Chen spent his walk back to the station thinking about the angles he might use to induce Tang to speak. He was, therefore, irate to discover that the industrialist had already been released on bail. Chen went straight to the captain's office to complain.
"Chen, I told you it might happen. I did what I could," Sung said. His heavy face looked gray and rumpled, the sign of a difficult afternoon. "I've had the governor on my back and lawyers coming through the windows. . . We'll get it to trial if we can, but don't count on it."
"So Tang can be responsible for the deaths of several young girls, including, it seems, his own daughter—not to mention his wife—and simply walk free?" Chen asked in disgust. "Oh, I suppose I should know better by now, but it still makes me furious."
Captain Sung gave a shrug of sympathy. "You know how the world works as well as I do. We're not young men, Detective Inspector."
"So I'd noticed," Chen said dryly. He already felt about a hundred and ten. He returned to his desk and began studying his notes for a minor case of fraudulent exorcism, and the revised proposal for the feng shui practitioners' licensing rules. Neither document managed to hold his attention. He rang Inari. There was no reply. The thought of Tang's freedom chafed at him like a yak-hair shirt. Checking through his pockets, Chen made sure that his rosary, scalpel, compass and other pieces of equipment were safe. He hunted through his desk drawers for two small octagonal mirrors and a tube of superglue, which he wrapped carefully in a tissue and placed in his pocket. Then, as he had done on the previous evening, he walked out into the humid city and caught the next tram to the Garden District.
Tang's private car was parked in front of the mansion, half-hidden in the shadows cast by the magnolia trees. Chen sidled along the street, making sure that he was well outside the security perimeter and that no one could see him from the mansion, then took one of the mirrors from his pocket. Murmuring a few words, he glued the mirror to the underside of the Mercedes' fender. He was taking a risk that the car might be monitored, but he was fairly sure that any security arrangements would be set to detect electronic equipment or explosives, not a cheap plastic mirror. Then he set off back down the street. He kept his hand on the second mirror in his pocket, but it remained cold.
Once he had reached the Opera House, however, the mirror flushed warm against the palm of his hand. Swiftly, Chen found a nearby teahouse, ordered a pot of dragon oolong tea, and sat down with the mirror in his lap.
Reflected in the surface of the mirror, as minute and precise as a digitized film, he could see the Mercedes pulling out from the curb. Tang himself was at the wheel, and as far as Chen could see, there was no one else in the car. He followed the image of the Mercedes as it turned north at the end of the street, heading into the suburbs. Circumscribed by the edges of the mirror, Chen caught glimpses of tower blocks and concrete ruins overgrown with creeper; perhaps bomb damage from the winter's terrorist attacks, perhaps simply areas of land where building had been planned but the money had run out. He glimpsed the flashy new facade of the temple of Woi Tsin: supposedly part of the urban regeneration project, and wondered what defenses the Mercedes enjoyed, that Tang risked driving through such poor and edgy ghettos. Leaving the zones behind, Tang drove up into richer country. Mansions appeared once more, flanked behind acres of ground, and Chen enjoyed the sight of the road to Shunan, stretching in a dizzying curve around the mountainside with the sweep of the sea beyond. The sun had fallen, and the sky was a pale, aquatic green. Chen took a sip of black tea and watched as Tang turned off the road. The Mercedes bumped down a dirt track, leaving the vista of the coast behind, and slowed to a halt in front of a shack. Tang got out and went inside. Chen finished his bowl of tea and poured another, then signaled to the waitress and ordered an egg bun. After the bun, he called for another pot of tea, which he drank slowly. Tang still had not emerged from the shack. Chen visited the gents, surreptitiously keeping an eye on the mirror as he did so and feeling more than a little self-conscious. On his return from the lavatory, he found that the café owner had switched on the seven o'clock news. Chen listened as he continued to stare fixedly into the mirror. A deal had been struck over the Texan secession. The Turkistan Alliance had come to an accord with the Chinese government over the Uighur border, and the Dagestani Liberation Front had agreed to a cease-fire. Peace appeared to be breaking out all over the place. For once, the news failed to depress Chen quite as much as usual.
The headlines were followed by a local report on the new gherao dormitory being built out in Jhu Ku. It seemed that the media's fascination with the bioweb and its effects had still not drawn to a close. Perhaps there was something about the bioweb nexi themselves that piqued interest: after all, most were women, and most were young. Chen recalled vaguely that bioweb technology had started in Malaysia, where girls signed up for a two-year stint as nexi in order to pay their own dowries. . . Momentarily distracted from the non-events in the mirror, Chen glanced up at the rows of motionless forms depicted on the television screen, each nexus floating serenely in her shallow bath of nutrient fluid, wrapped in the embrace of synaptic wiring as they silently and invisibly passed information to and fro. If he half-closed his eyes, he could imagine the girls lying at the edge of the sea, lapped by waves, cocooned in weed. The images were organic and disturbing. Chen had grown up in a world where technology was hard-edged: plastic and metal and steel, not soft and mortal flesh. The televised pictures of the gherao interfaces made him queasy; he began to regret the egg bun. He looked down at the mirror in his lap just in time to see Tang's reflection walking from the shack, holding something small and evidently fragile. Chen squinted into the mirror, trying to see. The thing looked like a jar. Tang placed it carefully in the back of the car, got in and drove off. Rising from his seat, and grateful that he didn't have to sit through yet another pot of tea, Chen headed swiftly back to the Garden District through the gathering dusk.