The police precinct in the Hebei district of Tianjin was a world away from the silent, gilded terror of the Forbidden City. Here, the air was thick with the smells of cheap ink, stale tea, and the damp wool of drying coats. The only authority was the droning clock on the wall and the irritable impatience of Sergeant Wei, a man whose ambition had long ago curdled into a permanent state of weary cynicism.
Constable Bao sat at a rickety wooden desk, the nib of his pen scratching methodically across a cheap sheet of rice paper. He was writing his daily report, a task most of his colleagues dispatched with the least possible effort. But Bao was different. He was a simple man, but he was a proud one. He believed in order, in the integrity of the record. He believed that small details were the bricks from which the wall of justice was built.
"Are you still writing about the clumsy foreigner, Bao?" Sergeant Wei grumbled from across the room, not even looking up from the newspaper he was reading. "He broke a few bowls. The shopkeeper was paid. The matter is closed. Stop wasting the ministry's ink."
"It was more than that, Sergeant," Bao replied respectfully, his focus remaining on his report. "His behavior was… unusual."
The image was stuck in his mind, replaying itself with unsettling clarity: the foreigner's pale, sweat-slicked face, the sudden, violent tremor in his hands, the raw, animal panic in his eyes as he fled. Bao had been a constable for fifteen years. He had seen fear in all its forms—the furtive fear of the pickpocket, the belligerent fear of the drunken brawler, the resigned fear of the debtor. This had been none of those. This had been the soul-deep terror of a man running from something inside his own head.
Ignoring his superior's sigh of exasperation, Bao continued to write, his characters neat and precise. He meticulously documented the time and location. He described the foreigner's appearance: tall, thin, pale complexion, wearing worn but clean Western clothing. He noted his erratic behavior, his sudden flight. And then he added the detail that had been bothering him the most, the small, solid fact in a sea of unsettling impressions. He wrote down the specific item the man had dropped and then frantically retrieved: a nickel-plated American pocket watch, a Westclox "Pocket Ben" model. It was a tiny detail, probably insignificant. But the report, Bao believed, should be complete.
He finished, blotted the ink, and placed the report in the wooden tray for filing. It was just one more sheet of paper added to the mountain of mundane bureaucracy that documented the life of the city—a record of petty crimes, minor disputes, and now, one very strange encounter. His duty done, Constable Bao donned his conical hat and went back out on his patrol, the incident already beginning to fade from the forefront of his mind.
Miles away, in a hidden, windowless room in the heart of the Tianjin concessions, the same report was about to take on a significance its author could never have imagined. This was a listening post for the Ministry of State Security, a nerve center in Spymaster Shen Ke's vast web. Here, Agent Lin sat at a desk under the green shade of a single electric lamp, the air stale with the smell of old paper and lukewarm tea.
Lin's task was brutally tedious. Under the Emperor's new, terrifying mandate to find the "ghost," his orders were to sift through the endless river of official paperwork generated in the Tianjin area—customs logs, port manifests, and, most tediously of all, the daily blotters from every local police precinct. He was looking for a needle in a haystack the size of a mountain, searching for any mention of unusual foreign activity, any anomaly that might point to the source of the catastrophic intelligence leak.
For hours, he had read nothing but reports of drunken sailors, squabbles between merchants, and minor smuggling infractions. His eyes were burning, his mind numb. Each new report was a testament to the dreary, repetitive nature of human fallibility. He picked up the next sheet from the stack—the daily report from the Hebei district precinct, signed by a Constable Bao.
He began to skim it, his eyes flicking over the familiar litany of petty incidents. Then, he stopped. His gaze locked onto a single entry. His professional boredom evaporated, replaced by a surge of pure, electric adrenaline.
He read the entry once. Then a second time, more slowly, his mind connecting the words to a different, far more important file. It was a high-priority intelligence brief on the "ghost agent" who had been eluding the Ministry for weeks.
Keyword match: FOREIGNER.
Keyword match: ERRATIC BEHAVIOR, PANIC.
Location match: TIANJIN PORT DISTRICT.
Physical descriptor match: TALL, PALE, a profile consistent with an American or Northern European.
And then, the final, crucial piece of data.
Associated item: AMERICAN MANUFACTURED POCKET WATCH.
Agent Lin's heart began to pound. On its own, the report was trivial. But when overlaid with the existing intelligence profile, it was a flare in the darkness. The "ghost" they were hunting—the same agent suspected of trying to procure high-grade tungsten filaments for the physicist Dr. Chen, the same phantom who had vanished from a rooftop trap—was almost certainly this man. His "erratic behavior" was not that of a clumsy merchant; it was the behavior of a trained agent whose cover was fraying under extreme stress. The pocket watch wasn't just a watch; it was a potential clue to his methods or mission.
This was a thread. After weeks of chasing shadows, here was a real, tangible thread. It was small, fragile, and led back to a simple beat cop. But it was a start.
Agent Lin reached for the secure telephone that connected him directly to his section chief in Beijing. He bypassed all local channels. This was too important.
He waited for the secure connection to be made, his hand tight around the receiver.
"This is Agent Lin, Tianjin Station," he said, his voice low and urgent. "Get me the Section Chief for Domestic Operations. Immediately." There was a pause. "Tell him we have a confirmed probable sighting of the primary American asset, codename 'Nightingale.' And, sir," he added, a note of triumph in his voice, "this time, we have a witness."
The camera of the narrative pulls back from the listening post, through the city, and settles on Constable Bao. He is standing on a street corner, watching the endless flow of carts and people, a stoic, unassuming figure of order amidst the chaos. He is thinking about what his wife will be making for dinner, completely, blissfully unaware that his simple, diligent report has just yanked him from his life of routine and placed him directly in the lethal, shadowy orbit of the Emperor's Spymaster. His world is about to be turned upside down.