Free Under Cover (Agent 21) by Chris Ryan Page A

you talking about? I don’t have a dog.’
    Felix gave him one of his infuriatingly smug smiles. ‘I know you don’t have a dog,’ he said. ‘
You
know you don’t have a dog. But the man in the street doesn’t.’
    Felix was being even more obscure than usual. ‘I suppose you are going to get around to telling me what you’re talking about?’ Ricky said.
    ‘It’s very simple,’ said Felix. ‘Stick that picture of Scruffy in your wallet. Sometimes, when you’re conducting surveillance on a person or location, you have to loiter in the same place for a long time. That attracts people’s attention. If someone challenges you, all you need to do is pull out your picture of Scruffy and show it to them. Say you were walking your dog in the area and it got away from you. Now you’re just hanging around for a bit on the off-chance that it comes back to the same place. If you can manage to look a bit tearful about the whole affair, so much the better. Oh, and we mustn’t forget to teach you how to fix your bike.’
    ‘Fix my bike?’
    ‘Yeah, of course. Best cover in the world. Nobody looks twice at a cyclist fiddling with his chain. It means you can stay in the same place, watching and waiting, for ages. But you need to be doing proper repairs, because if anybody’s watching you who knows anything about bikes and they see you’re faking it, they’ll know it’s just a pretence.’
    ‘And you think that’ll happen a lot, do you?’ Ricky said. ‘People watching me watching them.’ He was
seriously
beginning to wonder what he had let himself in for now.
    Felix suddenly looked very sober. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘In our world, Coco, everybody’s watching everybody else. You need to become very,
very
good at it.’
    ‘Let me guess, you’re the guy to teach me?’
    ‘Well, as it happens . . .’ Felix said, and he gave a little mock bow.
    Half an hour later, they had started with the basics.
    ‘You need to know how to follow someone in a crowd, without them
knowing
that you’re following.’
    Ricky looked around. It was ten in the morning, a cold, slightly damp early December day. They were standing outside a shoe shop on Oxford Street. The area was busy with Christmas shoppers eager to make use of the final few shopping weeks before the big day. Ricky himself was glad to have something to keep his mind off all that. For an orphan living on his own, there’s nothing festive about Christmas.
    ‘Are you paying attention, Coco?’
    ‘Sure. Following someone in a crowd.’
    ‘That’s right. Now, you’ll learn the first thing you need to know about surveillance in here.’ He rapped on the window of the shoe shop.
    ‘Er, no, that’s a shoe shop, Felix.’
    ‘You bet it is. The feet are the key,’ Felix said. ‘An amateur will make a note of their target’s jumper or coat, or even worse they’ll keep their eyes fixed on the back of their target’s head.’
    ‘What’s wrong with that?’
    Felix gave him a look that seemed to say:
Do I
really
have to tell you?
‘If you’re looking at the back of someone’s head, as soon as they turn round they’ll see you looking straight at them. Easiest way to get noticed. Much better to look at their shoes. Look how many different styles of shoe there are just in this one shop window. A hundred, maybe more? People’s shoes are
always
very distinctive, so if you follow them it makes it easy to keep track of where they are. Plus, if they turn round, you look like you have your eyes on the pavement. It makes it much harder for them to spot you. Now, look at my shoes, and remember them.’
    Felix was wearing a pair of scruffy but comfortable Nike Airs. If you didn’t know that he had a prosthetic leg, you certainly wouldn’t be able to tell if all you could see was his feet.
    Ricky spent the next few hours following his mentor. The walking stick made it easier, of course, but after a while Ricky found himself getting into a rhythm. He kept a distance of about