It looked as though Geoff wanted to say something more then decided against it. His image froze for an instant then disintegrated into pixels then the nothingness of digital nowhereness.
There were a few beats of profound silence in the room. Finally Chen spoke, “Shall I retrieve the phone, sir?”
Fong looked at this odd country cop with the potato-like facial features. “Do you understand . . . ”
“ . . . what I’m doing? Yes. Shall I retrieve the cell phone?”
“No, Captain Chen. I’ll do that. I want you to figure out how to put a bug into it. I’ll make that contact and deliver the phone but I want to be able to follow wherever that thing goes.”
“Why?”
No “sir” again. “Because what Mr. Hyland was doing might have something to do with who murdered him. This is not a political case to me. This is a murder investigation, Captain Chen.”
Chen nodded but didn’t move.
“What, Chen?”
“We don’t carry that kind of electronic equipment in our section of the department. We’ll need to requisition it from central stores. Other people will know we’re up to something.” Then, to Fong’s surprise, Chen smiled.
“Chen?”
“This could be one of those situations that could prove to be a problem or an opportunity, couldn’t it, sir?”
Fong smiled then nodded in agreement.
Fong felt the icky warm wetness soak through the knees of his pants as he knelt facing the filthy toilet of the second stall in the men’s room at the old theatre. He held his breath as he reached behind the toilet tank and, with the tips of his fingers, located the cell phone taped there. “Why do Long Noses take ideas from movies!” he hissed and let out the rest of the air in his lungs. He took in a short sharp breath. He’d smelled worse but at the moment he couldn’t recall where. With his cheek pressed hard against the underside of the toilet seat he finally managed to get his left hand far enough behind the toilet tank and, with one mighty yank, ripped the cell phone free of its bonds.
Geoff had used some kind of wide grey sticky tape to adhere the phone to the tank. Fong looked at the tape. He’d never seen anything like it. He unstuck it from itself and marvelled at it. It would have so many uses! But then it must be so expensive, so wasteful, so Western.
As he left the stall he slid the cell phone with the wireless Internet connection into his pant pocket and wondered what to do with the tape. Then he wondered about Westerners and their love of movies. He remembered an old joke during the Vietnam-war era. It seemed that an American president, Johnson he believed, announced at a public gathering that he had seen a movie called Patton and it had inspired him to invade Cambodia. The joke was: here was the first time in history that a war was based on a movie not a movie based on a war.
Joan’s arrival in Shanghai was somewhat less high profile than the first time she had come to the great city. Then she’d landed at Hong Qiao International Airport only to be detained by an overzealous immigration officer. She’d been saved from that indignity by the arrival of Wu Fan-zi who, for ten days and nights, became her reason to live. This time, with what appeared to be just a filthy bundle on her back, she trudged the last 9 miles along the side of a busy highway in the morning darkness surrounded by thousands of peasants. Hidden in her filthy bundle was US$25,000 and four sets of fake ID and passports – part of what was needed to get Xi Luan Tu out of Shanghai and to the West.
Back in his office with the cell phone safely in his pocket, Fong activated Geoff’s CD-ROM. He fast-forwarded through the lists and copied the names, numbers and code words with their meanings onto a pad. Then he hit the Eject button and removed the CDROM from the computer.
A milky morning light was just peeping over the horizon. Another day of heat clearly lay ahead. He called in Chen.
“Sir?”
“When I played this CD-ROM, did the computer copy it?”
“Copy it, sir? Oh, you mean back it up.”
“I guess. Did it?”
Chen sat at the machine. Two clicks and a scroll down later and he gave Fong the bad news. “The machine is set up with an auto backup. And it takes cookies as well. Not all the digital material may have been burnt onto the hard drive but some of it probably was.”
“Burnt means copied, right?”
“Right.”
“And cookies?”
“Cues to the computer as to how to find material that is stored on the drive. The term is American and I’m told refers to pieces of pastry left behind so children can find their way out of the woods.”
Fong nodded. For a moment he wondered why the children would use cookies to mark their path out of the woods. Wouldn’t animals eat the cookies? Then he wondered why he was wondering about stuff like this. He looked at Chen. The man was waiting for instructions. Okay. But destroying evidence was even more of a crime than having evidence and not reporting it. Fong would save Chen the problem if he knew how to destroy the CD-ROM and the hard drive – but he didn’t know how to safely get rid of either.
“Do you want the copy erased, sir?”
“Is that possible?”
Chen’s face took on a funny look. Fong had no idea what that look might mean.
“Well, Captain Chen?”
“You want to be certain there is no copy on the hard drive, right, sir?”
“Yes, Chen. That’s what I want.”
Chen reached into his pant pocket and took out a penknife. He tilted the computer to expose the screws in the back. “You understand what this means, Captain Chen?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.” He undid the screws with a remarkable dexterity. Then, removing the case he snapped out the hard drive.
“That’s the hard drive, right?”
“Yes it is,” he said holding it out to show Fong. “Now give me the original CD-ROM.” Fong hesitated. “You want there to be no trace of this, don’t you, sir?”
Fong nodded.
“Then I need to destroy the CD-ROM along with the hard drive.” Chen’s hand was still extended toward Fong.
Fong wanted to protect Chen from committing the offence of destroying evidence but he didn’t know how. Then it occurred to Fong that once he gave over the CD-ROM and the hard drive Chen would have all the evidence he’d need to really hurt him.
Fong trusted Chen. But now it was not just his future he was handing over to this ugly country police captain whom he had first met on far-off Lake Ching, on the lake boat with the seventeen dead foreigners, and who now lived with his ex-wife Lily – it was the lives of all the people implicated by the material on that disk.