Chen gritted his teeth as the soju seared into his wound. Pain flared to an agonised peak and then faded away, leaving him limp and gasping, but he had to do it. Stab wounds were notorious for infection. Wordlessly, Tao passed him a couple of alcohol swabs he’d unwrapped. A pair of chronically shadowed eyes watched Chen dab away the soju and blood, exposing the wound. It glared out of the lean muscle of his side like a deep, purple-red eye.

Tao had come into Xiumin’s circle a few years ago as part of a business deal between Xiumin’s and Tao’s fathers. In reality, calling the arrangement a business deal was somewhat misleading. Tao was effectively a hostage, ensuring that Xiumin’s father would have the full cooperation of the Chinese company Tao’s father ran. Chen would have much preferred to have Xiumin himself beside him right now, but with his friend in his current state, he had no choice but to hope that Xiumin’s trust in Tao was well-placed.

Sweating with pain, he took the superglue Tao handed him next and squeezed it onto the lips of his wound, pinching it closed until the glue set. Then he stuck a couple of strips of duct tape over the top of the whole mess. It would hurt like hell when he took the duct tape off, but it would get him through the night.

He took a swig of the remaining soju, then reached for his discarded shirt and started to put it back on. The fabric stuck to his clammy skin. The first three steps of his thrown-together plan were completed, which left the final, and potentially most difficult step: find out where Suho had gone.

The kid he’d knocked out in the car, Luhan, had said he was working for Suho. Luhan was his best bet. He told Tao to drive back to the road where he’d abandoned the car. Nearly half an hour had passed since he’d fled the scene, so it was unlikely Luhan was still in the area, but there was a chance Chen could find some information in the car that might point him to Luhan. In any case, it was his only lead right now.

They arrived to a sea of flashing blue and white lights. He counted five police cars and an ambulance. Three lanes had been cordoned off with yellow tape and temporary plastic barriers, and police officers were diverting traffic around what looked like a fairly bad accident. Shattered glass glinted on the road in the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles. The car Chen had hijacked was still in the flush median, about 50 metres before the cordon started. Tao pulled over behind it.

“Go find out what happened,” Chen told him. He could see through the police tape that the badly wrecked car was the same one that had escaped from the hotel, the one that first the cops, then Suho, had gone in pursuit of. It had been hit side-on by a pickup truck.

Tao got out and headed over to the cordon, and Chen went to look at the car he’d abandoned, ignoring the tug of pain in his side. As he’d expected, Luhan was gone, but had he been found unconscious in the car and taken to a hospital, or woken up and escaped on his own? He didn’t think he’d hit Luhan hard enough to knock him out for more than a minute or two, but he couldn't be sure.

He opened the car door and shone his phone flashlight inside. There was drying blood on the passenger door handle, and he remembered Luhan’s nose had been bleeding. He crouched down and shone his light onto the gravel beside the car. There - a couple of drops of blood caught the light – and there was another. The drops led towards the side of the road, where a low metal girder separated the flush median from a sharply downwards-sloping gravel bank, ending in a line of dark trees at the bottom. Chen strode over to the girder and looked down. There was a figure lying motionless about three metres down the slope, just far down enough to be out of view from the road above.

Chen climbed over the girder and began to slide down the steep slope, one hand on the ground for stability. Gravel shifted and crunched beneath his feet, and the prone figure shifted slightly at the noise. Chen grabbed the man’s shoulder and shone his light into his face. As he’d expected, it was Luhan. His face was smeared with blood and both his eyes were blackening. His gaze looked unfocused. He made a feeble attempt to pull away, but in his semi-conscious state Chen could hold him down easily.

“Hey.” Chen slapped his face lightly. “Luhan.”

Luhan groaned.

“Tell me where Suho is."

“I – I don’t know...” Luhan's voice was slurred.

“Wrong answer, kiddo.” Chen wound his fingers into Luhan’s hair, lifted his head, then let it fall gently back against the ground. He didn’t hit hard, because he could tell Luhan was already concussed. Another bad impact could be deadly, and he didn't want to kill the kid. Even so, Luhan let out a muted scream of pain, both hands coming up to clutch at his head.

“You don’t want to cross me, Luhan,” he breathed into the runner’s ear. “I can make you hurt a hell of a lot worse than this. Now. Tell me. Where is Suho?”

“He – he said to follow him to the old high school, the one by the river,” Luhan said, whimpering as Chen’s fingers curled more tightly into his hair. “Something went wrong with the deal. I think Jwi double-crossed Suho.”

Betrayals upon betrayals, Chen thought with an internal groan. Why did things always have to be so complicated?

