A Tip-Off Letter Says I Have an Insider Behind Me!

At ten o'clock on Thursday morning, November 26, on the sixth floor, Zheng Haifeng came downstairs with a manila envelope in hand and set it on Zhou Bin's desk.

"It was forwarded from women's apparel. The recipient is listed as the department."

Zhou Bin turned the envelope over, looked at it twice, and pulled out the two sheets inside.

They were printed on A4 paper. At the bottom were a name, a phone number, and a company name, with an official seal stamped in the lower right corner.

It was signed with a real name.

"Who's being reported?"

"Your store," Zheng Haifeng said. "Read it first."

Zhou Bin read it line by line. By the second line, his voice had risen.

There were two accusations in the letter.

The first said the store's single-day transaction volume on Double Eleven was abnormal. It had seventy-two orders the day before, then over 5,300 on the day itself—a seventyfold jump overnight. It suspected fraudulent transactions and demanded that the platform investigate the funds and logistics.

The second said the store had been reported for selling counterfeit goods on November 2. Its listings had been suspended, yet sales resumed a day and a half later. How could the documentation of a no-name little shop clear so quickly seven days before Double Eleven? The platform was asked to investigate whether there was anyone internally looking after it.

Zhou Bin slapped the sheet onto the desk.

"What did I say?" His voice suddenly shot up. "I said last month this store was shady, but none of you believed me. Su Qing even showed me the address. Now people doing business outside are writing letters in to report it."

"Did you read the second accusation carefully?" Zheng Haifeng kept his voice low.

"An insider. Yeah, I read it."

"Then do you know who that accusation is aimed at?"

Zhou Bin's mouth hung open, and he slowly sat back down.

A letter signed with a real name had been sent to the department. The first accusation investigated the merchant; the second investigated their own people.

The first would turn up nothing. Su Qing's data had already nailed that down. The second was investigating that day and a half—the thirty-odd hours between the listing being suspended and restored. During those hours, however many people on the platform had handled those three documents, a check would turn up that many names.

Lin Fan sat at his workstation, with a price-protection complaint about headphones still on his screen—the very same screen he had been staring at since morning.

How that day and a half had come about was something only he in the whole world knew.

On the night the report came in, Ma Le's suggestion had been to find an acquaintance and have a word put in. Lin Fan had not done that. He had squatted outside a print-and-copy shop, scanned the three sheets into images for one yuan apiece, and uploaded them to wait in line just like any other seller. The next morning, he was still at his workstation reviewing other people's business licenses while his three images sat in another queue in the same building. He had no idea how many stores were ahead of him, nor whether they would pass.

He had taken the route available to everyone on the platform, cleaner than anyone else could have done it.

That cleanliness had produced a day and a half.

And that day and a half had become the second accusation in that letter.

The person who had written that letter was in the north of the city, sitting in an office on Monday night.

That afternoon, operations carried a waterproof bag into the factory. Inside was a shoebox, and on the box was a string of foreign letters.

Lei Xiangdong took the shoes from the box, gripping one in each hand and weighing them.

He shoved his hand into the folded cuff and gave it a squeeze. When he let go, the fur sprang back on its own. He smoothed the fur around the cuff all the way down—it was connected to the lining. He brought it to his nose. No smell.

He turned the sole over, pulled out the insole, and found a string of letters and numbers pressed beneath it.

After looking for two seconds, he set the shoe down on the table.

Export work. The stitching had been made to meet foreign inspection standards, with a stitch length even tighter than his own factory's. The string under the insole was a client's product number, from last year.

That batch had not been newly made. It had been completed last year but never shipped out.

He had been in this business for twenty years, and he had always focused on only two things: machines and output. At the beginning of October, he had gone from factory to factory across Wenzhou, booking machines for fur cuffs from October through next March. His people had been stationed outside the five or six factories in the production area all day long. Every newly produced pair of fur-cuffed short women's boots for this winter was sitting in storage slots in the north of the city.

He could lock down the machines.

He could not lock down the warehouses.

There were thousands of factories in Wenzhou making export shoes. The financial crisis had hammered them for a full year. Canceled orders and abandoned inventory were piled in countless warehouses—no one could say how many. Those goods never went onto production lines and never passed through the production area. His map had not even included this territory. Someone had dug up this batch; the next was still sleeping in someone else's warehouse.

For a whole month, he had counted pairs one by one, but all he had counted was his own inventory.

"Lei, should we still investigate the factory behind this batch?"

"What would finding it get me?"

Operations had no answer.

So what if they found out which factory it was? The goods had already sold out, and the money was already in someone else's pocket. Seal one warehouse, and Wenzhou still had thousands more.

The problem was not Wenzhou.

