The Genoa Handoff
A simple brush pass in Genoa went sideways the moment I picked up a tail I hadn't been looking for. Here is how I confirmed it, walked away clean, and put the meeting back together a day later — without ever letting them know I'd seen them.
Mission BriefThree Days in Marseille
Three days to learn a man's life, walk a route that makes followers show themselves, and tell the difference between a real team and a coincidence of the city. The answer mattered more than he wanted it to.
Mission BriefThe Trieste Crossing
An old border, a frightened source, and a folder of paper that couldn't travel as a record of itself. The Wall had fallen but the habits hadn't. Here is what patience buys you when the line on the map has gone soft but the men who used to guard it are still standing around with nothing to do.
Mission BriefThe Turin Ledger
An industrial firm in Turin was bleeding its secrets and wanted the leak found. The client imagined break-ins and bribed guards. The truth was quieter and more ordinary, and I found it the slow way — not by taking anything, but by getting people to give it. A field note on elicitation, and on the difference between theft and conversation.
Mission BriefA Quiet Week in Lisbon
A fixed post in Lisbon — one man, one window, one building to watch. This is the discipline nobody glamorises: the static surveillance, the war against your own boredom, and the single hour in a long dull week when everything you came for finally walked through the door.
Mission BriefThe Naples Debt
A client got close to the wrong people and needed a careful go-between. This is about sitting across a table from men where a wrong word costs more than money — reading the room, finding the one person who actually runs it, and leaving clean. No heroics. The whole job was not being the problem.
Mission BriefThe Milan Courier
Moving a small package through a crowd by brush pass, with a nervous, clumsy partner who'd never done it. A field note on the contact handoff — why it works, why it fails, and why a single bad partner is more dangerous than any camera. The last winter before the euro, and a craft that was already older than the currency.
Mission BriefThe Zurich Account
Tracing where a client's money had gone — through Zurich, through paper, through the seams where one identity touches another. No safecracking, no confrontation. Just the patient work of finding the joins that someone tried very hard to hide, because money, like people, gets caught at the links.
Mission BriefThe Rome Tail
Confirming whether a journalist had picked up a state tail — a surveillance detection route through the centro storico, run so quietly the watchers never learned they'd been read. The whole prize in this work is knowing without showing you know. Here is how that's actually done, on foot, in a crowded old city.
Mission BriefThe Seville Meet
A first meeting with a source who thought he was being followed — and might have been. How I chose the spot, built the trust, and watched for the one thing that would tell me he'd already been turned.
Mission BriefThe Lyon Handover
Before I handed a witness to his lawyers, I had to be sure no one had handed him to me. A counter-surveillance run through the throats of an old city — the bridges, the traboules, the single platform with one way in.
Mission BriefThe Madrid Handoff
A simple handoff in a plaza I'd worked a dozen times. Nothing was wrong that I could name — and everything was wrong against the baseline. The story of an abort that cost me a fee and saved me worse.
Mission BriefThe Bilbao Job
An executive collecting threats wanted a bodyguard. What he needed was someone to own the route, the lobby, and the car park before he arrived — because the real work of protection is finished before the principal walks in.
Mission BriefThe Geneva Runner
A careful man, watching his own back, walking a city built for discretion. The art of the loose tail — how you keep someone by deciding, on purpose, not to keep him in sight.
Mission BriefThe Monaco Weekend
A wealthy family who wanted security to look expensive and feel invisible. The real job wasn't the threat outside — it was managing the principal who would not be managed.
Mission BriefThe Bologna Stakeout
Two men, a parked car, and a cover story that nearly came apart in front of a curious neighbour. What held it together was the most boring thing about it.
Mission BriefThe Porto Package
Two men passed something between them in Porto and never stood in the same place at the same time. The trick was never the hiding spot. It was the chalk.
Mission BriefThe Andorra Line
A client wanted his money out of one country and quietly into another. The work was not smuggling. It was making sure no single discovery was ever a total loss.
Mission BriefThe Ljubljana Contact
A reluctant source kept saying no. The mistake was treating his no as the obstacle. The no was the door, slightly ajar, and I almost walked past it.
Mission BriefThe Palermo Favour
A job in Palermo the year the lira died. The danger was never the work. It was the offered favour that would have cost me everything I owned, starting with the ability to say no.