Chapter 1 — The Journey of the Missing Bronze Drum

The rain tapped on the tarpaulin roof covering the excavation pit in steady rhythms, sounding like someone tapping their fingers on the surface of a large drum somewhere in the darkness. Doanh pulled up the collar of his raincoat, shined his flashlight along the row of markers marking the dugouts, counted again for the third time that night: twelve, all. He was less than twenty-five years old, had only been with the Go Lang Uyen archaeological team for four months, and this was the first solo shift he had taken, because the main security guard had a fever and had to return to the commune clinic in the afternoon.

The light stopped at the corrugated iron shack built specifically for the artifact, where a temporary tempered glass cabinet was placed - the bronze drum's last resting place before it was transferred to the Red River Antiquities Museum at the weekend. Doanh had looked at this shack exactly four times during his shift, the last time at eleven twenty, everything was still intact: the digital lock, the camera with a steady red light, the glass reflecting the sparkling flashlight.

This time the red light on the camera did not flash.

Doanh stood frozen in the rain, his heart beating faster than the rain on the corrugated iron roof. He walked closer, his shoes sinking in the mud, his shaking hands shining the light into the lock. The lock still hung there, intact, unpicked — but when he touched it, the entire lock came loose from the iron hook, light, as if someone had cut off the inner blade beforehand and just hung it back to give it shape.

He pushed the door. The hinge didn't make a sound, although Doanh clearly remembered it still creaked every time he opened and closed it this month.

The glass cabinet is empty.

Not empty in the sense of being smashed, with pieces of glass flying everywhere. The cabinet door was ajar, at the right angle of opening for someone familiar with it, as if someone had taken the artifact out and then gently closed it to avoid eyesores. There was only a circular streak of dust on the velvet-lined pedestal, the remains of a heavy block of metal that had been resting there for three weeks since the excavation.

Doanh stood still for exactly four seconds - he remembered clearly, because later when reporting he had to count how long he was stunned - then screamed, his scream drowned out in the sound of the rain, before he ran like crazy towards the command shack, where team leader Chu Vinh Tru was sleeping.

*

More than a hundred kilometers away, in a small apartment on the fourth floor of an old dormitory, Hoang Thuc Diem did not sleep. She sat at her desk, the desk lamp casting a yellow halo on the stack of photos of bronze drum patterns spread across the table - the job of appraising a private collection that had just been donated to the museum, the deadline was three days away. The phone was left next to a cup of tea that had long since cooled.

It vibrated at one twenty-three in the morning.

Diem looked at the strange number, the number from a distant province, and there was a part of her - the part that had become accustomed to calls in the middle of the night during her eight years as an investigator - that immediately knew this was not a good thing.

"Is that Ms. Diem? I'm Chu Vinh Tru, head of the Go Lang Uyen excavation team." The man's voice on the other end of the line trembled, unable to hide it. "Bronze drum LU-07 just went missing. Right in the guard shack. A while ago... maybe less than an hour."

Diem put down her pen. Her hand, out of professional reflex rather than emotion, reached for the worn leather-bound notebook next to the drawer - an old notebook, not hers, the writing in it was slanted, the broken strokes of an acquaintance scribbling in the field.

"Do security cameras still record anything?" she asked, her voice so flat that even she surprised herself.

"No. The power cord was cut from the technical box outside the electric pole, more than twenty meters away from the shack. The cut was clean, not due to short circuit or wind or rain. The lock was also... I don't know how to describe it properly, it was like it was removed from the inside and then reinstalled."

"Have you reported to the commune police yet?"

"Yes. They are present. But the museum told me to call you directly, saying that this is a national-level antiquities loss case, and the Department of Heritage must be involved from the beginning, lest the scene be trampled before any traces can be found."

Diem stood up and walked to the window. The rain in Hanoi tonight is not heavy, just light, different from the pouring rain she imagined pouring down on Go Lang Uyen right now. She looked down at the empty street, the yellow streetlights reflecting the puddles of standing water, and in a brief moment, an uninvited memory arrived: twelve years ago, the same phone call in the middle of the night, the same trembling voice announcing the bad news, only that time the person who died was not an artifact.