A no-name store with five diamonds had gotten its documentation approved in a day and a half. Reports could not touch it, fake orders could not pin it down, and bad reviews could not be posted. It understood the rules better than veterans who had been at it for ten years. Someone like that either had money or connections.

He could see the money—210,000 in a day.

He could not see the connections.

"Bring me paper."

That letter had been mailed out on Tuesday.

At eleven that morning, Zheng Haifeng called Zhou Bin and Lin Fan into the meeting room together. Su Qing was called over as well.

The door closed.

"I can't suppress this letter." Zheng Haifeng spread the two sheets across the table. "It's signed with a real name, stamped with a seal, and they even left a phone number. If I sit on it, the next letter goes upstairs."

"Zheng, then investigate it." Zhou Bin sat up straight. "I'll handle the first accusation."

"You already investigated the first accusation once last month." Zheng Haifeng did not look at him. "I submitted your conclusion upstairs."

Zhou Bin shut his mouth.

"Su Qing."

"I'm here."

"You have the most complete data on this store." Zheng Haifeng tapped the table. "Write an explanation for the first accusation. Make it clear that those five thousand-plus orders were real sales, the goods were actually shipped, and the money really came in. Lay it out point by point. Don't write anything else."

"I can finish that in three days."

"The second accusation." Zheng Haifeng paused.

No one spoke in the meeting room.

What the second accusation required was not called a conclusion. It was called self-inspection materials. It meant investigating the thirty-odd hours from November 2 through the 4th: which people on the platform had handled those three documents, whether anyone had put in a word, whether anyone had moved it up the queue.

Once written, those materials would be sent upstairs, under Zheng Haifeng's name.

"Lin."

"Zheng."

"You've always written the department minutes." Zheng Haifeng pushed the two sheets in front of him. "You draft the materials for the second accusation. Go through the process from beginning to end—who saw it at each step, what time they saw it, whether it went through automated or manual review. List it all clearly, item by item. We need to understand it ourselves before deciding how to report it upstairs."

"When do you need it?"

"Before the New Year."

Lin Fan picked up the two sheets and read them from beginning to end. When he finished, he folded them up.

"Fine."

The meeting ended at eleven forty.

The second accusation would turn up nothing. He dared say that to himself because, during those thirty-odd hours, not a single person had done anything for him. He had uploaded the documents himself, and they had gone through the automatic review route within the stated time limit. From beginning to end, there had not been a single manual checkpoint. The more meticulously he laid out the process, the cleaner it would prove to be.

Once those materials were completed, the second accusation in that letter would be dead.

What it cost was not his effort. What it cost was the way people in this building would look at that store from now on.

Last month, the store had been a little shop about to die. This month, it was something that could not be explained. From the moment of that letter onward, it was something connected to their own people.

He had glanced at a document last Friday. The date for the year-end rectification campaign had been set: beginning in mid-December, employees' linked accounts would all be reviewed.

The lamp had been swaying overhead before, shining wherever it happened to shine. Now that letter had tilted the lamp an inch inward.

When he rode his bike back to the residential complex after work that afternoon, the wind was harsher than it had been last week.

There were three things to deal with now.

First, he would write those self-inspection materials himself—cleanly and thoroughly—then submit them before the New Year and kill the second accusation.

Second, for the next six months, not a single manual checkpoint could be opened for anything involving his own store. It had once been a rule he set for himself; now a lamp hung over that rule.

The third was the most important.

There were still over two months left in winter. Boots were selling well, but he had no inventory left. Ye's three thousand pairs had been stock that had gotten stuck in someone else's hands. Wu's three thousand pairs had been diverted in breach of someone else's contract. Both deals had been windfalls. Wenzhou had already been searched through once; by this time next year, no dust-covered warehouse would be waiting for him.

He had 132,000 in hand, 33,000 he could use, and another 98,000 that would come in bit by bit over the next half month.

Someone with 130,000 did not need to wait for somebody else's stock to get stuck.

At seven thirty, he called Wenzhou from outside the garage.

Ye answered quickly. The first thing he asked upon recognizing Lin Fan was whether the goods had sold out.

"They're sold out," Lin Fan said. "Ye, I'm coming to Wenzhou in early December. I'll spend two days at your factory."

"Come anytime." There was a pause on the other end. "You still want goods? There really isn't a single pair left in my warehouse."

"I don't want ready stock."

"Then what are you coming for?"

"To see the machines on your two lines," Lin Fan said. "The goods I want—I want your factory to make them."

The other end fell quiet for three or four seconds. Only the sound of wind could be heard.

"Manager Ma." Ye's voice tightened. "Wait for my word. Over the next two days, I'll call some of the veteran workers back and run the machines idle once."

"Call them."

After hanging up, he slipped his phone back into his pocket and looked up at the half of the garage that had been cleared out.

In that empty courtyard in southern Wenzhou, the machines on two production lines had been oiled, and the doors were locked.