Li Jin was reeling from his good fortune. He had found a Russian buyer for Black Jade’s neuroprocessor on the sector of cyberspace that teemed with dealers from a whole load of former Eastern Bloc countries. The find had been much quicker than anticipated. He had placed cryptic information about the chip on a bulletin board that he knew was a magnet for fencers of stolen technologies in Eastern Europe, especially Russia. These guys dealt in contraband of various descriptions, advanced processor design, cutting-edge software, blueprints to classified computer systems, aircraft design and who knew what else.

Li Jin knew that the serious buyers automatically monitored the boards with bots that notified them when something interesting emerged on the market. The bots were trained to filter out hoax messages and other well-known electronic scams. Li Jin had written such bots himself so he knew how they worked. A potential buyer had picked up on his post and the message had come back from an Oleg Krachev from the Moscow Institute of Supercomputing.

Li Jin had done his homework, finding the institute’s patch of cyberspace and combing it with a fine tooth comb. There was an Oleg Krachev there alright, head of purchasing. He presided over a sizeable budget. Li Jin was pleased to see that the budget was of such a size as to comfortably absorb the amount he was asking for without even making a dent in the whole. This Russian Krachev’s barely concealed excitement was another piece of good news. He wanted more info on the chip to determine its authenticity and Li Jin had followed up with the quantum computing theories he knew only an expert would bite on.

A preliminary deal had been reached electronically. The exchange would be done in Hong Kong. Li Jin would deposit the chip in a safety deposit box at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. He would then meet up with Krachev in Kowloon Park where he would exchange the deposit slip for the credit. He had already set up several cyberspace bank accounts with carefully selected financial institutions. The accounts all used names of random villagers from his hometown in Shaanxi province. The village would come together for this one he thought. But, how to make sure that Krachev didn’t cheat him out of the chip? He had only thought of one solution. He would instruct Krachev to make the payment by radio and once satisfied that it had gone through, he would instruct the Russian on where to pick up the chip. Then he would disappear into the crowds on Kowloon’s bustling Nathan Road.

Li Jin had slipped out of the computer lab at Tsinghua University unnoticed and gone shopping in nearby Zhongguancun for the radio, a credit transfer device and a combat knife with a wicked-looking serrated edge. Now with all these things in his backpack he had just one more errand to run. He needed to pay a visit to Professor Yao’s home to retrieve the backdoor rig. This was easily the most dangerous thing he had to do, not counting the unknown factor of the Russian. In Hong Kong he could take precautions. He was in control of the battle field. The professor’s home was another matter altogether. The place could be crawling with PSB agents. Worse still, they could have already found the professor’s backdoor rig. But they wouldn’t know what to look for and neither did he. He figured he’d find it somewhere in the professor’s den. Although he had been to the professor’s home, he had never been in the professor’s study before. Mentally, he tried to picture which side of the siheyuan or four-sided compound the professor would have located his study. Tradition dictated on the southern side. But these days, who was that fastidious about tradition and the laws of geomancy? Li Jin’s life was governed by the laws of bits and bytes.

Li Jin guessed that the professor’s house would be deserted only for a few days. He had heard that the family had taken the body to Professor Yao’s village near the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall. Yet, it wasn’t the family he was on the lookout for. Public Security Bureau agents were probably looking all over Beijing for him and if they were thorough they’d have staked out the professor’s house. Li Jin had ignored instructions. That was crime enough. If they found out he had duped them, he was dead meat. But how could they prove that he had switched the neuroprocessor and the software? Actually, these guys didn’t need proof. Once they got their hands on you that was all the proof they needed. More substantial evidence could be manufactured later.

At any rate, Li Jin had figured that with the professor’s visit to New York it was all over for him anyway. It was the professor who had given him the research grant and a small stipend upon his graduation to continue his studies, otherwise he would have had to return to his village in Shaanxi and teach primary school kids or work for the village headman, his benefactor. It was the village after all that had pooled together to send him, their most promising student, to Beijing to sit the difficult entrance exams to Tsinghua University. And he had been as surprised as anyone when he had been accepted. Once this was all over, he’d have to make a sizeable contribution to the village coffers. They could use the money to build the new school they’d been talking about for so long and to repair the treacherous dust track that lead up to the village. Yes, there was much to do. First, he had to get his hands on the backdoor rig.

