She smiled. ‘Comrade Chen, maybe you don’t want to hear this, but cryptography is like writing a diary – whether you write a lot or a little, whether you write well or badly, it’s all up to you. You don’t need to worry about me. Quite honestly, even though we’re on the same side, we’re not going to be joining forces; in fact we can’t join forces.’

Comrade Chen just stood there, as if something was choking him; and for a very long time he didn’t say anything. Of course later on, when he insisted on coming to find me to complain about her, what could I say? All my bets were on Huang Yiyi, and I really didn’t like listening to Comrade Chen criticize her, but I couldn’t show it. I calmed him down: she came here because Director Tie gave her a military order to do so, and the fact that she dared to come at all meant that she must have good reason to believe that she could pull it off. We needed to give her time. Time would tell us what kind of person she was, what she could do, what she wanted to do, and so on … In fact, it was all waffle.

Fortunately I didn’t have to wait too long before Huang Yiyi started to make her presence felt.

That morning, the report on the analysis of the commercial encryption machine that we had brought back from headquarters came out, and I immediately told Comrade Fei to take it over to Comrade Jiang, and tell him to find out how it worked and then write a report. That afternoon I went to the calculations room several times, but they hadn’t yet completed their work. I was in a hurry, so I asked Comrade Jiang if it would be possible to get a result before we all went home. Comrade Jiang said that there was no way – there was far too much to do, and even if they all worked overtime it would still take until tomorrow morning. I just had to be patient and let them do their work, and the following morning I would see the results.

The next morning when I got to work, Comrade Jiang – who had been up all night – brought me three copies of the results, a really thick heap. I had a quick look and then handed over the two spare copies to Comrade Fei and told him to give one each to Chen and Huang Yiyi. He was to tell them to look at this immediately and that when they had finished we would be having a meeting to discuss the situation.