Long Ge was not a heavy smoker — he could go years without lighting a single cigarette. Yet during the days he had spent staking out the area below Li Haozhang’s residence, he kept finding that without realizing it, a small graveyard of cigarette butts had accumulated at his feet, and whenever he opened his mouth, the stench of nicotine came pouring out.

After returning to Beijing, Li Haozhang had barely left his apartment — like an unmarried girl in the old days who never stepped beyond the inner gate. Three meals a day were delivered entirely by food delivery apps. The more he behaved this way, the more Long Ge was convinced something was wrong. What kind of thug stayed home, refused to go out drinking or chasing women, made no effort to earn money, and played at being a hermit?

Unfortunately, he was not a police officer and had no access to wiretapping or financial tracing — otherwise, he would never have had to work so hard. He had not told Ba Yunye where he was, maintaining only the barest contact with her to let her know he had not disappeared. He had always been a man with a plan — but this plan could not be shared with anyone.

Then, one night, just after ten o’clock, a familiar figure stepped into Long Ge’s line of sight. That build, that particular way of walking — it was none other than He Ma, who had been missing for some time. He probably never imagined Long Ge might be in the area; he wore only a pollution mask, and slipped hurriedly into the stairwell.

Long Ge was a man of great composure. He stayed exactly where he was, working the prayer beads on his left hand, while his right hand lit another cigarette.

He Ma appearing here could be no coincidence. Was he connected to Li Haozhang?

Long Ge fixed his gaze on the stairwell lights and watched the glow come to a stop on the floor where Li Haozhang lived — which confirmed that He Ma had indeed come for him. Thinking of what Ba Yunye had said about Li Haozhang hiring thugs to harass the old orphanage site, a wave of anger rose from deep within Long Ge — not toward those thugs, but because He Ma, who had worked alongside Ba Yunye for over three years, had a connection to this man?

Li Haozhang peered through the peephole, saw that it was He Ma, and listened warily for any other sounds outside before reluctantly opening the door after a prolonged delay.

He Ma pulled off his mask, stretched lazily, and gave a roguish grin. “Well? Going out of your mind with boredom yet?”

“When is Mr. He going to give me another assignment?” Li Haozhang slouched on the sofa with boneless nonchalance. “I’ve called him several times. He keeps telling me to lay low. What’s so scary about Diao Zhuo? Like he’d really bother coming all the way to Beijing just for me. From what I observed over the past month or two, he and Ba Yunye are basically glued together in Yunnan every single day. If I were in his shoes, I’d want to be with a woman too. Tailing a man — what’s the point?”

He Ma had known all along that Li Haozhang’s trip had yielded nothing — it had been nothing more than He Zhengren’s ploy to create a distraction. He changed the subject. “Ba Yunye… she’s doing alright?”

“Business is good. She didn’t have a day off during Spring Festival — sometimes she takes a few clients to Lugu Lake or Blue Moon Valley.”

“Does she curse me out behind my back?”

“Who knows? I wouldn’t dare go anywhere near her.” Li Haozhang answered with a sulky edge. Over the past two months, Ba Yunye had given him no end of grief — never mind her sabotaging his tires, she sometimes took deliberate detours that left him completely disoriented, and at other times worked some trick or other that left the lot of them covered in hives, itching so badly they wanted to tear off their own skin.

“Right — Mr. He called me back. He said we don’t need to keep surveillance on Ba Yunye and Diao Zhuo anymore. Has he made some new discovery?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Mr. He has been acting strange lately.” Li Haozhang probed cautiously. “Do you think he’s… thinking of retiring?”

“Retiring? That won’t do at all!” He Ma shook his head regretfully. “I’ve barely made any real money following him. How can he start thinking about throwing in the towel now?”

“If he has any plans, he should communicate them to me…”

“He doesn’t necessarily tell you everything.” He Ma needled, his words carrying an undercurrent of meaning. “I spent over three years with Ba Yunye, and she probably only figured it out at the very moment I ran. And you? You spent barely two months with her, and look at the shape she made of you — she even found out you hired people to cause trouble at the orphanage. Sigh. Mr. He probably won’t use you again after this. You’d better start thinking about your own next steps.”

