The Ghost Shift (8 page)

She gazed at the photo again. The face was so like her own, it was almost identical. The eyes were hers, the way her brow dipped to meet the top of her nose, the flow of her lips. It was more than a mirror image, for Mei’s face would be reversed in a mirror, and this was the right way around. She could have accepted that it was mistaken identity, just someone uncannily like her, but she’d seen the body in the pond. She had touched her face. This hadn’t just been her sister—it was her twin.

The number told a different story. Aside from the photo, the laminated card held three pieces of data—the woman’s name, her workplace in the Long Tan complex, and her number: T
ANG LIU
, B
UILDING
P-2, 43010​41993​04074​425. Her name was not a surprise; it might have been anything. Nor did the workplace mean much—it must be one of the buildings she’d observed through her binoculars. But the long number, that was full of information.

This was the woman’s national identity number, and Long Tan had adopted it. Eighteen numbers, starting with the administrative code for her place of birth—province, city, and district—then birthdate;
then three digits to distinguish her from China’s other Tang Lius. Last, a checksum number to prevent forgery.

Mei could reel off her own number. 45030​01989​05072​264. The first six digits represented a district in Guilin in the autonomous region of Guangxi. Then her birthdate: May 7, 1989. If this were her sister, the first fourteen numbers on the card ought to have been identical, but they were utterly different. The woman had been born in a village outside Changsha in Hunan province and had been nineteen. Mei could explain away the first discrepancy—a baby could be taken to another city to be registered—but not the second. The girl had been allocated a number at birth;
that
could not be faked.

Whoever she had been, she wasn’t Mei’s twin.

Near the end
of ideology class, everyone relaxed. Most of the cadres perched on benches shut their notebooks and stopped writing. The lecturer didn’t notice. He’d acquired the habit of epic speech making from the Party leadership, measuring his output by how long he talked, not by what his students learned.

The lecture was on Deng Xiaoping Thought, which meant taking some bits from Mao and dropping the most brutal parts. Mao was out of favor, although his portrait still hung at the Gate of Heavenly Peace. He had been “seventy percent good, thirty percent bad”—this was the official mantra. The “thirty percent” was the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution.

After the disaster of Tiananmen Square, Deng had rescued his place in history on his southern tour to Guangdong, prodding those back in Beijing into reform. His image still adorned billboards, exhorting political loyalty to the Party, but he’d dropped Mao’s state economic control for “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Twenty years later, the characteristics were evident in the Pearl River. People lived good lives here, building new apartments and renting them to migrants, eating well, not working too hard.

The lecture over, Mei shuffled to the exit. She found Yao under a banyan tree by the nursery. He was smoking a cigarette and grinning at the small kids as they ran around in circles.

“Where did you go yesterday?” he asked. “Big date?”

“Oh, that. It was a waste of time.”

“Never mind. Let’s get this over with.”

Yao led the way across the courtyard, amid apartment and office buildings. The compound had grown into a kind of campus, with every kind of department and function fighting for space. The Guangdong branch of the Ministry of State Security, where they were headed, was in the middle. Taking Hou’s envelope there, as Pan had instructed them to do, was serious—like a combination of the CIA and the FBI, the ministry had sprawling powers. Mei was worried about the Wolf. She’d heard nothing from him for two days.

The ministry had lost the property lottery—it was housed in a squat building with rusty windows that did not open, behind the education wing. It took a while to find the right office, which was stuck along a corridor with no Party title on the door, just a name: Lai Feng.

Lai Feng wasn’t what Mei expected of a spy. She looked no older than the pair of them, and her black hair was drawn back in a band above a white moon face. Her eyelashes were coated in mascara, and her nails were painted gunmetal. She looked more like a Goth from the streets of Shenzhen than a Party official, and she stared at them as they entered. Although she had her own office, she did not appear to occupy most of it. She huddled by a window, holding a Poppy tablet, while the oak desk in the middle was empty.

