"We've captured the suspect Zhang Chunjiu. According to his confession, Zhang Chunling formerly worked illegally at a privately-operated small lumber mill so the younger ones could study a little. But the lumber mill was poorly managed and soon closed down. The owner fled to avoid paying taxes, and they used the abandoned lumber mill as their stronghold. Using all manner of illegal means—including robbery and murder—they accumulated some assets.
"Because the location was far from crowded areas, backing on a mountain forest, it developed into the first den for hiding criminals. The boss was Zhang Chunling. You could call this criminal organization the initial form of the Chunlai Conglomerate.
"Later, the tourism industry sprang up, and the Binhai District was no longer as desolate as before, so they expanded their den and got involved in the car rental business, first to mask themselves, and second to get faster information.
"Though a good thing can't last forever. Perhaps there were too many bodies buried in that patch of land in Binhai, and it was cursed. All the businesses failed, and the tourism industry in the end was more dead than alive, not gathering popularity. As the Chunlai Conglomerate expanded, they slowly moved away. The car rental business is now entirely abandoned."
"Good heavens," Lang Qiao gasped in amazement when she'd heard. "You've managed to dig so deep!"
Tao Ran sighed. "We had no other choice. The circumstances aren't very good now. The Reciter lured the escaped Zhang Chunling over there…"
"What!" Lang Qiao and Xiao Haiyang said with one voice.
Then, not far from them, there came a sudden string of gunshots.
Lang Qiao gave a start, feeling all the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. She turned and opened her eyes twice as wide. "Real guns? Or is someone letting off fireworks?"
Xiao Haiyang's experience with both gunfire and letting off fireworks was limited. He could only look helplessly back at her.
Lang Qiao pressed her hand to her waist. "Specs, tell me you didn't buy your firearms license."
"I scraped by, but don't ask me how," Xiao Haiyang answered. "They all said it was because I lost five-hundred yuan before the test."
"What's going on?" Tao Ran had heard the background noise over the speaker. "Wait, precisely where are you two right now?"
"Deputy-Captain Tao," Xiao Haiyang said grimly, "there wouldn't have been many car rental businesses here fourteen years ago. Do you think…that when the art teacher Yu Bin and his students rented a car back then, it could have been from those people?"
Tao Ran currently wasn't in the mood to discuss an old case with him and interrupted with rare harshness. "Don't worry about that now. You're too close. Stop where you are at once and await orders. Captain Luo and the others will be there soon!"
Lang Qiao said, "Hey, but…"
Xiao Haiyang hit the brakes and hung up Lang Qiao's phone.
"What are you doing?" said Lang Qiao.
Xiao Haiyang touched the gun at his waist. This had been requested along with the whole team when Zhang Chunling had sent people to kill Zhou Huaijin. Xiao Haiyang still hadn't gotten accustomed to it, always feeling that it was rubbing uncomfortably at his waist. He suddenly unlocked the car doors and said to Lang Qiao, "Get out and wait for Captain Luo here."
Lang Qiao said, "No… What are you going to do?"
Xiao Haiyang pressed his lips into a line. After the nearby sounds of gunfire had broken through the night sky, they'd become increasingly more aggressively concentrated in this desolate place. He suddenly opened the car door without a word and got out.
"Crap!" said Lang Qiao.
She hurriedly chased after, grabbing Xiao Haiyang's shoulder, holding him in place. "Have you ever been out in the field? Have you ever shot a gun? Can you shoot or run, young master? I'm really impressed!"
Xiao Haiyang's face went white, because Lang Qiao was right. Even a slender-looking girl like her could hold him up, but, but…
"The first notice we received said that the criminals had taken a hostage. If the Chunlai Conglomerate and The Reciter are exchanging fire now, what about the hostage?"
Although Tao Ran hadn't had time to tell them who the so-called "hostage" was, Lang Qiao still frowned.