He began to half-drag, half-carry Luhan up the slope. It was not easy. Luhan was heavily disoriented and made no attempt to either help Chen get him up the slope, or to get away. Thankfully Tao appeared at the girder, spotted them and came down to help. The taller young man hauled Luhan easily across the meridian and tossed him none-too-gently into the back of the car, whereupon Luhan curled up on his side and promptly passed out. Chen got into the front and looked at Tao.

“I talked to a woman who was driving behind them. She said the car stopped suddenly in the road and the driver sprinted out of the way. The truck came out of that side road -” Tao pointed - “and smashed into the car without even braking. A second car pulled up beside the wreck, and the first car driver and the truck driver dragged two people out of the wrecked car, put them in the second car, and drove off. The cops showed up not even a minute later. Some of them went in pursuit.”

“Then this wasn’t an accident. Both the car driver and the truck driver were working for Suho,” Chen said grimly. He’d suspected this, and it lined up with what Luhan had told him. If Jwi had double-crossed Suho, there was no way Suho would let him get away with it. The men they’d dragged out of the wreck had to be Jwi and the undercover cop impersonating Luhan. Chen’s eyes narrowed. No wonder those two cops he’d seen chasing Jwi out of the hotel had looked so frantic. One of their own was in danger.

He directed Tao towards the old high school. He knew the one Luhan meant. An abandoned three-storey building at the side of a tributary river, backed by a steep hill, it had been built in the 1960’s to accommodate the baby boomers and then closed down a decade or so ago when the amount of students sharply decreased. The area was run-down now, and few people lived there. So that was where Suho had been doing his business.

“Call all the guys you know,” he told Tao. “Suho’s going to have men at the school.”

“What about the cops?” Tao asked, pulling out his phone.

“Suho isn’t stupid. He won’t lead them straight to his hideout,” Chen said. “He’ll have to lose them before he goes there. We need to get there first.”

---

“Is it a secret passage?”

Baekhyun’s voice sounded clearly through the transmitter. Chanyeol and Sehun glanced at each other. That didn’t sound good.

Next came the unmistakable sound of a slap. “I told you to shut the up,” the unknown man’s voice snarled. Chanyeol’s hands balled - this bastard just hit Baekhyun – but the next thing that happened made him forget that, his heart jumping right into his throat. The transmitter made a crackling noise and faded into a static hiss.

“What happened?”

Seulgi checked the settings on the receiver and shook her head.

“Interference. He said a secret passage. Whatever it’s made of must be blocking the signal.”

Chanyeol swore and radioed the ops van. “What’s Baekhyun’s position?”

“We’ve lost his GPS signal,” came the answer.

“What was his last position?”

The officer read out the coordinates, and Sehun quickly mapped the information on his phone.

“There.” He showed Chanyeol the screen.

“Okay. We’re moving in.”

Chanyeol threw his door open. Adrenaline shot through his limbs, filling his body with urgency. They mustn’t lose Baekhyun. Without a GPS signal to track, he could be being taken further away with every passing second and they’d never catch up. Seulgi stayed in the car to monitor the receiver while he and Sehun headed into the hotel. As they ran into the lobby, another plain-clothes officer appeared from the far side and hurried up to intercept them.

“We got an anonymous tip,” he told Chanyeol. “The deal’s to take place in the executive lounge on the third floor. There’s a woman there already, but no sign of the courier.”

The courier was supposed to be Baekhyun. Chanyeol knew now that something had gone badly wrong. Baekhyun was definitely not in the building any longer, but if the buyer was still waiting for him, a third party must be involved.

“Arrest her,” Chanyeol ordered, before turning and running down the carpeted corridor after Sehun. Catching the buyer faded into insignificance with the need to find Baekhyun. He briefly wondered who had sent the anonymous tip, and why, but he’d have to figure that out later.

Ahead of him, Sehun turned right and pulled up by a heavy metal door.

“This was his last location,” he said. Chanyeol rattled at the door, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Stand back.” He pulled out his gun, widened his stance, took aim at the door, and fired. The noise was deafening, but Chanyeol ignored his ringing ears and fired a second shot, then a third, until the battered door tore open and hit the inside wall of the concrete tunnel with an echoing boom. Weapons out, they ran down the concrete stairs and paused at the bottom. Bomb-shelter tunnels branched off in every direction. Chanyeol started to walk forward slowly, searching the walls for any sign that Baekhyun had been this way. After a few moments his eyes caught a thin, fresh slash of black marking the grey concrete at the corner of one of the intersections up ahead.

“This way!”

They ran, following the marker lines at each corner. When they came to a room that was empty but had obviously been recently used, the marks ended – but now Chanyeol could hear the sound of distant running footsteps.

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