After driving for a while, the convoy pulled over at the Nujiang 72 Bends scenic viewpoint. Diao Zhuo ended the call. His lips pressed tight together, he stared vacantly at the ranges of mountains in the distance. Ba Yunye got out and said a few words to the clients, then walked back and rapped on the passenger door. “Hey — bathroom break time.”
Diao Zhuo stepped out, clearly wanting to say something but at a loss for words.
“What’s wrong with you?” Ba Yunye asked, then feigned an exaggerated alarm. “Don’t tell me Meng Xiao’ai is playing some game with you again — crying, screaming, threatening to make a scene!”
“Renlong Duoji…” He spoke the name slowly, syllable by syllable, and then suddenly looked directly at Ba Yunye.
“A call about Long Ge?” Ba Yunye blinked and sheepishly scratched the back of her head. Hearing the name out of nowhere, she had not placed it at first — they always called him Long Ge, Long Ge, and had nearly forgotten his full name. “What did he say?”
Diao Zhuo gave a faint shake of his head.
Just now, Ran Jinxian had told him that in re-verifying the identities of those killed in the accident, they had discovered a female tourist who had always been overlooked: Peng Chunni — a passenger who, like Song Fan, had flagged down the vehicle midway for a ride. When the family came to identify the body, the names on the signed documentation, besides her parents, included her newlywed husband: Renlong Duoji. “At present, we have found no direct link between Peng Chunni and Song Fan, but you once mentioned that both He Ma and Ba Yunye were hired by Renlong Duoji to work at the same club. We are not sure whether there is any connection there.”
Diao Zhuo recalled that when He Zhengren had recounted the events of the accident, he had also mentioned that Song Fan had not been alone when she flagged down the vehicle — she had been with another female tourist.
This news left Ba Yunye unable to come back to herself for a long time. Long Ge’s wife had also lost her life in that accident — and in all the years she had known him, he had never said a single word about it. No wonder he had taken such an interest in the photographs she held, and had been helping her confirm the locations where the photographs were taken all along.
Following the timeline, after she had shown Long Ge and He Ma the photographs, Zhang Chenguang and Song Fan had started appearing frequently at Yuzhu Peak and in the desert. Looking back now, Long Ge was clearly a comrade-in-arms in the same trench as herself and would never have leaked the photos — meaning the one who had revealed them to those two was almost certainly the defector, He Ma. But she was no longer concerned about He Ma’s loyalties. What kept turning over in her mind was one question: was her acquaintance with Long Ge a coincidence, and what had truly motivated all the support he had given her?
This question put Ba Yunye in a thoroughly wretched mood. She called Long Ge’s number — his phone showed as switched off.
“Are the police re-investigating the accident?” Ba Yunye asked Diao Zhuo after sitting in silence in the passenger seat for a long while.
The 72 Bends were no road to drive carelessly. Every few turns, a heavily loaded freight truck would round a bend at a plodding crawl. Diao Zhuo’s attention was almost entirely on the road and the corners, and he answered simply: “There is no evidence yet to re-launch the investigation.”
“Will they go looking into Long Ge?”
“The police have their own investigative methods. If he were simply an ordinary bereaved family member, there would be nothing much to investigate. But if he and Peng Chunni were also implicated in the matter…”
“Long Ge couldn’t possibly be in cahoots with Song Fan and that crowd.” Ba Yunye cut him off, the first time she had ever felt genuinely irritated by something Diao Zhuo said.
Diao Zhuo fell silent, seemingly absorbed in his driving.
Ba Yunye let out a long sigh. The mountains ahead shifted in shape and color as the vehicle moved, and the switchbacks of the mountain road left one’s eyes reeling. A wrecked car shell that was no longer recognizable and a signpost stood tall alongside the road, noting that this section alone had claimed the lives of more than seventy people to date — along Tibetan mountain roads, many of the warning signs were just this blunt.
Out of professional habit, Ba Yunye gave the passengers in the back an account of this stretch’s peril and the hardships of its construction, as well as several minor accidents she had witnessed firsthand. As the passengers marveled at the monumental human and material cost the nation had poured into supporting Tibet’s development, Ba Yunye reflected on her years alongside Long Ge, and said quietly to Diao Zhuo:
“Long Ge has been a little strange lately. Ever since I joined the club, I’ve never seen him gone this long, and he’s had no interest in the club or the inn operations either. The inn manager told me that last month when they went to him for accounts, he said he was busy. Several of his old friends said that since he gave up extreme hiking, he had never been this hard to reach. Now that I think about it, those years when he was doing extreme sports — right after the accident, after he left the military — his wife was gone and he was in a bad place. He probably didn’t care if he died, wasn’t afraid of any dangers along the way, and that’s how he ended up becoming a legendary long-distance hiker in those circles. But ever since I told him I didn’t believe the official account of the accident and showed him the photographs my elder sister left behind, he never went back to any dangerous routes or wilderness crossings — as if he became more careful with his own life. It turns out there was a reason for everything all along…”
“He was also searching for the truth.” Diao Zhuo said it with precision and certainty.
