In the Dark Read online
Mai Jia
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IN THE DARK
Contents
PRELUDE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
WIND LISTENERS
Blind Abing
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
WIND READERS
An Angel with Problems
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
THE SHADOW OF CHEN ERHU
Diary Excerpts: 25 March 1987
26 March
27 March
28 March
2 April
The Letter: Day One
Day Two
Day Three
Day Four
Day Five
Day Six
Day Seven
Two Old Letters
WIND-CATCHERS
A Vietnamese Ghost Story
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
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PENGUIN BOOKS
IN THE DARK
Mai Jia (the pseudonym of Jiang Benhu) is arguably the most successful writer in China today. His books are constant bestsellers, with total sales over three million copies. He is hailed as the forerunner of Chinese espionage fiction, and has created a unique genre that combines spycraft, code-breaking, crime, human drama, historical fiction, and metafiction. He has won almost every major award in China, including the highest literary honour – the Mao Dun Award.
PRELUDE
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1
Maybe one day you suddenly bump into an old friend that you have not seen for decades in the street, or maybe a total stranger suddenly becomes one of your very closest friends, and afterwards your life takes on a whole new direction, changing in unexpected ways. I reckon this is something that happens to everyone sooner or later. It happened to me. In fact, the origins of this book lie in just such an encounter.
2
My encounter was kind of interesting.
This all happened twelve years ago. In those days I was a young man, not even thirty years of age, and I was doing a very ordinary job at my work unit, whereby when I went on business trips I didn’t even get to fly. However, there was this one time when my boss went to Beijing to report to his senior managers. The report we had produced was nicely printed out and when my boss leafed through it he must have decided that I did not need to go in person. But then all of a sudden the senior managers changed their minds about what they wanted a report on and my boss started to panic; he demanded that I fly to Beijing immediately to produce a new report on the spot. That was how I got to fly for the first time in my life. Just as the poet says, ‘Availing myself of the possibilities of space’, I arrived in Beijing in less than two hours. My boss was only a junior manager so when he came to the airport to pick me up it was not just a matter of politeness; he also wanted me to ‘hit the ground running’. However, having just made my way out of the airport and said hello to the boss, two policemen walked across and stood between us. They didn’t ask any questions but demanded that I go with them. I asked why, and they said that I would find out when I went with them. They then started to drag me off. My wretched boss was in an even worse state than I was! He asked me what on earth was going on, but how was I to know? I was sure that them taking me away was some sort of mistake. The two policemen asked me my name, and I told them it was Mai Jia. My parents picked this name for me partly because they were not educated and partly out of humility; perhaps they were hoping that I would be a humble person. Mai Jia is a peasant’s name, really ordinary and everyday.
To return to my story, when the policemen heard my name they announced that it was indeed me that they wanted. This might seem completely unreasonable but in fact was not so, because someone had pointed me out to them and told them to arrest me. From that point of view they had made no mistake. Actually there were two men who had instructed the police to pick me up, and they had been sitting in the same row as me on the aeroplane. Hearing their private conversation I had realized that they came from the same town as me, and I felt as though I had suddenly arrived back at my far-distant home. Having noticed their familiar accents I started chatting to them. I had no idea that this short conversation would bring disaster down upon me, would bring these two policemen into my life, and would see me being arrested like a criminal.
The police were part of the airport security team and I actually have no idea whether or not they did have the right to arrest me. At the time the issue of jurisdiction did not seem all that important; what was much more crucial was how I was going to get out of this! The policemen took my boss and me into their office. This consisted of an inner and an outer room. The outer office wasn’t very big and when the four of us entered, it seemed even smaller. Once we had all sat down the policemen started questioning me: name, work unit, family, political persuasion, social position, and so on and so forth, as if all of a sudden I had become a suspect. Fortunately my boss was present and he kept reiterating that I was not some kind of criminal but a perfectly respectable Party cadre. As a result the interrogation really wasn’t too bad.
