by Reece Hirsch
Chris picked up his bags and waited in the customs line. It was probably his imagination, but the customs agent seemed to examine his passport for an inordinately long time. Chris wondered once again whether he might be on some watch list, but he was allowed to pass.
He boarded the green-and-orange-striped Maglev Train, which ran downtown. The Maglev was the fastest passenger vehicle in the world that was not a plane. The German-built train traveled the eighteen miles from Pudong Airport to Shanghai in less than eight minutes while “magnetically levitated.”
As the train accelerated and he felt the g-force in the pit of his stomach, a digital counter displayed the speed in miles and kilometers per hour. A few minutes into the brief trip, the counter hit a peak of 267 miles per hour. No sooner had the train reached that velocity than it was decelerating into the terminus. Chris wondered whether it made sense to run such a fast train over such a short distance, but he sensed that a larger point was being made, something about China’s modernity and new leadership on the world stage.
As he rode in a taxi from the bullet train terminus to the hotel, rain began to fall, and the roads and shop windows took on a lurid sheen under the streetlights. Chris realized that he recognized this place. This was the Shanghai in which William Gibson had grounded his cyberpunk novels. It was also the urban landscape of Blade Runner.
Chris arrived at the Park Hyatt and checked into his room, which was so tiny and black lacquered that it reminded him of a jewel box. The international flight had left him tired but jittery, so he decided to have a drink in the bar to help him sleep. He was going to need to have his wits about him tomorrow.
The hotel bar was on the ninety-first floor and displayed a dizzying panorama of nighttime Shanghai. Below, he saw the futuristic towers of the Pudong district and the Huangpu River. All the tables at the windows were taken, so he grabbed a seat at the long bar and ordered a Maker’s Mark. He gazed up at the high ceiling, which rose through the ninety-third floor. It was a grand room, but all he really wanted at the moment was a drink to take the edge off.
Two seats down from him sat a Chinese man in a sport coat and slacks with the tired, open-faced look of a salesman, nursing a beer and half watching a soundless soccer game on the bar’s television.
After Chris’s drink arrived, the man turned and said, “Wăn shàng hăo—Good evening. American?”
“Yes,” said Chris. “Is it that obvious? No one ever guesses Canadian.”
“More Americans doing business over here. The odds were with me.”
Chris returned to his drink, but the man wanted to talk.
“May I?” he asked, motioning to the stool between them.
Chris paused. “Sure,” he said, already looking for the bartender to see how quickly he could settle his tab.
The man lifted his glass and said, “Gān bēi!” “Dry the cup!”—a traditional Shanghai toast.
Chris lifted his drink and took a swallow. “Your English is good. Wish I could say the same about my Mandarin.”
“You speak Mandarin?”
“I represented a US tech company doing business in China for many years and decided I needed to learn the language. But let’s stick to English. I’m a little out of practice.”
“Certainly. My name’s Jingguo Lok.”
“Chris Bruen.”
“What brings you to Shanghai, Chris?”
“Business. I’m an attorney.” It was a relief to have a cover story that was largely true.
“What sort of attorney?”
“Corporate.” If he said he was a privacy attorney, it would be too much of a red flag.
“Here to take part in the great economic renaissance?”
“Something like that.”
“What part of the United States are you from, Chris?”
“San Francisco. California.”
“I’ve never been there, but it sounds beautiful. Golden Gate Bridge. Transamerica Pyramid. Tony Bennett.”
“It is beautiful. Sometimes we forget that.”
“Do you have a business card?”
Chris made a show of fishing in his pockets. “No, I don’t seem to have one with me.”
“It’s no problem, since it’s just me, but Chinese businessmen consider that to be poor form. You should always have your card with you. Here’s mine.”
Lok slid a business card along the bar.
“I’ll remember that.” Chris was beginning to wonder who this fellow was. “So what line of work are you in, Jingguo?”
“Import/export.”
“That’s pretty broad.”
