The Ghost Shift (32 page)

“But I feel terrible lying here. Even if I cannot work on the line, I want to contribute. There must be other things I can do, without using these fingers.” She paused. “I could push the trolleys, like some of the others do. That wouldn’t hurt. Allow me to do that.”

The instructor’s face split into a grin. “Jiang Jia, I congratulate you. You have the unbending spirit that exists inside the truest of our workers. Yes! If the doctor agrees, tomorrow we will find you a new job.”

He stalked out again. Mei put her head back in the sunlight and nodded when the nurse asked if she wanted more tea. It was a gilded cage, full of rewards for those who remained obedient.

The caretaker had
shuffled off, and Lockhart was reading the final chapter of Deng Xiaoping’s biography. He felt restless and impatient, but all he could do was wait. He could not even walk out into the alley, for fear of being noticed. Feng had driven him to the building in the early morning a few days before, with a suitcase of clothes, a couple of books, and some sheets for the bed. Since then, the farthest he had walked was between the bedroom and the toilet. The courtyard prevented anyone from looking in.

This silence gave him the same feeling he’d experienced before—the
dread of what was happening inside, with no ability to control it. He wondered how he could cope if it happened again. She wasn’t his daughter, but he’d grown attached to her, and he admired her bravery. If he could have shielded her, he would have done it, but Lizzie’s death had proved to him that he was neither as powerful nor as lucky as he’d imagined. He felt fragile, a vessel that could break.

Since Feng’s last visit, he’d received a few cryptic emails—they were making progress, there might be something to see soon—but nothing that showed she really trusted him. Sedgwick was impatient for information, and Henry Martin’s temper was fraying. He was in limbo, with nothing to do but hope that Mei could succeed where Lizzie had failed.

He heard steps on the stairwell and a knock on the door.

“Okay, I’ve got something,” Feng said, as he opened it. She had a suede messenger bag slung over one shoulder and carried two cups of coffee from the Internet café in the alley.

“Come in,” he said to her back, as she walked past him and dumped her bag on his desk.

“I shouldn’t show you. I shouldn’t even tell you I’m not showing you.” Feng removed a laptop from her bag and placed it on the desk. It was the latest Poppy—a fifteen-inch, high-resolution screen that glowed with information. She pulled up an Ethernet cable and plugged it in.

“Nice gear,” Lockhart said.

“What download speed are you getting?”

“Sixty-five megabits. Pretty fast.”

“That should work. Comcast will catch up sometime next century. Wait there, would you? National security.”

He watched from the corner as she made a connection and entered a series of codes. She opened a window: a satellite view of the Long Tan complex, showing the buildings from above.

“That’s terrific, but I can use Google.”

“Come closer.”

Lockhart stood behind Feng as she zoomed in, making it larger and more precise than any satellite view. He could see a line of trucks next to what looked like an aircraft hangar. Then, as he tried to make
sense of the image, one of the trucks moved. It drove along the side of the building and then reversed so that its rear door was close.

“Shit. This thing’s live.”

Feng said nothing, but shifted the magnification higher. Lockhart saw a pale square extend from the rear of the truck and two red dots move slowly around it. He couldn’t believe the evidence of his eyes. He was watching people.

“Chengdu Pterosaur drone, at forty thousand feet. This is advanced Chinese technology. The images are clear, aren’t they?”

“Almost as good as a Predator.”

“We watch people from the sky, like the CIA. The difference is, we don’t blow them up. It’s more harmonious.”

“What is this?”

“It’s part of the complex, in the northeast quadrant, away from the rest. There are two buildings with a fence a little less than a mile in diameter. One entrance here. Trucks go in and out in the day, loading and unloading. Building P-1, Building P-2. Mei is in there. This is the ghost shift.”

Feng pulled the magnification back to a panorama of the complex. It was eleven-thirty in the morning, and clusters of red dots spilled from one of the buildings onto a green expanse. The glossy line of the fence encircled them, and two trucks were lined up at the entry point. From aloft, without sound to go with the images, it was peaceful.

“Can you go closer?”

Feng enlarged the image until it filled the screen. The camera was pointing down on a barnlike building, with two tubes extending from it to a square structure a hundred feet away. Both tubes were bent in the middle: It looked like the larger building was embracing the smaller one.

“What’s that?”

“That’s P-1.”

“Why is it divided like that?”

“Don’t know. This is the dormitory. She must be sleeping there.” Feng moved the image to P-2, and they looked at it in silence for two minutes. The red dots swarmed it like an ant’s nest.

“You’re full of surprises,” Lockhart said, leaning on the desk. “I didn’t know the MSS had drones. I thought that was the PLA.”

“The CIA had them, and we got jealous. There was turf warfare, but we struck a deal. Does it matter? I’m lending it to you, which is nice of me. You can watch this all night. Remember, you get a fine view until the weather turns bad. Then all you’ll see is clouds.”

After she left, Lockhart sat at the desk, mesmerized by the images. He moved the camera from one building to another, then along the perimeter fence, watching the dots and wondering which one was Mei.