After that the police changed tack and started to ask me about what I had observed on board the plane. I really had no idea what to say. This was the very first time in my life that I had been on a plane, and my observations had been so many and various, so complex and confused that I did not know where to start. When I asked them what kind of thing they meant, the two policemen started interrogating me with a particular aim in mind; in fact the whole thing boiled down to a single question: What had I heard of the private conversation between the two men from my home town? Just at that moment I realized that the two men I had sat next to were no ordinary passengers and my current predicament had come about because I had overheard – or rather could understand – their discussion. They thought if they jabbered away in their thick regional dialect no one would understand a word they said, and so they had been discussing something secret as if there were no other people around them – in fact walls have ears and everything they said could have been noted down.
No wonder they were so worried.
No wonder this stray sheep had been rounded up.
To tell you the truth, I hadn’t heard them say anything special. To begin with
they had not been speaking in my regional dialect and I am not the kind of person who is driven to chat to passing strangers, besides which this was the first time I had ever been on a plane and I was really excited until I discovered that there was nothing special about it. Once the plane had actually taken off, I felt that there was nothing to it and just sat there, watching the television with the earphones on. It was only when I took the earphones off that I noticed they had switched to speaking in my regional dialect and once I had heard that, I felt like I had been joined by my family and immediately started chatting to them. I had absolutely no idea what they had been talking about before. I dare say this all sounded as though I was making it up, but I swear that I am telling the truth.
Actually, if you think about it, if I was up to something why would I have told them that we all came from the same place? And another thing, given that I was going to draw attention to myself in this way, why would I wait until they had been speaking for ages and then give myself away? Besides which, given that I introduced myself the moment that I noticed that they were speaking my dialect, is it likely that I would have heard anything important? Although there was no proof one way or the other, my assertion that I hadn’t heard what they were talking about won the day. My patient explanations and my boss’s praise resulted in the two policemen agreeing to let me go. However, they demanded that I swear that I would never tell anyone under any circumstances about what I had overheard, for it touched on issues of national security. Any failure to do so would have severe consequences. Of course I swore the oath, and that was the end of the matter.
3
How could that be the end of the matter?
Over the next few days, these events kept twisting through my mind like a snake, to the point where I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck rising. I could not imagine who those two men could be to possess such amazing powers and secrets that I was not allowed to hear even one word of their conversation. I knew something about the world, but this was a facet that I had never come across before, and, truth be told, it was more than a little scary. When I left the policemen’s office, the very first thing I did was to take the name cards that the two men had given me out of my pocket and tear them to bits; then I threw them in the bin. The first bin I found at the airport. Given that every bit of information printed on those name cards was wrong, you could say that they were rubbish right from the start. The reason I wanted to get rid of them so quickly was not just because it was pointless to keep them, but because I was hoping that by destroying them, I would also be preventing the two men from causing me any further trouble and the pair of them could go to hell! That was very important to me, because as an ordinary member of the public the last thing you want is to get into trouble with the authorities.
But I had a feeling that they would come and find me.
Sure enough, shortly after I got back from Beijing, they phoned me up (the address and telephone number that I had given them being perfectly genuine) and took turns in explaining themselves, asking about what had happened to me, apologizing and trying to cheer me up. They also very politely asked me if I would like to visit them. They said that their work unit was located not far from the county town, somewhere in the mountains. I had heard tell that there was a large work unit out in the valleys there, very mysterious, and that after they moved in no one from the town had ever been allowed to set foot in those mountains again and the original inhabitants had all been forced to move out. Given the circumstances, no one had a clue who these people could be. There were lots of stories though: some people said they were working on atomic weapons, some said it was a holiday residence for the members of the Central Committee of the CCP, some said the place belonged to the Ministry of National Security, and so on. If someone asks you to come and have a look at a top-secret work unit like that, most people would leap at the chance. However, since I was worried about the whole thing, there was no way that I was going to get involved lightly. It was because I had so many mental reservations that I kept stalling.
On the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, someone came to my house to find me and said that I was invited to dinner. I asked who it was, and the man said it was the director of his work unit. I asked again who that might be, and he said I would find out when I got there. Given that this was more or less what the police at the airport had said to me, I immediately realized that this must have something to do with the two mysterious men. When I got there, I found that I was right, but there were a number of other people present who also spoke my home dialect, some male and some female, some old and some young – about seven or eight in total. I discovered that this was a kind of reunion for people from my home town and that they had held such an event annually for the last five or six years, the only difference being that this time I had been invited along.
