Mo Du (默读) - Silent Reading

Verhovensky XXXIII

Fei Du stood in the basement’s narrow stairwell. This place made him feel rather unhappy, but it was still within the bounds of endurance, so he didn’t disclose it. He only frowned, pondering for a moment. “That driver just said that Lu Guosheng often used his car privately. So was going to the Longyun Center before also a private operation? Minor figures like them, while they have tracking devices on them, wouldn’t normally be looked after very strictly. After all, they’re the ones with nowhere else to go. They’re the ones who need the ‘organization’ to shelter them.—But why did they react so promptly when he was only delayed slightly today? Do those people know that we’re on Lu Guosheng’s tracks?”

Luo Wenzhou was silent for a long time, his heart starting to sink, suspecting that this time they would receive another corpse, leaving them without any evidence.

Just then, his phone made a sound, receiving a message from Xiao Haiyang—

Xiao Haiyang was sitting in a corner of the conference room at the City Bureau, euphemistically as “police force reception personnel”, actually as a voice machine repeating “we have rules” every three sentences, listening to neither the good nor the bad, getting a crowd of irate parents so angry their faces turned red and their necks swelled. If they hadn’t had scruples about this being the City Bureau, they would have come to blows long ago.

But in fact Little Glasses only had one true assignment: keeping a close watch on Wei Zhanhong.

In the instant Wei Zhanhong picked up his phone and his expression suddenly changed, Xiao Haiyang instinctively felt something was wrong. He didn’t think about it carefully. He came to a rapid decision, putting his hand in the desk and turning on a miniature signal blocking device.

The instant Wei Zhanhong pressed “send”, his phone signal was suddenly interrupted, and the message got stuck, anxiously looped around, then displayed that it had failed to send.

Wei Zhanhong’s expression grew grave. He subconsciously looked all around, but there was nothing unusual in any direction. There were only impatient parents surrounding the hard-pressed young person in charge.—Oh, there was also a four-eyed little police officer in the corner.—Wei Zhanhong looked at Xiao Haiyang, not taking him seriously.

Like a kid who’d mistakenly put on a grown-up’s clothes and had just shown up to buy soy sauce, Little Glasses was sitting there cautiously holding his notebook, giving off an air of inept schoolboy clumsiness.

Wei Zhanhong felt he was being paranoid. It was normal for the signal to be bad inside a building. He took a deep breath, focused, and calmly went out the door of the conference room.

Upon seeing this, the duty officer at the door blocked him. “Where are you going, sir? Could we help…”

“I’m just going to the bathroom,” Wei Zhanhong interrupted him with a fake smile. “What, are you worried I’ll run? You’re holding my son here, where am I going to go? Or are you saying that now we’re here, we even need someone to accompany us to the toilet? Then I advise you to simply get out your handcuffs and arrest us.”

He deliberately raised his voice for the last sentence. Many of the surrounding parents heard it and at once became even more enraged.

While the duty officer stared, Wei Zhanhong drew back his fake smile, coldly looked askance at him, and strode over to the bathroom at the other end of the hall.

The City Bureau’s corridor was narrow, and the windows were hard to open. It had an oppressive look. Wei Zhanhong felt that the sealed doors and windows kept both the light and the signal outside. With a grave expression, he walked into the bathroom holding his phone, looking all around. Only when he approached a window did a weak signal appear.