“Don't let anyone in that shack again,” she said, her voice regaining its familiar certainty. "Even the commune police, if possible, keep them outside the perimeter. I'll be there in four hours. Please give me pictures of the scene right now, taken from every angle, even the angle you think is unimportant."

"Yes... yes, I understand."

"One more thing." Diem hesitated for exactly half a breath. "In the command shack, do you keep a field diary? Who has been in and out of that area in the past three weeks, including members of the delegation, including visitors asking for permission?"

"Yes. I wrote it down in full."

"Good. Don't show that book to anyone before I get there, not even people in your group."

The other end of the line was silent for a moment, long enough for Diem to understand that Chu Vinh Tru had grasped what she meant without saying it directly: someone knew the exact time the guard changed shifts, knew the exact location of the technical box, knew exactly how to open a digital lock without leaving a pick mark. This was not a petty theft by a reckless stranger passing by who saw something precious and became greedy. This was a prepared event, and the person who prepared it understood very well the lifestyle of the site.

Diem hung up the phone and stood silently in the middle of the room for a long time, still holding the worn leather notebook. She opened it, didn't need to look to know which page it was, and stopped at a line hastily written in mostly faded blue ink:

"The line didn't disappear. It just changed the name of the goods on paper."

That line was written twelve years ago, by a man named Luong Viet Trac, just a few weeks before he drowned at Vinh Sa port during a survey night that the minutes concluded was "an industrial accident due to slipping while inspecting the wharf at night."

Diem has never fully believed in those four words "work accident". For twelve years, she carried this notebook with her as if she were carrying an unanswered question, folding it neatly into the bottom of her backpack every time she went on a business trip, not because of superstition, but because every time she reread the teacher's scattered notes, she felt like she owed him something yet to be paid.

She neatly stacked the stack of patterned photos on the table, changed into her work clothes, and stuffed her with a camera, calipers, specimen bag, and worn leather notebook. Before going out the door, she stopped and looked at the photo taped to the refrigerator: an old, blurry photo of her when she was twenty-two years old standing next to a skinny middle-aged man, both of them bending over an excavation hole, his hand on her shoulder, his mouth smiling widely because he had just found the first piece of pottery in his student's research life.

"I'll find out," she said softly, not sure whether to the photo or to herself, then closed the door, walked down the dark stairs, and out into the rain.

*

Four hours later, when Diem's car turned onto the dirt road leading to Go Lang Uyen, the sky was still not completely bright. Headlights scanned the barbed wire fence temporarily surrounding the site, past the silhouettes of a few commune police officers standing huddled in the rain, past a faded wooden sign painted in red letters: "Archaeological excavation area - No trespassing."

Chu Vinh Tru stood waiting at the gate, his raincoat was soaked, his eyes were dark from staying up all night. He did not say hello, just gave Diem a plastic bag containing something small.

"We found this falling near the base of the glass cabinet, when taking traces according to the instructions of the commune police," he said, his voice still shaking. "At first I thought it was trash, I almost swept it away."

"Who touched it before me?" Diem asked, not yet in a hurry to open the bag.

"A commune police officer, wearing rubber gloves, put it in his pocket as soon as he saw it. I wrote down his name, now I have picked it up, and the exact location is how many centimeters away from the base of the glass cabinet."

"So that's okay." Diem nodded, opened her backpack and took out a separate record book, the kind she always carries for scenes like this. She recorded the full name of the discoverer, time of seizure, and condition of the bag, then requested that the specimen be transferred to the Heritage Department's own barcoded evidence bag - the first principle of her profession: an evidence item without a clear chain of custody, no matter how valuable, will have difficulty standing up to anyone who wants to deny it.

Only after completing that procedure did she pick up the plastic bag and look under the flashlight. Inside was a small piece of paper, about the size of a matchbox, with one corner torn, printed with a series of handwritten symbols in red ink: two letters, a slash, three numbers.

Her hand stopped in mid-air.

That series of symbols—the abbreviation, the placement of a slash between two groups of letters—she had seen exactly like that, not once, but many times, in the last pages of the worn leather notebook that lay in the backpack behind her.