Gately & Day, the informal-interface snippet
there’s a well-known surveillance tactic known as the Box-surveillance, which involves certain members of the surveillance team establishing themselves in front of the subject.
Context
Paranoia and accurate threat-assessment made indistinguishable — the book's running surveillance-joke folded into a D.T. Geoffrey Day defends his conviction that the men walking ahead of him are tailing him by citing real tradecraft: Box-surveillance, in which operatives position themselves in front of the subject, is an actual technique, described correctly. Gately's deflation is airtight comedy — "why a sociology teacher weaving his way from his fourth bar to his fifth bar is important enough for four guys from some you-never-mentioned-what kind of conspiracy to be pulling this real complex surveillance thing." But the reader holds what neither man does: in these very weeks the A.F.R. is canvassing every demi-maison in a 25-km. radius of Ennet House (147, 149) — the snippet itself is undated, so anything tighter than the season is inference, flagged in the apparatus — and the halfway-house orbit genuinely is under professional watch. The novel arranges its most florid paranoid to describe correct tradecraft in the one setting where the tail is real; the delusion is wrong about its subject and right about its world.