The Message

by Mai Jia

  Commander Zhang picked up the other pair of binoculars and stood next to Colonel Hihara, focusing in the same direction, counting off the occupants one by one. Gu Xiaomeng was sitting on her bed, looking furious; Li Ningyu was combing her hair; Chief of Staff Wu Zhiguo was sitting all by himself on the sofa smoking a cigarette…

  He could see everything with the binoculars, even the mole next to Section Chief Jin Shenghuo’s eyebrow and the curl of smoke rising from Wu Zhiguo’s cigarette. He suddenly realized why Police Chief Wang had arranged the rooms as he had. One of the rooms had been locked so that Li Ningyu and Gu Xiaomeng had to share, because only these three rooms were in the direct line of sight of the east building.

  The two men watched for a while, then Hihara put down his binoculars and patted Commander Zhang on the shoulder. ‘Let’s go over there. She was desperate to talk to you.’

  4

  There was a nasty stench permeating the western building: the smell of death, corruption and fear. It was as if there’d been a repeat performance of the previous year’s murders.

  Police Chief Wang Tianxiang showed Commander Zhang and Colonel Hihara in, and Secretary Bai rushed out of the conference room to greet them. Perhaps the latter was upset on account of the shouting match he’d just had with Gu Xiaomeng; certainly, he made a mess of his greetings. Having shaken hands with Colonel Hihara, he then went over to shake hands with Commander Zhang.

  Commander Zhang glared at him. ‘What is wrong with you? Has this run-in with the Communists addled your brain? Why are you trying to shake hands with me?’

  Secretary Bai withdrew his hand and laughed idiotically. ‘No… not at all… I—’

  Commander Zhang cut him short. ‘Go and get the others. We’re having a meeting.’

  *

  The meeting was worse than a funeral. Everyone kept their eyes lowered, not daring to look up, as if afraid they might disclose something.

  Wu, Jin, Gu and Li,

  Which of you can it be?

  Commander Zhang’s ditty had set everyone on edge. Fears and suspicions swirled, unvoiced, crowding the thoughts of the ECCC officers, overlapping, contradictory, angry, scared.

  Was it the most senior among them – Chief of Staff Wu Zhiguo – or was it the oldest, Section Chief Jin Shenghuo? Was it the young and pretty Gu Xiaomeng, who came from such a powerful and famous family, or could it be Li Ningyu? Was one person involved or was it two? Did they even suspect three? Was this a new agent or had they been working for the Communists for years? Was this person anti the Nationalists or in favour of a Communist alliance with them? Why were the bosses so sure there was a Communist among them? Had someone stolen a top-secret message or had they killed someone? Were they doing it for money? Had someone turned traitor to escape the death penalty? Had someone made a silly mistake or had the ECCC been infiltrated long ago? Did they know who they were looking for or was everyone under suspicion? Was this a big fish or just some poor devil who’d be got rid of and that would be the end of it? Would whoever it was turn themselves in or would they be denounced by someone else?

  Wu, Jin, Gu and Li,

  Which of you can it be?

  Damn this! What the hell is this? This is a grenade! A pile of shit! A nightmare! It’s as if we’ve been stripped naked or have fallen among pirates; as if we’ve met a ghost or have taken poison; as if we’re in a torture chamber.

  Damn this!

  In this horrible situation, no one had any idea what they should do or what they should say. Whatever they said would be wrong. Whatever they did would be wrong. It would be wrong to swear, but not swearing would also be wrong. It would be wrong to cry. It would be wrong to smile. It would be wrong to stand up, wrong to sit down, wrong to walk out, wrong to stay put. It would be wrong to look, wrong to shut your eyes. Wrong! Every single damn thing would be wrong, but doing nothing would also be wrong.

  No one knew who to believe.

  No one had a clue how to get out of this.

  *

  Commander Zhang invited Colonel Hihara to take the seat at the head of the table. Hihara refused and sat down instead in the first seat to the left. Then he very politely requested that everyone else be seated.

  Once they had taken their places, Secretary Bai padded over to Commander Zhang’s side, whispered something in his ear and slipped him a piece of paper.

  The Commander looked at it and laughed, then handed it on to Hihara. ‘Have a look at this, Colonel. This is the message I gave them.’

