Hidden Moon

Chapter Two

The next morning, Min came up the stairs at seven o’clock. He walked by my office without looking in. I heard him open the file cabinets at the end of the hall and then the sound of him humming. A few minutes later, he walked back. This time he stopped at my door. “Good morning, Inspector.” He smiled and pointed out the window. “Beautiful spring day, fresh air, not a cloud on the horizon.” He smiled again. “Makes you glad to be alive. Had a good night?” There was no touch of irony in his voice. He sounded completely free of worry.

“Yes, great night.” I raised my head and searched his face with bleary eyes.

“Good. Let’s go over the bank robbery in about an hour, sort of put it in order. Then we can work on the security detail, nothing elaborate. Fine by you?” Min was practically bouncing on his toes, he was so full of good cheer.

“What do you know that you aren’t sharing?”

“I know, Inspector, that gloom only leads to more of the same. This morning I got up, put my feet down on the floor, and told myself that nothing can be as bad as it looks. We have troubles? Other people have more. This summer it may flood, the rivers may overflow their banks, and the glorious dams we read about every day in the newspapers may burst. But not today, and this is the day we are going to live in.”

I groaned. “On second thought, don’t share it with me. Just leave me alone for another hour.”

Min shook his head. “Your problem is, you don’t get enough exercise.” He grinned and walked back to his office, humming.

A moment later the phone rang. “O, get in here.” There was no lilt in his voice, just naked urgency. “Now.”

Min was staring openmouthed at a single piece of pale blue paper when I walked in. Actually, not very blue, but very lightweight, the paper that the Ministry uses for Most Sensitive information. Sometimes it is even on regular white paper, because the blue stuff runs out. But we still call it a Blue Paper. If we need to see one of those reports, we go to the Ministry to read it. They never get out of a special area in the Ministry, and certainly never make it to our office. Never, except of course for the one that was in plain sight. Min looked up. “Shut the door.”

“There’s no one else here.”

“Shut the fucking door, Inspector!”

I swung it shut. “You want it locked?”

Min rubbed his face with both hands. “Sit down. This”-he picked up the single sheet of paper between his thumb and forefinger and waved it limply like a flag of surrender-“this was in the daily mail I picked up before coming here. It isn’t supposed to be in our mail. I think we aren’t even supposed to know it exists.”

“Bad?”

“Bad? Oh, no, not bad. Terrible, appalling, horrifying.” He didn’t even have to pause to find the triplet; I mentally braced myself. “It says SSD suspects Yang is part of the plot against the British VIP.”

“Ridiculous,” I heard my subconscious mutter.

“It also says that you and me and Li are to be put under special surveillance.”

“Finally, a useful piece of information.” I had the sensation of threads being pulled together. “That explains the squad Yang saw at my apartment house the other day.”

“What? Surveillance? If he saw them, that means they saw him near your apartment. And they may have heard what you said yesterday.”

“About what?”

“First, you suggested that Yang lead the security detail. The man is part of the plot, and you recommend him to get on the inside! We don’t even have to guess how they’ll interpret that.” He looked at me strangely for a moment, then shook his head. “And then, you know, the other thing.” Min got up from his desk and looked out the window. “They’re probably over at the Operations Building right now watching us. I knew this was going to be a bad day, as soon as I woke up.”

“What about Yang?” If that report was right, Yang was in danger. He was in danger even if it was wrong. Anything on paper was dangerous.

“What about him?”

“Do we let him know?”

“Are you crazy, Inspector? I want him out of this office, immediately.”

“Why? Yang wouldn’t hurt a fly. SSD is being fed a line by someone, and I have a feeling I know who it might be-a Russian who sells stockings.” Logonov might not be capable of murder, but spreading disinformation was another story. The Russians liked to keep SSD jumpy, overload the circuits. Somehow a few years ago they got hold of a Ministry phone book, and they just went down the list. Someone’s big Slav finger ended up on Yang’s name, and it got cranked into the disinformation machinery. They probably hadn’t even checked to see who he was. “That Russian’s visa stamps are phony; Han was furious I had anything to do with him. I think he’s mainly here as a spotter, but who knows what he passes in those stockings? Tell me, why would Yang get himself involved in a plot of any sort? The man can barely stumble down the stairs without feeling he has offended someone.”

“I’m not interested in the drama of his inner life. We need to get him out of here before he takes us all to the coal mines. And you need to stay away from SSD’s operations; I shouldn’t have to tell you that. We have enough trouble of our own, without stepping on their flowers.”

“You going to take that Blue Paper back to the Ministry?”

“How can I? If I take it back, they’ll know I read it, and I’m not supposed to have done that.”

“They’ll know it’s missing, not right away, but it’s numbered. By the end of the week, when they count the copies, they’ll see it’s gone. Then they’ll search. They’ll question people. Nasty questions. Bad technique.” I paused. “Wait a minute. How do we know they didn’t plant that in your mail bundle? How do we know they just don’t want us to think Yang is involved?”

Min glumly turned that idea over in his mind. “Sure, and how do we know this isn’t a test of my honesty? They want to see what I’ll do. What am I going to do?”

“But what if it’s real?”

“You just said Yang wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“Yes, but they don’t know that. They may think the information is real, and they need to know if we can be trusted.”

“Inspector, we can go on like this for hours. Anything is possible.”

“Get rid of it. The Blue Paper. Get rid of it.”

“But if they planted it…”

“Trust me, Min, I was just thinking out loud. They didn’t plant it. It was a mistake, an unintentional security breach. If you report it, the clerks in the central mailroom will be put through hell. As soon as they realize it’s missing, they’ll fix their logs. No one else will know it’s gone. It’s happened before. But we have another problem.”

“I don’t want to know.”

Min knew the problem, he just didn’t want to hear it out loud. We had to do something about the case in order to bury these crazy reports that someone in our office-and by implication, all of us who dealt with that person-was involved in a plot against a foreign visitor. It was so ridiculous it could only be a cover for something else. I put a gag in my subconscious before it could say what I was thinking.

“You do what you have to do,” Min said. “If it doesn’t work, don’t forget, I won’t be there to wave when the truck drives away.”

“Don’t worry, if it doesn’t work, we’ll both be in the back of the truck.”