Peter May - Chinese Whispers

In a very small voice, Lyang said, ‘A dead woman.’

There was an extraordinary moment when time seemed simply to stand still, and they were frozen motionless by her words. It was a moment that seemed to Li to last a lifetime. He had been gazing out over the city, watching cars and trucks and buses etch lines of coloured light into the night, and even they seemed to come to a halt. He turned finally. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s from Lynn Pan,’ Lyang whispered, and Li felt all the hairs on his arms and shoulders stand up.

They gathered around her computer. The highlighted e-mail was titled For Bill , and was timed and dated at 5.03 p.m. the previous day, less than two hours before her murder.

‘Well, open it, for God’s sake,’ Hart said, and Lyang double-clicked on the highlighted bar. The e-mail opened up full-screen.

From: ‘Lynn Pan’ ‹lpan2323@sina.com›

Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2003 17:03:00

To: ‘Lyang Hart’ ‹lhart@earthmother.com›

Subject: For Bill

Bill,

No time to explain. Couldn’t e-mail you at work in case of intercept. Only have Lyang’s home e-mail. Scared something might happen to me. If so visit my private folder on academy website. User name ‘lynn.pan’. Password ‘scribble’. If I’m okay when you get this, drop it in the trash. I’ll explain later.

Lynn

There was something disturbing about reading the last words set down by a person who had been murdered so soon afterwards. Someone who had known they were in danger, someone who feared the worst. Lyang turned towards Li. ‘Why would she be scared something might happen to her when she thought it was you she was going to meet?’

Li had no idea. ‘Maybe she thought she couldn’t trust me. Maybe she thought someone would get to her first.’

‘But why? What was she scared of?’

Li tipped his head toward the computer. ‘Maybe we’ll find the answer in the private folder she mentions in the e-mail.’ He looked at Hart. ‘Do you know what she’s talking about?’

Hart nodded. ‘Websites are just space on a computer somewhere that’s linked to the worldwide web. Usually there are public folders, which anyone on the internet can access, and there are private folders, which only you can access. Private storage space, really. Most educational institutions allocate private folder space to staff and students on their websites.’

‘So now that you’ve got her user name and password you could access her private folder from here?’

‘Afraid not. You need special software. An FTP client. I don’t have that at home.’

‘But you do at the academy?’ Hart nodded. ‘We’d better go there, then.’

Lyang said, ‘What about dinner?’

‘I just lost my appetite,’ Li said.

And as they headed downstairs to get their coats, Margaret said, ‘I guess this means we’re never going to find out how good a liar I am.’ But no one was listening.

They drove in silence through the canyon of light that was Changan Avenue, floodlit buildings rising like cliffs on either side. Past the Forbidden City where the ancient rulers of China once held court. Past the closed world of Zhongnanhai, where the present rulers of China lived in private villas around a glittering lake. Past the telegraph office, the Ministry of Commerce, the Minzu Palace. To the intersection at Muxidi where they turned off on to Sanlihi Road and into the shady side street where they parked in front of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. There were still lights on in most of the windows, night classes in progress, staff and students working late on research projects and theses.

Hart led them up the steps two at a time, and waved his ID card at the security man in the lobby, although it was hardly necessary. They took the elevator to the fourth floor and followed him down a long corridor to his office. He blinked in the harsh glare of the fluorescent strip lights as they flickered and hummed and spilled their ugly light into every dark corner. He rounded his cluttered desk and sat in front of his computer and switched it on. It whirred and creaked and hissed and started to load its operating system.

He sat back. ‘It’ll take a minute or two.’

They had barely spoken a word in the twenty minutes it had taken them to drive to the academy. Li felt almost brittle with tension. He had no idea what would be in Lynn Pan’s private internet folder, but he knew it would be key. He felt Margaret at his shoulder, and she gave his arm a gentle squeeze.

She said, ‘So what do people normally keep in their private web space?’

‘Mostly stuff you want to save for your eyes only,’ Hart said. ‘A lot of people are involved in confidential research. Most of the computers here are on a network. So much computing space is shared, it’s difficult to keep things private.’

His desktop screen had loaded now. He pulled down a menu and selected Connect , then went into a folder labelled Applications and double-clicked on something called Fetch . More screens unfolded and Hart opened up a Dialogue Box which prompted him to enter an FTP address, a user name and a password. He entered the FTP address for the academy’s website, then tapped in lynn.pan and scribble . Almost immediately they were looking at a screenful of icons representing folders that Pan had stored in her private space. ‘Jesus,’ Hart said. ‘What are we looking for here?’

‘There,’ Li pointed. It was a folder labelled MPS Demo, Mon. 10th . ‘Those must be the files from the MERMER demo she gave us yesterday afternoon.’

Hart clicked his mouse on the icon and held it down. The image turned into a silhouette, and he dragged it across the screen, out of the website window, and on to his desktop where he released it. The file immediately began copying from the Academy’s computer on to Hart’s desktop PC. It took less than a minute, after which he disconnected from the website and double-clicked on the folder he had downloaded. It opened up a window filled with more folders. Twelve in total. Six were labelled Graphs A, Graphs B, Graphs C , through to Graphs F . The remainder were classified Pics A through to Pics F .

‘What are they?’ Margaret asked.

‘At a guess,’ Hart said, ‘I’d say that the Graphs folders contain the graphs showing the brainwave activity of each of the Ministry people during their demo test yesterday. And the Pics folders probably contain the pictures each of them was shown to stimulate that activity.’

‘Who’s who?’ Li said.

‘No idea.’ Hart turned to look up at Li. ‘She must just have labelled you A through F instead of using names.’

‘But we could each be identified by the pictures we were shown,’ Li said. ‘There was personal stuff among them. I was shown photographs of my apartment building, my home town. I guess everyone else was shown theirs, too.’

‘Then you would know which graph belonged to which person,’ Margaret said.

‘Might take a while,’ Hart said. ‘You know, getting hold of that kind of information. The students who did the research might remember, but I’m guessing their notes were probably among the casualties of that burglary last night.’

‘Let’s have a look at some of the pics,’ Li said, and he leaned in as Hart double-clicked on one of the Pics folders

Its window opened up and Hart cursed. ‘Shit!’ The folder was empty. He went systematically through the other five. Empty. ‘What the hell …’

Lyang said, ‘Why would she upload six empty folders?’

‘Christ knows,’ Hart said. ‘She was probably in a hurry. Maybe the MERMER software puts the pics somewhere else when it’s running a demo and she never retrieved them. I just don’t know.’