Lynn Pan carried her own inner light with her, and she seemed to glow as she showed Li into the room. He noticed the way that she was always touching him, a hand on his shoulder, or on his arm as she guided him to a seat at the smaller desk. She then sat on the edge of his desk looking directly down on him, her legs stretched out and crossed in front of her, her calf grazing his. It made Li feel slightly uncomfortable for the first time. But it was not a feeling that lasted long. She fixed him with her eyes and her smile, and he had that mush sensation in his stomach again.
‘I hear it’s a big day for you today,’ she said, and he frowned, uncertain what she meant. ‘The People’s Award for Crime Fighting.’ And his face immediately coloured with embarrassment. But if she noticed, she gave no indication of it. ‘I would have loved to go,’ she said. ‘If I’d been invited. I’ve never been in the Great Hall.’
‘Be my guest,’ Li said.
‘Wow! Invited by the recipient.’
Li searched her face and her tone for some hint of sarcasm, but found none. She had that openness and innocence about her that was common to almost every American he had ever met. Except for Margaret. Her cynicism and sense of irony marked her out as very different from most of her fellow countrymen.
‘Hey, listen, if I can get out of here on time I’ll be there.’ Pan’s smile was radiant. ‘But I gotta process you guys first. Convince you I’m worth backing. Yeah?’
She stood up, suddenly businesslike, and lifted a primitive-looking headset from the desk. Wires trailed out of the back of it like a Chinese queue. It consisted of a broad blue headband made from some kind of stretchy material that fitted across the forehead and around the back of the head. Another band ran from front to back across the scalp, attached by Velcro strips at both ends. Electrodes, each with their own little sewn-in velcro pad, could be moved about on the inner surface of the bands. ‘To optimise the placing of the electrodes,’ Pan explained. ‘Everybody’s head is different.’ She spent some time fitting the headset to Li’s larger-than-average head, her small breasts stretching her blouse just above his eyeline. He tried not to let his eyes be drawn. But he could smell her perfume, feel her warmth, and there was something irresistibly intimate about her hands moving across his scalp, touching his face, his neck. Warm, soft skin against his.
She talked as she worked. ‘When I’ve fixed this, I’m going to give you a list of nine items. We call them targets, but that won’t mean anything to you right now. I’ll explain in more detail afterwards. Anyway, the list will describe things like a knife, a landmark in your home town, your apartment block. Afterwards, I’m going to show you a sequence of photographs on your computer screen, and when you see a picture of any one of those items on the target list, I want you to click the left-hand button on the computer mouse.’ She leaned across him toward the desk to pull the mouse toward them. ‘Take a look at it. I don’t know if you’re familiar with computers or not.’
‘Sure,’ Li said. He placed his hand over the mouse. It was divided in two at the finger-end, and each half could be clicked down separately. ‘The left-hand side for anything on the target list.’
‘And the right-hand side for everything else. So you click once for every image you see.’
Li shrugged. ‘Seems simple enough.’ He smiled. ‘So how do you know what apartment building I live in?’
She grinned. ‘We’ve done our homework, Mr. Li.’
‘If you’d wanted my address, you only had to ask.’
‘Perhaps, but I’m not sure your partner would have been too happy. She’s an American, isn’t she?’
Li raised an eyebrow. ‘You have done your homework.’
‘On all of you.’ She stood back and smiled at him ruefully. ‘Sorry to disappoint.’
She finished arranging his headgear, and then skipped around to the other desk and opened a beige folder with Li’s name marked on the front of it. She leaned over to hand him his target list and sat down at her computer to prime it for the first test. Li looked at the list. As Pan had said it would, it described nine items: a knife with a jewelled handle; the body of a man washed up on a beach; a woman’s dress with blood on it; a pair of leather gloves; a red car with a missing front fender; your apartment building; the statue of Mao Zedong in front of the provincial government building in your home town; a photograph of a crime scene in which two bodies are charred beyond recognition; the licence plate on your official car.
Li read it over a couple of times. He had no idea what any of it meant, or why he was going to be shown these things. Pan looked up from her computer screen, positioned so that she would be looking at Li in profile while he was looking at his monitor. ‘All set?’ she asked.
‘I guess,’ Li said. ‘Left-hand button for everything on this list, right-hand button for everything else.’
‘You got it.’ And then it was as if she flicked off a charm switch and became another person. Cool, focused, impersonal. ‘At the risk of making you conscious of it, I’m going to ask you to try to blink as seldom as possible when I am showing the images. All right?’
‘All right.’
‘Focus on the screen. The images will appear for only three-tenths of a second, so please concentrate. There will be three seconds between each image, but try to respond with the mouse button immediately. You will see a total of fifty-four images. It will take approximately three minutes. We’ll have a rest, and then we’ll start again.’
Li found himself inexplicably tense in anticipation of it and had to make himself consciously relax his grip on the mouse. He flicked a glance at the list, afraid he might have forgotten something on it.
‘Eyes on the screen please.’
His eyes jumped back to the screen and the sequence began. It was all so fast it was hard for him to think consciously about any of the images he saw. The red car with the missing fender, the bloody shirt on the drive at the crime scene, a Swiss army knife, an apartment block that meant nothing to him. It seemed like a long three minutes. He saw one of the pictures of the crime scene that Pan’s graduate had shown them, and the close-up of the man with the back of his head missing. He saw a grey Nissan car that he did not recognise, the statue of Mao from his home town, the murder weapon he had handled only half an hour earlier. There were images of an axe, a licence plate he did not know, a dress with blood on it, the bizarrely familiar pink and white of the police apartment block where he lived in Zhengyi Road.
And then it was over, and Pan was smiling at him, the charm switch flicked back to the on position. ‘Just relax, Li Yan,’ she said, suddenly informal again, familiar. He allowed himself to blink, and sat back in his chair. The concentration the test had required of him had left him feeling fatigued. And, as if reading his mind, she said, ‘It’s tiring, isn’t it?’
He nodded. ‘Are you going to tell me now how it works?’
‘Not yet. We’re not finished. I’m going to show you the same pictures again, although not in the same order. The computer will randomise them. But I need you to treat them in exactly the same way. Left-hand button for the targets, right-hand for everything else. Okay, you ready?’
In fact, they ran through the images another twice before she finally turned on her sweetest smile and told him it was all over. She came back around the desk and removed his headset. ‘How long will it take you to figure out whether I was one of those briefed on the crime or not?’ he asked.