The Ghost Shift
Page 22
The problem was the screws that fastened the board. Most were easy to take out; she slotted the bit into the star-shaped screw head and, as she applied torque, they lifted. But some were so stiff that the tool slipped, and she had to wrench it to make it turn. It made her hand ache and spoiled the screw, which she would then discard in a bin. When it was impossible to shift, she had to alert a supervisor, who took the tablet to a workstation near the line for a remedial crew to work on. It felt like a failure every time—she was mangling the job.
Mei cursed those who had made her job so hard, until she recalled that she’d been one of them, rushing to fix the thing together on the other line, not knowing that all her work was for nothing. The tablet would be loaded on a truck and taken to P-1 to be ripped apart again. It was her second morning on the line and, although the work was frustrating, it was less tiring than in the original Poppy facility. The pace was slower, and she had time to pause, even rub her feet between jobs. Many fewer tablets passed by. Things moved so slowly that she was able to look around the facility, staring into the rafters until a guard met her stare. Mei dropped her gaze to the wall that divided the building. She couldn’t see through it, but she heard the hum of machines.
It was then, standing at the line, that she noticed something. The workers in red who wheeled the trolleys full of trays passed through a sliding door to her rear about a hundred feet away. The door closed behind each one. But half an hour later, the same worker would return through another door, this one in the central wall behind her, to pick up another cart. The whole circuit took twenty minutes from exiting to entering again. After a while, she could predict exactly when the next one would arrive. They were in a permanent loop—taking a cart, delivering it, returning it empty.
Mei wanted to see where the sliding door led, but it was impossible from where she stood. She started to flex one leg as if suffering from a cramp and pace around between tasks. She slowly lengthened her circuit until she could peep through the door briefly as it opened into a long, curved hallway.
“Jia, are you ill?” The instructor’s voice boomed in her ear, making her jump.
“It’s just a pulled muscle.”
“Carry on, then. But you can always see the doctor. We take good care of our family.”
She fixed a smile on her face and caught the eye of Ling, who frowned, warning her of danger.
Supper was fish steamed in ginger, choi sum greens, and yellow bean tofu. Here, they could leave their dishes on the table, with plates unfinished and rice to spare, and the kitchen staff would collect them. Ling had been talking to a friend at another table, but as Mei finished her food, she came across.
“Let’s take an evening stroll. You haven’t seen everything.”
“I’ll come.” Shu rose from her seat.
“Please do,” Ling said, and Shu sat again, obeying the coded command.
Ling led her from the back of the building to the recreation field. It was empty—Mei hadn’t seen anyone playing sports on it since she’d arrived—and they stood out in the night. It was a thousand feet to the perimeter fence and, beneath the moon, she saw a dog leaping playfully as his guard led him along the fence. The guard’s flashlight swept the dark ground inside the fence.
“You’re curious,” Ling said.
“Am I?”
“That’s not good.” Ling took her arm. “They don’t like anyone to be so interested. Don’t worry, they can’t hear us here, I think. But you should be careful. He saw you looking.”
They were on a soccer field, its lines glistening in the moonlight. The outline of P-1 lay ahead—the assembly building and a smaller square attached to one side by two tubes. One of them must be the hallway she’d seen on the other side of the sliding door. They were windowless, but skylights glowed on their roofs.
“How long have you been here?”
“A year,” Ling said. “I’ll never get out.”
“Why don’t you go?”
“They won’t let us. If you ask, they say you’re disloyal. You’re putting your ego above the collective. We can’t speak to our families. They won’t allow us home for the New Year holiday.”
“Does nobody leave?”
“A few do. That’s a big deal. We have a party for them to celebrate. Wu Ning, the girl who was in our room before you? She did. She complained, and they let her leave. They made a cake.”
Ling smiled as if encouraged by the example—that she might be lucky. She didn’t know what had happened to Wu Ning, Mei realized. They were kept sealed away, not knowing that death was the only way out.
“Can’t you escape?” Mei pointed toward the border fence.
Ling’s eyelids fluttered. “Someone did.”
“When?”
“About a month ago. There was an alarm one night—the lights flashing and the sirens going. They came to our rooms and searched them. They wouldn’t say why, but I heard a girl had disappeared.”
Mei’s heart felt as if it had stopped and she heard herself breathing loudly in the night air. “Who was it?”
“A girl on the trolleys. She hadn’t been here long. I saw her a few times. She looked like you.” Ling’s voice was guileless.
“She got out?”
“That’s what they said.”
The lights were on in the dormitory building, and they stood on a wide-open space, exposed to view from all sides, encircled by fence. The only other buildings were the two that formed P-1. It was perfectly designed to encircle its occupants, with nowhere to hide. Mei turned in a circle, trying to see how Lizzie might have done it. The sniffer dog barked to her left and, as she looked toward it, she noticed one weakness—a tiny flaw.
“We should go,” Ling said.
As they walked, Mei thought of Lizzie. She imagined her sister out in this field, gazing around; on the assembly line, figuring out how to unlock P-1’s secrets and to take them with her. She’d suspected Lizzie of being foolish, of behaving recklessly to impress Lockhart, but now she saw how clever she had been. She’d had a plan, and it had almost worked.