Li Haozhang flared up. “Can you compare me to yourself?! In what capacity did you get close to her? And me?! If you hadn’t run, would she have been so guarded?”

“Take care of yourself.” He Ma sighed, left behind a thick wad of cash, and walked out.

The cash was considerable, but Li Haozhang felt like an ant on a hot pan, pacing restlessly around the living room, his mind filled with He Ma’s words — “Mr. He probably won’t use you again” and “think about your own next steps.” After a long, irresolute interval, he picked up his phone and dialed a number.

“Old He is making moves — looks like he’s thinking of quitting!”

He Ma walked down to street level, hailed a taxi and made a swift departure. In a shadowed corner, a car quietly pulled in behind him and trailed him to an area near Beixinqiao Subway Station on the northern side of Dongzhimen. He Ma got out of the taxi, walked less than a hundred meters down a hutong, and vanished through the entrance of a youth hostel.

The place was not far from Ghost Street; at this hour, tourists who had just finished a late-night meal were still wandering back, talking and laughing loudly. Long Ge, wearing a cap and a face mask, blended in among them and checked into a guesthouse on the opposite side. The third-floor balcony provided a clear view of the youth hostel’s front entrance.

He stood on the balcony smoking for quite a while. Ba Yunye’s call came through.

“Long Ge, where on earth have you been? No one’s seen you in a month.”

“I’m in the Northeast.”

“The Northeast?!” Ba Yunye clearly did not believe him. “Where in the Northeast?”

Long Ge paused for a second. “Qiqi Ha’er.”

“What are you doing in Qiqi Ha’er?”

“Visiting an old comrade — the engineering battalion commander Yu Wutong. I’ve mentioned him to you before.”

“Let me talk to him.”

Long Ge couldn’t help but laugh. “You little rascal, you dare check up on me? Look what time it is — do you really think I’d be sitting around with another man?”

“So you’re with a woman?”

Long Ge gave a dismissive grunt.

Ba Yunye was not fully convinced, and could only change the subject. “I’m back in Lijiang. The peach blossoms in Linzhi are blooming in great swaths — more beautiful than last year, and with the television advertising the Peach Blossom Festival, lots of people are asking about it, and we’re getting more bookings than expected. Next month we plan to set out on the Yunnan-Tibet Highway with six vehicles together…”

Long Ge had no interest in business matters. “You handle it. And your man?”

“He flies to Kashgar at the beginning of next month.” Ba Yunye’s voice dropped, and one could hear from her tone that she was not happy about what might be a separation of up to half a year.

Long Ge smiled. “This year let’s do more scouting in Xinjiang. Eventually you could switch to the Xinjiang circuit — go from being a ‘Tibet drifter’ to a ‘Xinjiang drifter.'”

“If you’re in Qiqi Ha’er, why do I hear someone walking past in the background saying something about Houhai?” Ba Yunye dropped this without warning.

Long Ge caught a glimpse of a few drunk and rowdy young people on the street below, and immediately turned and stepped inside. “You heard wrong. It’s the TV drama I’m watching.”

They chatted a little more, and Long Ge excused himself by saying he needed to shower, and ended the call.

Over the past few days, Long Ge had paid the owner of a small convenience store near Li Haozhang’s building to keep watch for him while he switched to tailing He Ma. He Ma was far harder to track than Li Haozhang — he went out almost every day and lived like any ordinary resident of the area: eating at restaurants, taking walks, or hanging around bars.

Long Ge, with his background as a scout soldier, had kept himself from being spotted by He Ma the entire time. But the smog and the dry air had inflamed his throat on several occasions, and it was then that he truly appreciated how straightforward it had been to stake out the housebound Li Haozhang. Regrettably, he had not lost a single gram of weight.

Heaven rewards the diligent: one day he noticed He Ma take the subway out to the suburbs, and moments later drive off in an Audi A8 with someone seemingly in the back seat. Long Ge photographed the license plate and the location, then followed the car all the way to a private dining restaurant. Sure enough, a man got out from the back seat — his face was unclear, but he appeared to be of fairly advanced age and walked with difficulty.

