Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [106]
Once the canny subject steps onto the train platform, he can walk with the crowd, not letting anyone from the same car with him fall behind, and make his way to the escalator. On escalators, people face in the direction they’re traveling. They almost never turn around and look behind—they’re in a rush to get somewhere, and most of them have traveled this route hundreds of times before. No need to be curious. But as the subject approaches the escalator, he knows two things: the surveillance operative is probably in front of him, already on the escalator, and the operative will turn around at about the time that the target steps on the first stair. Even though the operative doesn’t want to give himself away, he must watch and make sure the subject gets on the escalator instead of heading for a different exit.
Once spotted, the surveillance team has to scramble. Now they need to rush operatives to the other exit, cover the elevator, and replace an operative who has been compromised. The subject may not have eluded the team this time, but he’s made life a lot more complicated for the operatives. That’s why high-end surveillance can cost tens of thousands of dollars per day. Following a trained or canny subject can be complicated work; it requires hiring a number of highly trained operatives, and such operatives are hard to find.
Countersurveillance, too, is a good business for Nick, who is just as happy to be paid by a company trying to keep its executives from being spied on as by a company doing the spying. Because the surveillance scene in London is so small, he’s sometimes paid to spend his time trying to outwit the espionage activities of his competitors, men and women he knows well. “In that case, our job is to identify the surveillance, and neutralize it,” Nick says. He reverse-engineers everything he would do as a surveillance operative and scans the streets for people doing the same thing. It may be arrogance, but Nick says he almost always spots the rival teams in action. Generally, he says, a stern warning to the opposing surveillance team is enough to scare them off. “I walk up to them and say, ‘Hey, guys, I’m not being funny here, but my friend over there is getting bored with you following him.’”
Nick knows that a warning like this will cause a problem for the other surveillance team. After all, their cover has been blown. He also knows that the other company will send in a replacement crew—that’s the same thing Nick would do—but for the moment his client will be free of surveillance, and Nick will have earned his fee.
This game of corporate spy versus spy can get expensive for clients, and there’s plenty of room for abuse. Sometimes, Nick says, his company gets calls from corporate clients who want counter-surveillance on a subject that another company already had paid Nick to spy on. In those cases, he says, he can’t reveal that he’s the one doing surveillance. Instead, he’ll tell the prospective client that he’s busy on the date involved. But not everyone in the industry is as careful to avoid conflicts of interest as Nick seems to be. Some firms have been known to accept fees from one client to put surveillance on, say, an executive and fees from another client to conduct countersurveillance on the same person. In effect, these firms are getting paid to spy on themselves.
Why are all these spies lurking about the city? Nick says that the length to which companies go will depend on the amount of money involved. The more money is at stake in a given transaction, the more effort by all parties in the deal. Companies use surveillance when the enormous expense is justified by the even more enormous stakes involved. One expert says that in every transaction