I have lived with that death until the present day; I don’t know if that is a sign of my weakness or my strength. However, now I have a sense of peace, for I know that I don’t have much longer to live, and then I can go and keep Xiaoyu and Huang Yiyi company. There is a saying, I don’t know if you know it, which goes: ‘All roads lead to Heaven’. I have been thinking about what that means, and in my opinion my most heartfelt wishes, perfect love, are things that can only come true in Heaven. Maybe other people don’t believe in Heaven, but I do. Of course I am an atheist, but I still believe in Heaven. It was Anderov who made me believe. Anderov often said to me, ‘How can humanity live without Heaven? Where do people’s souls go?’ Xiaoyu, Huang Yiyi and I are all just the same; if we can’t hope to meet again in Heaven, then what? How can we console others? How can we comfort ourselves?

All roads lead to Heaven, what a wonderful thing that is to know …

THE SHADOW OF CHEN ERHU

By 1987, Old Chen Erhu was no longer a healthy man; he’d die in the spring of that same year – seventeen years ago now. Most Unit 701 operatives’ personal files would have been declassified long ago. But Old Chen was no ordinary agent: he was a witness. A witness to what, you may ask. Well, to everything. Nothing that went on in Unit 701 escaped his watchful eye, no matter how small and insignificant. He was privy to all the inner workings of the cryptography division, privy to a vast storehouse of still top-secret information. Without exaggerating, making his personal file public would mean that half the secrets of the cryptography division would be revealed to the world. Perhaps that was the reason his repeated entreaties for the declassification of his own documents met with no success. It was also the reason, I imagine, why my efforts to get to the bottom of the matter had hit an impasse.