"Of course that's just my excuse." Xiao Haiyang sighed. Then, not caring whether Lang Qiao understood or not, he went on quietly: "All these years, I've wanted to know why…why there are people like Lu Guosheng in the world, why there are people who would hide them away like treasures and with even greater malice use them to do even more evil things. I've always dreamed of personally arresting him…"
As Xiao Haiyang spoke, he struggled…and still couldn't break free of Lang Qiao's grip, but in his struggle he knocked into the phone in Lang Qiao's pocket, which hadn't been put away carefully. By chance, the phone fell onto its screen and bounced off a sharp stone, instantly cracking into a spiderweb.
"Let me go! Let me go!" Xiao Haiyang's voice was very low. He was practically humbly imploring her. "Over a decade—for over a decade, not a day has gone by that I haven't thought of ending this. I've lived this long without succeeding in cultural or martial arts. I have no other aspirations… Even if I die here bringing them down with me, I'll still be perfectly happy. You don't understand, let go!"
The emotions Xiao Haiyang understood were always a little different from others' emotions. This made him feel that he was communicating with others through a layer of something, like an eccentric who didn't understand human feelings. Lang Qiao had never seen such deeply convincing grief and desperation in him. She subconsciously loosened her hold.
Xiao Haiyang tottered back a few steps from inertia and firmly met Lang Qiao's eyes for a moment. Then he seemed to suddenly spontaneously learn how to speak sensibly; leaving behind the phrase "look after yourself," he turned to go.
"Wait!" Lang Qiao bent and picked up her cracked phone, sadly sucking at her gums—this wasn't the piece of crap the City Bureau assigned them. It was her own phone, worth nearly a month's salary, dead in the line of duty before she'd even had a chance to put a protective screen over it. "You know what? Before my university entrance exam, I also broke a new phone and actually got a hundred on the math. Isn't that the same as the principle behind you testing for your firearms license?"
Xiao Haiyang: "…"
"Do you believe in mysticism?" Lang Qiao opened the car door. "Get in!"
The two of them quickly approached the abandoned car lot—the former lumber mill. It was very spacious here, backing onto a gently sloping hill. There was an expanse of forest on the hill. Though much of the vegetation had withered, the dead twigs with their withered leaves and the old trees could still just about give someone a place to conceal themselves.
Lang Qiao efficiently hid the car and did a simple inspection of the surroundings. She beckoned to Xiao Haiyang. "Follow me."
Xiao Haiyang's expression was somewhat complicated. "You really don't have to…"
"Shut up—hss… Deputy-Captain Tao didn't say this place was so big!" Lang Qiao had nimbly hopped through the woods into the little thicket behind the old mill. She sucked in her breath when she stuck her head out to have a look.
Both the lumber mill and the car rental business had come to an utter end. The surroundings were full of weeds. But the building's footprint was awe-inspiring; it was fully the size of a school. There was a ring of cars surrounding it. Dense gunshots rang out inside. Lang Qiao at once saw a string of eye-catching bloodstains.
"On the surface it was a parking lot for rental cars, and in reality it hid wanted criminals. The structure inside may be more complex. I'm thinking, where should we start…" Before Lang Qiao had finished, Xiao Haiyang suddenly pressed down her head.
Lang Qiao, suddenly interrupted, stared at first, then heard the rustle of footsteps.
The two of them hid behind a few big trees growing in a row, not daring to breathe too deeply, listening to the hasty footsteps growing near and then fading away, passing nearly right by them, then running off in another direction. After a good while, Lang Qiao carefully looked in the direction where she'd hidden the car, then held down the trembling barrel of Xiao Haiyang's gun—fortunately the kid had forgotten to remove the safety, or else there would have been great fun when it went off by accident.
She pulled out a small set of binoculars from somewhere and saw that there were about a dozen people in that group, each of them carrying a weapon, walking very fast towards a place where the mill backed against hill.
"What are those people doing?"
"I think they're Zhang Chunling's subordinates," Xiao Haiyang said almost inaudibly. "Look, they seem to be very familiar with the territory."
