The Ghost Shift (26 page)

“I liked the project. I’d spend time with Lizzie, and we’d work on the same thing. I didn’t realize that she’d become obsessed. She’d cross the border and spend hours talking to the workers by the gates. It upset her how they were treated. ‘It could have been me,’ she told me. She was angry that I was working for Martin. We’d bought her a
Poppy phone when she was a teenager, but she threw it away. She said she wouldn’t be a Poppy fan girl anymore. I said Martin was trying to help, but she laughed.

“She was right about Long Tan. They took me on the sanitized tour, with workers all smiling happily in a six-bed dormitory, with lots of space. They introduced a psychologist they’d hired to counsel the workers and showed us the fields where they played soccer. But it all felt fake—the place was like a country where they could close the border at will. Lizzie introduced me to some of the workers, and they told me more. They had to work hard, but that wasn’t the problem. It was secretive. They were split into teams, with different uniforms, separated from the others. None of them had met the kids who’d died.

“I couldn’t get inside, so I paid a couple of them to be my agents. I asked them to let me know if they saw anything. I was in the Peninsula one night, and Lizzie arrived. She’d found out what I’d done, and she was really mad. She said it was typical of me—that I was exploiting them, they could lose their jobs. I told her there was nothing to worry about, and she said if I meant that, she’d do it herself. She’d go inside there and find out what was going on. It would be easy to get a job—they recruited all the time because so many had left. All she’d need was an identity.

“When I thought about it, I realized it could work. She was smarter and more inventive than any of them. She could find out what was wrong in there, and then I could get Poppy to fix it. It would be easy to buy an identity in Shenzhen—it was full of clubs where girls took money for favors. I needed one who would misplace it for a few weeks and hide at home. Lizzie and I planned the thing. Her identity, how long she’d stay inside, how we’d keep in touch. We had a great time.

“In July, she went in. She had no problem getting recruited—she just walked in and that was it. They put her on the Poppy line, which was perfect. The shifts were long and she was tired, but it was okay. It wasn’t as bad as she’d feared. She’d call me from a café by the gate, so no one could overhear. The last time we spoke, she said she’d heard
something. She missed the next two calls and I started to worry, but there was nothing I could do.”

Lockhart clenched his jaw, remembering.

“Then the two girls I had been paying died—I was told they jumped off buildings. I hadn’t heard from them in a while, and I’d thought something was wrong. Martin got me to visit the parents of the victims and offer them money to keep quiet. He wanted to keep it out of the press. Their parents both told me the same story—the kids had gotten new jobs and stopped calling, then turned up dead. I panicked. I tried to get back inside but they cut me off.”

He took a stone, casting it across the lake, and faced her. “That’s when Madame Zhou called me at the hotel,” he said. “When they’d killed Lizzie, like they killed the rest.”

“Why would they kill them? It makes no sense.”

“Not then. But Martin called me at the Peninsula just after Lizzie vanished. He said they’d discovered something.”

Poppy had built its flagship DC store in a former Postal Service building on Farragut Square. The company had bought the structure and stripped it out, lofting away the safe by crane, restoring the 1930s tiles, and installing a glass staircase that led to a mezzanine. The limestone façade was blasted to gleaming white, and sunlight shone through polished windows. It looked as glamorous as one of the city’s monuments as they sat in the Escalade.

“Why should we trust her?” Sedgwick said. He was in the front seat, looking back at Lockhart.

“She can help,” Lockhart said.

“Is that true, Ms. Song?”

Mei nodded. It was enough for her to be out of Camp Peary, even if she didn’t know what would happen next. She wanted to stick with Lockhart—she’d found herself trusting him, if only because he seemed to be hurting as much as she was. After five days alone in a cell, she needed a companion.

The store was nearly empty as they stepped through the door. Outside, some late commuters rushed along the street to nearby offices in suits and sneakers. Inside, a pair of tourists held a Poppy tablet, leaning close to admire it. The curved edges were beveled, and the familiar logo glowed on the screen. An assistant, wearing the store uniform of jeans and a white T-shirt with the pink Poppy logo, waited, smiling. Sedgwick led the way up the staircase.

“Alan? I’m David. Welcome.” A lanky man, sporting stubble and
black-framed glasses, put a hand on Sedgwick’s arm at the top, making him flinch. “I’ll show you to Henry.”

He walked them behind a counter and through a white oak door to a workshop, where engineers were stripping the faces from phones and tablets and delving inside. At the end, he held up his pass to the entry plate. A second door pulled back, revealing another room with a long oak table.

Henry Martin was standing at the end, nodding intently at a young man who was talking to him in a low voice. The man had a thin frame and a scrubbed, pink face: an eager student.

“Tom!” Martin bounded across the room and slapped Lockhart on the back. Mei took two steps back, overwhelmed. She had watched videos of Martin unveiling new products, praising the little miracles as he paced the stage.

“You must be Mei.
Ni hao
,” he said, turning to her. “This is an honor for me.” He bowed and presented a card, holding it with both hands. On it were a Poppy logo and two words:

H
ENRY
M
ARTIN

“I’m sorry. I do not have my card,” she said.

“No problem,” Martin said, smiling like a spotlight. He placed an arm around her shoulder and drew her into the room. “I’m fascinated by your life. I would love you to meet Jade, my daughter. She’s from Sichuan.”

“That would be nice.” She spoke faintly, feeling overwhelmed.

“Okay, here we are.” Sedgwick looked irritated by the effusiveness of Martin’s welcome, which hadn’t included him. He stood by the door with Lockhart, separated from his prisoner.