  Hihara slowly read it aloud.

  ‘This message is a fake,

  But there is a real plot, at West Lake.

  If you want people not to see,

  Do not show them what you be.

  ‘Right here at our heart there lies,

  A Communist agent in disguise.

  Wu, Jin, Gu and Li,

  Which of you can it be?

  ‘Confess now or be denounced,

  Before your sentence is pronounced.

  When it is all over, do not rue

  That you did not believe our offer was true.’

  When he’d finished, Commander Zhang applauded. Then he said to Wu, Jin, Gu and Li, ‘I knew that you would all make great cryptographers: you got my original message absolutely right, not a single word wrong. However, this is just the beginning. I composed it to keep you occupied while we were waiting for Colonel Hihara to arrive. The real reason you are here—’

  Hihara interrupted. Gesturing at the piece of paper, he said, ‘The real reason is this: “Wu, Jin, Gu and Li, which of you can it be?” Am I not right, Commander Zhang?’

  Commander Zhang laughed. ‘You are absolutely right. That’s the real code we need to crack. It would be best if you gave me the answer yourselves, but if you’re not prepared to do that, it doesn’t matter, since our Colonel Hihara is an expert at that kind of thing and has been sent by General Matsui to help us.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t really call myself an expert, I just like this kind of work.’ Colonel Hihara and Commander Zhang were definitely singing to the same tune. ‘So when Commander Zhang asked me to come as soon as possible, I was happy to oblige.’

  Commander Zhang opened his briefcase and took out a piece of paper. ‘To decrypt this particular code you need some more information. Here we have a telegram… Come, Section Chief Jin, you read it.’

  Jin Shenghuo picked up the message and read it out in a feeble voice.

  ‘Telegram from Nanjing:

  According to reliable intelligence, Zhou Enlai has already dispatched a special envoy, code-named K, to Hangzhou. At 11 p.m. on the 29th of this month he will meet with leaders of the resistance movement in Zhejiang province at the Agate Belvedere Inn on Mount Fenghuang to plot further joint guerrilla activities. This—’

  Commander Zhang cut him short. ‘That’s enough, Section Chief Jin. This isn’t the first time you have read that message, right?’

  Jin Shenghuo silently shook his head.

  5

  Jin Shenghuo had first read the message at about three o’clock the previous afternoon. The message had come in at half past two, when Gu Xiaomeng was on duty in the decryption office. She saw that it bore the very highest level of security, ‘top secret’, and immediately started to decipher it. She couldn’t do it. She just got a random string of characters. This was very intriguing, but it also made her nervous, so she went to ask Li Ningyu what she should do.

  Li Ningyu had worked as a cryptographer for a long time, she was extremely experienced, and whenever one of her subordinates had a telegram they couldn’t decipher, they would ask her for help. She looked at the telegram, looked at the string of characters Gu Xiaomeng had produced and realized that it must have been encrypted twice.

  As you will understand, messages in cypher are intended to be secret: in a plain telegram, when you see 1234 or abcd then it means 1234 or abcd; you go to your international code book and then transcribe the corresponding text. But in an encrypted message, when you see 1234 or a
bcd, that’s not at all what it means – it could be anything else, but not that. There are thousands, tens of thousands, millions, even countless possibilities. So how do you work it out? You need the key to the cypher. Without that, an encrypted message is impossible to read. But if you have the key, even an untrained operative can decipher it and read it off. It’s very simple, like looking for words in a dictionary – you check them off one at a time.

  When a message is top secret, however, yet another level of encryption is added at the final stage, in case the key is known to the enemy. Because this second level of encryption is added at the very last moment, it’s quite weak; for example, in the case of the numbers 0 to 9, or the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet, you might move one place or you might move several. In that case, 0 would actually represent 1, 1 would represent 2 and so on. Or 0 might represent 3, in which case 1 would actually be 4, and so forth. It’s very simple but can sometimes prove quite useful; on this occasion, Gu Xiaomeng had been floored by it. So if this message had fallen into the hands of a third party, even if they’d had the key to the cypher (having cracked it or because they’d stolen it), or if it had ended up with a novice cryptographer like Gu Xiaomeng, they might have been floored by it too.

