Free The Finder: A Novel by Colin Harrison

garbage days or weeks earlier.
    A laborious process, this sifting for flecks of gold in a stream ofdata, but perhaps once or twice a month Jin Li found a genuine opportunity. In the ebb and flow of possibility, there inevitably arose companies that were approaching a merger, a new product launch, a phase of "restated" earnings, or quietly confronting a government investigation. She scanned all useful documents, along with her written commentary, onto an encrypted disc that each week was sent hidden in a fat bundle of last month's computer magazines that she bought in wire-wrapped bales at three cents a pound from a New York company that was paid handsomely to falsify circulation figures for glossy national magazines. Many of these magazines had promotional computer discs bound into them, and it was a simple matter to swap her disc into a certain issue, fold over the corner of the front cover, and send the entire wire-bound bale of magazines to her brother. The Chinese authorities generally smiled on any activity that created the free transfer of valuable information from the West to China and were happy to wave the computer magazines through. Of course it was easier, faster, and cheaper to send the information by e-mail, but her brother was rightly terrified of the American government's electronic surveillance programs, which sniffed phone and Internet chatter for keywords or word patterns. And then there were the filters that the Chinese used on all incoming e-mail. The people's government went through waves of greater and lesser repression of e-mail, but it was safe to say that Chen was not so well connected that he could be sure when the periodic tightenings would take place or how good the filters were. He had seen friends arrested for merely having the word "freedom" appear in their incoming e-mail.
    So better to smuggle information the old-fashioned way—physically. Each week Jin Li reserved space on an air cargo container that left JFK on Thursday night and arrived in Shanghai the next Saturday at dawn local time. Twenty-seven bales of the computer magazines, arranged in a cube, shrink-wrapped on a wooden pallet, went into the huge container. The container was off-loaded within an hour of arrival, and one of Chen's men would take possession of it. The bale containing the correct disc was always in the center of the pallet, and thusit was a simple matter to remove this bale, cut it open, and search the stack of magazines until the one with the folded-over cover was found. The plan was elegant in its simplicity. If for some reason another magazine cover had been folded over by accident, then the discs in the two magazines could easily be compared. The disc would be driven at high speed to Chen's apartment complex in one of the newest and most outrageously expensive high-rises where impoverished newcomers from the far provinces skulked around hoping to cadge errands from the smartly dressed Shanghai professionals too busy to pick up dry cleaning or polish their new cars. By Saturday morning, Chen had booted out whatever hookerish women he had entertained the night before and set to work, downloading the disc and following Jin Li's instructions as to what certain documents might reveal. He employed a small group of dedicated analysts, some of them trained by and stolen from the same large American and European venture funds and banks trying to spin money out of China, and they would collate the information against conventionally available research, sometimes deriving perception where she had not but mostly corroborating her judgment.
    By Sunday evening Chen had selected the strategies and supporting documents that he found most useful, and on Monday, while seated in a private dining room in one of China's most elite banks, he would explain to a small group of investors what he had discovered. Sipping their turtle soup, they listened intently, nodding solemnly if the opportunity appeared especially promising. Chen was