“Well, the details are not very interesting. I’m a distributor selling plastic bathroom items to Walmart—soap dishes, soap dispensers, toothbrush cups.”
Chris laughed. “You’re right. That’s not very interesting. But I could say the same about my job. Have you ever been to Bentonville?”
Lok stared back at him with a blank look.
“Bentonville, Arkansas,” Chris repeated, “Walmart’s corporate headquarters.”
“Oh, of course. No, never been there.”
A suspicion began to bloom in the back of his mind that the man might be affiliated with the government or the PLA. Even if he had never visited Bentonville, Chris thought that anyone whose livelihood was dependent upon Walmart would know where they were based.
“So what kind of work are you doing on this trip?” asked Lok, apparently anxious to change the subject.
“Well, I do mergers and acquisitions, but I can’t really say much more. Attorney-client privilege and all that.”
“I understand completely. Your clients rely upon your discretion. You can’t just share information like that with a salesman that you meet in a hotel bar. Especially one who’s had a few too many.” His voice rose a few decibels, as if he might be taking offense.
“If you’ve had too many, you don’t show it.”
“A salesman who can’t hold his liquor isn’t going to make many sales.” He paused. “It’s funny, though. I deal with quite a few lawyers in my work, and you don’t strike me as one of those slick deal lawyers.” Lok paused. “I see you as more of a regulatory guy.”
The conversation had started to make Chris uneasy. He had a strong sense now that the man knew who he was and why he was there. “Nope. M&A.”
“I guess my radar is off.”
“I’m afraid so.” Chris conspicuously checked his watch. “You know, I just got off an international flight, and it’s finally hitting me. I’m going to have to get some sleep.”
“You sure you won’t have one more? I’m buying.”
“Thank you, but I think that’s it for me.”
Chris settled his tab and slid off the barstool. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Jingguo.”
Lok took another sip of his beer and nodded. “Good luck with your deal, Chris. But can I give you one last bit of advice about doing business in China?”
“Sure.”
“Local custom is important here. It’s very easy to make a mistake that you don’t even understand is a mistake. And here in China, there is always someone watching.”
“Who’s watching?”
Jingguo stopped smiling. “That depends on what you’re doing. But someone will be watching. Count on it.”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
Chris felt Lok’s eyes on him as he crossed the bar, past the rain-streaked windows smearing the lights of the towers of Pudong. When Chris glanced back to confirm his suspicion, Lok caught his gaze and raised his glass.
Back in his room, Chris stretched out on the bed, eyes wide open. He no longer felt like he would be able to sleep.
5
Chris had the taxi drop him two blocks away, then walked down Datong Road toward the presumed headquarters of Unit 61398. The rain had stopped falli
ng, but the pavement was wet and the sky overcast. He wondered how much his drinking companion from the night before, Jingguo Lok, actually knew about him and his assignment. He wondered if his arrival at Datong Road was expected.
It was 10:00 a.m., and there was no foot traffic in the area, a street of modern office buildings behind iron gates and concrete walls. Chris felt exposed walking toward the white office tower. He crossed to the opposite sidewalk and quickened his pace, trying to look like someone with someplace to be.
This was going to be even more difficult than he had expected. There was no easy vantage point that he could use to stake out the building, no coffee shops, no stores. As he approached the building at Datong Road 208, he saw that there were two soldiers posted at a guard station by the gate. They would probably take notice of him if he loitered on the street for long. The fact that he was the only Westerner in sight didn’t help.
Chris walked a block past the building to a bus stop with a bench. He sat as if waiting for a bus and studied the eight-story building. It was estimated to house two thousand workers. There were pipes visible at the rear of the structure that might be generator exhausts. Making a show of examining his smartphone, Chris surreptitiously snapped several photos of the building and its surroundings.
He didn’t see a large parking structure, so it was likely that a decent number of the employees took public transportation home. That would offer his best opportunity to learn more about the workings of the unit.
