Pathetic Stake-Out Today

So C's pretty much recovered now and they sent he and I to New York to set up surveillance on this suspected Chinese operative. This woman Mai-Ling was supposedly having meetings with someone in the Defense Department and everyone wanted to know more about this. Allegedly information about nanotechnology was being leaked; and this was nanotechnology related to warfare; the kind of stuff that the government doesn't want you to know about. We're talking microscopic machines that replicate themselves from any known materials, machines that with a little more tweaking on the part of our scientists could turn mountains to dust in a matter of minutes; the so-called grey goo scenario. So needless to say, everyone was a trifle concerned.

Mai-Ling was posing as a Faberge egg dealer, meeting with potential business contacts in New York. (For some reason the Chinese seem to think the most ridiculous cover story is usually the best, and I have to say that this does seem to work for them most of the time. Though I do remember once they went overboard when one of their agents was posing as a flamboyantly gay rodeo clown. I'm pretty sure someone got fired for that idea.) Several of the eggs had been found to contain microprint military research inside of them, and this was how Mai-Ling was transporting the information back to China.

So C and I are set up all day today in a completely tinted-out, busted up 'Lee's Laundry Services' van in Chinatown outside this woman's apartment, trying to blend into the environment. And for anyone of you who know about stake-outs, that shit is not pleasant or glamorous in the slightest. With all of the surveillance equipment in the van, there's barely any room to move, it's hot and humid as hell, you're dripping sweat, it's hard to breathe, and, if you're working with someone who ate a rather large Mexican meal the night before and for some retarded reason had the leftovers for breakfast, things can reach a point where you're ready to say fuck the fate of the world, I'm retiring to a chalet in Switzerland.

So we're there for 12 hours today, listening to her phone conversations, which we'd tapped the night before, and being completely miserable. All she talks about all day is Faberge this, Faberge that, talking about her god-damned eggs more than a woman with ovarian cancer. She's talking to the Victor Mayer company in Germany, to some potential buyers in Manhattan, to some Wall Street guy who's making some ridiculous inquiries about 'Faberge egg salad' (by the way, wtf?) and just generally she's boring as shit. And after a while I'm pretty convinced that something is wrong here and she's just a regular old-fashioned Faberge egg dealer and we've got some bad information, or else someone else is doctoring her eggs. C's of a different opinion, though, and thinks she's just really deep undercover.

'Uhhh,' I say. 'If she goes any deeper under cover, she's going to be selling Faberge eggs for the rest of her fucking life. She'd really have us fooled then.' C conceeds that we may be wasting our time, especially since the search of her apartment the night before didn't yield any results.

"Do you think the donkey punch would be allowed under Bush's revised Geneva Conventions?" C asked out of nowhere. He's prone to non-sequitors during stake-outs. I assume it's a rhetorical question and say nothing.

To make a long story short, nothing at all happens all day except for C and me learning entirely too much about Faberge eggs, and me filling up almost an entire 2-liter soda bottle with my urine. Also, seeing entirely too much of C because he likes to strip down to a thong during these things because of the heat.