The Director ground his teeth. ‘I don’t have that much time to give you. You have one week! After one week, I want to see him in front of the radio equipment, and I want you to ensure that he will succeed – no excuses!’

11

One week meant seven days.

Seven days meant 168 hours.

Subtracting the hours spent sleeping, how much time was left?

I knew that audio surveillance operatives received eight months of training. That meant over two thousand hours of specific instruction. That was what they needed in order to become operatives in the field.

A northerner by the name of Lin, a woman who had started as a switchboard operator in the central exchange, had, after a month on the job, committed to memory the voices of all the personnel working in Unit 701. In demonstrating this kind of skill, it soon became obvious that she would be ideal for the audio surveillance unit. That’s what happened. She joined my class three months before we graduated. At the time, our instructors didn’t believe that she could complete all of the training and finish with us at the same time, but upon graduation her scores stood out above the rest of us, especially her ability to transcribe Morse code (our most important skill). She could transcribe 224 characters per minute, double what the rest of us could do. A year later, during a national post and telecommunications competition, she transcribed over 261 characters of Morse code in a minute and earned the nickname ‘Heavenly Warrior’.

The reason I mention this is that it should go without saying that one week is in no way sufficient time to properly train an audio surveillance agent, even considering the fact that Abing’s preternatural abilities were perhaps ten times greater than that of Agent Lin. Nevertheless, one week was all I had and I couldn’t ask for more; no one could. The only option available was for me to slap something together, to jury-rig a training programme that satisfied the essentials. There was certainly no way for me to transform him into a proper agent, but perhaps I could teach him the basics … Morse code; he had to be able to understand that at the very least. Secondly, he’d have to listen repeatedly to the enemy stations already identified, to familiarize himself with their unique characteristics and differences; the former he’d know by common sense, the latter by intuition. Nothing more could really be expected, and even this – well, seven days was pushing it.

One day passed.

Two days.

Three days.