As she stood, the tablet gave an electronic squawk and she glanced down. “Ah, I’d forgotten. Come in. Except that you’re already in.”

Yao stepped forward, grinning amiably. “Lai Feng, I am Zhang Yao, of the Discipline Commission. Deputy Secretary Pan sent us. I believe you know about our mission.”

“Your mission?” Feng raised an eyebrow in a perfect triangle and whistled. “So you’re secret agents.” She stepped past Yao and held a hand out to Mei. “You’re not his girlfriend, I hope.”

“My name is Song Mei. I’m his partner.”

The woman wrinkled her nose. “Well, any sacrifice for the Party.” She shot Yao a glance. “You two have something for me?”

Yao reached into his pocket and put the envelope on the desk’s stitched leather surface.

Feng picked it up and rocked it between her fingers, weighing the contents, then turned her gaze to Yao.

“An envelope, eh? This will test my expertise. Have you tried one of these?” She pulled a letter opener from a drawer.

“I think it’s secret.” Yao sounded like a small boy.

The woman sniffed. “
Top secret?
Okay, so you want me to open it up and seal it again. Well, this is exciting. Is it a letter in invisible ink? Maybe a microdot hidden in a character?”

“Can you do it or not?” Mei interjected. She was tired of Feng messing with Yao’s dignity. He irritated her too, but she had earned the right to give him a hard time. This woman hadn’t.

Feng looked at Mei. “I’m just saying, our work is less analog these days. Physical objects are so last century.”

Mei pointed toward Feng’s tablet, which she’d left by the window, with its Poppy logo on the back. “That’s an object, isn’t it? You think the Chinese economy is stuck in the last century?”

Feng raised an amused eyebrow.

“Okay, you’ve got a point. Anyway, they taught us this stuff. There isn’t much call for it now, like making molds of keys in clay. I need to revise the method a little.”

She walked to a bookshelf, from which she took a leather-bound volume.

“Here are the old potions. Lovely binding. I’d collect these if I didn’t have the set already.”

She rubbed a thumb, with its dark nail, over the leather and flicked through the pages. Then she giggled.

“It’s like Harry Potter. Come on, let’s try it.”

In a basement laboratory, the strip lights flickered to life. The room was white-tiled, with desks spaced throughout bearing flasks filled with chemicals. One wall was covered with shelves behind glass panels. Feng slid a panel aside and took a box from one shelf, then tipped its contents into a thin-necked flask. White crystals flowed out, forming a pile, and Feng poured two slugs of clear liquid into the vessel.

“Magicians measure by instinct. Here, give me that envelope.” She put it on a table, twiddled the flask between finger and thumb,
and made a spell-casting gesture with the other hand. “Aparecium!” Then she frowned, her eyebrows knitting together. “It’s supposed to reveal invisible ink. It worked on Tom Riddle’s diary. Oh, fuck this. The Party knows best.”

She brought down a cork and some glass tubing, which she stuck in the top of the flask. Then she lit a burner. After a minute, white fumes rose off the crystals and floated along the pipe. She waited until it streamed and then held the envelope to it. Thirty seconds later, the flap sprung open.

“And the Americans say we can’t innovate,” she said, handing it to Mei. “Have a look inside.”

“Am I supposed to?”

“Supposed to?” said Feng mockingly. “Go on, I won’t look.”

Mei took the envelope to a corner, feeling a flat, hard rectangle inside it. She didn’t want to know what it was. But as she hesitated, Yao moved.

“Let me see.” He put a hand on her shoulder, pulling her body back against his to gain a better view.

Taking the envelope, he pulled out a packet of green-and-purple bills bound in a white band. Each bore a cross and the image of a bald man in a high white collar, and next to it the words “Schweizerische Nationalbank.” They were crisp, unused one thousand Swiss franc notes.

“Fuck.” Yao pushed the packet back into the envelope and tried to close the flap, but it lifted open. He hurried across the room to Feng, who was sitting on a bench, gazing at the ceiling.

