The Rules
A working life, boiled down. The ten that never change, and the standing orders underneath them.
People always want the list. Fine. Here's the list — the short version of everything in the files, the things I'd tell you if we had one coffee and you actually listened. Start with the ten. The rest is detail.
Reading the room
Get the baseline in the first ten seconds, then stop looking. You're not watching the room — you're waiting for it to change.
Once is nothing, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.
The real tell is interest. Ordinary people are too busy being the centre of their own lives to track you.
Take the seat that sees the door and put a wall at your back. When someone else already took it, pay attention.
Slow down before every doorway, stairwell and garage. Trouble waits in the pinch, not the open.
Working people
A conversation walks through the door that interrogation only builds walls against.
People don't lie about what they want, only about how much. Measure the gap.
After a shaky answer, say nothing. They'll fill the silence with the truth.
When someone turns friendly the second it gets tense, that's the interrogation starting.
If the nice stops the moment you say no, it was never nice.
Staying gray
Don't hide — be boring. Nobody remembers dull.
A tail follows your habits, not your footprints. Kill the pattern, not the speed.
Confirm you're followed before you act. Bolting on a hunch only teaches them how you run.
You can't be invisible. You can only be expensive to find.
The phone is the modern way to be blind. Use it like a weapon you have to put away.
When it goes wrong
If the fight's fair, you set it up wrong.
Distance is time. Keep the gap and you get to think.
Never go to the second location. The first scene has witnesses; the second has none, by design.
Win now, feel later — but make sure later actually comes.
The long game
Never decide anything important while scared, cold, hungry or wrecked.
Whoever controls your money and your movement controls you. Keep both yours.
The job ends; the habits don't. Make your peace with the chair that faces the door.
An hour a day beats a heroic weekend. Competence is years, not a montage.
None of this makes you dangerous. It makes you hard to surprise, hard to read, and hard to find — which, in my experience, is most of staying alive and all of staying free.
— M.