It was a few minutes past midnight when Li Jin made his way down the deserted Beijing road that lead to the hutong where Professor Yao’s house was located. Hutong’s were the north-south, east-west lanes between the walls of adjacent quadrangle courtyard houses. Li Jin recalled that the word hutong was derived from the Mongolian word hottog, which meant water well. Communities had developed around water wells, leading to the Beijing version of the same word hutong, now synonymous with what was left of the myriad sprawl of gray brick that used to spread outwards from the Forbidden City.

There was a decided bite to the air. A blanket of fog had descended lending the street an eerie atmosphere. Li Jin walked through this icy shroud of gray until he arrived at the vermillion gates located at the south-eastern section of the compound. A black cat leapt off the compound wall and disappeared down a nearby drain. Li Jin almost jumped out of his skin. He tried the gate, his thin hands feeling totally inadequate on the gigantic copper door rings. The gate refused to budge. It was locked from the inside. The dilapidated stone lions sat there, their faces eroded with time, staring straight ahead but their all-seeing eyes were fixated on him as though willfully denying him entry.

The closed gate probably meant there was someone asleep within the dark confines of the compound. Servants? The PSB? Unless of course the family had left through a side door on their way to Mutianyu but those were rare in a compound of this size. Then Li Jin remembered. There was a tree to one side of the house that might afford him access to the roof of one of the buildings. He walked round the corner of the compound, his ears alert for any sounds from without or within. To the south-east of the compound he spotted the gnarled cypress tree whose branches stretched out into the compound. Excellent.

Li Jin climbed the tree with ease and crawled along one of its branches until he was hanging over the roof of the southern-most building in the compound. He jumped and felt a couple of tiles crack underfoot. If there was anyone at home or PSB agents lurking about they would definitely have heard the small commotion. He crouched on the roof and waited. Nothing but silence and the cold night air nipping at his ears.

Professor Yao’s residence was a classic siheyuan compound with two courtyards. Li Jin found himself in the outer courtyard, which housed buildings that historically accommodated servants and visiting guests. Li Jin remembered that most of the outer buildings were used as storage facilities for the myriad items that the professor had collected during the course of his eventful life, awards, scrolls, paintings of little cultural or commercial value and an assortment of corporate gifts.

After satisfying himself that nothing had stirred within the compound, he jumped off the low-hanging roof into the yard. He winced as he felt his tendons react to the impact. It was one thing coming here during the daytime and quite another at night. Yet luckily all siheyuan followed certain rules of design, layout and building use. Just in front of him was the spirit wall or yingbi, which prevented people on the outside from seeing the interior of the compound. Li Jin smiled as he thought of the other, perhaps more important, function of spirit walls. They prevented ghosts or evil spirits from entering the compound. Since spirits could only walk in straight lines, the spirit walls effectively brought any invading specters to an abrupt halt, impeding their access into the compound proper. That is if they’d made it past the raised wooden floor beam in front of the gate designed to trip them up. Li Jin chuckled to himself. This was one spirit whose access won’t be denied tonight.

Li Jin walked around the spirit wall and through the small pavilion that lead into the inner courtyard. To the north was the main house where the professor used to live with his wife, now deceased. The south-most building in the inner courtyard would house his study. Li Jin had noticed a locked door next to the reception room the last time he had paid the professor a visit.

You couldn’t tell from the traditional outlook of the professor’s house that he was at the cutting edge of computing technology. This was a dichotomy that governed the lives of many of New China’s leading minds. It was the Chinese way. He moved towards the door of the room that he figured was the professor’s study. Would the professor have kept something so valuable in an outer room or in the main building in the north of the compound? Knowing the professor, Li Jin reckoned that the study was the best place to look. Professor Yao hadn’t been the most secretive of people considering the type of classified stuff that he worked on. He was the type of person to leave stuff exactly where you wouldn’t expect to find it.

Li Jin stood in front of the door of what he thought was Professor Yao’s study. He pushed forward on the wooden door. Surprisingly, the door gave way opening up into what looked like quite a large room. It was too dark to see inside. He fished in the pockets of his jeans for his key ring which had a tiny flashlight on it. Li Jin played the thin beam of light over the contents of the room. The study was dominated by a huge desk, surrounded by numerous bookshelves. As the light danced across the walls, the coarse paper of calligraphy works and ink paintings came into view. The professor had been a keen calligrapher and a dab hand at landscape painting but Li Jin was not interested in that today.