"Wait, I remember Deputy Tao saying…that The Reciter lured Zhang Chunling here? But isn't this place the Chunlai Conglomerate's old lair? Fighting in another person's territory—what's wrong with these Reciter people's chief's head?"
"The Zhang brothers have always hidden behind the scenes. They must be very cautious and very afraid of death. They wouldn't have dared to come so quickly to a strange place. It may be The Reciter's aim to make them stop at nothing." Xiao Haiyang paused, then said, "Xiao Qiao-jie, what should we do now?"
Lang Qiao, full of misgivings, froze when he called to her like this, her heart giving a lurch without warning, an ill-timed memory stabbing her like a needle.
Xiao Qiao-jie…
Only Xiao Wu, when he'd just come to the City Bureau, had called her that.
"Come on." Her gaze sharpened. "We follow them."
Lang Qiao had guessed right; the structure under the abandoned lot was more complicated than it appeared from the outside, like an ant hill.
Storerooms and narrow corridors intersected. There were false walls and secret passages everywhere, perfectly separating the place where they'd carried on the disguise of doing business from the place where they'd sheltered evil.
Fei Du had taken a rough look and had a faint guess—this was likely the original form of The Louvre and the Beehive.
Fan Siyuan must have come here ahead of time to investigate many times. He was very familiar with it. Under Zhang Chunling's fierce besieging firepower, he quickly took a crowd of people to withdraw underground.
Underground there was a space with thick cement walls on all four sides, built like an air-raid shelter. There was a thick protective door at the entrance that could be tightly sealed. The protective door was painted the exact same gray as the surrounding walls. If you didn't get close and look carefully, you practically wouldn't notice the completely different world here.
There were peepholes and small openings for bullets to pass through in the door, enough to support a dozen guns. It was like a fort.
Fei Du was roughly thrown onto the cement floor. He turned his head to look. In these disorderly circumstances, Fan Siyuan and the others had actually brought the burden of Fei Chengyu along. Perhaps due to blood loss, Fei Du's vision darkened a little. He squeezed his eyes shut for a while, whispering as though talking to himself: "I guess this must be close to the place where Su Hui dumped the bodies. Is that right, Teacher Fan?"
Speech echoes in an enclosed environment. As soon as he spoke, Fan Siyuan's believers surrounding him all immediately pointed their guns at him in a very unfriendly manner.
Fei Du was entirely indifferent. "Did you find this place by following Xu Wenchao and Su Luozhan? No wonder…"
"No wonder what?" said Fan Siyuan.
"No wonder Su Luozhan knew the details of the crimes Su Xiaolan committed over twenty years ago," Fei Du said. "Su Luozhan is a little psychopath, jealous by nature. Tormenting people is her delight. If she 'by chance' found out about the harassing phone calls Su Xiaolan came up with, she certainly wouldn't be able to resist imitating them—truly a brilliant move, achieving so much with so little effort."
"Shut your mouth!" the woman who had been pushing Fan Siyuan's wheelchair all along suddenly said.
Fei Du looked at her in the dim light. With a smile that wasn't quite a smile, he said, "In the process, you must have witnessed the little girls' bodies being transported here many times, right? Such a pity. So many of them, such little girls. Flower buds that hadn't opened yet, dying in humiliation and becoming cold corpses…"
The woman could stand it no longer. She strode over and grabbed Fei Du's collar.
"Teacher Fan," said Fei Du, "could you take better care of the important prop?"
Fan Siyuan sighed and called his subordinate to a halt. "Ruobing."
The woman's hands trembled. Her raised palm stopped in midair.
Fei Du was astonished to find that there were tears in her eyes.
Fan Siyuan said grimly, "We may have been able to prevent one or two cases, save a few girls, but so what? Catching Xu Wenchao and Su Luozhan alone wouldn't change anything. Xu Wenchao was only a psychopath's puppet. He didn't know anything. And the Su family's third generation little monster hadn't even reached the age to assume criminal responsibility yet. The Chunlai Conglomerate behind them was the true culprit. It wouldn't feel it if you cut off one of its tentacles. It would have been saving a little only to lose a lot, making many more people suffer.—Ruobing, some sacrifices are necessary."