  In such cases, a weak level of encryption suddenly becomes very important; it might even delude the enemy into imagining that a new cypher has been used. After all, when things go wrong, people tend to think of complicated explanations for it. This was not the case for Li Ningyu: first of all, she knew perfectly well that the same cypher was still in use, so she wasn’t going to make that mistake. Secondly, she’d seen plenty such messages before, so she worked through the possibilities and very quickly discovered how they’d done it, whereupon she began decrypting the telegram.

  Once the text had been written out in plain language, Gu Xiaomeng did as protocol required and handed it over to Section Chief Jin. He then passed it on to Commander Zhang. Which meant that before it reached the Commander, it had already passed through three people’s hands: Jin Shenghuo, Li Ningyu and Gu Xiaomeng. The three had already admitted as much.

  As his next question, Commander Zhang asked Jin Shenghuo, Li Ningyu and Gu Xiaomeng whether any of them had mentioned the contents of this top-secret message to anyone else between the time it was decrypted and the middle of the night when they were brought to the estate. In fact, he’d already asked each of them this the previous evening, on the phone. But this time his tone was much more searching.

  Section Chief Jin swore that he had not.

  Gu Xiaomeng also said very firmly that she had not.

  Li Ningyu glanced at Wu Zhiguo and then said with an embarrassed air, ‘I am very sorry, Chief of Staff Wu, but I feel I ought to tell the truth.’

  ‘What?’

  Li Ningyu said that she’d told Chief of Staff Wu about it.

  The Commander noted that they all repeated exactly what they’d said the night before on the phone, only this time with greater conviction. What he had not expected, however, was that when Li Ningyu spoke, Wu Zhiguo would spring up from his chair and shout at her in a thunderous voice, ‘When the hell did you mention it to me?’

  Commander Zhang asked Li Ningyu to be more specific. And did she have any witnesses?

  Li Ningyu said that yesterday afternoon, just after they’d finished decrypting the message and while Gu Xiaomeng was still in the office writing out the text for their superiors, Chief of Staff Wu had suddenly come in to look at some files. Since this was a top-secret telegram and nobody without the right security clearance was supposed to know what it said, Gu Xiaomeng was worried that he might read it, so she quickly covered the message with a newspaper.

  ‘I guess that made Chief of Staff Wu curious,’ Li Ningyu said. ‘He asked Gu Xiaomeng what the message was and why she was being so secretive about it. Gu Xiaomeng tried to make a joke of it. “You’d better go away,” she told him. “It’s top secret.” And he replied, also jokily, “I’m not going anywhere. I want to know what it says, and what are you going to do about it?” The two of them were just bantering, nothing serious. But when he’d finished reading through the papers that he’d come in for, he said he wanted to talk to me, so I took him to my office—’

  Again Wu Zhiguo leapt to his feet and shouted, ‘You’re lying! When have I ever set foot in your office?’

  Commander Zhang ordered him to sit down. ‘Let her speak, and then it will be your turn.’

  Li Ningyu continued in a calm voice, each word clearly articulated. ‘When we got to my office, he asked me what the telegram was about. I said I couldn’t tell him. He asked if it was about some new appointment or whether someone had been dismissed. I said no. He kept on at me, and in the end, although I knew that the rules said I shouldn’t tell him, I thought he’d have to know sooner or later anyway, seeing as he’s in charge of dealing with Communist activities, so I told him.’

  Wu Zhiguo was about to explode again, but he was pinned to his seat by a glare from Commander Zhang.

  Commander Zhang asked Gu Xiaomeng whether Li Ningyu had spoken the truth. She said she could vouch for the first part of Li Ningyu’s story, but as to whether Chief of Staff Wu had then gone into Li Ningyu’s office, she shook her head. ‘I have no idea. I can’t see round corners, so I don’t know where they went. I was focused on getting the message written out. Of course, if I’d realized that it was going to be important, I would have got up and had a look—’

  Commander Zhang quickly understood that Gu Xiaomeng was trying it on. ‘That’s enough!’ he said. ‘I get the picture.’ He turned to Wu Zhiguo. ‘Now it’s your turn. You say you didn’t go into her office, but is there someone who can corroborate that?’

  ‘Well…’ This was a problem for Wu Zhiguo. He had no witnesses, so he could only swear by this and that that he hadn’t gone anywhere near Li Ningyu’s office.

