Xiumin was unimpressed at the amount of time it took to get through to Lay.  His anxiety grew as he was kept on hold, wondering what had happened with Semi, whether the police really would hold him accountable even if it clearly wasn’t his fault, and if Luhan had potentially grown tired of the waiting game and just seized the opportunity, in which case he suspected he would be held accountable.

“What?” Lay grumbled at him.  “It’s two in the morning.  I’m not supposed to be on shift.”

“Semi’s missing,” Xiumin told him.  “She never came back to the apartment and she’s not with her friends.”

Lay yawned.  “I know.”

For a moment, Xiumin stood there in disbelief.  Then a wave of anger crashed over him.

“You knew?” he spat out, too irritated to feel relieved.  “Where is she?  What have you done to her?  What’s the point in dragging me out of prison to protect her if you’re not actually going to use me for that?”

There was a pause at the other end.  “Are you worried about her?”

“I’m angry you didn’t tell me where she was!”

“I’d be able to if I actually had an idea.”

The anger gave way to a sickening sense of dread.

“I’ve literally just got off the phone to Semi’s friend Tao,” Lay said around another yawn.  “He’s reported her missing too.”

The dread was accompanied by confusion.

“Kind of surprised you asked specifically for me, though,” Lay went on.  “I was under the impression that we hated each other.”

“Doesn’t mean I don’t recognise ability,” Xiumin muttered.

“I have a very serious question to put to you.”  Lay suddenly sounded more awake.  “What are you going to do if it turns out Luhan has her?”

“Ask him to give her back,” Xiumin replied without question.  “You’ll kill me if he doesn’t and I have a right to life.”

“I’d say your criminal record begs to differ, but okay.”  Sleepy Lay returned with another yawn.  “Well, unless there’s anything you’d like to add on Semi’s disappearance, I guess you can go to bed and so can I.  Tao mentioned you spoke to him, so I’ll just trawl through the videos for your side of the conversation in its unadulterated true form because trusting you is going to come as easily as life to a dodo.”

Xiumin was silent for a moment.  He needed to get hold of Luhan and find out what the man was doing and whether he was involved in Semi’s disappearance, but he didn’t dare do it in the apartment.

“Can I have permission to leave the apartment?” he asked.

“Why?”

Grimacing, Xiumin said, “Let me come into the police station.  I need to help.  It’ll be easier if we’re all doing it from the same place.”  And somewhere between the apartment and the police station, particularly if he walked, he’d be able to get hold of Luhan.

“Sure,” said Lay.  “I’ll send people round first thing in the morning to desensitise your bracelet and bring you along.”

Or not.  It would be too risky to try to escape from an in order to contact Luhan, particularly if there was already potential for Semi to be in Luhan’s hands.  The easiest way would be using Luhan’s contacts in the police station.

It turned out not to be until nearly midday that Lay bothered sending men round.  Or, as Lay put it, that they bothered to get their assigned mission done.  He had to wait a good few minutes as they worked on taking the bracelet off without electrocuting him (though he suspected they probably wouldn’t have been all that bothered if it had done), and the traffic was so bad going to the police station that the police officers with him began to discuss firing up the roof to get through the traffic more quickly.  The most senior one was a stickler for doing things by the book, though, and so they ended up crawling along with everybody else.

The police station was in chaos when they arrived.  Phones, pagers and walkie-talkies were going off all over the place and the vast majority of active police officers were running harum-scarum throughout the entry hall.  A dour-faced sergeant was barking orders at people who were probably too distracted to listen and the general mess was made even worse by the riot squad scrambling to assemble.  Xiumin  was a bit surprised to note that there was also somebody with BOMB DISPOSAL UNIT plastered across his back.  Clearly, a security crisis of some magnitude was going on somewhere.

“Can you see Sergeant Lay?” one of his chaperones asked the uptight man who’d denied them the luxury of using sirens to get places quick.  He and the third policeman shook their heads.  “I’ll just go and—”

A tone issued from his walkie-talkie and he swore.  “I’m being called up.  I’ll leave Lay a message telling him to come and get you.  Don’t leave.”

Xiumin was about to gesture to the other two and point out he was unlikely to be going anywhere when their walkie-talkies both went off as well.  He caught something about car bombs and suspicious packages being delivered to government buildings and full-scale riots downtown and somebody else demanding if the three were related, which sparked an argument across the airwaves, and the three men hurried away.

He dithered, watching as they disappeared into the crowd.  He knew where Lay’s office was and could probably take himself over there when needed, but for now it was more important he contacted one of Luhan’s men.  Luhan had told him there were two and given him their names just in case there was an emergency, but he didn’t have a clue what either looked like beyond the fact that one was male and one female.  He could only make the symbol of Luhan’s gang members wanting to talk to each other – a wolf’s head with one hand, dipping the ears up and down – and hope one of them would notice him.

