‘Interesting,’ said Jericho. ‘And how are the holographic tour guides coming along?’
‘Ah!’ Tu wiped the corner of his mouth clean with a serviette, one which had clearly had to assist with several other mealtimes too. ‘You had a visitor.’
‘Yes, I had a visitor.’
‘And?’
‘Your friend is terribly sad. What happened to him?’
‘I told you. He ate bitterness.’
‘And beyond that it’s none of my business, I get the picture. So let’s talk about his daughter.’
‘Yoyo!’ Tu stroked his hand over his stomach. ‘Be honest now, isn’t she sensational?’
‘Without a doubt.’
Jericho was intrigued as to whether Tu would talk about the girl on a public phone line. It was true that all telephone conversations were recorded by the authorities, but in reality the observation apparatus rarely followed up on the analysis, even though sophisticated programs pre-selected the recordings. As early as the end of the previous century, within the context of their worldwide Ecelon Program, American Secret Services had introduced software which was able to recognise key words, with the result that you could be arrested just for mentioning the word ice-bomb three times in succession when planning Grandma’s birthday party. Modern programs by contrast were, to a certain extent, perfectly able to understand the meaning of the conversation and create priority lists. But they were still incapable of recognising irony. Humour and double-meanings were alien to them, which forced the spies themselves to listen in, just like in the old times, as soon as words like dissident or Tiananmen massacre came up. As expected, Tu merely said:
‘And now you want a date with the girl, right?’
Jericho grinned cheerlessly. He knew it. There were going to be difficulties.
‘If it can be arranged.’
‘Well, she has such high standards,’ said Tu craftily. ‘Perhaps I should give you a few useful pieces of advice, my dear boy. Will you be in the area in the next few hours at all?’
‘I have things to do in Bund. I should be free later.’
‘Excellent! Take the ferry. The weather’s lovely, let’s meet in Lujiazui Green.’
Pudong
Lujiazui Green was a picturesque park surrounded by skyscrapers, not far from Jin Mao Tower and the WFC. Tu sat on a bench on the bank of the small lake, basking in the sun. As usual, he was wearing sunglasses over his normal glasses. His crumpled shirt had worked its way almost entirely out of his waistband and was straining at the buttons. Patches of his white belly peeped through the gaps. Jericho sat down next to him and stretched out his legs.
‘Yoyo is a dissident,’ he said.
Tu turned his head round to him lethargically. His eyes couldn’t be seen behind the crooked construction of glasses and sunglasses.
‘I thought you would have picked that up from our conversation on the golf course.’
‘That’s not what I mean. What I mean is that the case is a little different to my normal ones. This time I’m supposed to look for a dissident in order to protect her.’
‘A former dissident.’
‘Her father sees that differently. Why would Yoyo have gone underground, if not out of fear? Unless she’s been arrested. You said yourself that she has a tendency to aggravate the wrong people. Perhaps she crossed someone who was a little too big for her.’
‘And what are you planning to do?’
‘You know exactly what I’m going to do,’ snorted Jericho. ‘I’m going to look for Yoyo of course.’
Tu nodded. ‘That’s very generous of you.’
‘No, it goes without saying. The only snag is that I’ll have to work without the authorities this time. So I need any information there is about Yoyo and her world, and that’s where I’m relying on your help. My impression of Chen Hongbing was that he’s extremely honourable and incredibly private. Perhaps he just turns a blind eye; in any case, getting information from him was like trying to get blood from a stone.’
‘What did he tell you?’
‘He gave me Yoyo’s new address. A few films and photos. And dropped a whole load of hints.’
Fumbling, Tu took the sunglasses down from his nose and tried to push the remaining glasses into a reasonably straight position. Jericho noticed that he hadn’t been mistaken: the left arm really was bound with sticky-tape. He wondered, not for the first time, why Tu didn’t get his eyes lasered or switch to photochromic contact lenses. Hardly anyone wore glasses for the purpose of improving their eyesight any more. They were just eking out an existence as fashion items, and fashion was as alien to Tu Tian as the atomic age was to a Neanderthal.
They were silent for a while. Jericho blinked in the sunlight and watched an aeroplane pass by.
‘So’ said Tu. ‘Ask your questions.’
‘There’s nothing to ask. Tell me something about Yoyo that I don’t know yet.’
‘She’s actually called Yuyun—’
‘Chen told me that much.’
‘—and belongs to a group who call themselves Guardians. I bet he didn’t tell you that, right?’
‘Guardians.’ Jericho whistled softly through his teeth.
‘You’ve heard of them?’
‘I sure have. Internet guerrillas. Dedicated to human rights, raising the profile of old stories like Tiananmen, attacks on government and industry networks. They’re really putting the wind up the Party.’
‘And they’re right to be nervous. Guardians are of a completely different calibre to our sweet little Titanium Mouse.’
Liu Di, the woman who called herself Titanium Mouse, was one of the pioneers of internet dissidence. At the start of the millennium she had begun to publish edgy little commentaries online about the political elite, initially under the pseudonym of Stainless Steel Mouse. Realising that it wasn’t as easy to imprison virtual people as it was those of flesh and blood, Beijing’s leadership began to get very nervous. These dissidents showed presence, without being present.
The head of the Beijing secret police remarked that the new threat gave cause for extreme concern and that an enemy without a face was the worst kind, a conclusion that grossly overestimated the first generation of net dissidents – most didn’t even contemplate disguising their identity, and even the ones who did made other mistakes sooner or later.
The Stainless Steel Mouse, for example, had walked right into their trap when she assured the founder of a new democratic party of her support, not knowing it was an official assigned to her case. As a result of which she was dragged off to a police station and imprisoned for a year without trial. After that, however, the Party learned their next lesson: that it may be possible to make people disappear behind walls, but not on the internet. There, Liu Di’s case gained significance, made the rounds in China and attracted the attention of the foreign media. Suddenly, the whole world was aware of this shy, twenty-one-year-old woman, who hadn’t even meant any of it that seriously. And that turned out to be the powerful, faceless enemy the Party had cowered so fearfully from.
After her release, Liu Di upgraded from steel to a stronger metal. Titanium Mouse had learned something. She declared war on an apparatus that Mao couldn’t have thought up in his wildest dreams: Cypol, the Chinese Internet Police. She routed internet forums via servers abroad and created her blogs with the help of programs that filtered out incriminating words as she wrote. Others followed her example, became increasingly sophisticated in their methods, and by then the Party really did have cause to worry. While veterans like Titanium Mouse made no secret of their true identity, Guardians were haunting the net like phantoms. Tracking them down would have required ingenious traps, and although Beijing kept setting them, so far no one had been caught.