  Commander Zhang thumped the table impatiently. ‘She says you went to her office and you say that you didn’t – who am I to believe? If you don’t have any proof, I don’t want to hear it.’ He paused and clarified his thoughts. ‘Actually, it doesn’t matter either way – knowing what the message said isn’t what’s at issue here. Wouldn’t you agree, Colonel Hihara? You must have a pretty good idea of what happened, right?’

  Hihara smiled and nodded.

  ‘It’s this that’s the real problem.’ Commander Zhang took a packet of Pioneer cigarettes out of his briefcase and handed it to Colonel Hihara. ‘Police Chief Wang obtained this from a Communist agent, and there’s something very important indeed inside it.’

  There were a dozen cigarettes inside the packet. Hihara tipped them out, and then a single crushed cigarette rolled out from the bottom. He picked it up and stared at it as if he’d hit upon a great secret, then used the very tips of his fingers to gently extract a tiny ball of paper. Someone had taken the tobacco out of the cigarette and hidden a slip of paper inside.

  He uttered a very deliberate ‘Ah’ of surprise, and then said, ‘You’re quite right, this is very important.’ He unrolled the strip of paper and read it out:

  ‘Tell Tiger that 201’s special representative has been spotted. Call off the Gathering of Heroes.

  Ghost.

  For immediate dispatch.’

  When he’d finished, Colonel Hihara raised his head and looked straight at Commander Zhang. ‘Here we have another secret message.’

  ‘Let me explain,’ Commander Zhang said rather smugly. ‘This so-called “Tiger” is the head of the Communist underground here in Hangzhou; he’s the boss. We’ve been looking for him for the last two months, but he’s a slippery customer. We’ve nearly had him on more than one occasion, but he always manages to get away.’

  ‘How could he fail to get away?’ Colonel Hihara said. ‘Ghost was right by your side: even an idiot could have done it.’

  ‘Yes.’ Commander Zhang nodded. ‘“201” refers to Zhou Enlai. It’s a cypher used by the Communist headquarters up at Yan’an – there’
s a different number for each member of the Communist Party’s top brass. The Gathering of Heroes is the meeting on Mount Fenghuang.’ He snorted sarcastically. ‘A few insurgents get together and they call it a “Gathering of Heroes” – who the hell do they think they are?’

  Hihara laughed and then said with a sigh, ‘So we have a ghost in our midst. Someone inside the ECCC read the top-secret message from Nanjing and attempted to warn the insurgents of its contents.’ He very deliberately looked up, then with fake bonhomie addressed the four people in front of him. ‘Which one of you is Ghost? Wu, Jin, Gu and Li, which of you can it be?’ His voice was soft and slightly muffled, as if his mouth were watering.

  6

  The four reacted to this new twist in the drama as if they’d just woken from a dream. But this was a nightmare: the devil was among them and they didn’t even know where. Even worse, any one of them could at any moment find themselves the innocent scapegoat, sacrificed by the demon in their midst. They sat in silence, too scared to speak out, just looking at one another, hoping against hope that this might help them understand what was happening.

  Commander Zhang didn’t like this silence at all; he wanted them to start talking, either to confess or to denounce someone else. He tried offering inducements, and he also tried threats, but still nobody confessed, and nobody denounced anyone else.

  There was one person who wanted to make a denunciation, and that was Chief of Staff Wu Zhiguo. Later on, he consistently held to the view that Li Ningyu was Ghost. But right then, in that nightmarish situation, he just sat there stunned, unable to speak, the words frozen in his throat. The circumstances were too horrifying – everyone was petrified.

  They would have to wait, give everyone time to get over the shock.

  The silence was broken by the sound of hurrying footsteps coming closer; evidently someone had something urgent to report.

  It was the fat Staff Officer named Jiang. He whispered something in Commander Zhang’s ear. The latter got up from his chair, thumped the table violently, and shouted, ‘So you don’t want to speak! Well, when you have something to say, go and find Colonel Hihara. I don’t have any more time to waste on you.’ As he strode out of the room, he yelled, ‘I am sure that one of you is this Ghost. Until you tell me who it is, none of you are leaving this place. If you want to get out of here, tell me who Ghost is!’