Spy Tips on Working as a Team, Beating Motion Sensors, and more
As a spy, you get to spend a lot of time alone. Whether you’re in an Indonesian prison, a cave in the Afghan mountains, or the back of a cargo truck, it comes with the job. You’re trained to make the most of it, plan your next move, go over your intel, review your training. But when you’ve cleaned your gun thirty times and reviewed the past tense of every verb in five languages, you start itching to make a move.
Air bags are great for surviving crashes, but they make some evasive maneuvers tough. Gone are the days when you could run through a stand of trees without a face full of nylon. Of course, anything you used to do head-on, you can still do.
When you’re claiming to be someone you’re not, the key is commitment. You’ve got to sell it like your life depends on it. Because sometimes it does.
One reason to work with the same people is you know each other’s moves. So if you shoot at your team in the middle of an operation, they know to go with it.
Every thief knows that the best way to scout a place you want to rob is as a customer. Who gets to see the vault at the local bank? The rich guy with something to protect. Who gets to see the security at a private military company? A guy who wants to start his own little war.
A great way to get people talking about their security is to put them on the defensive. Accuse a guy of having bad locks, and before you know it, he’s telling you where his motion detectors are.
It takes some practice, but counting your steps can be extremely useful if you need to reproduce a floor plan from memory. Once you’ve memorized the floor plan, you wanna get it down on paper as quickly as you can. Combine that with the technical specs of the security devices in the room, and you’ll know where the holes in the security are. Then it’s just a matter of slipping through one of those holes.
Badly done surveillance, that is surveillance you notice, can mean a lot of things. Some organizations need intelligence but can’t afford to pay for training. Some organizations just want you to know they’re watching.
Getting into a secure facility is as simple as giving yourself a good reason to be there.
The typical floor is concrete slab over twenty-gauge steel pan with steel trusses spaced thirty inches for support. When you cut through a floor, the thing you have to worry about is wiring. Cut into the wrong wire, and you’ll set off the building alarms, electrocute yourself, or both. If you don’t want a chunk of concrete crashing through to the floor below, you need to drill a hole and anchor the slab. A concrete saw cuts it like butter.
If you’ve done your planning right, you’ll be dropping into a blind spot for the security system, usually behind an interior wall.
Motion detectors bounce sound off objects and analyze the reflection. If something changes, the alarm goes off. Move slow enough, and a wool comforter absorbs enough sound to keep it from triggering. A thermal blanket, meanwhile, shields your body from heat sensors.
Quadrangle buckshot is a specialized round designed to destroy the inside of anything delicate. A computer, for example.
For hardened security glass, I prefer Frag-12, a military round with an explosive projectile
Once the cops pick up a call on a flagged cell, they triangulate its location. From there, they organize and deploy units, a process that can take ten minutes, give or take. Bad guys don’t have that chain of command. They can be anywhere as fast as their wheels can take them.
When you work as a spy, it’s easy to think of people as assets, resources to accomplish a goal. Because you don’t have a personal relationship with an asset. You don’t care about an asset. You don’t miss the scent of an asset when she leaves the room.