Chapter Two: A Name Worth Fifty Thousand

The North Shore still echoed with surf at four in the morning. Shen discarded his wedding suit, put on a dockworker's gray coat, and withdrew fifty thousand yuan from an automated locker. The machine swallowed the cash card and displayed a name: Zhou Jiming. Wanxing had prepared an identity for him. Inside the locker were the ring and a shipping bond maturing that morning. SeaGravel Shipping's bond had a face value of one hundred yuan, traded at 11.7, and would default at ten. On its back Wanxing had written: Do not guess direction. Find who is afraid. At a dockside internet café, Shen spent three hundred yuan on public records. SeaGravel claimed insolvency, yet two company vessels had changed course overnight. One carried refined nickel worth 1.