Winter, 1937. The embers of the Battle of Shanghai have yet to cool, but the neon lights of the Shanghai French Concession still glow. The grooves of a record playing “Jasmine at Night” on the gilded phonograph in the Paramount Ballroom conceal the coordinates of a Japanese submarine. In the lining of a safe in the HSBC vault, bloodstained qipao embroidery hides a list of infiltrators. The “Cherry Thorn” plan, crafted over ten years by the Japanese Army’s “Shadow Warrior” special training unit, is quietly underway. A Japanese intelligence team codenamed “Thorn” has already burrowed into the heart of the Military Statistics Bureau.
Lin Xiu, head of the action unit at the bureau’s Shanghai station, studied cryptography at Waseda University in Japan in his youth. A scar from sulfuric acid, left by the 1935 bombing of the South Manchuria Railway Research Institute, marks the little finger of his left hand. The smiles of his wife and daughter, tucked into his pocket watch, are his only connection to the Nanjing Massacre. When he finds cipher marks unique to Waseda’s laboratory at the scene of a counterfeit money case, all the evidence points to a fellow student who supposedly “died for his country.”
The underground Communist Party agent “Bluebird,” Ye Wanqing, has a silver fox shawl soaked in five kinds of invisible ink. The compass in her earring trembles before a fortune-teller’s stall at the City God Temple. She sees that the burst blood vessels in a dancing girl’s eyes conceal a mustard gas formula, yet as she investigates, the pattern of cracks in Lin Xiu’s pocket watch uncannily aligns with her own. The cracks in its face glass trace precisely the same pattern as the electromagnetic spectrum of the Japanese army’s latest radio transmitter.
Zhou Zhengxiong, customs inspector for the Wang Jingwei puppet regime, soaks his gout-ridden ankle in a simmering medicinal broth. Between the pages of his Diamond Sutra, a list of bounties is stained with secret orders from the Special Higher Police. A third of the goods on the customs passes he signs each day conceal frozen bacterial strains from Unit 731. And in a Leica camera in the basement of his German-style villa, there are recent photographs of Lin Xiu’s “late wife” at a laboratory in Harbin...
