Clear Price

In 1937, before Nanjing fell, two things were locked away in the vault of the National Reserve Bank: a boatload of gold that had never been shipped out, and a secret telegram the Japanese would give anything to obtain.

The man in charge of the books was Zhou Yan. Twenty-four years old, wearing gold-rimmed glasses, speaking slowly and keeping accounts quickly. He had a strange gift: he never forgot a number he had seen. Cipher keys, combination codes, gold withdrawal slips, telegraph codes: what looked like gibberish to everyone else was plain text to him. The price was a rush of white noise in his ears every time he forced himself to memorize something, leaving him deaf for two days.

The problem was that the first thing he uncovered wasn't a trace of the enemy, but one left by his own superior: Manager Rong Zhihe had authorized seven transactions totaling 620 small gold bars in seven days, yet the books looked as pristine as new. Zheng Xiaonan, newly assigned to the Military Intelligence Department, had set his sights on the bank, while a woman dispatched by the Japanese intelligence agency was waiting for him to slip up at a tea party.

He couldn't call out, run, or make a mistake. There was only one thing he could do: keep the gold safe and balance the books.