Scott Murphy's Notebook: Spytech

Scott “Mossad” Murphy hates guns. He can't hit a target with a handgun, and any weapons he can use aren't easily concealed. However, his spycraft is second to none, and he's great with improvised weapons, traps knows enough spy craft to survive when talking very, very fast doesn't cut it. He's the sort of person who takes notes on a tv show called Burn Notice—which looks like one part MacGyver for the dark side and the A-Team.

This is a page from the notebook of Scott Murphy:

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* Ammonium Iodide—take one part ammonium, one part iodine, and stir well. Let it settle overnight, and then, later, strain through coffee filter paper. Be very careful with the resulting little green crystals. Enough crystals to cover your palm will be enough to blow off your leg if you step on them.

* How to bulletproof a car. Yellowpages can stop a non-Armor Piercing bullet; they penetrate an inch into the phonebook, and they stop. If you add steel plate, it will only only penetrate a ¼ inch—line the walls of the car with the phone book: put them and the steel behind the panels of your car, unless you like swimming in phonebooks and yellow confetti. Put foam in the tires to make them bullet resistant, and use dual layer plexiglass for the windows.

* Molotov cocktail: a classic that never goes out of business, mix some high proof alcohol into a glass bottle, slip a rag into the mouth of the bottle... light rag, throw bottle, and you have a nice little firebomb.

* Homemade hand grenades: A New York street gang in the mid twentieth century adopted a science geek. He took a test tube and a stopper, then filled it with some interesting chemicals: glycerin, nitric acid, and sulfuric acid. They separated the chemicals with a layer of parafin wax—basically, you can use melted candle wax on each level of chemicals. Drive a nail through the stopper, and then through the rest of the layers of wax, shake well, and throw away quickly before you blow your hand off: you have just created nitroglycerin.

* Take a metal chain and wrap it around two power lines, and you've created an electrical circuit. It certainly makes sparks fly, and acts as a great distraction. Highly illegal, so you better have a great reson for taking out the power of up to two or three city blocks.

* Wrap a metal wire around the prongs of a plug—a paper clip will do. Plug it back into the wall, watch all of the lights go out when the circuit breakers disagree with the effect.

* Use a cigarette as a time delay switch, and matches as a detonator. If you put multiple aerosol cans in a garbage can, the cigarette burns down to the matchbook, and flares, heats the aerosol cans, which are already under pressure. The effect is like puncturing the oxygen tank in Jaws, only on an obviously smaller scale.

* Security cameras as easily overloaded. Flash the laser into a camera, you've just created your own blind spot.


* An optical bug uses a laser against a window pane to pick up vibrations, enabling the listeners to hear everything in the room. To detect it, take the infrared filter off of a digital camera, and it will pick up a great big red spot on your windows. Your pictures won't be something you want in your photo album, but you can be certain you're not being bugged.... unless you are being bugged, in which case, you wan to give your listeners nothing but noise. With a listening device in your room, you can always turn on a television, a shower, or a radio. With an optical bug, you can put a vibrating back massager against the window; if the laser bug picks up vibrations, the massager will give them pure static.


# In the middle of Queens, New York, a Chicklet's factory exploded. The reason: there were enough dust particles in the air and on the floors to create an issue. A spark went off; that spark ingited a wave of fire that set each individual particle of dust on fire instantaneously. You can recreate the effect with baking powder made into a dust cloud. Or, for something a little simpler, use powdered nondiary creamer powder to cut gunpowder, and you get a fireball full of sound and fury.


# If you must beat someone over the head with sports equipment, use a golf club, not a baseball bat: the golf club has a smaller surface area, and the force isn't as distributed.