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After checking my email and my bullet count, I leave the office via a different door. I can't exactly be seen hanging around an engineering office wrapped in weaponry and advanced materials (though Kevlar is a great engineering material.) It's one thing to see an engineer walk into a nondescript door in an alley. It's quite another to see a Navy Seal walk out, checking his email on his Blackberry. Damn I need that phone.

I send Jardine a brief but reasonably informative text: "49.268571,-123.044418"

Well, maybe not informative to everyone, but he'll get it. Those are coordinates, latitude and longitude (in which order? Damn, I can never remember...) Oh wait, that Tragically Hip song... "At the hundredth meridian!" So... Wait. What the hell is a Meridian? Maybe it's a more poetic word for longitude.

Anyway, I hop in the car (an old beater BMW, not my new one) and drive to near the spot. It's nice and dark out. By nice I mean the darkness is nice. Not the weather. It's raining. Of course it's raining, it's winter in Vancouver.

My car is a piece of shit. I am banging on the dash to try to get the fan to stop squealing while I try to defog the windshield, so I don't hear Jardine open the rear passenger door, and slide into the seat behind me. What can I say? I'm not that good of a spy. I'm too ADHD to make a good spy. So when Jardine whispers "Boo" in my ear I jump about a foot off the seat and bang the hell out of my knee on the steering wheel. "Fucker," I mumble as we get out of the car, "I hope you get shot tonight." He's all smiles, laughing at me as I hobble across the street behind him. Boy that guy is sneaky.

"Alright, brotha, are you ready to roll?" says Jardine, still smiling.

"Yep, let's do this like Buddhists."

We start towards the restaurant, a great Dim Sum place on the second floor of a weird shopping mall complex.

"I've eaten here a lot, it's great."

"Oh yeah? I love dim sum. My favorite is chop suey ball."

"... I'm going to assume you mean Cha Su Bao, which is BBQ pork bun."

"Yes! Delicious!"

Jardine doesn't put as much effort into learning Chinese as he should. I'm just gonna throw that out there.

"Chop Suey balls?"

"Shhhhh.... Quiet."

The stairwell is all green painted metal. Dark and slippery, but we are goddamn ninjas. We move silently like ... black wolves in the forest. That is so much of a better analogy than black cats.

"I hate cats."

"What? Shut up."

Pffft... Jardine's always all business. No matter, we've arrived. From our spot in the shadows I look through the windows of the restaurant, and I can see what must be 30 Chinese dudes, all in either suits or tight-ass Armani Exchange t-shirts, seated around three big tables, all drinking and playing cards, whatever. Partying. The younger ones are all built like brick shithouses. What is it with weight lifting? Gangster dudes love that shit.

There's a bunch of cute girls hanging around too, including one that appears to be wearing a few squares of single ply toilet paper over her private parts, held in place by strategic dental floss.

"Dude, that chick is so hot!" I whisper.

Silence for a few seconds, then, "That is a valid statement. But let's go."

He does not mean "Leap Into Action". He means leave. We leave. There's no way we're busting into a room of 30 dudes and 10 girls, even if some of those girls are only wearing six square inches of highly absorbent, cottony soft paper.

We get back in the car. I turn it on, turn up the heater. God it's cold. Nothing like Sydney. God I wish I was back in Sydney.

"Damnit. I thought tonight was the night!" I yell, banging the dash angrily, still trying to quiet the fucking fan noise, that on speed 4 sounds like a squirrel on meth losing his shit in a VPD bait car.

"It is, let's just wait it out for a bit. They can't play cards forever."

"Good. I hate cards."

To be continued...

Duncan, 2008-11-03, 05:10:13 You should get a barbed wire tattoo around your upper arm.