The Ghost Shift (34 page)

Lockhart had nothing to do but sit and watch the screen. Every few hours, one drone would pull away for refueling and the image on the laptop would go blank. But, within a few minutes, another would arrive on station and the pictures would flicker back to life. Somewhere, the ministry’s controllers kept their machines floating in the atmosphere. At dusk, it became harder to see the buildings, but the people stood out. The blobs of the workers’ tunics faded, but the infrared cameras showed their body heat as a red glow.

It was a factory, with shift patterns that matched those in the main Long Tan compound, but he couldn’t see how everything fit together. They lived and ate in P-2, that was obvious. At mealtimes and at the end of the day, people walked there and disappeared inside. After breakfast, they spilled out toward P-1, the assembly plant. The building that intrigued him was the annex attached to P-1 by two tubes. Lockhart was sure they were hallways—he’d enlarged the image when the skies were clear and had seen heads passing under panels. Inside the annex itself, the infrared image showed heat spots.

The operation was connected to the Long Tan complex. One set of trucks drove from plants in the outer compound, entering along the access road and unloading at P-1. Workers loaded another set of trucks, which left the compound and drove to the exit, bound for the expressway. When he was bored, Lockhart counted the trucks arriving at P-1, noting the numbers on a piece of paper. It was only a small fraction of Poppy’s output—P-1 wasn’t self-sufficient, nor was it a finishing plant for every Poppy tablet. It was a puzzle.

At eight-thirty, Lockhart heard the caretaker open the apartment door. Feng came into the room, putting her bag on the table, and looked over his shoulder at the screen of the laptop.

“Anything happening?”

“Nothing much.”

“There’s a storm coming, so the drone may back off for a while. They don’t like turbulence.”

Lockhart nodded. When he looked back, he noticed something odd—like nothing he’d seen before. The camera was locked on the walkways linked to P-1, and a red dot had appeared against the white of the roof, by one of the panels. He checked the time in the upper right of the screen. It was 8:36—late for anyone to repair the roof. Lockhart switched the image back to a normal camera, and the reds, greens, and oranges were replaced by a gloom in which little was visible.

Lightning flashed at the window, followed almost immediately by an enormous clap of thunder. A sheet of light filled the laptop screen and he saw a shape on it where the red dot had been.

“It’s her,” he said.

Feng stood by him. “What is?”

The image was so poor that he switched it back to infrared and pointed at the red dot. As they looked, it shifted slightly, moving from the curve of the roof to the ground next to it.

“That’s your evidence?” Feng said.

As Lockhart pulled the focus back to show a panorama of the compound, the image shook. The rainfall outside the window grew louder, and lightning flashed as the storm broke.

“Wait.” Feng seemed to be appealing to the drone’s controllers, not to him. She bent her face up to the screen.

They had three seconds before the drone pulled away, and the image went with it. The buildings loomed at the bottom of the screen, and between them and the fence lay a dark expanse of field. As they watched, the red dot detached from the walkway and moved diagonally.

The screen went black.

“It’s her,” Feng said.

Mei ran blind,
the rain pelting her face. She felt the light of the buildings recede but didn’t look back. She was by herself on the field, and she watched wet earth and grass passing beneath her. She glimpsed a white line on the pitch, and then it went by. The field filled with water as she ran, pooling and splashing. Once her front foot slid from under her and she almost fell.

The ground hardened, and she felt the gravel of the running track around the field. She stopped, crouching to keep her profile low as she tried to recalculate her course. The walkway was far behind her—five hundred feet or so, she reckoned. Rain would be pouring through the panel, flooding onto the floor and toward the doors at either end. She hoped that nobody had followed her and that she would have time before a breach was found—she desperately needed it. She was at the far side of the soccer field, near the storm sewer. A dog barked, not far away.

Mei walked a few steps, her head low, and then broke into a run, keeping on the alert for guards. If they were at the perimeter fence, they should still be another five hundred feet away, but the dog had sounded closer. Feeling the rain on her face let up, she saw a patch of sky, dotted with stars, emerge among the clouds. The storm was passing westward, taking with it the downpour that had hidden her. Soon she would stand out on the landscape.

Suddenly, missing her footing, she tumbled and grazed her knee. Hearing water in front of her, she reached out and splashed a hand in a muddy stream. She was perched on the downward slope of the open drain. The sewer was doing its work, taking water off the field and toward the border of the complex, where it would flow out through channels toward the river. Without it, the compound would turn into a swamp.

The dog barked again, and she pitched forward, slithering into the stream. It was a couple of feet deep—too shallow to float but deep enough to keep herself hidden. The water, which had bucketed from the receding clouds, was fresh, but the bottom of the drain was slimy with mud. She slid her hands along, trying to crawl on her hands and knees. It was slow progress, and the sky was clearing, exposing
her to the sight of anybody close to the lip of the open sewer, or anyone gazing along its length. She was best protected from the side.

Something like safety lay a hundred feet ahead—an open pipe into which the sewer water flowed. She half-crawled, half-scrambled toward it, waiting for the sound of the guards, and flung herself the last few feet. The pipe was three feet wide, and the water from the sewer welled up as it forced into the gap, rising to about half the pipe’s diameter. It would leave her little room to breathe, and she couldn’t see far down its length. But that wasn’t her immediate problem.

