Subject: Hotels
To: REDACTED
From: REDACTED
Date: REDACTED


That sounds... inefficient. Cloistering oneself in a closet like some kind of paranoid rodent, powdering your nose in the dark?

Pathetic.

If you're going to engage in anything illicit—drug use, infidelity, or something more elaborate—you don't do it hiding in a closet. You take control of the space. Dominate it. You don't submit to the architecture.

My procedure is meticulous.

I only stay at high-end hotels—The Carlyle, The Pierre, Claridge’s if I’m in London. Anywhere with a concierge trained by the Swiss or a bartender who knows the difference between an Old Cuban and a Hemingway Daiquiri. That’s the minimum.

And suite positioning—Christ, I’ve had arguments with concierges about this. You never take the top floor. That’s for honeymooners and narcissists who don’t understand sniper ballistics. Never ground level either—too easy to breach. You want third to fifth floors, end of the hallway, preferably with two walls not shared. Corner suite if possible. Windows with no direct facing building within 100 meters. Ideally something with a balcony—not for the view, but for the drop potential. You know what I mean.

Upon entering the room, I do a full sweep. It’s not dramatic. I'm not crawling under beds or tapping walls like some tweaker. I carry a custom titanium travel case—TUMI, monogrammed, obviously—containing a Leica thermal imager, a slim LED inspection mirror with a carbon fiber handle, and yes, a screwdriver set. Wera. German precision.

I swap out the Wera set depending on the city. In Paris, for instance, I use PB Swiss Tools—lighter, finer tolerances. Discretion is everything when the walls are paper-thin and you’re operating two floors above a retired French intelligence officer pretending to be an art dealer.

I inspect for surveillance devices—hidden mics behind the thermostat, lens glints in fire alarms, IR signatures in paintings. You’d be shocked at what boutique hotels in Miami think they can get away with.

I’ve always maintained: the only way to be truly alone, truly unguarded, is to strip the space down to its atoms. Unscrew, unfold, disassemble. Look behind the frame, pull the sheets off the mattress, disarm the minibar and repurpose the ice bucket if needed. There’s no such thing as privacy unless you take it. And even then, you don’t relax—you surveil yourself.

Location, of course, is the nucleus. Always near a hospital—but not next to one. You want accessibility without association. If you can hear a siren, you're too close. Three to five minutes by car is optimal. Eight if there’s a good secondary exit through the garage.

After, I adjust the lighting to daylight temperature—around 5500K—to avoid disorientation. Music—Donald Fagen or something sterile and electronic—goes on low volume to create white noise. If the job—or the evening—requires a sharper mental edge, I’ll switch to early Brian Eno, Another Green World era. Minimal distraction, maximum cognitive elasticity. Then I call down for room service: usually carpaccio or a rare burger, glass of Barolo or a vodka martini, bone dry, stirred.

And if I were to do a line, which I don’t... I’d do it in front of the window, overlooking the city, naked, arms outstretched like some finance-era Nietzschean god. Because that’s how you assert your power—not by hiding in closets like a damn intern at Deloitte.

The point is simple: if you don’t control the environment, the environment controls you. Which is why most people are nothing more than furniture in someone else’s room.