that makes many banks strong also opens up holes in their information defenses. The banking industry has been consolidating recently. Often the newly acquired institutions are more likely to be Velcro’d on to the mother ship then they are to be assimilated. There are many reasons for this, but one of the biggest is the technology cost, in both dollars and human capital, required to reconfigure the entire IT infrastructure each time another chip is added to the stack.

This means that analysts, like yours truly, are forced to navigate through a myriad of differing types of servers and databases to get to the information we need to make business decisions. While this is cumbersome when completing day to day tasks, it makes it easier for someone to run database queries and hide their covert data gathering agendas. One of easiest ways to do this is to have your code reference a macro located on your desktop. When your code finishes, erase the macro and it becomes very, very hard for someone to go back into your query and figure out what it did. They’ll see the macro referenced, but have no idea what its function is. This is akin to reading a novel’s sequel without reading the predecessor. Sure you can generally follow what’s going on, but you’re definitely not getting as much out of the story as you could be.

This morning Mother sent me a partial business name: ‘Pinnacle.’ This company had become involved the Bulgarian extortion scheme. All I knew was that the company’s name started with Pinnacle and it was located in Florida.

Here’s the short version:

Step 1: From database A, pull all records where the first eight characters of the business name were ‘Pinnacle,’ along with some firmographic information. This brought back hundreds of businesses.
Step 2: From database B, pull all business names located in Florida. This brought back thousands upon thousands of businesses.
Step 3: Move the datasets created in Step 1 and 2 into temp space, giving them different names, so they would be automatically deleted when I signed off.
Step 4: Determine which companies are located on both of the datasets. This brought back a handful of companies, six to be exact.
Step 5: Convert this dataset to a comma delimited text file and download it the Recycle Bin on my desktop.
Step 6: Copy the dataset, but rename it when I upload it back to database A.
Step 7: Append a junk dataset, one copied from a coworker’s directory, containing a few thousand records, to the end of it.
Step 8: Download this back to my desktop in the form of a comma delimited text file, renamed to something else of course.
Step 9: From database C, pull all companies that completed a cash advance on their credit cards within the past 12 months.
Step 10: Determine which of these companies matched with the six companies I identified in Step 4. Luckily, there was only one match. Memorize the account number.
Step 11: From database D, pull credit bureau data from the credit card application, but create the search parameters wide enough so that I would capture the one account as well as a lot of other extraneous noise.
Step 12: Move this dataset, in comma delimited text file format, to temp space. Do I even need to say ‘and rename the dataset’ at this point?
Step 13: Import the dataset from temp space into an access database. Sort data by account number, and locate Pinnacle Travel Enterprises by manually scrolling down until the account number is found.
Step 14: Send email on personal BlackBerry to Mother giving, among other things, the name, social security number, home and cell phone numbers, online banking logon ID, and mailing address of the primary card holder.
Step 15: When cleaning up your electronic paper trail, do not just delete your datasets, save over them first with something benign. Then delete them. I'll save my macros for when I really need them.
Step 16: Dial into next conference call and act like nothing happened.

See, pretty easy.

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"Allez, Homard!"

Damn, your life becomes boring when you have a corporate job. The two most exciting things that happened today were the tilapia fish tacos I made for dinner.

I did find an easy way to pass information in the office though, not that it’s too hard to begin with.

There are a considerable number of co-workers who use the community fridge in the break room. They drop their meal off in the morning when they arrive and then pick it up when they eat lunch. So, it would be quite easy for someone to drop something off in the morning and have another person pick it up from the community fridge later in the day. It’s not like there’s a sign in/out sheet for everyone’s lunch bag.

There is some risk however. Word ‘round the water cooler is that there have been a few ham sammy thefts lately. It’s not fool proof, but it’s viable.

Any-who, on to the 4th season of 24 tonight.

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Shoulders, Toes, Head and Knees

I’m working from home today. This doesn’t mean merely monitoring my emails while watching TV in case I’m asked a question. Rather, I’ve been quite busy – analytical follow-ups from a senior leadership roundtable, ongoing segmentation analysis and an ad hoc data pull to profile a highly performing portfolio segment. Unfortunately, all of this work hasn’t left time to identify and locate the Bulgarian corruption influence. While the delay is necessary to keep my corporate cover story, Mother will not be pleased.

I finally took a shower during my lunch break. I have a ‘shower routine.’ Mine’s not as bad as this guy’s, though. First, it’s shampoo, then body wash, and lastly, a facial scrub. Today, for some reason, I body washed first. This obviously isn’t a huge deal, but it proved to me that I’m not thinking clearly. Routines and checklists save lives. If I let the simple things go awry, what else am I susceptible to?

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All Of Them, Please

Today was uneventful, which is good because that means no one took a shot at me. Let’s see, there were a few conference calls, marginal progress tracking down the Bulgarian money, and a fresh hair cut, which was free due to one of those ‘buy 9 and get the 10th free’ type deals.

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My Home is My Cubicle

The state of Delaware declared a weather emergency last night in anticipation of the snow we got today. Drum roll…grand total: about 1.5 inches of fluffy white stuff. That’s about 38.1 millimeters, give or take. The emergency can’t be related to the actual snow, but rather the inability of Delawarians to drive in it, as previously noted.

Fearing for the safety of the minions, the corporate execs urged us to work from home today. So, as I write this, I’m unshowered, unshaven and about to phone into a four hour conference call.

At least the coffee is free here. Well, except for the fact that I had to buy it last week, but ya know what I mean.

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Are We There Yet?

Today ended up being fairly uneventful. It did start with a bit of a scare though. When I arrived at work, I noticed a Verizon maintenance van backed into the corner spot in the corner of the parking lot, providing a full view of the area. Two men were inside. The driver was talking on his cell phone. When I see a van, I immediately think surveillance. Name brand company vehicles aren’t typically used, but you don’t stay alive by dismissing possible threats.

Pretending to fend off the cold morning, I hastened my pace and headed towards the office entrance. I always carry a pen. Usually it’s for jotting down information, but this morning I was ready to impale a retina or four if the situation dictated it. Once inside, I knew I was out of the van’s sightline so I relaxed a little. I swiped my badge on the card reader, and as I entered the revolving door, a buzzer went off and the door reversed its turn, pushing me back into the lobby.

Apparently the “Oh shit” I mumbled under by breath was audible to the brunette behind me. She laughed and said that this happens all the time. Another swipe of my badge, and I entered the office without a problem.

I was able to confirm from multiple people that security door gives everyone problems from time to time. I wasn’t able to determine anything about the maintenance van though. It’ll be something to keep an eye on.

The rest of the day dragged on unbearably. I knew it was bad when I laughed to myself thinking that I was “bored as a two-by-four.” At least tomorrow’s Friday.

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