How not to be followed

Belfast taught me most of what I know about surveillance detection. Not because it was the hardest environment I worked in, but because it was the most unforgiving. You learned the discipline there, or you paid for not learning it.

The Discipline

The principle is simple. A surveillance team needs time and space to work, so you take both away from them. Vary your routes. Double back. Approach from directions that don't make sense for someone with nothing to hide. Build choke points, places where anyone following you has to close the distance and become visible, or drop off and lose you.

We worked alone or in pairs, coming from different directions and meeting in the middle. Every route was walked before it was used, every natural observation point noted. You learned which doorways gave cover, which junctions forced a decision, which stretches of road left a tail with nowhere to go.

That discipline traveled with me into smaller cities, quieter streets, different countries with different rules. The geography changed every time. The principle never did. If anything, the quieter places made the work easier. Less noise to hide in, cleaner reads on who belonged and who didn't.

Over two decades of that work, I was never blown.

On the Page

James O'Neill, the character at the center of The Key Series, operates on the same logic. The routes he walks through Belfast in The Lost Key, the way he reads a street before he commits to it, the reason he never takes the obvious path from A to B: none of that is invented.

I get asked sometimes whether spy fiction gets the small details right, the walking-around tradecraft rather than the car chases. Most of it doesn't, not because the writers aren't skilled, but because most of them haven't had to do it for real. Checking a reflection in a shop window, taking the long way home for no reason a stranger would notice: that comes from repetition, not research.

The Key Series

That's the gap I wrote The Lost Key to close.