the pointless loop as counter-surveillance
From Cambridge’s Latinate Inman Square, Michael Pemulis, nobody’s fool at all, rides one necessary bus to Central Square and then an unnecessary bus to Davis Square and a train back to Central. This is to throw off the slightest possible chance of pursuit.
Context
Textbook dry-cleaning, run by a teenager. One necessary leg, one deliberately unnecessary leg, a doubling-back — the classic route to burn a tail, executed "to throw off the slightest possible chance of pursuit" when there is almost certainly no pursuit at all. Pemulis is the amateur end of the book's surveillance spectrum: the same counter-surveillance doctrine the A.F.R. and Steeply run for real, performed here as the practiced habit of a dealer-student who treats op-sec as a matter of professional pride. The loop costs him an afternoon and buys him nothing but the feeling of being uncatchable.