“Of course!” Ba Yunye straightened her back, a flash of emotion rising in her.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly, for the clumsy thing he had said a moment ago.
Now it was Ba Yunye’s turn to fall silent. After she had told Long Ge about Song Fan and Li Haozhang taking turns hiring thugs to harass the orphanage, he had asked a friend to look into Li Haozhang — and the reply he got back was that the man was also an unemployed drifter, suggesting that in all likelihood there was someone else further up the chain. But since they were not police, there was no way to access Li Haozhang’s financial records, and the thread seemed to have gone cold. All they could do was watch and wait.
Though Long Ge had told her he was at an old comrade’s place in Qiqi Ha’er, Ba Yunye’s heart was all unsettled, gripped by a persistent sense of foreboding.
Perhaps sensing that she had been quiet for a long time, Diao Zhuo asked, “Are you angry?”
Ba Yunye snapped back to herself and said on purpose, “Yes, I am. So what?”
Diao Zhuo recalled something he had heard at some gathering of friends, where someone had made a remark to the effect that women — if you coax them a little, their intelligence drops to zero, so there is no point getting into meaningless arguments. And so, the geological straight-laced man who spent his days with data and measurements, in the interest of obtaining accurate baseline readings, asked what he imagined to be a reasonable, precise question:
“Have you ever had your IQ tested?”
Ba Yunye clenched both fists and bellowed: “Diao Zhuo! If you weren’t driving this car right now, I would throw you out the window!”
Diao Zhuo, a man who could read fingerprints with the naked eye, stared at her in bafflement, still completely at a loss as to why he had just been sentenced to death.
These past few days, He Zhengren’s mind had been frequented by visions of towering piles of banknotes. Once the beryllium ore data had been listed on the dark web, just as he had anticipated, buyers came swarming in, and the price climbed relentlessly upward — enough to keep him living in comfort not just for the rest of his life, but probably the one after that. He spent several days forcing himself to stay clear-headed, and he knew full well that once this data was sold, the repercussions would be anything but trivial. This would have to be his last deal. His former right-hand men Song Fan and Zhang Chenguang had both come to grief; the remaining Li Haozhang had ambitions of his own; and He Ma could not be fully trusted yet. This time, he would have to go personally and see it through in one clean stroke.
And then there was Long Ge — who had been lurking in the stairwell of He Zhengren’s building for quite some time now, waiting for what he judged to be the right moment to make his move. To that end, he had not only mapped out all the blind spots in the building’s surveillance coverage beforehand, but had also learned the schedule of He Zhengren’s housekeeper, A’Hong — today, for instance, happened to be her day off.
He Zhengren returned from an outing and was in the act of unlocking his door when Long Ge materialized silently behind him, landed a precise strike on a pressure point, and he crumpled to the floor without so much as a yelp.
Long Ge used his key to open the door, dragged He Zhengren inside, bound him to a chair, and took his phone. During the brief interval waiting for him to regain consciousness, Long Ge lit another cigarette and surveyed his surroundings with cold, appraising eyes.
After his newlywed wife had been killed in the accident, the years of anguish that followed — barely scraped through by burning through his savings on suicidal wilderness treks — had given way, in some small measure, to the faintest recovery. He had wanted to wreak vengeance, and so had first gone to the province he knew best, Yunnan, to seek out Ba Xiye’s family, only to find that she had been an orphan — and through that, had come to know Ba Yunye. With no family to take revenge against, and nothing to go on, he had found himself obliged to befriend Ba Yunye on a surface level while investigating Ba Junyi’s background — until, through what Ba Yunye told him about Ba Xiye’s character and conduct, he came to feel that the narrative of a third party interfering in a marriage simply did not hold up.
But this left him in an impossible position: the original motivation of coming to find Ba Xiye and settle a score could no longer be voiced. Out of a sense of guilt, he had given Ba Yunye more care and attention — what had started as going through the motions had grown into the genuine, deep-rooted bond of an elder brother.
When Ba Yunye produced the three photographs for him and He Ma to see, he became all the more convinced that the accident had far more to it than met the eye, and from that point he had turned his attention toward the accident’s survivors. Since He Zhengren had been Rao Qinghui’s colleague and was reportedly well off, he genuinely could not imagine what motive He Zhengren might have for engineering the accident or being entangled in it — and so he had focused his attention especially on Zhang Chenguang and Song Fan.
