Chapter 1400 - The Cheka

"I have prepared a memorandum based on my research into some of the economic issues at the various overseas stations. Please have a look." Yi Fan eagerly produced a document from his imitation BOSS briefcase and handed it to Ma Qianzhu. On the question of the division of powers between localities and the center, and how to allocate fiscal revenues, he—as a veteran of Wudaokou—had made intensive studies.

Ma Qianzhu took the document and casually passed it to his secretary, Hou Wenyong, beside him. "Comrade Yi Fan, your mission this time is of great importance. You must be extremely cautious." He stood up and clasped the hand of Yi Fan, who had hastily risen. "Be sure to report to the organization in a timely manner if anything arises."

Yi Fan took his leave and exited the Executive Committee compound. He requisitioned a government carriage to return to his office.

The Cheka's office had expanded along with the ever-growing governmental organs and state-owned enterprises of the Council of Elders. It now employed three hundred naturalized civilian workers and occupied an entire three-story building. The corridor echoed with the clatter of abacuses, and staff carrying document boxes flowed ceaselessly through the hallways. Apart from the somewhat spartan conditions, the atmosphere here was just like an ordinary auditing firm back in the original time-space.

Yi Fan thought back to how he had originally set up the team with twenty naturalized trainee workers whom he had begged hard to obtain. He and Jin Zhijiao and a few other Elders had worked day and night teaching them to use the abacus, read account books, and prepare audit reports. During their first auditing assignment for the Council of Elders, the carelessness and "rogue behavior" of a few naturalized workers had often caused complete rework of the entire project. Those dark days of working around the clock in rooms stacked with paper, scribbling away with calculators and computers, still occasionally appeared in the nightmares of the Cheka's Elders.

Recently, however, the Cheka's affairs had become increasingly regularized. Most newly recruited workers had at least a junior primary school education; the most basic things like the abacus and arithmetic no longer had to be taught. After the reorganization of the grain levy, many skilled registry clerks and granary constables from the county yamens had been retained—some went to the Tax Bureau, and the rest fell into the Cheka's hands. These people were well-versed in traditional bookkeeping and were even more familiar with all the "tricks" involved. As a result, Cheka staff had been repeatedly called upon to assist in inventorying "spoils of war" and conducting surprise audits of native collaborators' account books.

Yi Fan's office was on the uppermost floor. When the office was being set up, someone had warned him that a top-floor office in Lingao's subtropical environment would be extremely hot in summer. Si Kaide's office was a cautionary example, though his rooftop at least was made with original lightweight thermal-insulation wall panels brought from the old time-space. By the time it came to Yi Fan, he could only rely on Lingao's own manufactured insulation materials—insulation boards filled with kapok. The effectiveness of this stuff was naturally quite dubious.

To solve this problem, Mei Wan had added an observation platform atop Yi Fan's office roof, with an awning built on top of that. Only then was the problem more or less resolved.

Yi Fan wore a baggy, obviously ill-fitting cotton mandarin-collar top, similar in style to a Zhongshan suit. Because Lingao's summer was simply too hot, there was no way to put on a pair of riding boots—so the cotton jodhpurs he had ordered had to be omitted as well.

Bamboo blinds hung on all the office windows, blocking out the scorching sunlight. To ensure adequate natural lighting and save electricity, all offices in Lingao used large glass windows—which made them extremely hot in summer. To cope, a large wooden tub had been placed in the middle of the office, containing a large block of ice that was now emitting white vapor. As soon as he sat down, Yi Fan's female secretary brought him an iced towel and cold tea.

"Please invite Director Jin to come." Yi Fan wiped his face and neck with the towel. The towel carried a faint jasmine fragrance. He glanced at his secretary; she kept her eyes downcast and said nothing, her face full of resentment. Only then did Yi Fan remember that he had not "favored" her in quite some time. This secretary was a domestic secretary he had bought early on from the Female Servant School. Because he hadn't drawn a good number, he had only gotten a C-grade. Later, Yi Fan drew a good number and bought an A-grade at auction. The C-grade, with whom he had never been entirely satisfied, was sent—under the pretext that she was "promising material"—to the Fangcaodi administrative training course, then installed in the office as a secretary. Of course, from time to time, Comrade Yi Fan would still "favor" her for a change of flavor.

He had been about to offer a few soothing words, but thinking of the pile of matters weighing on his mind, he lost the inclination to say anything.

A few minutes later, Jin Zhijiao arrived. She wore a "1634 Summer Season New Style Dress"—supposedly something concocted by a fashion club set up by several women of the Feiyun Society, currently available only to female Elders and wives of Elders.

Yi Fan had always harbored misgivings about his deputy director—not because of her outstanding professional competence or burning ambition, but because her husband, Hu Muye, was an engineer at Lingao Telecom who was specifically responsible for maintaining the telephone exchange in Bairren City and was always active around the exchange. As everyone knew, the Elders mostly conducted their work discussions over landline telephones, and important notices and reports were also transmitted through the fixed-line telephone network. Yi Fan had a pathological suspicion that his conversations were being monitored by the deputy director's husband.

