“This is copied from a soap opera?”
“Yes. Your man either likes to make jokes or doesn’t know Chinese well and got this from some Internet search. It might fool the police, but no, we wouldn’t leave a note like that.” He chuckles at the thought and then spits on the ground.
“Maybe it was just a fake to confuse the police.” She chooses her words carefully. “Or maybe it was done by one gang to sic the police onto the others. The police also found a phone, probably used by the killer, in a Chinatown Dumpster. I know there are several Asian massage parlors in Quincy, so maybe this girl was too much competition. Are you sure you don’t know anything about this?”
Luo flips through the other photographs of Mona. Ruth watches him, getting ready to react to any sudden movements. She thinks she can trust Luo, but one can’t always predict the reaction of a man who often has to kill to make his living.
She concentrates on the Regulator, priming it to release adrenaline to quicken her movements if necessary. The pneumatics in her legs are charged, and she braces her back against the damp wall, in case she needs to kick out. The sudden release of pressure in the air canisters installed next to her tibia will straighten her legs in a fraction of a second, generating hundreds of pounds of force. If her feet connect with Luo’s chest, she will almost certainly break a few ribs—though Ruth’s back will ache for days afterward, as well.
“I like you, Ruth,” Luo says, noting her sudden stillness out of the corner of his eyes. “You don’t have to be afraid. I haven’t forgotten how you found that bookie who tried to steal from me. I’ll always tell you the truth or tell you I can’t answer. We have nothing to do with this girl. She’s not really competition. The men who go to massage parlors for sixty dollars an hour and a happy ending are not the kind who’d pay for a girl like this.”
? ? ?
The Watcher drives to Somerville, just over the border from Cambridge, north of Boston. He parks in the back of a grocery store parking lot, where his Toyota Corolla, bought with cash off a lot, doesn’t stick out.
Then he goes into a coffee shop and emerges with an iced coffee. Sipping it, he walks around the sunny streets, gazing from time to time at the little gizmo attached to his key chain. The gizmo tells him when he’s in range of some unsecured home wireless network. Lots of students from Harvard and MIT live here, where the rent is high but not astronomical. Addicted to good wireless access, they often get powerful routers for tiny apartments and leak the network onto the streets without bothering to secure them (after all, they have friends coming over all the time who need to remain connected). And since it’s summer, when the population of students is in flux, there’s even less likelihood that he can be traced from using one of their networks.
It’s probably overkill, but he likes to be safe.
He sits down on a bench by the side of the street, takes out his laptop, and connects to a network called “INFORMATION_WANTS_TO_BE_FREE.” He enjoys disproving the network owner’s theory. Information doesn’t want to be free. It’s valuable and wants to earn. And its existence doesn’t free anyone; possessing it, however, can do the opposite.
The Watcher carefully selects a segment of video and watches it one last time.
Jasmine had done a good job, intentionally or not, with the framing, and the man’s sweaty grimace is featured prominently in the video. His movements—and as a result, Jasmine’s—made the video jerky, and so he’s had to apply software image stabilization. But now it looks quite professional.
The Watcher had tried to identify the man, who looks Chinese, by uploading a picture he got from Jasmine into a search engine. They are always making advancements in facial recognition software, and sometimes he gets hits this way. But it didn’t seem to work this time. That’s not a problem for the Watcher. He has other techniques.
The Watcher signs on to a forum where the expat Chinese congregate to reminisce and argue politics in their homeland. He posts the picture of the man in the video and writes below in English, “Anyone famous?” ?Then he sips his coffee and refreshes the screen from time to time to catch the new replies.
The Watcher doesn’t read Chinese (or Russian, or Arabic, or Hindi, or any of the other languages where he plies his trade), but linguistic skills are hardly necessary for this task. Most of the expats speak English and can understand his question. He’s just using these people as research tools, a human flesh-powered, crowdsourced search engine. It’s almost funny how people are so willing to give perfect strangers over the Internet information, would even compete with each other to do it, to show how knowledgeable they are. He’s pleased to make use of such petty vanities.
He simply needs a name and a measure of the prominence of the man, and for that, the crude translations offered by computers are sufficient.
From the almost-gibberish translations, he gathers that the man is a prominent official in the Chinese Transport Ministry, and like almost all Chinese officials, he’s despised by his countrymen. The man is a bigger deal than the Watcher’s usual targets, but that might make him a good demonstration.
The Watcher is thankful for Dagger, who had explained Chinese politics to him. One evening, after he had gotten out of jail the last time, the Watcher had hung back and watched a Chinese man rob a few Chinese tourists near San Francisco’s Chinatown.
The tourists had managed to make a call to 911, and the robber had fled the scene on foot down an alley. But the Watcher had seen something in the man’s direct, simple approach that he liked. He drove around the block, stopped by the other end of the alley, and when the man emerged, he swung open the passenger-side door and offered him a chance to escape in his car. The man thanked him and told him his name was Dagger.
Dagger was talkative and told the Watcher how angry and envious people in China were of the Party officials, who lived an extravagant life on the money squeezed from the common people, took bribes, and funneled public funds to their relatives. He targeted those tourists who he thought were the officials’ wives and children and regarded himself as a modern-day Robin Hood.
Yet, the officials were not completely immune. All it took was a public scandal of some kind, usually involving young women who were not their wives. Talk of democracy didn’t get people excited, but seeing an official rubbing their graft in their faces made them see red. And the Party apparatus would have no choice but to punish the disgraced officials, as the only thing the Party feared was public anger, which always threatened to boil out of control. If a revolution were to come to China, Dagger quipped, it would be triggered by mistresses, not speeches.
A light had gone on in the Watcher’s head then. It was as if he could see the reins of power flowing from those who had secrets to those who knew secrets. He thanked Dagger and dropped him off, wishing him well.
The Watcher imagines what the official’s visit to Boston had been like. He had probably come to learn about the city’s experience with light rail, but it was likely in reality just another state-funded vacation, a chance to shop at the luxury stores on Newbury Street, to enjoy expensive foods without fear of poison or pollution, and to anonymously take delight in quality female companionship without the threat of recording devices in the hands of an interested populace.
He posts the video to the forum, and as an extra flourish, adds a link to the official’s biography on the Transport Ministry’s website. For a second, he regrets the forgone revenue, but it’s been a while since he’s done a demonstration, and these are necessary to keep the business going.
He packs up his laptop. Now, he has to wait.