Secret War on Paper

In the autumn of 1943, Yan Ke walked into No. 76 Jisi Feier Road, Shanghai - the headquarters of Wang Puppet Agent. His public identity: Deputy Chief of the Archives Department. True identity: A latent intelligence agent of the Chinese Communist Party, codenamed "Bronze Lock". His cover identity was a lie spun from within—no organization endorsed him. Once someone tracks him down, everything will come crashing down for him. He has only three weapons: archival classification, handwriting recognition, and photographic memory. He can find dates that have been changed in piles of files, and he can determine the direction of an interrogation from the wording changes in the interrogation records. He was an unnervingly quiet thorn in the most notorious of institutions, No. 76. But someone started scanning Shanghai's intelligence network. The dates on the files of the inconspicuous person were misplaced, and the female traffic officer "Magpie" was found to be following - two clues pointed to the same person: Kenichi Kamiya, a field expert in the special high school. He is systematically sorting out every file and every node. From the underground archives room at No. 76 To the reception office in Nanjing after Japan surrendered, to the heavily guarded core archive rack of the Ministry of National Defense - Yan Ke was doing the same thing in seven different positions: fighting an unknown war with paper and pen. His superior had lost contact, the female traffic officer he was covering had been arrested, his immediate superior had invited him to drink for the last time - and he could not come to the rescue even once. This is not a story about guns. This is the story of a dated file, a replaced scale, and a vacant number. Decades later, no one knew what the number stood for. But the light on the bookshelf is still there.