"I know," the woman said quietly. "Teacher, I understand."
Fei Du's brow moved. "Oh, really? But from what I understand, you haven't only watched people in mortal peril without trying to help. Zhao Haochang, who killed He Zhongyi, really was a scumbag, but there's a cost for even a scumbag to kill someone. Without a compelling need, who would use that method? Who was it who made him steadfastly believe that He Zhongyi was a parasitic drug addict? And who sent that text message pointing at the Golden Triangle Lot? I ran into He Zhongyi and exchanged a few words with him. He was introverted and timid. All this time I haven't been able to understand how he managed to get up the courage to go 'pester' Zhang Ting, a strange young woman.
"And then there's Dong Xiaoqing. After Zheng Kaifeng's second contact person, Zhuo Yingchun, passed away, your people took advantage of the vacancy to creep in. You knew that Zheng Kaifeng was planning an internal war against Zhou Junmao, so you helped him arrange Dong Qian, a perfect killer—just like arranging for Lu Guosheng to kill Feng Bin—and afterwards you tricked that stupid girl Dong Xiaoqing…"
"We didn't trick her!" the woman denied loudly. "We only told her the truth! Didn't she have the right to know the true reason behind her parents' deaths?"
"It was far more than the true reason behind her parents' deaths. You must also have told her the secret of the mole within the police." Fei Du sighed. "That old fart Zheng Kaifeng truly was crafty. First he use a trumped-up paternity test result to drive a wedge between Zhou Junmao and Zhou Huaijin, burying a chess piece. Then he secretly commissioned an assassination. This way, even if a conspiracy theorist discovered that there was a plot behind Zhou Junmao's death, suspicion would all point to Zhou Huaijin, the eldest son of confused origin. Even Dong Qian may have thought his employer was Zhou Huaijin.—But, beauty, don't tell me that your all-powerful Teacher Fan was also misled by him?"
The woman stared.
Fei Du laughed aloud. "Why didn't you tell Dong Xiaoqing that Zheng Kaifeng was the real culprit, Teacher Fan?"
The woman stubbornly said, "Because…because Dong Xiaoqing couldn't have gotten close to Zheng Kaifeng. What would have been the use of telling her? The outcome would only have been that old scumbag quietly getting rid of her!"
"After she killed Zhou Huaixin, wasn't she still silenced according to pattern?" Fei Du's line of sight went past her, fastening onto Fan Siyuan. "Teacher Fan, you clearly knew that until it was all over, Zhang Chunling's people would be watching Dong Xiaoqing. You were afraid that the sluggish police wouldn't be able to find traces of the organization. Before they dealt with Dong Xiaoqing, you lured the police to her house, lit the fire to lead the police to investigate the security camera on the door across the way…"
Fan Siyuan's face fell slightly. He shot a look at two men following him. The two of them quickly pushed aside the woman and stepped up.
Fei Du quickly said, "In fact, you'd always wanted to lead Dong Xiaoqing into killing Zhou Huaijin—yes, your original target was Zhou Huaijin, because Zhou Huaixin was stupider, easier to control! How would Dong Xiaoqing have known that Zhou Huaijin was getting out of the hospital that day? You helped her plan it! Zhou Huaixin was unsatisfied with his family to start with. If both his father and the older brother he mutually depended on for survival died unnatural deaths one after another, you could take the opportunity to get close to him, use him, get his help investigating the Zhou family's association with Heng'an Orphanage… Ugh…"
Fei Du groaned. A man had grabbed his neck and punched him in the lower abdomen, forcibly cutting off his speech. The other person roughly taped his mouth shut.
Cold sweat rolled down Fei Du's forehead, quickly soaking his eyelashes. He was curled up in pain, but from start to finish, his eyes were fixed on the woman beside Fan Siyuan, hunting down a flash of alarm on her face.
