Chapter 59#

Yan Zishu surrendered his phone, his glasses, and his wallet without resistance and made no attempt to fight back.

There was a gun visible at the waistband of the man in front of him. Against that, fists were not going to be very useful.

When in a position of weakness, Yan Zishu also knew how to write the wise adapt to circumstances.

As for who would be walking around illegally armed in this day and age — in his assessment, there was only one candidate: the old loyalists Fu Weishan’s mother had left behind.

The unexpected part was that it was him who got abducted, not Fu Jinchi.

The group operated with evident experience — alert, efficient, minimal. Someone put handcuffs on him with his arms behind his back, an awkward position. When Yan Zishu shifted slightly, the warning came immediately: “Don’t move.”

Their manner toward Ji Chen was harder to read — threatening, or protective, it was impossible to say. But Ji Chen’s treatment was noticeably better: his freedom wasn’t restricted. Possibly because he looked too slight and unwilling to cause trouble. He kept his head down and followed along.

Yan Zishu was taken back down in the elevator to the underground garage.

The two of them were loaded into a small cargo van. Two men drove up front; three stayed in the back to watch them.

The van’s cargo compartment had been modified — iron frames on both sides served as seats. Technically you could sit on them, but after any length of time they ground into your bones.

In this state of minimal comfort, the van drove for an unknowable period of time, shaking its occupants apart, before finally stopping.

But Yan Zishu quickly gathered that this was only a resupply stop before leaving the city. They got back on the road almost immediately. This group knew what it was doing — avoiding road checks, taking routes that wouldn’t be scrutinized. They drove for something like seven or eight hours in total. He couldn’t be precise; his watch had also been taken.

The three men in the back played cards to pass the time. Ji Chen didn’t look at Yan Zishu. The two of them exchanged nothing.

Eventually, somewhere, the jolting finally stopped.

Before he was taken out of the van, someone put a blindfold on him. He stumbled on the way, caught a doorstep, then descended two sets of stairs, and was deposited in what was evidently some sort of basement. The door shut and the lock engaged.

He worked the blindfold off and found a small space — no windows, cement on all four sides. He was alone.

From yesterday to now, the abduction had been sudden, silent, and fast. Almost no useful information had been given.

Going back over it, the few fragments he could extract were limited:

The leader of the group had pointed at him and asked Ji Chen to confirm his identity.

Which meant these people had originally planned to take Ji Chen, not him. Whether Ji Chen had volunteered to lure Yan Zishu in, or had been coerced into it — either way, they had deliberately made use of Yan Zishu as a person.

He sat on the bed, legs folded, and thought about what made him useful.

Beyond thinking, there wasn’t much else he could do — unless he planned to dismantle an iron door with his bare hands.

At the end of all this reasoning, his only real consolation was that he’d had the foresight not to have a pet at home.

The basement had nothing but bare concrete on every wall. A low-wattage bulb overhead lit the cramped space. A toilet, a washbasin, a lopsided table, a single bed, no chair. Hot, damp, stifling — exactly what being locked up felt like.

Since being put in here, he had seen no one. Twice a day, food was passed through a small hatch in the door.

Calling out to whoever was outside generally yielded no response. He tried asking for the handcuff key, and it was tossed in with a rough gesture.

His captors hadn’t directly mistreated him, but being locked in this matchbox was not meaningfully better than mistreatment. Nothing to look at but walls. Oppressive, suffocating. Ten days or two weeks of this and a person’s mind would start to unravel.

Fortunately, they were not committed to driving him to the edge.

By his count of meals, three or four days had passed before someone finally came to bring him out. He dimly recognized one of the men who had guarded him before.

*

When the blindfold came off this time, the surroundings were utterly different.

Clean windows. Camel-colored carpet. A crystal chandelier. At first glance, a high-end hotel room.

But looking through the windows, and feeling the faint movement under his feet, this was in fact a cruise ship.

In the mirror, Yan Zishu saw himself: compared to the day he had disappeared, he looked haggard enough to pass for someone sleeping rough, his suit completely shapeless.

This was hardly surprising. Three or four days without a shower, a shave, or a change of clothes did not leave a person looking their best.

There was something that appeared to be a staff uniform in the room — possibly taken from the ship’s restaurant or bar — left for him as a change of clothes.

Since it had been provided, he made use of it. He washed, shaved, and changed. The fabric was thin and cheap, the sizing not quite right. His hair had gotten long. He found a can of styling spray in the bathroom and smoothed his fringe straight back.

With the hair that had been falling over his eyes pushed back, his forehead clear, the clouded look in his face eased somewhat.

Lose the battle, don’t lose the spirit.

And so, when he was brought before the person behind the abduction a little later, that person’s expression registered a moment of quiet surprise, though it didn’t show on his face. The fat man even smiled warmly and complimented the young man on his resilience, adding several courteous expressions of terribly sorry for the trouble.

The man’s name was Wen Biao. Round face, round belly — a former loyalist of the late Fu Weishan’s mother’s family. As for the present day: organized crime in the traditional sense no longer really existed, and he had long since redirected his energies, presenting the outward appearance of a convivial businessman who believed money came to those who kept the peace, and who described himself as running a nightclub operation.

But Wen Biao prided himself on his sense of loyalty. However thin his remaining resources, doing what needed to be done when it needed to be done was, he maintained, the proper code of a man who had earned his place.

Most of the time, Wen Biao was an unapologetic nostalgist. He missed and revered the old days of street-level operations. That had been a life of freedom — the strong prevailed, principle governed conduct, if you had the ability, you set the terms and no one dared contradict you.

Not like now — constantly holding yourself back, afraid at every step that the law would come knocking.

