The Cold Crow

He was once the organization's most loyal intelligence officer, and its sharpest weapon. Then one day, he discovered that he himself was the most important target in the conspiracy. In the winter of 1987, Shen Yanzhou returned to his hometown, Jianghai, after twenty-eight years away. At thirty-six, he was a senior operations officer in the First Directorate of the National Security Committee of the Northern Federation, code-named "Cold Crow." His mixed Chinese and foreign heritage, a temperament so calm it bordered on coldness, and more than a decade of intelligence work on the knife's edge had made him one of the organization's most trusted operatives. This time, he was ordered to return to Jianghai to find a missing secret contact and retrieve a classified list capable of changing the international intelligence landscape. But hardly had the mission begun when one strange event followed another. A woman who had been dead for over twenty years suddenly appeared in his photograph. An intelligence investigator he had never met correctly named a secret from his childhood. A sealed children's file from twenty-two years ago recorded eight children who had been secretly taken away. Most unbearable of all, the father who had personally trained him to become a top intelligence officer had issued an order himself: keep him in Jianghai forever, whatever the cost.