"Zhijiao." Yi Fan always addressed her with this ostensibly affectionate title. "I'm going to join the inspection team this time; I'll probably be away for several months. I'm leaving the Cheka shop in your hands."

"Don't worry." Jin Zhijiao pursed her lips in a smile. "Without you, the audit office building won't collapse."

Jin Zhijiao disliked the awkward full name: Special Audit Committee for the Elimination of Corruption and Malfeasance. Nor did she like the strange abbreviation "Cheka." She always insisted on calling this place "the Audit Office." Although Yi Fan had always harbored wariness toward her, the two had actually become quite close due to their frequent work interactions.

"Heh heh," Yi Fan gave a dry laugh. "You know what our Cheka work is like—sums it up in one word: 'tedious'—and nobody likes us for it. It's a job that offends people. With me gone, you'll be under a lot of pressure these next few months."

"It's no problem. We all work according to the Executive Committee's orders. We're all Elders—who's afraid of who?" Jin Zhijiao said nonchalantly. "It's just—how am I supposed to handle the cases the Cheka Office is working on? I don't have a clue."

Whenever cases involving specific naturalized-civilian corruption were concerned, Jin Zhijiao never got involved. Such matters were handled by the Cheka's Fifth Division. The Fifth Division had no director; it was led directly by Yi Fan. Even the Fifth Division's office was not in this building but in the adjacent courtyard.

"That's exactly why I asked you here." Yi Fan took out a stack of folders from the file cabinet. "These are all the cases the Fifth Division is currently working on. Most are already on track. When they're concluded, you just need to make the final check and sign off, and they can be sent directly to the Arbitration Tribunal for disposition."

"Alright." Jin Zhijiao took the folders and flipped through them casually. More than a dozen departments were involved, with case amounts ranging from a few hundred yuan to over a hundred thousand yuan in circulation vouchers.

The current Cheka threshold for initiating a case was involvement of two hundred yuan or more in circulation vouchers. Smaller cases were simply handed over to the relevant department for disciplinary action and placed on file.

"Currently, the high-incidence areas for these cases are in administration and construction." Yi Fan spoke with weary disinterest. "On the administrative side, small amounts of money are used frequently and often; even with approval systems in place, sometimes they become mere formalities. Little by little, it adds up. Administrative spending keeps rising. Director Xiao spoke to me last time, wanting us to crack a few big cases to serve as a deterrent."

"Crack a few big cases?" Jin Zhijiao asked, puzzled.

"You know that many of the irregular expenditures we find on the administrative side don't even meet the threshold for initiating a case—a few pencils, a few notebooks, a crate of kvass... all micro-level amounts, and it's impossible to trace where they went. Investigations are very difficult. Even if we manage to prosecute a few cases, there's no impact."

"So you want to kill a chicken to scare the monkeys."

"That's the idea. But the chicken isn't easy to find." Yi Fan rubbed his forehead. "If the position is too low, it's meaningless; if the position is high, it involves too many connections..."

"You'd need a nest case to make it work." Jin Zhijiao said expressionlessly.

Yi Fan's eyelid twitched. This woman was ruthless! With a nest case, many small cases that didn't meet the threshold—even matters that could only be called disciplinary infractions—could be bundled and processed together.

"But a nest case would have too great an impact..."

Jin Zhijiao also fell silent. Things were different now compared to a few years ago. The household and enterprise were vast, every department was a sprawling operation, and personnel had expanded by several thousand percent. If they really dug up a nest case and arrested a whole bunch of people, it would inevitably paralyze an entire department. The Lingao under the Council of Elders' rule was not 21st-century China, where civil service exam candidates and degree-chasers angling for career establishment positions were everywhere. Every administrative worker had at least half a year of training; arrest one and it would take ages to fill the vacancy.

Moreover, according to the Council of Elders' "purity" requirements, anyone arrested could never return to the administrative apparatus. This meant that administrative workers trained at great expense would simply go to waste.

In the embarrassing silence that lasted several minutes, Yi Fan directly changed the subject: "There's also the matter of the construction sector. There are major issues there, and the amounts involved are probably not small." He pulled out a memorandum. "This is an investigation memo on the past year's resettlement housing for naturalized civilians under the Civil Affairs Office..."

"These projects were all contracted to Lingao General Construction Company..." Jin Zhijiao drew in a sharp breath. At present, there were no private construction companies in Lingao; all construction projects were undertaken by this general company. "Are you saying there are problems with the subcontracting and procurement?"

"It's inevitable." Yi Fan nodded. "With such a vast construction operation, I just went and took a casual look—there are several subcontracting bosses at even a small work site: one for digging foundations, one for hauling sand, one for crushing gravel... With so many outsourced projects, how could there not be problems?"