She was absolutely right; I had hurt her time and again. I wanted to apologize, but she cut me short. ‘It’s fine, I don’t want to talk about it. I’m here to tell you that I want to use my power not to help Comrade Wang but Zhang Guoqing. Please do your best to help Zhang Guoqing bring his wife and son back to Unit 701.’

I was confused. What was Zhang Guoqing to her?

Everyone in Unit 701 knew Zhang Guoqing. He used to work in the confidential documents division, and all secret and top-secret documents generated by Unit 701 passed through his hands. His wife was a nurse at our hospital, a woman from Jiaodong, very tall and strong, with a real temper. It was said that Zhang Guoqing was afraid of his wife, because if they started quarrelling she would pick up anything that came to hand and throw it at him. One time what came to hand was a scalpel, which flew like a sliver of silver to bury itself in Zhang Guoqing’s shoulder. I guess that was when the story about the domestic violence he suffered first started. But people said that she really loved her husband and that he didn’t have to lift a finger at home – she would even wash his feet and clip his nails for him. She was always talking about how wonderful Zhang Guoqing was, how much she loved him and couldn’t bear to be apart from him, to the point where she couldn’t sleep if he was away from home, and so on and so forth. The thing is that Zhang Guoqing was often away from home, because his work demanded that he travel regularly to headquarters. On one occasion three years earlier he was on his way back from headquarters – he always used to go to the office first on his return, to lock the confidential documents in his filing cabinet before he headed off home. But on this occasion the train had been delayed by many hours, so by the time he got to Unit 701 it was already well past midnight, and if he had gone to his office before going home it would have taken at least an hour. He just couldn’t bear the prospect, so he went straight home, not thinking that this would result in terrible consequences.