Spy Tips on Free Lunches, Hostage Situations, Tablets, and more
As a spy you have a lot of ways to get information. You can get it with a gun. You can get it with a lockpick. You can get it with a listening device. But most often, more than all the other information gathering techniques combined, you get information with a free lunch.
When someone starts acting like there’s an extra person in the conversation, it’s a pretty good bet that they’re wearing a wire. The question then is, who’s taping you.
Government agents have to stay within the law but they still have plenty of options to hit you below the belt. Sometimes a bullet to the head is a lot easier than a slow death drowning in red tape.
There are a number of different choices when you take over a building by force. Do you keep the hostages facedown on the floor or do you move them into a room together? How do you cut all the lines of communication out? And how do you deal with the places security methods? Whatever your style, hostile takeovers are about one thing, total dominance.
A wounded hostage is a good measure of how far a criminal’s willing to go. They either want to keep the hostage alive or they don’t, which means more people are getting hurt.
In a hostage situation, any idiot can steal a gun and start shooting. It’s a great way to get a bunch of innocent people killed. Keeping people alive means fighting like a spy. Fighting like a spy means disguising attack as attempts to help. It means making acts of man seem like acts of god.
Cutting through a well with scissors isn’t as hard as it sounds. Start at an electrical socket and saw through the hard surface of the drywall and the lower layers are a lot easier.
In an enclosed space, getting around a cellphone jammer is a game of who’s got the stronger signal. A cellphone jammer broadcasts a powerful signal over a range of frequencies, but it can’t compete with an entire Ethernet wired to serve as one big antenna.
The massive air pressure that makes air hammers effective also makes them dangerous. Tamper in any way with the locking collar that holds the bit in place, and the air hammer becomes a very inaccurate gun with a single bullet.
Mixing medications is always a bad idea, especially when one’s an upper and one’s a downer. Anxiety and allergy meds together are a scary combination, and that’s before you add the caffeine of an energy drink.
Experience with battlefield medicine may not make you as precise as an E.R. surgeon, but after you’ve stitched up a few people under artillery fire, you can handle outside pressure.
People are too trusting when it comes to pills. They’ll take whatever a doctor hands them.
Liquid nitrogen can cool a wound to 150 below, freezing the cells and cutting off blood flow. Super cooling, also damages metal. Freeze the inside of a gun, and the next time it gets hot, it’ll rip apart as if it’s loaded with the wrong ammo.
Elevators have so many safety devices that they’re easy to sabotage. Disable any part and the entire system shuts down.
Life with a hypochondriac mother gives you a useful knowledge of pharmaceuticals. In low doses, Pilocarpine cures dry mouth. In high doses, it has roughly the same effect as a sarin gas attack.
In a weakened state, you want to avoid pressure on your carotid artery. Block the blood flow to your brain, and you black out in four seconds.
The coating on tablets and medicine keeps them from dissolving in your stomach right away. Which buys you a little time to find some privacy and do the only safe thing, get them out of your system.
If you have one bullet and you need to take down three armed guys in close quarters, you’re betting your life on a lot of lucky breaks. It’s the kind of bet you don’t want to make unless you have to.