“Close it, please.”

She bent over the envelope, stroking gum from a nail polish-sized bottle onto the paper. “You know what a guy I knew told me? The most important quality in a spy is the ability to forget.”

Feng held out the envelope to Mei, and she took it reluctantly. No matter how hard she tried to shun it, the evidence kept seeking her out.

Yao opened the door and beckoned Mei inside. He wore pajamas under a silk nightgown, sash tied lightly at the waist, displaying a wedge of bare chest. The silk was embroidered with a red dragon, on fabric finer than anything she owned.

“Don’t let anyone spot you. It might spoil your reputation.”

Mei lacked the energy for a retort. It was late, and she was tense. Even Yao didn’t look at ease.

Yao’s room was like hers—a bedroom with a small bathroom attached to a tiny kitchenette, a study with a desk, and a two-person sofa. Their lives as cadres were the same too. They ate every meal in the commissary, except for a few excursions—nights in Guangzhou, shopping in Shenzhen, a walk in the park. The Party made sure that they didn’t have much time for recreation. Yet there was a gulf between them in the room’s small touches—the fabrics draped across his sofa and the photographs on his desk. He had so many cousins, it was unimaginable to her. There he was with his mother and aunt in Tiananmen Square, there with his father next to a rocket launcher at an Army parade.

Yao’s pedigree was impeccable. His family tree had army officers and high-level officials. One line led back to a great-granduncle who’d been among the Eight Immortals—Deng and the seven Party officials who’d followed Mao. That alone gave him an exalted stature—he was destined for high office. Which didn’t escape the attention of the girls who fell into his bed, she thought.

She sat on Yao’s sofa while he paced around the room in his slippers. “What do we do?” she asked.

The envelope with its customs seal was still in her pocket, the stack of Swiss franc notes shifting inside when she moved. Mei knew that if she gave it to the Wolf it would be the end of him, and knew that she’d been chosen for the task.

“You heard Feng. Give it to him, walk away, forget it. The Wolf’s at the end of his career, and we’re at the start. I bet he’s been on the take for years.”

“I don’t believe that.” It was too neat, this affair. Pan had been onto her as soon as she’d returned from Dongguan, with a mission to bring him down.

“What don’t you believe?” He was exasperated, as if Mei were being deliberately obstructive.

“That he’s corrupt. This is a setup, Yao, can’t you see? Why were we sent to the docks? Why did Hou produce the envelope? Why did Feng open it and tell us to take a look? It’s all fixed.”

Yao clenched his jaw and groaned. “Do you really believe that? What’s in the envelope, anyway? Ten or twenty notes, fifteen thousand francs. That’s nothing for a man in his position. Do you think he’s been clean for all these years and that this is his first sweetener?”

“So why were we chosen to catch him?”

“Isn’t that supposed to be our job?”

Mei laughed. “Of course—two cadres in training at the Discipline Commission. Just the people you send to trap the boss of the organization. They must do that all the time, we just haven’t heard of it.”

“Okay then, so why?” He stood in front of her, waving an arm in frustration. “You’re so much smarter than I am. I’d just a dumb princeling, that’s what you really think.”

“I don’t.”

“Yes, you do.” He was shouting, angrier than she’d ever seen him. “You do. So, why us?”

Mei’s fingers dug into her knees. “Not us.
Me
.”

“Right.
You
. Because you’re special.”

“No, because of what he showed me.”

Yao exhaled and reached for a chair. He sat and leaned toward her, his face close to hers.

“What did he show you?” he asked quietly.

“The woman in the marsh.”

“Who was she? I asked you before.”

Mei grimaced apologetically. She had tried to keep the Wolf’s secret but it was no good—she needed Yao’s help.

“She worked at Long Tan.”

“A factory girl, was she? The people who manage that place work them to death. They’ve been falling off the buildings for months. Did you see the photos? They’ve put up nets to catch them.”