Shen Bao's Protocol Bureau check came back on the seventh day with an answer I had not expected.
Master Cheng had not submitted an audience request.
Not that he had submitted it and it had been processed. Not that it was pending in the queue. There was no record of any audience request from Master Cheng Baolin in the Protocol Bureau's reception log for the past thirty days. The mechanism had not been initiated.
I sat with this for a long time.
The most obvious interpretation was that he was waiting. That, as Wei Zhengnan had suggested the previous evening, he understood the sequencing logic of a sensitive communication and had decided to hold until the conditions were right. This was reassuring as an interpretation, but it left the question of what conditions he was waiting for.
