‘And has our hero cracked the case yet?’ Beijing Police Commissioner Zhu Gan’s use of the word hero was laden with sarcasm. He was a tall, lean man with rimless glasses who viewed Li through them with patent dislike. He was not one of Li’s champions, and had made clear to him on numerous occasions his distaste for the award ceremony scheduled for the Great Hall of the People that evening. In his view it was, he had told Li, a dangerous return to the cult of personality. Li might have agreed with him, had he been allowed. But in almost the same breath Commissioner Zhu had told him that since the edict had come from the Minister himself, neither of them was in a position to raise objections.
‘What developments, Li?’ The slight build of the older man who sat sandwiched between the procurator general and the deputy minister in no way reflected his status. As director general of the Political Department, Yan Bo pulled plenty of clout. Li recognised him but had not had any previous dealings with him.
Li looked at the faces expectantly awaiting his response. He did not feel that this was the occasion to share with them the news that their killer was modelling himself on Jack the Ripper. Nor did he feel like explaining that the reason for his failure to change into uniform was that he had been unavoidably detained by lunch. ‘I’ve just come from an interview with the dead girl’s mother,’ he said. Which was not entirely untrue. But he wondered if it would have passed Hart’s polygraph test.
‘She’s the fourth, isn’t she?’ said Deputy Cao taking another pull on his cigarette.
‘That’s right,’ Li said. ‘And probably the worst case of mutilation I’ve seen. Not only did he hack her face to pieces, but he cut her open and made off with her uterus and her left kidney.’ His words conjured images for them that they would, perhaps, have preferred not to envisage so soon after lunch, and they were greeted with silence. Li added, ‘I could have done without being here at all this afternoon.’
Commissioner Zhu said dismissively, ‘I’m sure your team can manage without you for a few hours, Section Chief.’
The door from an inner office opened, and an attractive young woman in her early thirties emerged into the meeting room cradling an armful of folders. Her hair was cut short, spiky on top, and she wore a man’s suit — Armani, Li thought — black pinstriped, over a white open-necked blouse. She had a radiant smile which she turned on the room. ‘Gentlemen,’ she said, ‘I am so glad you could make it this afternoon. My name’s Lynn Pan, and have I got a show for you.’
She looked Chinese, but everything else about her was American. Even her heavily accented Chinese. Li immediately sensed a rise in the testosterone level in the room. She had spoken only a couple of dozen words, but already she had these middle-aged senior officers from the Ministry eating out of her hand. They were on their feet in an instant.
She laid down her folders and went round each of them individually, shaking their hands, presenting them with her business card and her winning smile, receiving theirs in return. She arrived at Li last, and he wondered if he imagined that she held his hand just a little longer, that her gaze fixed his just a little more warmly. Her eyes were a rich, dark brown with a deep inner light, and they turned Li’s stomach to mush.
‘Gentlemen, please be seated.’ They sat in their various chairs around the room, and she drew up an office chair on wheels and positioned herself so that she could see them all. She let her gaze wander around the assembled faces, and they almost held their breath waiting for her to speak. Finally she said, ‘You know, there’s one thing that every criminal takes with him from a crime scene. Can you think what that is?’
There was a moment’s silence, then Li said, ‘His memory of what happened.’
Professor Pan turned a brilliant smile on him. ‘You’re absolutely right, Section Chief Li.’ He felt like the star pupil in the class, and the teacher had even remembered his name. ‘It’s like a video recording in his head, and there’s nothing he can do to erase it.’ She looked around the other faces. ‘Usually we search a crime scene for traces of what a criminal has left behind. Fingerprints. DNA. Fibres. All useful in identifying the perpetrator. But what if we don’t find anything? Well, if we have a suspect, we can always look inside his head. Because if he’s guilty, the crime scene will have left an indelible print in his brain. Impossible, you might say.’ She flashed her winning smile once again. ‘Not any more. Because MERMER lets us do just that — look inside someone’s mind and detect knowledge. Replay that video, read that indelible imprint.’ She paused. ‘We call it brain fingerprinting, and we have the technology.’
It had a nice ring to it, Li thought. Brain fingerprinting. It wasn’t about collecting evidence left at the scene by the criminal; it was about reading the print the crime had left in the culprit’s brain.
‘Now, I don’t want to get technical about it,’ the professor said, ‘because it’s a highly complex piece of science. But the essence of it is this: if you are shown something that you recognise, there is a unique electrical response in your brain. It doesn’t matter if you deny recognising that something or not. Your brain’s response is always the same. You have absolutely no control over it. And you know what?’ They all waited eagerly to know what. ‘We can read that response. We attach sensors to your head, entirely noninvasive, and plug you into our computer, and we will know what you know and what you don’t.’ She waved her hand airily toward the ceiling. ‘Which is as much good news for the innocent as it is bad news for the guilty. Because we can rule you out, just as certainly as we can rule you in.’
She stood up and clasped her hands and seemed for a moment transported to another place. She began walking slowly around the room as if addressing students in a lecture room. ‘We call that unique electrical response a MERMER. It’s an acronym. It doesn’t work in Chinese, so there’s no point in me trying to explain. It’s just what we call it. I learned about MERMER from its inventor, who was my professor at university in the United States. Doctor Larry Farwell. A very smart man. Smart enough to recognise that I was smart enough to invest his time in. And now here I am, back in the land of my ancestors, developing a uniquely Chinese version of the process that could revolutionise criminal investigation in the People’s Republic. In every test carried out to date it has proven one hundred percent successful.’ She spun around to face them, eyes wide. ‘But I don’t want you to take my word for it. I want to prove it to you. Because we need your support for the funding that will make this process available to every criminal investigation department in the country.’
It was a very slick and persuasive presentation, and she had been in the room for less than ten minutes. There wasn’t one of the senior law enforcement officers present who didn’t want to believe her.
‘I’m going to demonstrate just how effective MERMER is by subjecting you to a test that I developed for work with my students,’ she said. ‘My assistant and a team of graduates will prepare you for it. You will be split into two groups of three. One group will be briefed on a specific criminal scenario, the other will not. I will be unaware which of you is in which group. But afterwards, when I test you, your brain will provide the answer for me. And I won’t need to ask you a single question. All you will have to do is look at some photographic images on a computer screen while I monitor your brain’s response. And the reason it’s foolproof?’ She held out open palms and smiled, as if it was simplicity itself. ‘Your brain just can’t lie.’