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By Root 1259 0

amount of money or whose name will be linked to the company’s brand in the public imagination. Paying Nick’s steep fees can be worthwhile if he prevents millions of dollars of public relations damage months later. In some cases, preemployment surveillance seems to verge on entrapment. Nick recalls one case in which he tailed an executive to a midweek golf game. Nick alerted his client that he was observing the executive playing golf, and the client called the executive’s cell phone. After some initial chitchat, the client said, “So, what are you doing now?” Not wanting to appear as though he was slacking off, with a lucrative new career opportunity hanging in the balance, the job candidate said, “I’m just heading out to a meeting.” The client crossed him off the list for the job. What he minded wasn’t that the executive was playing a round of midweek golf—who doesn’t enjoy that once in a while?—but that the executive had lied to his future boss. “If he’ll lie about the little things,” the client later told Nick, “he’ll lie about the important things, too.”

Soon Nick had developed a network of like-minded surveillance experts who had formerly been in the military. “A couple of us got together and said, ‘We’ve got to make this a viable business.’” They banded together and incorporated a company. Nick will not reveal its name, except to say that it has a bland corporate title designed to give no hint of its real business—“You can call it ‘Harry’s Chocolate Factory,’” Nick says elusively. The firm does not have a Web site. It does not have a listing in the phone book. “We’re nowhere,” he says. But the top corporate intelligence firms in the world know his phone number when they need him.

Nick had stumbled on a key piece of the corporate intelligence business model. Most of the hundreds of firms in the world don’t have large staffs. Instead, they serve as a kind of facade that helps connect corporate clients with the netherworld of intelligence, the more shadowy “contractors” who do most of the actual work. Each time a client project comes up, the firms put together teams of subcontractors with the specialties needed for that situation. Need surveillance in London? Insert a contractor. Need linguistic help? Contractor. Need a forensic accountant? Ditto. The teams are assembled for each case and managed by the firm. Nick doesn’t need a Web site to publicize his business. The man who pays him already has one. Also, having pictures of himself and his team members on a Web site would devalue their service: “If my face and my operators’ faces are all over the Web, we’re a blown commodity,” he says. “We’re useless.”

The money’s good. Nick says high-end surveillance firms like his charge 1,200 to 1,600 pounds sterling per day per man, plus expenses, plus mileage, and plus the cost of any special equipment. Just to place surveillance on one unsurprising executive in London can cost upwards of 15,000 pounds per day. Nick says he has no idea what the intelligence firms he works for charge their clients for his services, but he suspects they mark up the bill by as much as 20 percent. That’s fair, he thinks. The intelligence firms don’t know how to do high-end surveillance, he says, but they’re charging the client for the one asset they do have: Nick’s phone number.

In a typical executive surveillance case, Nick turns over a written report with the details of every place the executive went, the times he went there, photos of him at each of those locations, and photos of anyone he met with while he was there. Nick’s team will also conduct audio surveillance, either with recording devices or by getting undercover operators close enough to hear the conversations in person. With modern equipment, he says, this work can be done almost anywhere.

Nick sometimes uses a laser microphone that can record conversations in a room as much as a kilometer away. Pointing the invisible laser at the glass window of the room in which a meeting is taking place, Nick can record every word that’s being said in the room—so long as he has a direct line of sight