Chris thought he noticed one of the soldiers at the gate glance his way. He could not stay there much longer. If they decided to come over and question him, his mission would be over before it had begun.
Fortunately, at that moment a bus rumbled down the road toward him, stopping with a hiss and squeal of pneumatic brakes. Chris climbed on board and rode to the next stop. He walked in the direction of the Pudong commercial district, breathing easier the farther he got from Datong Road. He had already formulated his plan, but he had a few hours to kill before he could put it into play.
Chris walked until he reached the Bund waterfront, Shanghai’s most famous landmark, centered around Zhongshan East No. 1 Road. Zhongshan was a broad street flanked on one side by the Huangpu River and on the other by a series of grandiose hotels and former bank buildings that dated to the colonial era. Across the river were the futuristic, Lego-like spheres and towers of Pudong’s skyline.
Chris strolled the broad promenade along the river side of the Bund, looking down from the embankment at a procession of barges and the smooth, slate-green waters of the Huangpu. When the rain returned, he moved indoors, spending the next few hours exploring the imposing colonial-era buildings, drinking coffee, and watching pedestrians milling on the Bund.
By late afternoon Chris had exhausted the sightseeing possibilities, so he wandered into the Shanghai Club Building, now the Waldorf Astoria hotel, for a drink. The columned, baroque building had once been the principal men’s club for British residents of Shanghai. There was a time when gaining admission had required membership in a certain social strata and a certain race.
In the early 1800s, Western merchants seeking to correct a trade imbalance with China were looking for something that the Chinese craved the way Londoners craved tea—and they found it in opium. The British traders began smuggling opium into China, developing what became an avid market. The British argued that the Chinese ruling dynasty, the Qing, were stifling free trade by barring Western commerce. The Qing countered that the British were unscrupulously getting their citizens hooked on a dangerous narcotic. The so-called Opium War broke out when tensions finally boiled over into a battle that the British won. The Treaty of Nanjing gave the British a self-governing settlement in Shanghai, and this room at the former Shanghai Club had been the epicenter of the colonial outpost. Chris knew that the trade war between China and the West had never really ended, but now it was being fought with hackers and malware rather than muskets and gunboats.
Chris grabbed a seat at the famous Long Bar, an L-shaped bar of unpolished mahogany that stretched endlessly across a room that seemed to extend the length of the hotel, with ceiling fans revolving languidly overhead. Noël Coward was said to have laid his cheek on the bar and noted that he could see the curvature of the earth. Chris sipped a Tsingtao beer, read the New York Times, and waited as the afternoon evaporated as slowly as the beads of sweat on his glass.
At a quarter to five, Chris boarded the sputtering bus back to Datong Road, arriving at the bus stop at 4:55. According to Zoey’s research, a large segment of Unit 61398’s workforce maintained banker’s hours, leaving the building at 5:00 p.m. sharp. He took a seat and once again made a show of concentrating on his smartphone while he snapped more photos of the facility. He was going to see what this hacker army looked like.
At five on the nose, the gates opened, and cars began to emerge, along with a sea of people headed purposefully for his bus stop. Everyone wanted to get there first so that they could be on the first bus home. Chris snapped as many photos as he could of the license plates of the passing cars and the employees power walking toward him. Then the bus stop was engulfed by a swarm of young Chinese men and women, most in their mid- to late twenties and dressed in business casual. If Zapper had a slightly more conservative dress code, this group could have been the young coders getting off work at Paul Saperstein’s Menlo Park campus.
As Chris boarded the crowded bus, he faced a decision. He had to figure out who was the most important member of the unit on the bus. He had no doubt that the more senior managers had cars and would not be riding public transportation. Nevertheless, he had to work with what he had.
You could tell a lot about a workplace by the demeanor of its employees. If the Datong Road operation was run by the People’s Liberation Army, Chris expected that it would be a grim and authoritarian place, but if that was the case you wouldn’t know it by the chattering, laughing young hackers who filled the bus. As far as he could tell, their jobs seemed to make them happy.
