Hu Bugui unhurriedly looked at the door. In fact, this was only an automatic gesture. He believed that even if the person who had been instructed to watch him suddenly walked in and saw what he was furtively doing right now, he would most likely pretend not to have seen, walk right out, and close the door.
There was a file pouch in the cabinet, yellowed with age. Hu Bugui wiped the dust off of it and opened it. Inside he found a map densely marked with different colors of pen, a list of names—Hu Bugui glanced at it briefly and knew that everyone on this list was using an assumed name—with contact information and locations after them, as well as a check, a little notebook, and a hard disk.
The little notebook was actually a diary, a research journal kept by an unknown person back when the Utopia Project had still been legitimate. Hu Bugui flipped through it, then put it away, figuring that the things on the hard disk were likely also inextricably linked with the Utopia Project.
When the worst had happened, General Xiong had taken on the nonexistent blame for everyone, laying a road for the RZ Unit to continue in the dark.
Just as Hu Bugui was about to put the things away, there was a faint movement behind him. Hu Bugui quickly turned his head. His hand had already subconsciously reached for his waist when he saw a human figure flash and a person jump inside.
He opened his mouth. Rather dumbfounded, he said, "Su...Qing?"
Su Qing winked at him, patted dirt off himself, put his index finger up to his lips, and shushed him. He openly walked over and sat on his desk—he seemed very sure of his own safety. He must already have noticed that there was no surveillance system here.
Hu Bugui kept his voice low. "How did you get in? Didn't I tell you not to come back?"
Su Qing seized Hu Bugui by the front of his shirt and, smack, kissed him firmly on the lips. His eyes curved in a smile. Somehow, Hu Bugui felt that he was in an especially good mood—his mood was better than it had ever been before. It wasn't that Su Qing was normally very gloomy. It was that he very rarely displayed any particular emotions in front of others.
Hu Bugui couldn't maintain his frown. His expression softened involuntarily. Looking at Su Qing, he sighed very helplessly.
"I get in by every opening," Su Qing said, smiling. "Headquarters has lots of defensive gaps. When I snuck in without ever having been here, you still couldn't catch me, never mind now when I'm so familiar with the place."
Hu Bugui found that he had suddenly become younger, very obviously using his expression to hint "Aren't I awesome? Hurry up and praise me." There seemed to be a fluffy tail wagging behind him. So while Hu Bugui was still as care-laden and heavy-hearted as before, he couldn't resist smiling and reaching out to stroke Su Qing's soft hair.
"Do you have anything else to do at headquarters? If not, I'll think of a way to get you out of here." Su Qing considered. After a moment, he asked, "Have they all gone?"
Hu Bugui nodded and tucked the file pouch away. "Where's Tutu?"
"I handed him over to my dad," Su Qing said briskly, the corners of his eyes and the tips of his brows rising. He seemed a little like a youngster. He even couldn't resist complaining, "That dad of mine, he's really hard to sway, and he's a grouchy old man. If I had told him to leave B City, then even if I had laid everything out, he still wouldn't have gone. But if I asked for his help with something, he definitely wouldn't refuse."
He took out an iron hook and flashed it in front of Hu Bugui. "There's a fifteen-second blindspot when the surveillance camera on the roof turns in the other direction. Climbing three floors—can you do it?"
Hu Bugui nodded. Seeing Su Qing standing by the window, looking rather eager to have a go as he looked fixedly at his watch to calculate the time, he couldn't help asking, "Your family... Have proper arrangements been made?"
"Everyone's relatives have been fixed up." Su Qing turned his head and smiled at him. "I even went to your house for a free meal. Captain Hu, your mom makes delicious meat pies."
Watching his silhouette, Hu Bugui's heart suddenly felt very soft. He quietly said, "When all this is over, we'll go home and have my mom make them for you every day."
Su Qing casually teased, "How are you going to introduce me to your mom then?"
Hu Bugui looked at him and said in total earnestness, "I'll say you're my lover. Can I?"
Su Qing paused, quickly glanced at him, then averted his eyes and a little unnaturally said, "You're so mushy... I'll count down. Five, four, three, two, one, come on!"
He had hardly finished speaking before he nimbly ducked out. Following closely, Hu Bugui leapt out the window. Su Qing tossed him a safety rope. Hu Bugui caught it precisely, then fell directly downward with the acceleration of gravity. The safety rope pulled tight, stretching a little with perfect resilience, then contracting again, tossing him into the air in an arc and precisely into an open window. Hu Bugui landed and loosened his grip, rolling aside to get rid of inertia. Then he instinctively clung to the base of the wall to avoid being caught by the surveillance system.