You could say that that was the origin of this book, and that afterwards one thing followed on smoothly from the next.
4
This book tells the story of Special Unit 701.
Seven is a strange number; it seems to have a black aura about it. Black is not the most beautiful of colours, but it is certainly not vulgar. It can be serious, secretive, brutal, aggressive, independent, mysterious, even mystical. To my knowledge there are many countries in the world whose national security organizations are connected with the number seven; Britain’s MI7 in the First World War, the seven main administrations of the Stasi in former East Germany, the seven intelligence agencies that advise the President of France, the seven directorates of the KGB in the former Soviet Union, the Japanese Unit 731, the United States Seventh Fleet, and so on. In China there was Special Unit 701, an intelligence-gathering organization modelled upon the seven directorates of the KGB, which was ‘special’ both in terms of its organization and its remit. In particular, it had three main divisions:
Intercepts
Cryptography
Covert Operations
The intercepts division was primarily responsible for detecting enemy communications, the cryptography division was in charge of decrypting ciphers, while the covert operations division was of course about undertaking operations in the field – that is, going out and spying upon people. Interception involves listening to unearthly sounds, to noiseless sounds, to secret sounds. Cryptography involves cracking codes, whereby you have to read runes and understand hieroglyphs. In covert operations you set off in disguise to venture into the tiger’s den, standing firm against the storm. Within the unit, everyone called the people working on intercepts ‘Wind Listeners’, while those working in cryptography were called ‘Wind Readers’, and the spies were called ‘Wind Catchers’. When you get right down to it, people who work in intelligence have to have a sense for which way the wind is blowing; it is just that the different divisions go about it in a different way.
Of the two mysterious men from my old home town, one was then the head of Unit 701, and his surname was Qian. To his face people called him Director Qian, but behind his back he was known as the Big Boss. The other man was a very experienced spy from the covert operations division, a man named Lü, who many years before had been part of the Communist Party underground in Nanjing. People called him ‘Old Potato’, meaning that he had been in the underground. Both had joined the Revolution before the Liberation, and with the passing of the years they were now the only ones of their generation left in Unit 701. Later on I got to know both of these men well, to the point where gradually I was able to become a special visitor to the Unit, and was allowed to wander round the mountain.
It was called Five Fingers Mountain, and from the name you can imagine how it was shaped – like the five fingers of a hand standing up from the plain. In between the peaks there were four valleys. The first valley was the nearest to the county seat, which was maybe only two or three kilometres from the mountain. There was a little village here, the houses clustered along the mountainside. Given that this valley was the broadest, the housing compounds fo
r Unit 701 had been constructed here, together with a hospital, school, shops, restaurants, guest house, playing field and so on. It was a complete little community, and although getting to meet the people there was a bit more complicated than usual, it was not that difficult to be able to come and go. Later on, when I was writing this book, I came to visit quite regularly and would stay at the guest house for days at a time. After a few such visits lots of people recognized me and since I always wore sunglasses (since the age of twenty-three, thanks to a condition that makes my right eye unusually sensitive to sunlight, I have always worn sunglasses when I am out of doors), everyone called me Specs.
The remaining three mountain valleys were much narrower and the difficulties of getting in increased the further you went. I was lucky enough to be able to visit the second valley three times and the third valley twice. The fourth and furthest valley I was never allowed to set foot in. My understanding is that this valley is where the cryptography unit was situated and that was the most security-sensitive area in the whole mountain. The covert operations division was based on the right-hand side of the second valley, with the training centre on the left; the bosses of both work units held the rank of deputy bureau chief. These two work units spread across the valley like a pair of wings, but the left-hand side was clearly much bigger than the right. Usually there were not many people from the covert operations division in residence, since they were all out in the field.
There were also two work units in the second valley: one was the intercepts division and the other the head office of Unit 701. The layout of these two work units was different from that of the covert operations division and the training centre, which had been built face-to-face, in that they had been built in a row – the head office of Unit 701 came first, then the intercepts division. The two work units shared the space between them, where they had put in a soccer pitch, a dining hall, a little clinic and so on.