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.

Whoops.  I looked at their alarmed and irritated faces, and then realised that I was about to bust my cover if I didn’t say something smart.

“Well, looks like the silencer works,” I volunteered lamely.  “Just thought I’d check it before heading out.”

Feng glared at me.  “Can you not?”

I attempted to smile at him.  “Sorry.  Habit.”  At least the gun wasn’t pointing at anybody when it went off.  That might’ve been harder to explain.

Fortunately, I wasn’t given another chance to make a prat of myself because Feng gave orders to move out, and I once again found myself with the policeman who’d brought me in.  The pair of us split off from the main group once we were out of the building, and I followed my guide in silence through a maze of side streets and alleyways until I was pretty sure we were nowhere near where we were supposed to be.

“We took out the cameras along this wall and the front entrance earlier as a decoy to get the crack squad in this afternoon,” the policeman told me, “so they only have human guards, and… hang on.”  His radio was crackling with static, and he hastily tuned in to listen to whatever was going on.  “Okay, you’re good to go.  They think all the human guards are away from this area at the moment to look after the ruckus our group is causing.  You want to slip over the wall there.”  He pointed at the concrete wall in front of us, which was topped by barbed wire and had the occasional camera perched on top of it like a bird out of Minecraft that had gone very badly wrong.

“That camera there—” he pointed to one about fifteen paces away, “—is still working.  Just make sure to keep off it, but the closer you are to working cameras, the further you’re likely to be from a patrol person.  Remember to throw down pepper or garlic for the dogs, as well.”

I smiled at him and gave him the diver’s okay.  He gave me a wry smile in return and melted into the shadows, leaving me with the problem of how I was going to climb up a ten-foot concrete wall.

I had the amazing luck to drop right down onto somebody on the other side of the wall.  Amazing because a) it broke the fall quite nicely, b) I knocked him out instantaneously and didn’t have to deal with the kerfuffle of a fight the instant I landed and c) he was almost definitely going to raise the alarm the instant he came to, which, yes, was not a good thing at all.  In fairness, landing on him wasn’t totally my fault, however much it was a pleasant fluke: I was struggling to get through the barbed wire, having concluded I didn’t want to climb over it (because balancing precariously on a piece of wire is something I will only ever do in my worst nightmare), and kind of came free unexpectedly with a little too much vigour and dropped practically head first.

Clambering off the unconscious guy and wincing at the bruises I’d sustained in spite of the soft landing, I looked around.  I was in what was either a large courtyard or car park, and I was mercifully alone, if you don’t count people who are out cold.  A complex of buildings lay in front of me, and in the background, probably towards the rear of what I looked to be the largest building, a number of tall chimneys stabbed into the sky.

I frowned.  This wasn’t a warehouse.  The mafia guy in charge wasn’t playing it by the cliché book.  The place seemed much more like a factory.  And it was kind of big.  Very big.

Still, I wasn’t dumb enough to try to figure out what to do in plain sight, so I got behind the first industrial skip I saw (rubbish dumps were beginning to feature a lot in my life) and crouched down in the shadows before tugging Luhan’s phone out from a pocket in my bulletproof vest to refresh the find my phone app.  It was supposedly accurate to within twenty metres, and I hoped to God that the app’s specs were actually correct, because in my experience of those kind of apps, accuracy was a rarity.

Luhan hadn’t moved an inch.  Well, technically, he could have moved up to about eight hundred inches in any direction from the spot he’d last been in, but the blob was at least in the same place.  Sod’s Law: the other side of the factory compound I was in.  Of course he was.  Grumbling under my breath, I tucked the phone away and stood up.

I was about to step out from behind the skip when a sudden rustle of clothing alerted me to company nearby.  Heart pounding, I pulled on the night vision goggles, which had now had time to cool down, and crouched low to the ground to peek out from my cover.  If anybody was looking in my direction, I hoped that they’d be looking more around head-height than around foot-height and would miss me.

I wouldn’t quite say that having your vision switched to sensory input via infra-red is like a unicorn farting in your eyes, but it’s pretty close.  Most places were an intense blue or green, with the exception of the explosion of warm colours where the unconscious guy was lying by the wall and the person who had discovered him.  I bit my lip.  A warning was going to be raised a heck of a lot quicker than I’d intended, and it was definitely time for me to skidaddle, so I did.

It wasn’t until I was halfway across the complex and debating over whether or not it was better to take a shortcut through the main factory building or to risk trying to get around it that I was spotted.  Frankly, I was stunned I’d made it that far.  Maybe I did have a car