He shivered as he entered the room. There was a musty smell of aging ink, rice paper and something else he couldn’t put his finger on. Li Jin could feel the presence of the professor in the room. Was the professor looking at him, wondering what his trusted assistant was doing in his study not long after his death? Or was the professor guiding Li Jin’s actions from beyond the grave, willing him to find the backdoor rig. Li Jin would never know. Yet here among the scrolls, the reams of documents and the bottles of fermenting snake wine the professor’s backdoor rig probably lay. There was a nondescript Great Wall console and monitor on the desk but nothing resembling what Li Jin was looking for.

Li Jin tried various drawers to no avail. There were computer discs, piles of printout, various data chips but no backdoor rig. Another sweep of the room with the tiny light. There was a large cupboard at the back of the room with one of its doors partially open. Li Jin’s heart beat faster as he moved towards the cupboard. He opened the doors with eager anticipation. Disappointment. More stacks of paper, some with the professor’s handwriting and written on them cryptic coding sub-routines that echoed the professor’s thoughts on various aspects of code design. The backdoor rig, if it existed at all, was probably in the main building in the north of the compound. The professor had erred on the side of caution after all.

As Li Jin walked back towards the door of the study, something deep down in his psyche was awakened. There was something in the room that demanded further investigation but for the life of him he couldn’t put his finger on it. He stopped and listened. All he could hear was the ice cold wind whistling outside and the distant sounds of the city. In the gloom of the courtyard proper, the buildings cast imposing shadows enhanced by the muted light of the moon. There was a loud cough outside and the sound of someone spitting. It sounded very close. Li Jin switched off the tiny flashlight.

Just in time, Li Jin made out the amber glow of a cigarette cutting into the night. Someone was awake and heading to the very room where he was standing. He moved quickly behind the door and waited, trying desperately to calm his nerves and prepare for the worst. He had the knife with the serrated edge in his knapsack and it was heavy. Its blunt handle would have to do as a weapon. There was no way he was killing a PSB officer or a member of the professor’s family. His bony fingers snaked into the backpack carefully searching for the knife.

Footsteps inched closer and then a hand holding a cigarette grabbed the side of the door. A head loomed into the room. Li Jin could barely make out its outline in the gloom. A body followed as the man took a few steps into the room. Li Jin was so close he could smell the cheap tobacco of the man’s cigarette. The man stayed within the moonlit quadrangle created by the open door. He was listening. Li Jin knew that he had to keep absolutely quiet. Being caught was not an option now.

“Bloody cats,” the man muttered as he retreated, closing the door behind him. Li Jin had been holding his breath all that time. As he walked towards one of the half-open windows to watch the man and his glowing cigarette disappear into one of the compound’s side houses, it dawned on him what had been bothering him about the professor’s study. The wooden floor sounded hollow.

With the terrifying thought of the close call he had just experienced echoing through his mind, Li Jin decided to eschew the use of the flashlight. Instead he went down on all fours and started feeling along the floorboards. There was definitely something below the floor. He could sense it more than anything. Five minutes later, Li Jin was about to give up on finding anything when his fingers brushed against metal just below the professor’s desk. He felt what appeared to be a handle and was pleasantly surprised when it came away from its housing allowing him to raise what he hoped was a trapdoor.

He opened the trapdoor with ease and peered into the darkness below. A damp musty smell assaulted his nose. He reached down into the darkness, expecting to find the bottom with his fingers. No such luck. Li Jin started to believe that the trap door didn’t lead to a hidden compartment but to an underground room. He had never heard of hidden basements in a siheyuan before, yet he was not surprised by the professor’s ingenuity.

Li Jin braced himself for the unexpected and began to inch his body down the hole in the ground. He paused and listened. The only sound he could hear was the constant rasp of his own breathing. Holding on to the sides of the trapdoor, he lowered his body until his arms were fully extended. Still no floor? It couldn’t be too far away, he thought. Or was that wishful thinking on his part? What were the chances of this basement room being more than eight to ten feet high? He figured they were slim to none. Yet he braced himself and relaxed his muscles in a bid to minimize whatever impact or injury lay below. Li Jin took a deep breath and let his fingers slip from the trapdoor. Immediately he felt the darkness below welcoming him.