Deer Luhan, With Love

41

Chapter 41 – In Which I Fail at Being Badass

Deer Luhan,

I would be lying if I said that your stunt in the helicopter hadn’t inspired me to amazing heights of idiocy, but I’d also be lying if I said I’d expected it to go quite this far.  Because seriously, who actually believes somebody is a spy when they turn around and tell you they’re a spy when you don’t know them?  If people know you’re a spy, then you’re a failed spy.  And you usually get arrested or assassinated.

Leigh

I don’t know about anybody else, but I personally wouldn’t trust a lot of really expensive equipment, the life of a colleague and the safety of a pretty well-known pop star to a crazy nineteen-year-old foreigner who claimed to be working for SIS.  Then again, I wasn’t Commissioner General Feng Xue-Qin and I’ve never come face to face with a girl who claims to have learnt Mandarin in a month and professed herself to having been top of her shooting class during spy training, so fortunately I’ve never been put in the position where I have to decide whether said girl is a total crackpot who needs to be put away in an asylum or whether it’s worth the gamble of throwing her into the fray with my favourite semi-automatic pistol and one of my underling’s bulletproof vests.  I guess desperation makes stupid decisions for the best of us.

And so it was that I found myself sitting on a chair by the door five minutes later, a couple of policewomen fussing over me with a headset and nightvision goggles as I redeployed all the stuff I’d taken from the dorm into hidden pockets in the bulletproof vest, toying with the semi-automatic and trying to look as though I knew what I was doing with it (and praying that the safety catch was on, if it even had one) and trying to pay attention to the briefing that Feng was giving me.

“The tricky part will be getting in there in the first place,” he repeated for about the fiftieth time, and I nodded as if it was the most important thing ever.  To be fair, right now, it kind of was.  “We’ll do our best to provide a diversion.  After that, you’re on your own.  Use the radio if you feel the need, but don’t let it give you away.  And be careful: they’re armed.”

I gave him a thumbs up to show I understood.

“Oh, and also, avoid the basement area where they kept Mr Lu’s aunt,” the policeman who’d brought me in added.  “We think there might be explosives down there.”

“Keep out of basements,” I confirmed.  “Got it.”

“Let us know if you find Mr Lu,” Feng finished up.  “We’ll try our best to assist you in getting out.”

I gave him another thumbs up.  I was ready to rumble.  So ready to rumble I felt like I was going to throw up.  Why did I think this was a good idea again?

As I got to my feet and prepared to move out with a small squadron of people in similar attire to me, I began to wonder if maybe it was a better idea to just admit the truth and that I didn’t actually have a clue what I was doing.

Luhan rescued you from a helicopter when he’s terrified of heights.

But you could actually get killed, Leigh.

You came all the way here.  Don’t back out now.

My fingers accidentally squeezed the trigger of the pistol, which I’d been holding onto in an attempt to comfort myself, and the floorboard next to my left foot exploded with a sharp crack!  Several of the police officers near me jumped and whipped around.