It was eleven o’clock, nearing the end of the morning shift, when the girl who did the task opposite slipped away to the restroom, leaving Mei alone. She looked over her shoulder. The supervisor had drifted along the line to ensure that the flow of tablets would not be held up by a jam of trolleys. Mei had just taken both screws from the securing arm and placed it in the tray. There wouldn’t be a better moment.
She took the scalpel in her right hand and bent her shoulders so she could not be seen. Then she placed her left hand against the tablet and, with a swift, deep stroke, slashed the tips of three fingers. Blood spurted, covering the tablet, and she reeled away from the line, clutching her wrist and crying in pain. This part she didn’t have to pretend: It hurt like hell. She’d tried a light slash—the most blood for the least injury—but she’d cut down to the bone.
There was a commotion, and a klaxon sounded as the line halted. Ling rang to her and wrapped a cloth around her hand, but the blood would not stop. The white cloth turned red and blood dripped down her uniform. A supervisor brought a chair and she sat, shaking and feeling faint.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so stupid.”
“How did it happen?” Ling asked.
“I looked the wrong way as I cut.”
A gurney came, pushed by two nurses. They strapped her hand and helped her onto it, then wheeled her the length of the line, with the workers gazing at her as she went. She lay facing up, observing the ceiling of the factory. Even the guards on the walkway peered at her. In the medical room, near Dr. He’s office, a doctor placed strips on the cuts and bandaged up each finger separately. She was given a tetanus shot, a painkiller, and, finally, a cup of Longjing tea. It was the most efficient emergency care she’d experienced in her life.
Mei was dozing when the instructor came.
“Jia! The last person I’d expect to have such an accident on the line. You are always precise.” He sat by the
gurney, bending forward to look at her bandaged fingers.
“I’m upset to have let you down. I don’t know what happened. I feel so ashamed of myself.”
“You mustn’t. Cao Fu says in his book: ‘If someone attacks us, we strike him harder. If they are troubled, we help them.’ What did I tell you on the day you arrived? Love comes first at Long Tan. You will rest until you are recovered. Only then will you need to work again.”
“But I feel terrible lying here. Even if I cannot work on the line, I want to contribute. There must be other things I can do, without using these fingers.” She paused. “I could push the trolleys, like some of the others do. That wouldn’t hurt. Allow me to do that.”
The instructor’s face split into a grin. “Jiang Jia, I congratulate you. You have the unbending spirit that exists inside the truest of our workers. Yes! If the doctor agrees, tomorrow we will find you a new job.”
He stalked out again. Mei put her head back in the sunlight and nodded when the nurse asked if she wanted more tea. It was a gilded cage, full of rewards for those who remained obedient.
The caretaker had shuffled off, and Lockhart was reading the final chapter of Deng Xiaoping’s biography. He felt restless and impatient, but all he could do was wait. He could not even walk out into the alley, for fear of being noticed. Feng had driven him to the building in the early morning a few days before, with a suitcase of clothes, a couple of books, and some sheets for the bed. Since then, the farthest he had walked was between the bedroom and the toilet. The courtyard prevented anyone from looking in.
This silence gave him the same feeling he’d experienced before—the dread of what was happening inside, with no ability to control it. He wondered how he could cope if it happened again. She wasn’t his daughter, but he’d grown attached to her, and he admired her bravery. If he could have shielded her, he would have done it, but Lizzie’s death had proved to him that he was neither as powerful nor as lucky as he’d imagined. He felt fragile, a vessel that could break.
Since Feng’s last visit, he’d received a few cryptic emails—they were making progress, there might be something to see soon—but nothing that showed she really trusted him. Sedgwick was impatient for information, and Henry Martin’s temper was fraying. He was in limbo, with nothing to do but hope that Mei could succeed where Lizzie had failed.
He heard steps on the stairwell and a knock on the door.
“Okay, I’ve got something,” Feng said, as he opened it. She had a suede messenger bag slung over one shoulder and carried two cups of coffee from the Internet café in the alley.
“Come in,” he said to her back, as she walked past him and dumped her bag on his desk.
“I shouldn’t show you. I shouldn’t even tell you I’m not showing you.” Feng removed a laptop from her bag and placed it on the desk. It was the latest Poppy—a fifteen-inch, high-resolution screen that glowed with information. She pulled up an Ethernet cable and plugged it in.
“Nice gear,” Lockhart said.
“What download speed are you getting?”
“Sixty-five megabits. Pretty fast.”
“That should work. Comcast will catch up sometime next century. Wait there, would you? National security.”
He watched from the corner as she made a connection and entered a series of codes. She opened a window: a satellite view of the Long Tan complex, showing the buildings from above.
“That’s terrific, but I can use Google.”
“Come closer.”
Lockhart stood behind Feng as she zoomed in, making it larger and more precise than any satellite view. He could see a line of trucks next to what looked like an aircraft hangar. Then, as he tried to make sense of the image, one of the trucks moved. It drove along the side of the building and then reversed so that its rear door was close.