Fan Siyuan beckoned to the woman. "Ruobing, don't you know how crafty this person is, how well he can confuse and poison people's minds?"
The woman hesitantly backed up a step.
Just then, human voices suddenly came from outside. The person who'd been guarding at the protective door with a gun turned to Fan Siyuan and said, "Teacher, they've caught up!"
Before he'd finished, rapid gunshots drew close—this place had after all been single-handedly built by Zhang Chunling. He knew perfectly well where the boltholes were. It was only a matter of time before he caught up. Everyone tensely went on guard.
"How many of our people have been sacrificed to reach this point? Including our brothers and sisters who were just standing with us. For the sake of luring Zhang Chunling here, they've smeared their blood on this filthy ground," Fan Siyuan said coldly. "Ruobing, what are you thinking?"
The woman lowered her head, not daring to make a sound.
Fan Siyuan looked at Fei Du with a gaze as though looking at an inanimate object. "Put on the yoke. The last trial can begin."
The woman hesitated, looked at Fei Du, slowly walked over to Fei Chengyu's moving hospital bed, and pulled off the sheet covering him.
Fei Du's expression at last altered.
At 4:50 AM, the "underground fortress" where Fan Siyuan and the others were located encountered an assault comparable to the firepower of a battlefield, but unfortunately one side couldn't get in, while the other couldn't get out; they were practically deadlocked.
Zhang Donglai was in Fei Du's hands, Fei Du had threatened that he only had "one hour's worth of patience," and now daybreak would soon come to Yan City's sky. No one knew what Zhang Donglai, held in a foreign land, would suffer. Zhang Chunling was simply about to go mad, very much wishing to blow that shit-stirrer Fan Siyuan sky high.
But Fan Siyuan was entirely unmoved, not at all worried about running out of ammunition and provisions and dying trapped here; he simply let them waste time.
At 4:55, Zhang Chunling couldn't take it anymore.
The phone carried by the driver who had kidnapped Fei Du suddenly rang. He respectfully handed it over to Fan Siyuan. "Teacher."
A faint smile appeared at the corners of Fan Siyuan's mouth. "Chairman Zhang, here I was thinking you weren't going to contact me."
Zhang Chunling ground his teeth. "What do you want?"
"Come down here and let's reminisce about the old days." Fan Siyuan smiled. "Though I'll be gone soon, I still have some time left. I'm afraid President Fei's people won't wait any longer. Isn't that right, President Fei?"
Fei Du couldn't answer. Zhang Chunling hung up the phone.
"Teacher, they've stopped firing outside, they're going to…"
The person pressed against the protective door looking out had gotten halfway through his words when he was interrupted by an enormous sound—one of the walls of this seemingly impregnable underground fortress collapsed.
Dust and smoke came pelting down. A corner of the innermost wall turned out not to be solid; there was a passage there about the size of a person!
Lang Qiao and Xiao Haiyang, with peril on all sides, had followed the group of people that had gone around to the foot of the hill the whole way. They'd watched them go into a dilapidated thatched cottage, lift open the floor, and go right down.
Lang Qiao gaped, in spite of herself remembering when she'd been little and her school had arranged for them to watch Tunnel War14. She yanked back Xiao Haiyang, who'd wanted to go right down, and cautiously investigated the surroundings. Then she gestured at him, and the two of them, one after another, went in after those people. This seemed to be a small secret escape tunnel, only big enough for one person to pass through. It was easy to accidentally get your face full of the surrounding sandstone. Luckily, people had gone ahead leading the way.
When the winding tunnel was about to turn a corner, an enormous sound suddenly came from up ahead. Lang Qiao subconsciously put a hand over Xiao Haiyang's mouth and pressed him to the side.
Next, she heard someone's voice.
This person said, "This was our asylum in case of emergencies back then. I didn't expect that you would find it.—Fan Siyuan, you didn't think that when we built this place, we wanted to die trapped in it?"
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Authors note:
(14) 1965 Chinese film about a village defending itself against a Japanese attack during World War II using tunnel warfare.