Was he the chauffeur for the owner of this A8? Or just a designated driver? The first rule of surveillance was to resist the urge for hasty conclusions. Long Ge kept well back in the shadows and did not approach further.

Over the next several days, Long Ge established that He Ma was not a designated driver but the dedicated personal chauffeur for this A8. The vehicle had been to only two places: the private dining restaurant and the office building housing the Beidou Rescue Brigade headquarters. Through this, Long Ge also learned that the owner of the A8 was none other than one of the survivors and eyewitnesses of the terrible accident of years past — He Zhengren. He showed the photograph around and asked questions here and there, and discovered that Li Haozhang had also been He Zhengren’s driver — until He Ma took over, at which point Li Haozhang had vanished from the picture.

Zhang Chenguang. Song Fan. Li Haozhang. He Ma. He Zhengren. The web connecting these five people left Long Ge staggered with shock — and in the wake of the shock, a hollow, boneless weakness spread through his body, followed by a surging, roiling fury. Even someone with no personal connection to these events could imagine the number of conspiracies, already successfully carried out, that were threaded through this web.

“He Zhengren…” He enunciated each syllable heavily, as though tasting the weight of a name that was not entirely unfamiliar to him, and slumped back against the wall.

The Soaring Eagle Club’s Yunnan-Tibet run this time deployed six off-road vehicles. Ba Yunye led the convoy, and the journey from Lijiang onward went smoothly — the clients all got along well. In her front passenger seat sat a man who sometimes even took the wheel: Diao Zhuo. After reaching Lhasa, he would fly directly to Kashgar.

Parts of National Highway 318 were sometimes temporarily closed or backed up due to rockfalls and traffic accidents. One day, just as the convoy was approaching the “72 Bends of the Nujiang River,” they ran into a traffic jam, and everyone climbed out — some to take photographs, others to fly their drones.

Ba Yunye and Diao Zhuo stepped out of the car and stood looking out at the “Z”-shaped heavenly road stretching into the distance, both falling into silence. The accident from years ago had happened not far ahead. Just looking at the dramatic drop of the terrain, one could picture the horror of what had occurred.

Ba Yunye wore sunglasses, hands in her pockets, her bearing slightly cool. “When I first started in this trade and was driving solo to scout the route, I got to this stretch and it was completely dark. I was a little tired, and wasn’t paying attention for a moment. I must have nodded off at the wheel — and then it was as though someone gave me a sharp smack on the back of the head. I hit the brakes on instinct, and only then realized I was right on the outermost edge of the sharpest bend. One second later, and it would’ve been me and the car, gone over the side.”

She pointed out roughly where it had happened and spoke lightly. “Evil lives a thousand years.”

Diao Zhuo, characteristically stone-faced, administered retaliatory retribution by vigorously ruffling her hair, and asked her, “Have you ever heard a saying?”

“What saying?”

“A tortoise lives ten thousand years.”

Ba Yunye drew a deep breath. “You absolute idiot, I swear I’ll do you in.”

The sudden eruption of Shaanxi dialect caught Diao Zhuo completely off guard. A few seconds passed before he crossed his arms. “Learning nothing good, and you’ve picked up cursing like a second language?”

“When you’re out making your way in the world, you need a few skills to fall back on.” Ba Yunye lifted her eyebrows smugly, with a rakish satisfaction.

“Say a bit more — let me hear it.”

“Not telling.”

The other drivers in the convoy, with nothing better to do, began teasing Ba Yunye and Diao Zhuo. “Hey! Did this handsome fellow pay his fare?”

“Of course he did,” Ba Yunye replied with complete composure. “But since he’s so good-looking, I gave him a fifty percent discount.”

The other drivers all knew she was making it up, and deliberately asked her: “What kind of discount do we get for our looks?”

Ba Yunye gave them a withering look. “You get double-priced.”

The road ahead appeared to be clearing. Ba Yunye waved and called the clients back to their seats. Diao Zhuo was just about to get in when his phone rang — it was Ran Jinxian. He answered and sat quietly in the passenger seat listening. Ba Yunye glanced over at him and saw his eyes widen almost imperceptibly, as though he had just received some startling news.