Sure enough, shortly after I got back from Beijing, they phoned me up (the address and telephone number that I had given them being perfectly genuine) and took turns in explaining themselves, asking about what had happened to me, apologizing and trying to cheer me up. They also very politely asked me if I would like to visit them. They said that their work unit was located not far from the county town, somewhere in the mountains. I had heard tell that there was a large work unit out in the valleys there, very mysterious, and that after they moved in no one from the town had ever been allowed to set foot in those mountains again and the original inhabitants had all been forced to move out. Given the circumstances, no one had a clue who these people could be. There were lots of stories though: some people said they were working on atomic weapons, some said it was a holiday residence for the members of the Central Committee of the CCP, some said the place belonged to the Ministry of National Security, and so on. If someone asks you to come and have a look at a top-secret work unit like that, most people would leap at the chance. However, since I was worried about the whole thing, there was no way that I was going to get involved lightly. It was because I had so many mental reservations that I kept stalling.

On the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, someone came to my house to find me and said that I was invited to dinner. I asked who it was, and the man said it was the director of his work unit. I asked again who that might be, and he said I would find out when I got there. Given that this was more or less what the police at the airport had said to me, I immediately realized that this must have something to do with the two mysterious men. When I got there, I found that I was right, but there were a number of other people present who also spoke my home dialect, some male and some female, some old and some young – about seven or eight in total. I discovered that this was a kind of reunion for people from my home town and that they had held such an event annually for the last five or six years, the only difference being that this time I had been invited along.

You could say that that was the origin of this book, and that afterwards one thing followed on smoothly from the next.

4

This book tells the story of Special Unit 701.