After spending enough time around Diao Zhuo, Ba Yunye had become firmly convinced that Ba Xiye was innocent, and Long Ge did not press for specific details. Instead, he had taken a different approach: without knowing what the three photographs meant, he had fixed his surveillance on the thread leading through Li Haozhang. He had never imagined that after all his circuitous tracking, the trail would lead him back to He Zhengren.
Was it professional jealousy? Was it a desire to usurp Rao Qinghui’s standing in academic circles? Long Ge did not understand, and that was precisely why he needed clear answers.
The cigarette burned down. Growing impatient, he reached over for the cold water pitcher on the coffee table and was about to pour it over He Zhengren’s head when his phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen out of reflex and saw an incoming message from Ba Yunye — whose calls he had blocked:
“Long Ge, you haven’t picked up my calls in a long time. I know about Peng Chunni’s passing. I asked around a lot of people, including Yu Wutong, and I know you’re not in Qiqi Ha’er. Whatever’s going on, let’s meet and talk. Otherwise you’re not being a real friend.”
Long Ge’s two faint eyebrows drew together into a deep crease. He unblocked Ba Yunye’s number, and her call came through almost immediately.
“Long Ge! Where are you exactly!” She was in a frenzy.
“He Ma is now He Zhengren’s driver.” Long Ge didn’t bother with preamble, cutting straight to the point. “Li Haozhang and He Ma both answer to He Zhengren. Zhang Chenguang and Song Fan’s boss — there’s a good chance it was him too.”
“Are you really in Beijing?! You’ve gone to find He Zhengren?!”
“Since you know that I, like you, lost someone close in that accident, you should be able to understand the urgency I feel to cut down my enemy with my own hands. Ba Xiye was your elder sister, and you had no blood relation to her — but Peng Chunni was the person I loved most. I’ve already succeeded more than halfway. Don’t worry about me; when this is done, I’ll turn myself in. I won’t bring any trouble to you.”
“I’m not afraid of trouble — it’s just…”
“Say no more. He Zhengren is our enemy. I believe, like me, you are someone who must repay every debt. Only I’m at an age where I’ve nothing left to hold me back, while you’re still young — so your vengeance, I’ll settle for you as well.”
“What nonsense! You still have your parents, you still have…”
“I’ve left them a good deal of money.”
“Long Ge! You—”
Dong — dong — dong — The large wall clock in the living room began to chime the hour, jolting He Zhengren awake.
Long Ge saw this, ended the call and switched off his phone, leaving Ba Yunye at the other end of the line, frantic and bewildered, jumping up and down: “Long Ge is going to kill someone! Long Ge is going to kill someone!”
He Zhengren stared at Long Ge with ashen fury, his expression caught between terror and the anxious flicker of someone trying to confirm a suspicion. He seemed to sense that this intruder was no ordinary burglar.
“You are…” The words had barely left his mouth when he appeared to recognize the man, and he drew in a long, sharp breath.
Long Ge perched on the edge of the coffee table, legs crossed, working his prayer beads through his fingers, and gave a mild smile. “Mr. He, honorary adviser — good evening. Allow me to introduce myself: I am Renlong Duoji, from the Sichuan branch. Ah, judging by your expression, I’m not entirely a stranger to you. After all, your driver He Ma spent over three years working at my club — so you should know a thing or two about me. Oh, but wait — he didn’t come to the club because of me. Perhaps I’m flattering myself.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He Zhengren coughed twice and attempted to struggle, but failed. He had deployed Li Haozhang — whose background could not be traced — specifically to muddy the waters and throw Ba Yunye and Diao Zhuo off course, leaving them with nothing to pursue. He had never imagined it would bring Renlong Duoji himself to his door. He was genuinely puzzled: why had Renlong Duoji taken personal action? Was Ba Yunye really worth that much to him?
“Since you’re with the Sichuan branch, if you have some grievance over there, take it up through the proper channels — there’s no need for this. Besides, I’m only a nominal adviser. I’m not involved in the rescue team’s day-to-day operations. Tying me up serves no purpose.”
Long Ge gave a cold snort. “Pretending you know nothing at this point is a waste of both our time.”
“This is kidnapping! This is a crime!” He Zhengren suddenly bellowed.
“What was your monthly salary before you retired? Even if you won some major academic prize, how much could the award money have been — a few tens of thousands at most? Ha…” Long Ge was in no hurry. He walked unhurriedly among He Zhengren’s possessions, appraising them one by one, turning an antique vase over in his hands. “Antiques and paintings everywhere. That modest Gustav Becker wall clock alone runs close to forty thousand yuan. Money so plentiful you don’t know what to do with it? Too afraid to put it in the bank, too afraid to buy property — purchasing collectibles is also a way of holding value.” He paused. “Why don’t you explain to me why Li Haozhang and He Ma became your drivers, one after the other?”