As Mei stacked the cart with trays, the cut on one finger opened and blood oozed through her bandage. The nurse had fitted a new one after breakfast, strapping her fingers together and placing a mitten over them, which made her look like a white-gloved traffic cop. The bandage turned pink, but the color didn’t get darker. She was safe for now, and she returned to stacking the trays. Wedging the left side of each into her palm, she took the weight with her right hand to avoid injuring herself more. The trays weren’t heavy—the parts of each tablet, extracted on the line, weighed no more in pieces than when she’d held it in the Poppy store. Two nights before, they had shown the workers a video of Martin onstage in San Francisco, showing off the latest devices, with the instructor leading the applause.

Mei looked at the supervisor, to check if it was okay to move, and he waved her forward. The worker in front was passing through the doors. She followed, crossing the floor and glancing above her to the guards. Nobody seemed to be watching—she had regained her status as an invisible cog in the Long Tan machine. She maneuvered the cart around a corner at the edge of the building, using her hips to keep it in line, then the doors slid open ahead of her and she passed out of the hangar.

She was in the walkway now. It had a low ceiling, with glass panels in the roof that filled it with light. Mei’s sneakers squeaked on the concrete floor as she shoved the cart. The boy ahead was out of sight and she couldn’t hear anyone behind her. She was alone in the tube
for a minute before another door loomed, sliding back to admit her to the other building.

Her first sight was a tall kid in jeans and a T-shirt, who stood at the door with a handheld scanner attached to a tablet. Smiling, he scanned the codes on each tray, then checked his tablet to ensure that each had registered. He grinned again, holding her gaze as if he would like to know her better, and waved her along a trail marked in green paint. As she moved forward, Mei looked around. She was in the smaller building she’d seen from the field.

A hundred feet ahead, a conveyor belt ran along the first floor, where two workers loaded it with trays, then snaked in an S-shape up to a mezzanine. That floor was filled with workstations staffed by pairs of employees. One half of each was a programmer, dressed like the boy who’d greeted Mei at the door. Mei saw one—a woman with a mop of hair—tracing lines of figures on a screen, then breaking off to tap a Poppy tablet. The other half of each pair was a technician, wearing safety glasses. This one took a long metal probe and bent over the workstation. Mei couldn’t quite see what he doing, but his safety glasses reflected an intense, flickering light. It was the same pattern at each station: a programmer and a technician, lines of data and the blue-white pulse of something being soldered.

Then it made sense. She didn’t have to see what they were doing—she knew. It explained the ghost shift, why the tablets were being taken apart, how one had arrived in Washington with a chip inside that nobody recognized. This was where they made the rogue tablets.

Mei was gazing so intently that she almost bumped her cart as she reached her spot. She parked it by a worker who unstacked the trays, putting them on the belt that carried them toward the mezzanine. This part of her job was complete—the path beneath her feet switched to a painted line of footsteps to the left of the conveyor belt. Mei followed and entered a hallway, emerging at the end of the building.

It was the turning point, where the sequence that had started in Building P-1 reversed. The belt curved down from the mezzanine floor, bringing the trays back down. Two workers stacked them into trolleys again, and Mei stepped forward to take hold of one. She saw
the porter in front pushing his cart through another set of sliding doors, and she followed. Another kid with a scanner, with a less committed smile, checked her into a second walkway.

It was similar to the first, starting out straight before turning a long semicircle. As she reached the apex, Mei heard only the cart ahead and nothing behind.

She halted.

Sliding one tray out, she held it with her injured left hand and explored the slots in the tray. Each one contained a part from the original tablet, as before. It took her a minute and a half, glancing in both directions down the curve and listening for footsteps, to find it.

She pulled out the part she’d identified. It was the tablet’s logic board, with each of its chips in place. She touched each, until she reached the main processor, with the Poppy logo etched on its face. It was still warm from being soldered in place.

After resting her finger for a second, she stuffed the logic board back into its slot and returned the tray. Using her shoulder, she pushed it back into motion and guided it around the curve.

Past the door at the far end of the walkway, she emerged into the main part of the building. This time she was on the far side of the dividing wall—the mirror of the one she knew—looking along another line of red-uniformed workers. They were working in groups, as their counterparts. But Mei was back through the looking glass. Instead of taking tablets apart, they were putting them together—it was a line to reassemble the tablets.

A supervisor beckoned her to a bay at the head of the line, where the trays were lifted from the cart. They were slotted into frames on wheels, and Mei was allocated one. As she pushed it along the line, workers reached behind their bodies to take pieces and fix them together. The tablet was remade in front of her eyes. She passed the places she had worked, watching the frame fixed to the shell, the board reinserted, batteries and audio clipped in place. At the end of the line, the restored tablets were put back in boxes and shrink-wrapped.

As good as new.

Mei was walking
to the factory for the overtime shift at twenty past five when she felt a tap on one shoulder.

“Jia, what a nice surprise,” said Dr. He. Her face was flushed. “We never had a chance to talk about the old days in Heyuan before. Do you have time now?”

“I’m due back on shift, I’m afraid.” Mei edged away from the psychologist, smiling earnestly.

“I’m sure they can spare you. I will let them know. Don’t worry—you won’t suffer for telling me about home and family. Discipline is vital at Long Tan, but what comes first?”

“Love,” Mei said.

In her room, Dr. He walked to a cupboard at the side of the room and took out a box and some cups. “Would you like tea?”