The Tracker's Business Card

Lin Shen later thought back on this day and felt that everything had been an omen—the leaves on the plane trees fell faster than usual, and on the walk back to the parking lot, three crows perched on the power lines. He even turned to look back. But he didn't notice anything out of the ordinary.

By the time Lin Shen came out of the café, the sun was already slanting westward.

He tucked the envelope into the inner pocket of his jacket and zipped it shut. 76 East River Street. He silently repeated it twice in his mind. Then he quickened his pace toward the parking lot, moving half a beat faster than usual.

The sidewalk on Wutong Road was uneven, tree roots bulging up from beneath the paving stones, making each step feel slightly unsteady. Lin Shen counted his steps in threes—every third step landed on a loose brick. At the fifth such brick, he stopped and glanced at a white Mazda parked by the roadside.

No. Just a food delivery car passing through.

A hundred meters ahead was the parking lot. He paused for about two seconds under the third streetlight, pulling out his phone as if to check the time—the screen's reflection showed roughly twenty meters behind him. Nothing there.

He put the phone away and kept walking.

Maybe I'm overthinking it, Lin Shen thought. But the pencil in his hand was gripped even tighter.

The parking lot was an old six-story structure, its white paint flaking to reveal the gray concrete beneath. At five-thirty in the afternoon, most cars were still there, the echoes of vehicles going up and down never quite ceasing. Lin Shen headed toward his spot on the third floor, hands in his jacket pockets, the butt end of the pencil pressing into his palm. He instinctively rubbed his thumb back and forth over the engraving on the cap.

As he reached the second-floor landing, he heard a sound that shouldn't have been there.

Tires.

Not the sound of a car driving past—it was the sound of tires rolling over the parking lot's concrete floor at an extremely slow speed. Uniform. Too uniform. A normal driver would ease off the accelerator at this turn, but this sound didn't change. It climbed steadily up from the first-floor ramp, its pace never varying.

Lin Shen didn't turn around. He tightened his grip on the pencil in his pocket and walked up to the third floor at a normal pace.

Two of the light fixtures on the third floor were broken, making the area much dimmer. His car was parked in the second spot near the elevator—a gray, older-model Camry. He walked around to the driver's side, opened the door, sat down, and locked the door.

The mechanical click of the lock was unusually clear in the sealed cabin. He leaned back against the seat, exhaled, and put the pencil back in his bag's side pocket. The engine hadn't started yet. The air inside the car hadn't begun to circulate. It was so quiet he could hear the pulse of the blood vessels at his temples.

Then he saw it.

Something on the passenger seat.

A cream-colored business card, placed right in the center of the seat cushion. Standard business card size, edges neatly cut. He was certain he hadn't put anything on the passenger seat that morning. He'd left his backpack on the back seat.

The card was face up. Black printed text, no extra design elements—just two clean lines:

"Jiang Fei. Independent Investigation."

Below that was a phone number. Beneath the number, no address, no email, none of the usual information found on a standard business card—just a single line of tiny gray text, so faint it looked like it had been printed when the toner was almost empty: Number 0327.

Lin Shen flipped the card over.

The writing on the back wasn't printed. It was handwritten, in black ink, pressed down hard—the iridium tip of the pen had left ridges and valleys on the paper. Six words:

"I know you're looking for her."

The script was thin, almost without ligatures, horizontal strokes straight and vertical hooks tilting slightly to the left. The writer's style was economical—even the "ge" radical on the right side of the character "I" was written with just a dot, no hook. Not a habit—it meant they didn't want to waste any time.

Lin Shen flipped the card back to the front, then to the back again. He ran his finger along the indentations left by the pen.

Someone had gotten into his car.

He put the card in his pocket and reached for the lock button on the center console—it was already locked. He checked all four windows again. Completely closed. The sunroof too. There were no signs of tampering on the door seals.

He took the card out and looked at it again.

It hadn't been tossed in. All the windows were locked—there was no way a card could have been slipped in from outside. Someone had opened his car, placed the card neatly on the passenger seat, closed the door, and left. His Camry didn't have keyless entry or remote unlock. That could only mean one thing—this person had his car key, or something even more convenient than a car key.

Lin Shen lifted his head and looked through the windshield at the parking lot. The third floor was quiet. No cars starting up. No footsteps. No sound of those overly uniform tires from the second floor. He rested his hand on the key, thumb on the ignition, but didn't turn it.

He looked out through the windshield—the spot directly in front of him was empty. To the left, another row of empty spaces. On the concrete pillar to the right, someone had drawn a turtle in chalk, crooked and lopsided, as if the artist had given up halfway through.

He pulled his gaze back and let it settle on the card again.

"Jiang Fei."

This person knew Su Wan. In this world where everyone claimed not to know Su Wan, there was someone who had gotten into his car and written six words on the back of a business card with a fountain pen—not to show off, but to let him know he wasn't the only one who knew.

Lin Shen started the engine. The sound was amplified twofold in the echoes of the parking structure, like someone bouncing a ball directly overhead.

As he backed out of his spot, he caught a glimpse of something in the right-side mirror.

A black car.

Parked at the entrance ramp of the third floor. Headlights off, engine silent, hugging the wall in a blind spot for the security cameras. Part of the license plate was covered; the two visible digits were "04."

