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‘Since when did the police care whether things are voluntary?’

‘They don’t, Owen, but it’s a question of economics. They’re losing too many officers. Being a traffic policeman tops the list of most dangerous jobs right now, and most of them would rather be assigned to tracking down and catching mentally disturbed mass-murderers. And, well, there’s the humane aspect too, no one wants dead policemen. It’s no problem at all if a Holo-Cop gets run over, it even still manages to file a report about it. The projection sends a signal to the computer, including the car make and number plate.’

‘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.’

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.

‘Even today, the Party still has no idea how many of them there actually are. Sometimes they think they’re dealing with dozens, sometimes just a few. A cancerous ulcer in any case, one which will eat away at our magnificent, happy and healthy People’s Republic from the inside.’ Tu hacked up some phlegm and spat it in front of his feet. ‘Now, we know what comes out of Beijing, predominantly rumours and very little of anything that makes sense, so how big do you think the organisation really is?’

Jericho thought about it. He couldn’t remember ever having heard of a Guardian being imprisoned.

‘Oh sure, now and then they arrest someone and claim that person is one of them!’ said Tu, as if he had read Jericho’s thoughts. ‘But I happen to know for certain that they haven’t made one successful arrest yet. Unbelievable, isn’t it? I mean, they’re hunting an army, so you’d think there’d be prisoners of war.’

‘They’re hunting something that looks like an army,’ said Jericho.

‘You’re getting close.’

‘But the army doesn’t exist. There are only a few of them, but they know how to keep slipping through the investigators’ nets. So the Party exaggerates them. Makes them seem more dangerous and intelligent than they really are, to distract from the fact that the State still hasn’t managed to pull a handful of hackers out of the online traffic.’

‘And what do you conclude from that?’

‘That for one of Beijing’s honourable servants you know a suspicious amount about a bunch of internet dissidents.’ Jericho looked at Tu, frowning. ‘Is it just my imagination, or are you playing some part in the game too?’

‘Why don’t you just come out and ask if I’m one of them?’

‘I just did.’

‘The answer is no. But I can tell you that the entire group consists of six people. There were never more than that.’

‘And Yoyo is one of them?’

‘Well.’ Tu rubbed his neck. ‘Yes and no.’

‘Which means?’

‘She’s the brains behind it. Yoyo brought the Guardians to life.’

Jericho smirked. In the distorting mirror of the internet, anything was possible. The Guardians’ presence suggested they were a larger group, potentially capable of spying on government secrets. Their actions were well thought out, the background research always exemplary. It all created the illusion of being an extensive network, but in actual fact that was thanks to their multitude of sympathisers, who were neither affiliated to the group nor possessed knowledge about their structure. On closer inspection the Guardians’ entire activism boiled down to a small, conspiring hacker community. And yet—

‘—they have to be constantly up to date,’ murmured Jericho.

Tu jabbed his elbow into his ribs. ‘Are you talking to me?’

‘What? No. I mean, yes. How old is Yoyo again?’

‘Twenty-five.’

‘No twenty-five-year-old girl is cunning enough to outmanoeuvre the State Security in the long term.’

‘Yoyo is extraordinarily intelligent.’

‘That’s not what I mean. The State may be limping behind the hackers, but they’re not completely stupid. You can’t get past the Diamond Shield using conventional methods, so sooner or later you’ll have the Internet Police knocking at your door. Yoyo must have access to programs which enable her to always be a step ahead of them.’

Tu shrugged his shoulders.

‘Which means that she knows how to use them.’ Jericho spun the web further. ‘Who are the other members?’

‘Some guys. Students like Yoyo.’

‘And how do you know all this?’

‘Yoyo told me.’

‘She told you.’ Jericho paused. ‘But she didn’t tell Chen?’

‘Well, she tried. It’s just that Chen won’t hear any of it. He doesn’t listen to her, so she comes to me.’

‘Why you?’

‘Owen, you don’t have to know everything—’

‘But I want to
understand
.’

Tu sighed and stroked his bald head.

‘Let’s just say I help Yoyo to understand her father. Or, that’s what she hopes to get from me in any case.’ He raised a finger. ‘And don’t ask what there is to understand. That has nothing whatsoever to do with you!’

‘You speak in puzzles just as much as Chen does,’ boomed Jericho, aggravated.

‘On the contrary. I’m showing you an excessive amount of trust.’

‘Then trust me more. If I’m going to find Yoyo, I need to know the names of the other Guardians. I have to find them, question them.’

‘Just assume the others have gone underground too.’

‘Or were arrested.’

‘Hardly. Years ago I had the opportunity to get a close look at the cogs of the State welfare services, the places where they look inside your head and declare you to be infested with all kinds of insanity. I know those types. If they had arrested the Guardians, they would have been boasting about it at the tops of their voices for a while now. It’s one thing to make people disappear, but if someone’s running rings around you, making you look like a fool in public, then you put their head on a spear as soon as you catch them. Yoyo has caused the Party a great deal of grief. They won’t stand for it.’

‘How did Yoyo even get into all this?’

‘The way young people always get into things like this. She identified with
zi you
, with freedom.’ Tu poked around between his shirt buttons and scratched his belly.
‘You’ve been living here for a good while, Owen, and I think you understand my people pretty well by now. Or, let’s put it this way, you understand what you see. But a few things are still closed off from you. Everything that takes place in the Middle Kingdom today is the logical consequence of developments and breakthroughs throughout our history. I know, that sounds like something from a travel guide. Europeans always think this whole yin and yang business, this insistence on tradition, is just folklorist nonsense intended to disguise the fact that we’re just a band of greedy imitators who want to make their stamp on the world, continually damage human rights and who, since Mao, have no more ideals. But for two thousand years, Europe was like a pot which continually had new things thrown into it; it was a patchwork of clashing identities. You’ve all overrun each other, made your neighbours’ customs and ways your own, even while you were still fighting them. Huge empires came and went as if in time-lapse. For a while it was the Romans having their say, then the French, then the Germans and the Brits. You talk of a united Europe, and yet you speak in more languages than you can possibly understand, and as if that weren’t enough, you import Asia, America and the Balkans too. You’re incapable of understanding how a nation that for the most part was entirely self-sufficient and self-contained – because it felt the Middle Kingdom didn’t need to know what was outside its borders – finds it hard to accept the new, especially when it’s brought in from the outside.’