Page 52 of Soul on Fire
“My friend, you will be remembered for a thousand years. Now, no more calls. It is too risky, and we have come too far to fail. You have what you need for your mission. I will see you on the other side. Goodbye, my brother.”
The line cut.
* * *
Chapter Twenty
En Route to Beijing, China
Emily’s laptophard drive was partitioned and secured with a password that took an hour to brute force through it. Bai was in the air, three hours from Beijing, when he broke in.
Once, interrogators used to have to spend days breaking someone down, whittling their defenses away and splicing their weaknesses apart until someone was too weak to resist any longer. To turn someone against themselves was a talent many could learn, but only a few could turn into an art. Bai remembered those days.
So much simpler now. A person—especially from the younger generations—lived in their electronics. Because of that, they could never erase their shadow or their ghost, not as long as their digital life existed. He didn’t need to break a person down over days anymore. He only needed to break into their digital life.
He couldn’t interrogate Emily’s corpse, but he could uncover what she’d been up to. It would all unfold before him in her hard drive.
Emails, both professional and personal. She’d emailed her mother every day. The two were close and Emily called her mother her best friend when she wrote to her. “Hello Best Friend!” She had a dating profile and match alerts were still arriving in her inbox.Mark has swiped for you! You haven’t checked out his profile yet!
There were drafts of articles for theNew York Times, too. Reports from sources she’d used, businessmen and politicians’ staffers. Contact information for her sources, some of whom were nicely connected in Washington DC. She’d been assigned to the political desk, working her way up the ladder by reporting on domestic policy, on the kinds of stories that were inside the fold, buried on page six.
Here and there, she’d reported on Chinese-American issues, but only when it impacted domestic policy. Trade tariffs and imports, the shifting labor markets.
There was nothing threatening he could see. Bai frowned. Perhaps he was mistaken about her death. He wasn’t usually. That feeling he’d learned to listen to had told him to look into her. But…
Maybe a mugging truly was just a mugging. Wrong place, wrong time.
It was better to have investigated. Always better to know everything. Secrets were the death of the people. To investigate the problem, Mao said, was to solve it. Nothing stayed hidden forever.
He was charged with protecting the state and countering foreign intelligence operations. His last assignment was in Tibet, and before that, investigating students at a Beijing university who were suspected of being American intelligence operatives attempting to work on Chinese scientific research projects as graduate interns.
Emily’s murder had come across the cables as he perused the country’s collected crime reports. Foreign operators left trails behind them, no matter how small: vandalism, robbery, missing persons. Occasionally, unexplained deaths or obvious homicides. He’d learned to check the unusual circumstances and dig for more. A break-in might just be a robbery, but not when the victim was the mistress of a high placed Party official.
A young woman—an American reporter for theNew York Times—dying in Guangzhou might be a terrible accident, or it might have been purposeful. Targeted.
He remembered Mrs. Wu’s face, her valiant efforts to hold her grief inside. To be strong in the face of her loss and not crack in front of a Party Officer. Emily’s death was not a good death. She would be buried far from her family, and there would be few who visited her grave to remember her. Her soul had been taken from her body at the wrong moment, and there would be nothing but sorrows for the Wu family ahead. Still, Mrs. Wu had done what she could. He’d spotted the burnt offerings of paper beneath Emily’s photos.
A tragedy for both mother and daughter: a young woman visiting her mother and falling victim to a random crime. Deeply saddening, but not a problem for the state. He shut her laptop and leaned back, watching out the window of the government plane taking him back to Beijing. Clouds drifted through the wings, slicing apart and wisping back together again when they’d passed. All things moved on. Everything continued. Mrs. Wu would find her peace eventually. In time.
The case should have resolved itself in his mind. Once he’d understood the crime and had satisfied himself of all possibilities for the motive and the means, the whys and hows and what fors, he was content. He moved on. There were always more investigations.
Questions bubbled up in his brain, breaking the surface of his calm thoughts.
His gaze slid back to Emily’s laptop.
Who were the two figures in black who’d thrown her body into the river, captured on CCTV? Why did her mother, the person Emily seemed closest to in her life, not know where Emily was going that evening? Why had Emily slipped out of the house after her mother had gone to sleep?
He lifted the lid on her laptop, fingers running down the hard plastic case. Bright pink with bubbles playfully rising from one corner. He’d have glanced once at Emily and never again if he’d seen her in the streets or working at coffee shop. From her photos and her emails and her clothing, all the way to her laptop case, she projected nothing but sweetness, an almost shy charm. She’d been as beautiful as she was smart, a deadly combination. Mark would have fallen head over heels for her.
Back to her hard drive. He pulled up the drive specs and checked the partitions. She had one and a half terabytes in her laptop, an unusually large drive for a small laptop.
The partitions didn’t add up.
He could see both drives now. The public one, filled with her digital life: social media, email, dating profiles, photos of her cat and New York City alongside articles on American education reform and healthcare and government spending. And, he could see the encrypted one with her contacts and her private emails back and forth to those who were known as her ‘unnamed sources’ in interviews.
Added together, the two drives should have equaled one and a half terabytes in space. They were short by fifty gigs.
There was another partition, a hidden one beneath the encrypted partition.
