Spycraft and Strange Spy Gadgets, Part 3

You’re in the habit of afternoon walks in the park. The leaves are changing from green to gold, and soon the branches will be bare and draped with snow. Ice will cover the sidewalks, and the bench will be too cold for sitting. You’re enjoying these last few weeks before winter, and each day you extend your stay in the park just a little longer.

Lately, there are two new visitors in the afternoon, and both of them attract your attention — but for different reasons. The handsome, well-dressed man always arrives first. He has a slow, dizzying smile, which he dazzles you with before taking his place on the bench next to you. His voice is low-pitched and quiet, like a motor on an expensive town car. He occasionally leans your way and comments on how nice you look today, or makes small talk about the weather or the morning news shows. He leisurely eats his lunch, never finishing more than a few bites, then saunters away, casting his leftovers into the trash can — carefully folded in its brown paper wrapper. You watch him until he disappears from sight, barely breathing, already longing for tomorrow and your next encounter with him on the bench.

You don’t leave yet, though. Your curiosity glues you to your seat. You wait. Wondering if the same thing will happen again today.

It’s not long before you have your answer. 

Ten minutes later, a scruffy-looking woman appears, dressed in the rags of the city’s homeless. She slowly makes her way along the winding path, gradually drawing nearer to your spot on the bench. She passes by, smelling of expensive lotions and perfume. The scent always surprises you. It’s so unexpected. She pauses at the trashcan, rifles through its contents, and straightens, holding the brown paper wrapper. She stuffs it into her oversized pockets and then disappears back into the park.

You suspect something is going on, but for the life of you, you can’t figure out what it is.

What it is, is a drop, and our two spies are using a very low-tech means of communicating… invisible ink.

A Pentel Rollerball is one tool used for invisible writing. You can buy it almost anywhere in the world. Our spy uses one. He writes his message on a piece of paper, then presses it against the brown paper wrapper. The ink dries almost immediately, and the message paper looks completely blank. The transferred message will later be developed by our second visitor to the park, and the secret message will no longer be so secret.

(Oh, by the way, if you’re a man, feel free to go back and change the sex of these visitors.)

There are older methods of invisible writing. Most people know that you can take a toothpick, dip it in lemon juice and then write an invisible message to someone. An iron, gently ran over the paper, will reveal what you wrote.

Most of us are familiar with the high-tech gadgets of James Bond… his deadly Aston Martin; his miniature helicopter with built in machine guns, rocket launchers, and heat seeking missiles; his high speed boat equipped with hang glider for that tricky getaway; and, of course, his exploding briefcases. But spies have long relied upon low tech gadgets as well — such as the invisible ink or the cats eyes I talked about previously. Explosive booby traps also come to mind. Such traps have been used extensively in special ops. And a carefully arranged cigarette, match, piece of string, and a timing fuse is one of the oldest methods employed by special forces and guerrilla soldiers for constructing a delayed fuse.

Kaylea Cross mentioned in one of her posts to me during this Latte Limelight, that she used to spend quite a bit of time in Washtington DC looking on the ground for crushed chalk. She had read a book that said spies sometimes marked a drop location, or signaled that a meeting was on, with crushed chalk. I wrote back and told her that her comment made me think of Aldrich Ames. He used to leave a chalk mark on his mailbox. It was a prearranged signal, and it meant that he had top-secret documents to pass on. He would then deliver them to a prearranged drop location.

This is my last post here, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this time we’ve spent together. I’ve certainly enjoyed it, and I’ve really appreciated all the visitors and comments. My spies were happy to make silly mistakes to attract your attention — not something spies would normally do, of course — but these fictional accounts were meant to entertain, and I hope they did that. I will be blogging more about spycraft in the days ahead at my own blog. (It will be a few days, though, before I post new material.) I hope you will join me over there then. Here’s the link: http://www.dlynnkennedy.blogspot.com

And if you’d like to spend more time in the company of spies, let me recommend my new novel, Sleeping With Skeletons. You can find out more informtaion on that at my website. You might also like some of the additional posts that I’ve written below. Thanks again! I appreciate the time you took to join me as I blogged about my new novel and the art of spying.

Here’s the link for my site:

http://www.doralynn.net