“It’s great that you came.” Martin’s attention was still on Mei. He sat at the head of the table and pointed to the chairs nearby. “Mei, you sit there. Tom, Al, there. Joe—” He waved at the man he’d been talking to. “Take a place. Okay, we’re set.”

The man who had led them in placed a metal case on the table and took out two boxes. One was filled with small screwdrivers and other
tools, set in individual slots under a Perspex lid. The other was a white cardboard container with a silver Poppy logo from which Martin extracted a tablet.

“Want to hold it?” He passed it to her and she saw the petals of the Poppy logo grow and sparkle on the screen, like an improved version of nature. “This is our new one, out last week. It’s twice as fast, with five times the graphics capability. It’s so beautiful. It’s blowing people’s minds.” He pressed the button to switch it off.

“Why don’t you show us, Henry?” Lockhart said.

“Okay. It’s pretty remarkable. If they weren’t screwing with my business, I’d be impressed.”

Martin lifted the Perspex lid and took two tools from the box. Then he pushed them into two tiny side-slots and twisted. The aluminum plate clicked and slid free. Putting it on the desk, he took a screwdriver, unfastening six screws from the frame inside. The interior of the plate was intricately ridged, like a coastal shelf. He unclipped a few more components and then the device lay on the table, reduced to pieces of aluminum, silicon, and glass.

The logic board held several chips around a square semiconductor, an inch wide, printed with a Poppy. He tapped each in turn. “Flash, flash, I/O controller, and this is the master chip. Most of these are commodities—it’s the way we combine them that matters. But this is the brain.”

“So tell us what’s wrong,” Lockhart said.

“We design the chips, then they’re made in Taiwan and shipped to Long Tan, where the tablets are built. The problem is, this isn’t our chip. It looks like it, works the same, the same specs, but it’s fake.”

“How do you know?”

“The serial number doesn’t match anything from our facilities. It’s come from nowhere.”

“Why?” Mei stared at the tiny chip. It looked as if it belonged there, with its pink logo on black silicon. It had found its way into the heart of the device, like a cuckoo in a nest.

Martin laughed. “That’s the question. They do knockoffs of our products in China all the time, but this is inside our own device. We
pay for the chip, and it’s assembled at Long Tan. They’ve gone to a lot of trouble for nothing.”

“I doubt it,” Sedgwick said.

“So do I, but I haven’t solved it,” said the young man Martin had been talking to when they’d arrived. His voice was low, and he stared at the floor as he spoke. “It needs more time.”

“Is this the only American one?” Sedgwick asked Martin.

“So far, but they’ve only just been launched and we were lucky to find it so fast. There have to be others.”

Mei picked up the tablet’s box. It was creamy white, with a pink line around the edge, and a rainbow-colored anti-forgery hologram in the shape of a poppy stamped on the bottom.

“I think I saw one of these,” she said.

Lockhart’s apartment was
a walk-up in a limestone on S Street with bay windows at the front and a fire escape at the rear. He’d bought it after his marriage broke up and, at first, it had felt small and empty without his family. He’d come to appreciate his freedom and the solitude, but Lizzie’s death had brought the loneliness back.

His visits to Mei at the Farm had been the only thing he’d looked forward to in a long time. He had driven south, taking his time across Virginia, as the radio played. With Lizzie gone, she was the closest he had to a daughter. When she emerged from her cell in her oversized coat, jogging a few paces for exercise, it almost made him smile. For all the pressure Sedgwick was piling on her, he knew that someday they would let her go, and he feared what her life would become.

He brought out his French press, grinding beans and heaping powder into it, then placed it on a tray with three cups and cookies from the corner store. He didn’t know the etiquette for a Party official who’d been in custody, but Sedgwick was talking politely to Mei in the other room about the China of the 1970s. He’d had a change of heart about her since she’d volunteered her tidbit in the Poppy store. “Let’s find somewhere to talk,” he’d said as they left.

“Mei’s telling me about the Four Seasons in Guangzhou,” Sedgwick said as Lockhart brought in the tray. “I had no idea.”

“It’s quite something.” Lockhart looked at Mei, perched on a sofa he’d bought at Crate & Barrel, picking it at random to fill the place.

“You want to know what I saw.” She cut through the pause as Lockhart poured coffee.

“We do,” Sedgwick said.

“If I tell you, will you help me?”

“I’ll try,” Lockhart said. They weren’t just words, an interrogator’s promise to keep a subject talking. He meant it.

“You talked about Secretary Lang,” she said to Sedgwick. “I went to see him one night in his home. When I was there, I saw a box in his sitting room, like the one Mr. Martin showed us today. I noticed it because I thought it was odd. He isn’t the kind who would buy one. I thought it was a gift.”

“Did you see the device?” Lockhart asked.

“The box was sealed. He hadn’t opened it.”

She was formidable, Lockhart thought. Getting off the Farm and back into her clothes—Lizzie’s, really—had restored her. He believed her story, although it was the flimsiest of evidence, and there was no way to be sure.

“Why should we trust you?” Sedgwick asked, expressing Lockhart’s unspoken question.

For the first time since Lockhart had encountered her at the Golden Dragon, Mei smiled. “I’ll prove it,” she said.

As Lockhart walked over the little bridge to Shamian Island, he saw the first of the wedding couples. The woman was perched by a flowerbed in a meringue-like dress and the photographer was arranging her husband by her side, instructing him to gaze at her lovingly. They weren’t the only couple there—two more were posing nearby, under the colonial buildings. He could see why photographers were drawn to this spot. It was like stepping from twenty-first-century Guangzhou into Canton, the nineteenth-century trading post of the British Empire.