Then he heard a slight sound. The red light on the surveillance monitor at the end of the corridor flashed twice, then dimmed. At the same time, Su Qing nimbly jumped in through the window, then hauled back the hook and the rope. He pulled Hu Bugui up. "Come this way—I blew up the surveillance room while I was hanging outside. It's three more minutes before the backup generator kicks in."
The route had evidently been planned by Su Qing ahead of time—the inexplicably loosened ceiling, the opened lock on a side door, and the unconscious patrolmen on the way.
Hu Bugui witnessed with his own eyes that it took Su Qing only eighteen seconds to break into a car. Hu Bugui, a person who all his life had obeyed the law and served the nation, didn't even have time to see his movements clearly before the car door opened. Su Qing whistled and returned the criminal tools to his pocket. "Get in, we're withdrawing!"
He drove unhurriedly to the main gate and was stopped for inspection. Su Qing wasn't flustered. He only rolled the window down a little and presented an ID through the crack without even showing his face. As Hu Bugui looked on in stupefaction, the guard actually let them by.
Only when they had snuck out of the headquarters he had believed to be tightly guarded with strict security did he feel a faint cold sweat rise on his back. He couldn't resist asking, "What did you give him? Where did it come from?"
Su Qing grinned. "A useful ID. I pinched it on my way to get you."
Hu Bugui hadn't yet had time to leave the frame of mind of the master of headquarters. "I...never thought that headquarters had so many security loopholes."
"There's no wall in the world that doesn't let the air in," Su Qing said, smiling. He raised a hand and rather carelessly put on music. "Should we contact them?"
"There's no rush." Hu Bugui relaxed along with him. He rolled down the window. The wind of the outskirts blew in through the cracked window. He suddenly felt that he didn't seem to be running away. He simply seemed a little like he was going on an outing in the suburbs. Su Qing drove at lightning speed, humming along with the song. Hu Bugui watched him swaying his head, opened up the little notebook and the map from the file pouch, and slowly began to investigate them.
Only when Hu Bugui had basically worked out the story behind the research journal did Su Qing finally stop the car. Wherever this was, the geographical location was rather complex. After turning a corner, they entered a rather irregular-looking auto repair shop.
He very casually drove the car in. Some men at work raised their heads to look at him. A hefty, fierce-looking fellow covered in machine oil, narrowing his eyes, looked their car up and down.
Su Qing rolled down the window and pulled out a handful of bills from his wallet without even looking—as though it wasn't cash he was pulling out but napkins. "A private job. Can you convert it?"
The hefty fellow looked at the car they were in rather fussily—Su Qing had chosen a half-antiquated hatchback, not one of the vehicles they used for going out into the field, quite ordinary from its performance to its external appearance. "This car of yours...won't be easy to deal with. This is the kind of car that's only good for driving through morning and evening rush hour in the city. Trying to compete with this...huh!"
So Hu Bugui understood that this was the sort of illegal, unlicensed car refitting criminal den that the rich kids went to when they wanted to play with their lives racing cars.
"What the fuck are you babbling about? If it was good to drive, would I have any use for you?" Su Qing rolled his eyes at him, looking every inch a rich kid. "Are you taking the job or not?"
"Well, I can take it, actually..."
Su Qing put a cigarette in his mouth and got out of the car, pulled the guy over and talked a lot of this and that, only making the guy's expression look stranger and stranger as he spoke. After a long moment, he finally put in: "Buddy, what crime did you commit? You've been put on a wanted list, no?"
The look in Su Qing's eyes was somewhat dangerous. His trench coat was deliberately wide open to display one side of a gun holster. The hefty fellow glimpsed it and gulped. Su Qing lowered his voice. "Neither of us has any room to talk. If you dare to take this private job, as none of us are law-abiding citizens, as long as you don't ask what shouldn't be asked and do your work well, you'll be paid what you deserve for it."
The hefty fellow looked at the cash in his hand and silently considered.
Su Qing clicked his tongue, rolled his eyes, and leaned down to take a small satchel from the car, dropping it right into the man's arms. The hefty fellow was tall, broad, and savage-looking, but when he opened the satchel, he immediately went from grey wolf to little sheep. Su Qing said, "It's all cash. Take it as advance payment. If you do well, there'll be more profits for you."
The hefty fellow looked at him, then turned his head and beckoned to a group of his subordinates. "There's work! There's work!"
Su Qing turned his head and smiled at Hu Bugui. He knocked on the window. "Get out, I'll take you to get something to eat."
Picking locks, coming to a criminal den to get a car refitted, booking a room with false IDs—before nightfall, Su Qing had also scared up a computer from somewhere. Hu Bugui was already numb. He felt that he hadn't done so many illegal things in his life as in this one day.