The end of the pipe was sealed with a grate.

Mei felt under the water’s surface. The grate was fastened to a wooden frame, and she could not unbolt it. She ran her fingers along the wood, feeling its splinters, and pulled the bars with her good hand, trying to pull it free. It shook at the bottom, where the wood had bloated. She couldn’t do more with one hand, so she turned around and lay flat in the water, feet to the grate. Pulling back her knees, she kicked as hard as she could with her heels. The metal shifted in the frame, making what sounded to her like a huge noise, but didn’t move.

Mei kicked again, and again. She was broadcasting her presence, but she had no choice. On the third kick, she felt the bottom of the grate give slightly. She kicked wildly a fourth time, and then a fifth. On the sixth, the bars at the bottom broke free. Turning, she wrestled at them with her hand, trying to force a bigger hole. She was half-submerged, water flowing around her neck, as she worked. After a minute, she dipped her head through the gap and kicked against the sewer’s sides to get her shoulders through. Waggling her body, she eased through, holding her breath underwater.

As her feet cleared, she came to the surface and shot along the pipe. She was floating, carried on the stream of water that gushed down the narrow channel. She struggled to avoid drowning as the water tumbled her over and frothed in the pipe, not knowing which way was up as she flowed downstream in darkness. Whenever her face surfaced, she tried to catch a breath. It was happening too fast to think—all of her attention was focused on snatching oxygen.

The pipe turned a bend and became wider, the water level falling as the internal pressure eased. Mei was dumped on her back, water flowing around her. She sat, coughing and retching. A hundred feet ahead, water cascaded from the end of the pipe in a waterfall, and the night sky was visible—the world beyond Long Tan’s borders.

This was how her sister had escaped. She knew it.

The waterfall shone as if illuminated, and she crawled toward it. The closer she got, the brighter the light became, until she poked her head into a dazzling glare. The headlights of three Jeeps were shining on her; next to one of them stood a man with a self-satisfied smile.

“Jiang Jia,” the instructor said. “We must teach you discipline.”

Two guards took Mei by both shoulders, extracting her from the pipe. She’d lost a shoe, and the bandage on her hand hung down in strips. Dragging her, scraping her along the sewer floor, they stood her up by the vehicles. Water dripped down her face, and a contact lens had lodged in the back of one eye.

“You are soaking wet. We must get you dry. Take off your clothes,” the instructor said.

Mei looked at him in disbelief. She was standing in the open air, surrounded by men.

“Remove her clothes.”

The guards stepped toward her, and one reached down to unzip her pants. As she struggled with his hand, the other slapped her, cutting the inside of one cheek on a tooth. He stepped behind her and gripped her by both shoulders while his partner got on with his task. He pulled off her shoe and then reached around her waist to strip off her pants and underwear. Then he lifted her tunic and ripped off her bra, taking his time to run his hands over her breasts. She stood naked, trying to cover herself, as the instructor inspected her body. He searched the pockets of her soaking tunic, pulling out the logic board.

“Here.”

The instructor handed her a towel, and she wiped herself down, leaving smears of mud down her body. She felt utterly degraded as she struggled to pull on a fresh uniform, still barefoot.

“Now,” he said. “Let’s talk.”

He opened the rear door of one of the Jeeps, then sat in the front himself. As she dipped her head to enter, the other passenger looked at her as if she were a student who’d broken the school’s rules. It was Dr. He.

“I was puzzled by your answer, Jia. I wondered how you could have forgotten. The Year of the Dragon started on January 23, and you were in Heyuan on February 16, when the earthquake struck. You did not register in Guangzhou until later in the month. A Heyuan girl who does not know any Hakka dialect? You are a mystery.”

Mei kept silent—there was nothing to say. She kept her head down, staring at a crushed cigar butt in the Jeep’s ashtray. The door clicked open, and the seat shifted as Dr. He climbed out. The instructor hummed tunelessly. As the door opened, a pair of polished shoes appeared in her line of sight, and she smelled fabric infused with cigar smoke.

The instructor clapped his hands. “Show respect, Jia. You are in the presence of a great man whose hospitality you have abused. Not many people have this privilege. This is Cao Fu.”

Everything about Cao was angular—the line of his jaw, his cheeks, his nose. His cigar was twice the diameter of his long fingers, on which the knuckles stood out. When Mei raised her head, he stared at her for a moment before resting his cigar in the tray by his last stub.

“Open your eye.” Her held Mei’s jaw in one hand and gazed into them, then held open one eyelid and with his finger and thumb gently rubbed her eyeball, plucking out a dark contact lens.

“There, that’s better.” He discarded it on the floor and picked up his cigar again. “A girl with one green eye and one black eye. I’ve never seen that before. Your face is familiar. Who are you?”

“My name is Jiang Jia.”

“I don’t think so. It is unlikely.” His voice was light and resonant; he spoke as if he’d experienced so much deception that it didn’t bother him. “What is the second of the precepts that everyone at Long Tan learns?”

“I don’t know.”

Fu grunted and took a puff of his cigar, blowing a swirl of smoke around the interior of the Jeep. “Was she not taught, instructor? Is that the reason for her bad behavior?”

“It is the first thing we teach, Dr. Cao. I taught her the precepts myself, on the day she arrived.” The instructor stared at Mei indignantly, as if she had let him down in front of his boss.