September 1984 - Burbank
The reply came in September. Four months later. Routed back through Hong Kong, forwarded to a P.O. box Tommy had opened under a false name.
He drove to the cabin before he opened it. He didn't want to read it in the compromised apartment.
The envelope was thin. Chinese postmark, Hong Kong forwarding label. The handwriting on the inside pages was careful, feminine, the English slightly formal in the way of someone educated in it but not native.
Dear Thomas,
Your letter reached us like a voice from a life we had almost forgotten. My mother is old now, and her mind wanders, but when I read her your words she wept.
Yes. The old story is true. She kept the watch all these years. She set it to his time, the American afternoon, and each day at the appointed hour she would grow quiet.
The hour was 3:47.
She asks me to tell you: she never forgot him. And she is glad, before the end, to know his family still lives.
I hope we may write again. There is so much lost time.
Your sister,
Mei
Tommy read it standing in the cabin, afternoon light slanting through the trees outside.
3:47.
The answer was right.
Something loosened in his chest—an ache he hadn't let himself feel in months. They were real. They were alive. His father's other family, the sister he'd never met, the woman Rick had loved. After thirty years of silence, a door had opened.
He read the letter again. She wept. She never forgot him. So much lost time.
He sat down at the cabin table, already composing the next letter in his head. He would tell them about Rick's death, gently. About the letters he'd found. About—
Tommy stopped.
He read the letter a third time. Slower.
The hour was 3:47.
The answer was right. Exactly right.
Too exactly.
He'd asked the question deliberately vague. A relative once kept a matching one, and set it to a particular hour each day. He hadn't said which relative. He hadn't said whether it was a mother or an aunt. He'd left the pronoun open, the relationship unspecified, so that a genuine family member would fill in the true details naturally.
And the reply had filled them in. My mother kept the watch. She set it to his time, the American afternoon.
Correct. All correct.
But Tommy had never mentioned an American afternoon. He'd never said Rick was the American, never said the time ran that direction across the ocean, never framed it that way at all. His letter had been carefully generic.
Whoever wrote the reply knew that Rick was the American. Knew the watch was set to his time and not hers. Knew the sentiment ran from Shanghai westward across the Pacific.
They knew the shape of the whole story.
Which meant they hadn't answered from memory. They'd answered from a file. A file that contained Marie's letters—or copies of them—the same letters Tommy had photographed in Baltimore. The line about 3:47 wasn't a private truth held only by two lovers.
It was in the record. The system's record.
And the system had just used it to pass his test.
Tommy set the letter down very carefully, as though it might go off.
The verification he'd designed to expose a forgery had done the opposite. It hadn't proven the reply was real.
It had proven the system had access to everything that family knew. Every letter. Every private detail. Every sentimental hour.
He'd built a lock. And the reply proved they'd always held the key.
Then he saw the other thing.
The reply had used the word mother. It had named the relationship plainly—my mother kept the watch. But it had never named the woman herself. No name. Just mother, just she.
Tommy's own copy of the file—Rick's own genealogy chart—had left that woman nameless too. A dash where a name should be. Rick had spent his life keeping that single thread unpulled. A name is a thread they can pull, Marie had written. She has no name here anymore.
So the letter's silence could mean two opposite things.
Either whoever wrote it didn't have her name—because even the system, with all its files, had never learned it—and the blank was a crack in the forgery.
Or whoever wrote it knew that leaving the name blank was exactly what a real daughter would do, protecting the last thing left to protect. And the blank was proof of authenticity.
The same silence. Two opposite readings. And no way—no possible way—to tell which was true.
Tommy walked to the window. Stood looking out at the Maryland woods, going gold in the September afternoon.
He'd sent his letter through Hong Kong, through a broker with no connection to his real life, through a dead man's address book. He'd been so careful. And somewhere between California and Shanghai, the system had simply been waiting. Reading. Answering in a voice that might belong to his sister, or to no one at all.
Which meant they knew now, for certain, what Tommy was looking for.
The recording. In Shanghai.
He'd spent thirty years' worth of his father's caution to ask one question. And the only thing he'd accomplished was to confirm, to the people who'd killed Carol Martinez and Dave Miller and his own mother, that Rick's son had picked up the thread.
That he was going for the recording.
That all they had to do now was let him lead them to it.
Tommy looked at the signature. Your sister, Mei.
Maybe Mei was real. Maybe his half-sister truly sat in a room in Shanghai, writing letters under the supervision of men who understood what she did not. Maybe her mother truly was old and wandering, wept over by a daughter who had no idea she'd been a chess piece for three decades.
Or maybe there was no one left at all. Maybe Mei and her mother had been gone for years, and this letter was written by someone in a room with a file, signing a dead woman's name—or a name they had, and Tommy never would.
He would never know. That was the point. That was how the system worked—not by hiding the truth, but by making it impossible to ever be sure of it.
Tommy folded the letter and put it in his pocket.
Outside, the light was fading. It was almost evening.
He glanced at his own watch, an old reflex.
3:47.
He didn't stop to think of anyone. He just stood there, in a cabin that didn't officially exist, holding a reply that told him nothing except that he had already lost—and understood, the way his father must have understood, alone in St. Louis, that the worst thing the system could do to you was answer.
October 1984 - Burbank, California
Tommy made his decision in the cabin, watching the light die over the Maryland woods.
He would stop.
Not out of fear this time. He'd stopped out of fear once before, in 1981, burning his father's notebook in a dumpster while his hands shook. That had been surrender. This was something colder and clearer.
He'd finally seen the whole board.
Every move he made pointed at Shanghai. Every question he asked drew a line the system could follow. The letter through Hong Kong hadn't opened a door—it had confirmed to them that Rick's son had found the thread and was pulling it. As long as Tommy kept reaching, he was a compass needle, and they only had to watch where he pointed.
But a needle that doesn't move points nowhere.
If he stopped—truly stopped, went quiet, went back to being nothing but an engineer who built airplanes—then the thread went slack. The recording in Shanghai, wherever it was, with whoever still lived to guard it, stayed invisible. Because the one man who might lead them to it had chosen to stand still.
It was the opposite of everything his father had done. Rick had spent twenty years reaching, documenting, pushing—and every push had cost a life. Helen. Morrison. David Coleman. His own.
Tommy would do the reverse. He would protect the truth by refusing to touch it.
He drove back to California and returned to work.