Things didn’t go back. People didn’t improve.

This was not, however, the moment for Wen Biao to indulge his nostalgia.

Yan Zishu looked at the fat man across from him without warmth, and noted that his sudden disappearance meant his colleagues had probably already filed a police report.

Wen Biao just smiled: “Ai! It’s nothing so serious! I genuinely mean no harm here! This is just a situation with Weishan, and I wanted to get everyone together for a proper conversation. My men were a bit clumsy about how they went about it — rest assured, I’ll deal with each of them afterward.”

This performance of the inscrutable strategist prompted a wave of nausea in Yan Zishu. You kidnapped me — just say you kidnapped me. Why the charade.

He waited for the speech to end, then said coldly: “Given that — when can I leave?”

Wen Biao said immediately: “The day after tomorrow! Everyone will be here by then. Can the young man hold out two more days?”

Yan Zishu said drily: “I’m a nobody. Whatever you people need to discuss, I doubt it involves me.”

Wen Biao smiled: “No, no — without you here, a certain person might not bother to show up.”

It didn’t take long to hear it: yet another person who thought Yan Zishu could be used as bait for Fu Jinchi.

Yan Zishu had nothing to say. What was there to say — that’s not a reliable assumption? Or to ask where this confidence came from?

Wen Biao, reading his flat expression, seemed to find the exchange somewhat dull, and had him taken back.

Before he left, Yan Zishu said: “One more thing — the young man who was taken with me. Where is he?”

Wen Biao gave a good-natured laugh: “Now who said anything about taken? I told you — everyone here is a guest. He’s on the ship as well.”

Yan Zishu frowned: “Can I ask — why did you invite him?”

“That’s not something you need to know.” Wen Biao said. “It doesn’t have much to do with you.”

“Ah—” Yan Zishu let the syllable draw out slightly, then nodded. “So those are instructions from Fu Weishan. His pet dog carrying out orders.”

Wen Biao’s expression tightened. He’d been cultivating an air of mystery, and the image had just been punctured. Before he could respond, Yan Zishu continued: “Let me guess — you went to see Fu Weishan during visiting hours, and he asked you to look out for his little boyfriend? That’s why you only took me and not him. I was wondering about that.”

Without waiting for an answer: “Which is actually quite funny. Does Fu Weishan’s mother know you’re doing this? Wouldn’t she rise out of her coffin in outrage? Your lot were not exactly gentle with Fu Weishan’s last boyfriend. Either your thinking has evolved considerably, or you’ve forgotten who your original employer was.”

Wen Biao’s face went cold: “Sharp mind on you, kid. But does all that guessing not get tiring? Knowing this does you no good.”

Yan Zishu said: “No good is fine. I was just thinking out loud. The old saying goes — even if you have to die, die knowing why.”

Wen Biao gave no answer, only swore at the men outside for being slow, why hadn’t they moved the person along yet.

He did, however, have someone return Yan Zishu’s wallet and glasses. The phone remained confiscated.

Yan Zishu took these back without a word, put his glasses on, and after that stayed in his room without asking anything further.

In truth, what Yan Zishu had claimed to have worked out wasn’t pure deduction — it was mostly a matter of cross-referencing the plot. And using the secrets Fu Jinchi had once shared to project a certain air of depth was largely theater; his actual confidence level was closer to fifty-fifty.

The irony was not lost on him: Wen Biao believed abducting him would put pressure on Fu Jinchi. From Yan Zishu’s perspective, it was frankly difficult to imagine a battle-hardened older man who had committed every variety of transgression still carrying such a naive assumption. Whether Fu Jinchi, knowing a trap was laid, would walk into it to save him — that was genuinely unclear. But whether Fu Jinchi would show up for the opportunity to destroy Fu Weishan — that you could almost certainly count on.

Hatred was a stronger driver than almost anything else.

As for the eventual realization that there was, in fact, only one hostage — himself — he found he wasn’t particularly disturbed by it.

Wen Biao bore grudges and apparently liked to be petty about them: he had deliberately sent someone to hint that while Yan Zishu had been sitting in that basement, Ji Chen had been on the ship the whole time as a comfortable guest, and had gone along with leading him into the trap. Yan Zishu found the whole performance deeply tedious. He could hardly claim to be emotionally devastated.

At most, he found himself recalling something Fu Jinchi had once said: You really are quite pitiable. Not a single person willing to protect you.

Was that really worth dwelling on? Fretting over this was less useful than simply filing a proper police report.

Though right now, Yan Zishu had no way to know what was happening outside — at the very least, someone had in fact reported his disappearance.

Helen, finding that Yan Zishu had stopped coming to work without notice and with his phone completely unreachable, had asked Director He, who was equally at a loss. Between them, they had naturally contacted the police. The men Wen Biao was using, however — the ones still operating outside — all had reasonable counter-surveillance skills. In the short term, police hadn’t yet established Yan Zishu’s whereabouts.

Wen Biao was exploiting this window of time. But it could only be exploited for so long before it ran out.

Hence the decision to hold negotiations at sea — harder to locate, and easier to slip out of the country if things went wrong.

For now, everything was proceeding according to his plan. Two days later, the relevant parties had boarded the ship, and it left port.

The weather Wen Biao had chosen was genuinely unfortunate. From early morning, the sky was a solid grey, saturated with moisture and electrical charge, the light flat and heavy. Rain looked imminent at any moment. The wind at sea was strong, the water choppy enough that Yan Zishu was experiencing mild seasickness.

At some point — hard to say how long — the coastline was no longer visible. Someone came to knock on his door, saying the time had come, and asked him to come out.