She caught Zhou Jin’s eye through the glass panel and tilted her head to indicate a direction. “Team Leader Tan is looking for you.”
Out of habit, Zhou Jin glanced at Jiang Hansheng — as if saying a brief farewell, or perhaps seeking some quiet form of approval.
Jiang Hansheng met her gaze and smiled. “Go ahead. I’ll stay and ask a few more questions about the autopsy.”
“Alright.”
---
Arriving at Tan Shiming’s office, he looked up and waved at Zhou Jin to close the door.
Zhou Jin stood before Tan Shiming. Neither mentor nor student was in a light mood. The failed net-closing operation, Yao Weihai’s death, the unrelenting succession of incidents — each one pressed down on them with a suffocating weight.
Tan Shiming was silent for a long moment. Then, abruptly, he said, “Zhou Jin, you are my apprentice, and you are Old Zhou’s daughter — the one who raised you right. Zhou Chuan died in the gun-theft case. You’re the one who wants this solved most desperately.”
Zhou Jin listened to him lay out these words, as if he were building a case for something, or convincing himself of something. “What is it, Master?”
Tan Shiming said, “I suspect there’s a mole inside our department.”
Zhou Jin was startled. “Why?”
Tan Shiming’s tone was not entirely certain, but within the department, Zhou Jin was the only person he could trust absolutely and deploy freely.
He explained, “There’s no hard evidence yet. But in this net-closing operation, every move our police made seemed to fall exactly within the enemy’s calculations. We were completely on the defensive — entirely reactive.”
Zhou Jin fell into deep thought, a succession of faces passing through her mind, yet she could not bring herself to believe that any of them could be a mole.
“All right — I’ll think it over more. I’ll tell you when I need you. You and Professor Jiang stay alert and watch your own safety.”
“Understood.”
Tan Shiming set aside that line of conjecture and moved straight to business. “The reason I called you in is to tell you two things. First — the identity of the second victim has been confirmed.”
He produced a classified dossier and handed it to Zhou Jin.
She opened it to find, first, a one-inch photograph: a man in a police cap and uniform. That same man was now lying on the autopsy table, having given his life alongside Yao Weihai.
His name was Meng Junfeng. According to his file, at the time the “8·17” gun-theft case occurred, he had been a third-year student at the Southwest Police Academy. For his outstanding conduct, he had been recruited by Yao Weihai as an informant and brought into the investigative operation surrounding the “8·17” case.
Tan Shiming said, “Before the operation, Director Yao handed me a note containing a piece of transaction intelligence passed along by the undercover agent known as ‘Hidden Edge.’ We have good reason to believe that Hidden Edge was Meng Junfeng — that his undercover identity was exposed early on, after which the criminal organization turned him and used him to feed false intelligence to the police. That directly caused the failure of this net-closing operation.”
Zhou Jin stood frozen for some time, her internal doubts piling deeper and deeper.
Meng Junfeng was the undercover? He was Hidden Edge?
Then what was Jiang Cheng’s role in all of this?
“Master, there’s something I need to tell you — something significant. I wasn’t sure whether I should.”
Tan Shiming frowned. “At this point, what can’t be said?”
Zhou Jin hesitated a moment, then decided to tell Tan Shiming everything from that day. “When I found the enemy’s sniper in the control tower, he got away afterward. In my report, I said only that someone had come to assist his escape. What I didn’t say was — that person was…”
Tan Shiming fixed her with a searching, penetrating look.
Zhou Jin put her hands behind her back, gripped them together, and said, “It was Jiang Cheng.”
“Jiang Cheng?!”
Zhou Jin said, “He told me he knew that the group was responsible for my brother’s death. At the time, I thought he might be an undercover officer working for the police…”
She moistened her dry lips and continued, “If it’s possible — could you request the clearance to look up Jiang Cheng’s name in the classified files?”
Tan Shiming dropped the dossier folder onto the desk, leaned back in his chair, and said in a low, measured voice, “You may be disappointed. This is the second thing I wanted to tell you.”
His eyes dropped downward, directing her to open the folder on the desk.
As Zhou Jin opened it, she listened to Tan Shiming speak: “His name is not in the undercover files. But it is in the public security fingerprint database. The forensic examiner lifted a fingerprint from the handgun, and after comparison, it was confirmed to belong to Jiang Cheng.”