Stanley Johnson: Kompromat

Jang Ling-Go called to his assistant through the open door. ‘Please ask Shao Wei-Lu to come and see me.’

Minutes later, a young Chinese woman entered the room. ‘What’s the story on the Shengle Farm tiger?’ Jang Ling-Go asked. ‘Are the rangers tracking it?’

‘They are,’ the young woman replied. ‘As a matter of fact, we know precisely which tiger we are dealing with. It’s already in the database. It came over from Russia three days ago, stopped two days ago at Shengle Farm where it killed two goats, and now appears to be heading back to the forest.’

Shao Wei-Lu opened her laptop. They gazed at the screen. ‘See that pulsating dot? That’s our tiger. He’s about ten miles from the river. Hasn’t moved for the last several hours. Probably digesting his lunch.’

‘Send a message to call off the patrol. Tell the villagers to go back to their homes,’ Jang Ling-Go ordered. ‘That tiger may have killed a goat or two. I don’t care. Our job here is to demonstrate that the Amur tiger is as safe on our side of the border as it is on the Russian side.’

Jang Ling-Go mopped his brow. The last thing he wanted at this point in time was a dead Amur tiger on his hands.

Shao Wei-Lu was still tapping away at her laptop. Jang was amazed at her dexterity. Though he was far from being an expert himself, he recognized that a combination of camera trapping and telemonitoring had transformed wildlife biology. Nowadays, judiciously placed camera traps recorded animal movements whenever the sensors picked up movement, with the findings being transmitted via orbiting satellites in real time to the control centre.

‘What are you looking for now?’ Jang Ling-Go asked.

‘I’ve just run the ID programme. Correlating the data from the camera traps with the known moments of the tiger, I’ve discovered that we are indeed dealing with a large male here, just as the rangers suspected. Looking at the record, this particular male – No. 127 in our database – appears to spend most of its time in Russia, but crosses over into China about once a month. The tiger, of course, doesn’t know he’s crossing into China.’

‘Don’t be so sure of that,’ Jang Ling-Go said. ‘The animals I’ve met have a pretty good idea of where it’s safe to go and where it isn’t.’

‘Hello. This is odd.’ Shao Wei-Lu seemed surprised.

‘What’s the problem?’

‘There’s an anomaly here,’ Shao replied. ‘We manage the database in common with our Russian colleagues. It’s one of the exemplary areas of Russia–China cooperation. Our Russian colleagues recently reported that President Popov had personally darted a tiger as part of their ongoing field programs.’

‘So?’ Jang didn’t see what Shao was getting at.

‘Did you see the video of the tiger President Popov darted the other day?’

‘Of course I did. It was on all the news channels. Khabarovsk is virtually our local station, if you don’t mind watching the news in Russian. I still don’t see what you’re trying to say.’

Shao Wei-Lu took her time. She sensed that her superior was in a tense frame of mind that morning, to say the least.

‘Look, sir.’ She added the ‘sir’ as a sign of respect. ‘This ID programme is very effective. Every tiger in the world has a different set of stripes. Feed a picture of a tiger into the computer and the computer will tell you if the tiger is already on the database and, if it isn’t, it will create a record for that tiger which can be updated as further sightings come in.

‘So what did I do?’ she continued. ‘I’ll tell you what I did. The tiger ID programme can work with moving images as well as still photos. A moving image is simply a sequence of still photos run at speed, isn’t it? The programme just picks up individual frames. And what do you think the computer told us when I ran the video of the tiger they put out on the news? Shall I run the clip again?’

Shao Wei-Lu clicked on the clip from Russia television’s evening news bulletin, which showed President Popov confronting a large tiger, rifle in hand. Then she tapped another key. ‘I’ve just activated the “analyse and identify” programme. Give it a few seconds and it will come up with the answer. This is a worldwide system. We use it for other wild tiger populations, the Royal Bengal tiger, for example, in India and Bangladesh. If the tiger is not already on the database, it will say so. But it is, isn’t it? Look. Here comes the answer.’

“ Tiger, large male, approximately seven years old. Already in database since 18.08.2014 as Amur 127 .”

‘So do you see why I’m puzzled?’ Shao Wei-Lu continued. ‘Do you see why I think there’s an anomaly here? That tiger wasn’t darted by President Popov . It’s been in the system since August 2014.’ She pressed another key. ‘We can see where that animal has been over the last three years. Right up to the time, a day or two ago, it swam across the Ussuri River and entered Chinese territory. So why did President Popov dart that particular animal, since it was already in the system?’

‘Maybe the Russians didn’t know the animal was already in the system? Surely that could be the explanation?’

‘It could be an explanation,’ Shao Wei-Lu conceded, ‘but I doubt it. Generally the rangers know their animals. They know which ones are already in the system. If they don’t know they usually have time to check. They’ve all got hand-held computers, not much bigger than your mobile phone. As long as they have some kind of a visual reference, they can check the database. Anyway, if President Popov had darted the tiger, we’d have a double signal, as the second micro-transmitter begins to function, but there’s no such signal. Instead, we see our tiger bound away from the site of the kill, as though he has been startled or surprised. He makes a rapid loop or two.’ She tapped the screen to indicate the tiger’s movements. ‘Then he quietens down and heads for the border, and a couple of days ago he swims across the river.’

‘Oh, my lord!’ Jang suddenly realized the full implication of what Shao was suggesting. ‘You mean Popov never darted the tiger at all? Maybe they realized that tiger had already been collared, so they let it go. Then why all the pictures on TV of the president with his rifle?’

Shao Wei-Lu thought long and hard before replying. She knew she was getting into deep water. Way above her pay-grade.

But she, as a loyal cadre, felt she had a duty to speak.

‘I don’t think Popov fired the dart at the tiger,’ she said slowly. ‘That’s not what the record shows.’

Consisting of seven men, the Standing Committee of the Politburo of China’s Communist Party is effectively China’s ruling body. As usual, the committee met that May morning in Beijing’s Zhongnanhai district, the exclusive area next to the Imperial City, which houses not only the president’s office and other organs of state, but which also provides residential quarters for China’s most senior politicians and officials.

There was a time when Zhongnanhai had been open to the public, but since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 security had been greatly increased. Access had been closed to the general public, with numerous plain-clothes military personnel patrolling the area on foot.

If the Standing Committee of the Politburo was a closed grouping in the most literal sense, it was also closed metaphorically. For the most part its members had spent their lives in the service of the party, often in far-flung provinces. The grandest of all were those who had links by blood or by marriage with the Party’s now almost mythic heroes, men whose fathers or grandfathers had been on the Long March with Chairman Mao.