“Shit. This thing’s live.”
Feng said nothing, but shifted the magnification higher. Lockhart saw a pale square extend from the rear of the truck and two red dots move slowly around it. He couldn’t believe the evidence of his eyes. He was watching people.
“Chengdu Pterosaur drone, at forty thousand feet. This is advanced Chinese technology. The images are clear, aren’t they?”
“Almost as good as a Predator.”
“We watch people from the sky, like the CIA. The difference is, we don’t blow them up. It’s more harmonious.”
“What is this?”
“It’s part of the complex, in the northeast quadrant, away from the rest. There are two buildings with a fence a little less than a mile in diameter. One entrance here. Trucks go in and out in the day, loading and unloading. Building P-1, Building P-2. Mei is in there. This is the ghost shift.”
Feng pulled the magnification back to a panorama of the complex. It was eleven-thirty in the morning, and clusters of red dots spilled from one of the buildings onto a green expanse. The glossy line of the fence encircled them, and two trucks were lined up at the entry point. From aloft, without sound to go with the images, it was peaceful.
“Can you go closer?”
Feng enlarged the image until it filled the screen. The camera was pointing down on a barnlike building, with two tubes extending from it to a square structure a hundred feet away. Both tubes were bent in the middle: It looked like the larger building was embracing the smaller one.
“What’s that?”
“That’s P-1.”
“Why is it divided like that?”
“Don’t know. This is the dormitory. She must be sleeping there.” Feng moved the image to P-2, and they looked at it in silence for two minutes. The red dots swarmed it like an ant’s nest.
“You’re full of surprises,” Lockhart said, leaning on the desk. “I didn’t know the MSS had drones. I thought that was the PLA.”
“The CIA had them, and we got jealous. There was turf warfare, but we struck a deal. Does it matter? I’m lending it to you, which is nice of me. You can watch this all night. Remember, you get a fine view until the weather turns bad. Then all you’ll see is clouds.”
After she left, Lockhart sat at the desk, mesmerized by the images. He moved the camera from one building to another, then along the perimeter fence, watching the dots and wondering which one was Mei.
As Mei stacked the cart with trays, the cut on one finger opened and blood oozed through her bandage. The nurse had fitted a new one after breakfast, strapping her fingers together and placing a mitten over them, which made her look like a white-gloved traffic cop. The bandage turned pink, but the color didn’t get darker. She was safe for now, and she returned to stacking the trays. Wedging the left side of each into her palm, she took the weight with her right hand to avoid injuring herself more. The trays weren’t heavy—the parts of each tablet, extracted on the line, weighed no more in pieces than when she’d held it in the Poppy store. Two nights before, they had shown the workers a video of Martin onstage in San Francisco, showing off the latest devices, with the instructor leading the applause.
Mei looked at the supervisor, to check if it was okay to move, and he waved her forward. The worker in front was passing through the doors. She followed, crossing the floor and glancing above her to the guards. Nobody seemed to be watching—she had regained her status as an invisible cog in the Long Tan machine. She maneuvered the cart around a corner at the edge of the building, using her hips to keep it in line, then the doors slid open ahead of her and she passed out of the hangar.
She was in the walkway now. It had a low ceiling, with glass panels in the roof that filled it with light. Mei’s sneakers squeaked on the concrete floor as she shoved the cart. The boy ahead was out of sight and she couldn’t hear anyone behind her. She was alone in the tube for a minute before another door loomed, sliding back to admit her to the other building.
Her first sight was a tall kid in jeans and a T-shirt, who stood at the door with a handheld scanner attached to a tablet. Smiling, he scanned the codes on each tray, then checked his tablet to ensure that each had register
ed. He grinned again, holding her gaze as if he would like to know her better, and waved her along a trail marked in green paint. As she moved forward, Mei looked around. She was in the smaller building she’d seen from the field.
A hundred feet ahead, a conveyor belt ran along the first floor, where two workers loaded it with trays, then snaked in an S-shape up to a mezzanine. That floor was filled with workstations staffed by pairs of employees. One half of each was a programmer, dressed like the boy who’d greeted Mei at the door. Mei saw one—a woman with a mop of hair—tracing lines of figures on a screen, then breaking off to tap a Poppy tablet. The other half of each pair was a technician, wearing safety glasses. This one took a long metal probe and bent over the workstation. Mei couldn’t quite see what he doing, but his safety glasses reflected an intense, flickering light. It was the same pattern at each station: a programmer and a technician, lines of data and the blue-white pulse of something being soldered.
Then it made sense. She didn’t have to see what they were doing—she knew. It explained the ghost shift, why the tablets were being taken apart, how one had arrived in Washington with a chip inside that nobody recognized. This was where they made the rogue tablets.
Mei was gazing so intently that she almost bumped her cart as she reached her spot. She parked it by a worker who unstacked the trays, putting them on the belt that carried them toward the mezzanine. This part of her job was complete—the path beneath her feet switched to a painted line of footsteps to the left of the conveyor belt. Mei followed and entered a hallway, emerging at the end of the building.