Lin Shen shifted into Drive and rested his foot on the accelerator. He checked the rearview mirror again. The black car didn't move. It sat there, like a crouching figure.

He pressed the gas. The tires let out a brief screech against the concrete. As he drove down the spiral ramp from the third floor, he instinctively checked the rearview mirror at every turn—no car followed.

It had stayed on the third floor. He confirmed it twice.

After exiting the parking structure, he merged onto the main road. Evening rush hour hadn't fully arrived yet, traffic was in that state just before congestion. He rolled the window down an inch, let the hot afternoon air rush in, then rolled it back up. He glanced at the business card on the passenger seat. Then again.

He turned off the main road into a small street and parked in front of a convenience store. Before getting out, he felt under every seat in the car—under the driver's seat was an empty water bottle, and wedged in the back seat crack was a hair tie that belonged to Su Wan. He picked it up and slipped it around his wrist.

The convenience store's cooler hummed. He bought a bottle of water, stood at the entrance, and drank half of it in one go. Then he walked back to his car, circled it once, bent down to check the lower edges of each door. Near the left rear door, he spotted a cigarette butt wedged in the door gap. Not his—he didn't smoke. The butt still had a trace of warmth. It had been stubbed out violently, crushed directly against the door, the filter flattened halfway.

He kicked the butt away, got into the car, and locked the door.

Lin Shen didn't go home right away. He drove back to the area near the café, pulled into an alley across the street, killed the lights, and sat in the dark.

He placed the business card on top of the steering wheel and stared at it. He knew he now had two leads: a warehouse at 76 East River Street, and a business card that read "I know you're looking for her." Both leads had come to him within the same hour this afternoon—one from a person he couldn't quite remember, one from a person he'd never seen.

His hand moved to the storage compartment under the steering wheel and found the pencil. The "L&S" engraving on the cap had worn so thin it could only be made out at a certain angle. Lin Shen rubbed the cap firmly with his thumb pad—the friction cleared the dust from the grooves. The engraving was still there, but fainter than it had been that morning.

He held the pencil and stared at the steering wheel for about five minutes. Inside the car, there was only the sound of his own breathing and the mechanical ticking of the clock on the center console. The air carried the faint smell of the plastic water bottle from the convenience store and a trace of burnt tobacco from the discarded cigarette.

He weighed the two options in his mind: find the warehouse first, or make the phone call first.

Then he picked up his phone and dialed the number on the card.

It rang twice. Someone picked up.

"Hello." A woman's voice. Neither high nor low, but steady—like the smooth cut of a knife through tofu.

"You're Jiang Fei."

"Lin Shen." When she said his name, there was no rising intonation—not a confirmation, not a greeting, just a statement. "You kicked my cigarette."

Lin Shen's fingers tightened around the phone. "You've been following me."

"Since you walked into the café. I was sitting in the booth behind you when you ordered your oat latte. When you left, your backpack strap caught on the back of the chair—you turned back and took about four seconds to unhook it." Jiang Fei's speech wasn't fast, each word seemed pre-cut before being released. "There's a three-centimeter scratch on the lower edge of your left rear door. Your last car wash was within the past three days—there are still streaks of car wash soap on your windshield. You took the day off today. The cold was fake."

Lin Shen turned and glanced out the window. Only one streetlight was on in the alley; beneath it, an orange cat was licking its front paw.

"What do you want?"

"I want to talk to you."

"About what?"

"About Su Wan."

Lin Shen tapped the steering wheel with his finger. Tapped again. The third tap stopped midway, and he clenched his fist instead.

"How do I trust you?"

Jiang Fei was silent on the other end for two seconds. Then she gave him an address—not by speaking it directly, but by sending a text message. An MMS, not plain text. The image showed a handwritten list with six rows, each row containing a set of numbers and place names: coordinates, dates, names. "Project Mirror," "Corrector," "Mirror A," "Crosser"—every term was something Lin Shen was seeing for the first time.

"After you've read it," Jiang Fei said on the phone, "come to this address to find me. You have one hour. After that, I'll move."

"Who are you hiding from?"

"The same person you are." On the other end came the sound of a lighter, followed by what sounded like a long exhale. "Except I got started three years earlier than you."

The call ended.

Lin Shen stared at the address in the text message on his phone screen, silently repeating it three times. Then he copied it onto the sticky note where he'd sketched with the pencil, tucked it into his jacket pocket alongside the business card.

He drove the car out of the alley and merged back onto the main road. Just as he entered the flow of traffic—he saw it again in the rearview mirror. The black car.

This time it was closer. About three car lengths away. Its front end pointed in his direction.

Lin Shen pressed the accelerator, made a sharp turn into a one-way street at the next intersection, then made two more consecutive turns before finally pulling into a paid parking lot of a commercial building. He killed the engine and buried his head against the steering wheel for about two minutes. When he looked up again, the black car was gone from the rearview mirror.

He sat in the driver's seat, pulled out his phone, and sent Jiang Fei a message: "Not tonight. Tomorrow at nine in the morning."

After sending it, he took the cream-colored business card out of his pocket and flipped it to the back one more time. The indentations from the pen caught the parking lot's light, showing a pale golden shimmer.

His hands were steady. The pencil tapped once against the dashboard.

Outside the car, the parking lot attendant walked past with a dog. The dog barked three times in the direction of his car.