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. 450300198905072264. 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
Mei could reel off her own number. 450300198905072264. 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
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