“What’s he doing?” Yixing asked, settling himself in the office chair beside Jongin, who had drawn up the feed from the cameras in the entrance hall on his laptop.

“It looks like he’s just waiting for something.  He must be.  He knows where your office is.”

Yixing patted his shoulder.  “We’re geniuses, aren’t we?”

“Hush.  Let me concentrate.  I don’t know if any of the potential suspects are going to try to approach him or if he’s going to communicate in some other way.  There are too many to keep an eye on if you distract me.”

“I’m sure I’m not as much of a distraction as Song Qian.”

Jongin’s ears went red.  “Shut up.”

Laughing, Yixing ruffled his hair.  “What’s he doing with his hand?”

“I don’t— wait a second.”  Jongin enlarged one of the feeds and zoomed in on Xiumin’s hand.  It rested loosely by Xiumin’s side, ears of the wolf’s head flitting up and down absently.  “Well, either he’s playing at shadow puppets very badly or that’s some kind of signal.  Give me a moment – where’s he looking?”  He zoomed out again and shrank the window.

“I think he’s staring into space,” Yixing observed.  “He’s trying to make it look—”

“Absentminded,” Jongin finished.  “He probably would have been a good actor if he hadn’t decided for a career in nefarious wrongdoings.”

Yixing snorted.

“Don’t diss my vocab,” Jongin sniffed.  “Oh, look, somebody’s approaching him.”

“We have our mole!”  Yixing clapped his hands together excitedly, but he sobered when he saw Jongin’s frown as he monitored proceedings.

“I think we should wait a bit more.  Xiumin’s still doing that shadow puppet thing.”

After a moment or two of conversing, the woman who’d approached Xiumin left again.  Not that long after, another approached him.

“Okay, she wasn’t on the suspect list, and I don’t think the first was either.”

Yixing squinted and leant closer to the screen.  “Is she flirting with him?”

“Yeah.”

The woman was joined by another.  “Oh, now she was on the list,” Jongin said.  “At least, I think she was.”

They both watched as Xiumin straightened up, running his hand through his hair.

“Okay,” said Yixing a moment or two later, “is he flirting with her?”

“Yeah,” Jongin affirmed.

The second woman to approach Xiumin left after a few more moments of conversation, leaving Xiumin with the last one.  To Jongin and Yixing’s disappointment, they didn’t converse long before the woman left.

“Do you reckon Xiumin had enough time to tell her to tell Luhan Semi’s missing, or do you think we’re barking up the wrong tree?” Yixing asked, losing confidence.  Jongin opened his mouth to reply, but Yixing’s desk phone rang, interrupting him.

Yixing picked up.  “Yeah?”

“Sergeant Lay, are you free right now?  There’s somebody here to see you by the name of Kim Minseok.”

“She’s on the phone to somebody,” Jongin reported.  Yixing waved an impatient hand at him to shut him up.

“Sure.  Send him over.”  He hung up.

“She’s hung up.  Did she just ring you?”

“Doofus.”  Yixing whacked the back of his head.  Pouting, Jongin turned back to his computer in time to see the woman return to Xiumin.  “Also, about Suho’s mole—”

“I’ve already told you, ninety-nine percent certain.  When are we going to make that arrest?”

“Not until after we have Semi back.  I don’t want Suho backing out of his end of the deal.”

“Yeah, but we can’t have somebody who’s actually on our team working for him.  He has a huge rivalry with Luhan—”

“You can’t call it a rivalry when even ‘flat-out enmity’ is a tame description of that relationship.  I’m very surprised one of them hasn’t yet hired Byun Baekhyun to finish the other off.”

“Either way, it might screw things up.  And as a general rule, enemy spies are best ruled out.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get out of the room and practice tripping into people if I’m going to plant a bug on our precious mole so I have proof she contacted Luhan and we can lock her up for good.”

Chuckling, Yixing knocked him on the side of the head again.  “Sure.  Send Chen over if you see him, will you?  I think he’s camping out in Kyungsoo’s office.”

Jongin shut his laptop down and bolted from the office.

Not long after, Xiumin and his companion showed up in the doorway.  He thanked her and she left before he knocked on the doorframe.

“Afternoon,” Yixing told him coolly, folding his arms.  “Who was she?  Somebody you know?”

Xiumin’s eyes glinted.  “No, but I’d like to.  She’s my type.”  He his lips.

“You’re married.”

“And?”

“And how do you plan to help out with finding your wife?”

The voice asking Semi if she felt she could take a deep breath was one she was unfamiliar with but surprisingly reassuring.

“It’s all right,” the man said.  “Just try again.  Breathe with me, okay?”