There was one young man in a black North Face jacket who cracked a lot of jokes. More importantly, he was getting polite laughs, which meant that he had some influence. Genuine laughs meant that he actually had a good sense of humor. Obligatory chuckles indicated respect for whatever degree of power he possessed. Not enough to drive a luxury car to work certainly, but sufficient to command attention here. An up-and-comer. Chris decided that he had found his high-value target.
The bus chugged out of the commercial district and into a residential area full of shoddy, student-quality apartment buildings. The young man in the black jacket rose and exited the bus. Chris got out after him.
Chris followed the hacker at a discreet distance through a backstreet that seemed to have been largely cobbled together from sheets of fiberglass and cinder blocks. At close range, China’s growth was messy and improvisational. The apartment buildings, leaning precariously over the street, looked as if they could collapse on top of him at any moment. Chris suspected that if he returned to this street a month later, it would look radically different.
He passed a stall with live ducks and chickens, a small electronics store, and a stand selling freshly made pancakes and fried bread. Vines groped out of a vacant lot, trying in vain to reclaim the street. The buildings were a patchwork of colors, none of them attractive—cream, brown, and gray, with many of the windows in the newer buildings tinted a deep blue.
Chris’s target stopped at some sort of convenience store and emerged with a plastic bag, then continued on. He never looked back once and didn’t seem to suspect that he was being followed.
Farther into this neighborhood, the street remained paved, but the sidewalks were a work in progress, some blocks of concrete cracked and others missing entirely. The neighborhood smelled of wet sawdust, trash, and cooking. Chris felt nearly as conspicuous on this crowded backstreet as he had in the empty business district of Datong Road. He found no other
Westerners in sight.
The man in the black jacket walked up the steps of a three-story apartment building that appeared marginally nicer than those around it. A moment later he pulled back the curtains of a third-floor window. Chris snapped a couple of photos.
It wasn’t much, but now he had something—the identity, or at least the face and address, of someone who appeared to occupy a position of some responsibility in Unit 61398. Lacking a better strategy, Chris decided to observe the man for a while and see what happened.
Chris found a food stall within sight of the apartment building and took a seat at a tiny table with uneven legs. He and the proprietor, a small, gnarled man, reached a tacit accommodation. Chris was allowed to remain there as long as he kept buying Cokes and orders of fried bread. When he couldn’t eat any more, he began feeding his portions to a couple of mangy dogs that prowled the street. They were suspicious of him at first but soon seemed to reach the conclusion that he was the best thing ever, this fried bread–dispensing yang guǐzi (“foreign devil”).
Night fell, and the street life took on a different rhythm. Blue-collar workers headed to work the night shifts at factories. Small groups of young men staggered drunkenly over the uneven pavement. More scraggly dogs arrived to eat his fried bread.
Chris sat there long enough for the incongruousness of his situation to fully sink in. He was a successful, respected partner in a major American law firm, and yet here he was essentially playing private detective on a backstreet in Shanghai, risking imprisonment by the Chinese government. It was not lost on Chris that he was pursuing supremely techno-savvy criminals using investigatory techniques that could have been employed by Sam Spade.
And what was he doing it for? To help Paul Saperstein and Zapper maintain their stock price and market share? Chris wasn’t one to walk away from a challenge or let down a client, but he realized that he would probably be facing a decision point soon, and he wanted to know in advance what he would do when he reached it. He could already tell that there would come a time when pursuing this assignment would put either his life or his freedom in jeopardy. He decided in that moment that, no matter how well Zapper paid him, he wasn’t going to risk everything for them. No matter what the Supreme Court said, corporations were not people, and he wouldn’t put his life on the line for one. After all, if he was locked away in a Chinese prison, he knew that Zapper would probably deny he was working for them. To do otherwise would create an international incident.