Chapter Twelve: Nan Huai of the Nan Family (2)
On the international train from Beijing to Moscow, there is a very special carriage.
The carriage had four separate compartments, yet only one was occupied by its owner. The remaining three held a doctor, and armed men. In both China and Russia, carrying guns is illegal, but unfortunately, that did not apply to the owner of this carriage.
Inside the owner’s compartment, there was no nurse, only two doctors and two men.
One sat asleep at the bedside. It was Kyle. The other lay on the bed, having just escaped the swamp of death.
After several emergency resuscitations, the person on the bed had begun to breathe faint spontaneous breathing.
Six days and six nights of travel was too exhausting. Even the two doctors were utterly worn out, yet they did not dare neglect this man.
Sunlight filtered in through the glass, falling onto the floor. The train was crossing the Siberian continent, with thousands of miles between stations, nothing but vast forests and grasslands. Such scenery, he could not see.
No one knew where his dreams were.
Except himself.
In his twenty-nine years in this world, he had been to many places. From war-torn local battlefields to tightly controlled roundtable political arenas, too many people feared him, hated him. Too many were willing to bow their heads before him, and too many women had loved him. But those places, to him, were only markers on a map.
The only places that truly remained in his memory were his childhood life in Shanghai, the few years in Belgium, and the journey to Southeast Asia when he was fourteen. The final stop of that journey was Wanding.
It was the only thing he had ever decided on his own.
He had wanted too much to see Myanmar, that country where everyone believed in Buddhism, and Wanding was the best passage.
Wanding was the southwestern gateway of the nation. Cross a bridge, and you would be where he wanted to go. There were mountains and rivers, tropical rainforests, and the smallest national-level border station. There were many Southeast Asians. As a boy, he had been fascinated. What he had not expected was that it also held the largest underground black market in Southeast Asia, and gamblers who risked their lives.
In a hotel late at night, he was suddenly hooded and bound, taken away.
It was because someone in the black market had suddenly offered a high price for his life.
At that time, his name was Cheng Mu.
The reason one “Yang” was missing was to sever ties with the Cheng family. Unfortunately, because of an unbreakable blood connection, he was still implicated. His maternal grandfather had been a capitalist and had never been involved in the underworld. His mother had married his father early on, divorced him, and brought him back to Shanghai. Naturally, there were not many entanglements.
It was only after his father died, when Old Master Cheng sent someone to deliver the Cheng family genealogy, that his mother learned about his father’s family business.
So his kidnapping was entirely an accident.
This accident killed everyone who had been with him that day. Those people had never, in their lives, seen a real gunfight, a black market, or desperate fugitives. Only one Miao girl, who had also been kidnapped, escaped with him. The two of them fled into the dense forest in the middle of the night, underfoot uneven with wild plants and filled with terrifying sounds, and several grown men who had discovered them and were pursuing.
The Miao girl was terrified. In the end, she abandoned him and climbed up a tree several meters high.
Only he remained, lying in the grass, fists clenched tightly, listening to the approaching sounds.
He was reciting prayers to the Buddha. If the Buddha were willing to lend a hand, he would be willing to shave his head and enter the monastic life. Long passages of scripture surged through his mind. His heartbeat slowed more and more. Fear spread through him, and he could not even remember the next line.
Panting, spitting, and curses filled the air. Under beams of light, the girl above revealed her position. In the crisscrossing light, she was shot dead at random by several men. Her body fell from above, blood splattering everywhere, warm and viscous, landing in his left eye.
He did not dare wipe it, nor move. His eye burned sharply, his vision dyed red with blood.
He did not dare recite the Buddha’s name anymore.
He even began to pray to God like the auntie who worked in his family’s household, telling himself that if there really was a God in this world, he was willing to believe. If God was willing to reach out a hand and help him, he would devote himself to Him in sincere faith from then on.
There was no fabled light, no imagined salvation.
Only a heartbeat growing more terrified, and the laughter and threats of those grown men. They threatened him to come out immediately, otherwise they would skin him alive and sell him to those savage families who liked to eat human flesh.
Amid the steadily approaching footsteps, a gunshot suddenly rang out. As someone fell, it turned into a gunfight. Countless bullets tore through the dense forest. The smell of gunpowder, the smell of blood, the thunderous explosions made him twitch involuntarily. It was that movement that made a dying man in front of him look over and find him.
Before his eyes, that man’s mouth opened and closed faintly. He did not say a single word before dying.
“Xiao Gege, is there someone there?” a girl’s voice suddenly asked.
“Someone? Aren’t they all dead?”
Although the boy said that, he still cautiously searched over.
He held a compact submachine gun, poking around with the long barrel.
“Shh.” The girl suddenly grabbed him and pointed at a small bow tie on the ground. “Stop looking. If you find them, you’ll have to silence them.”
The boy put an arm around the little girl’s shoulders. “My Beibei, your heart’s gone soft?”
The little girl made a small sound of agreement, crouching down to look at the dead girl. “Abu Yong was probably chasing a few kids. One is already dead, that’s miserable enough. Let the rest escape.”
He did not know whether she had seen him.
But he saw her.
Her face was small, the corners of her eyes slightly upturned, with black pupils.
She was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.
The Philippines.
The red-light district of Manila.
Nan Bei gradually regained some consciousness. She was too weak to speak in complete sentences, yet instinctively wanted to touch her abdomen. Unfortunately, Du was too cautious. Even in such a serious condition, he still kept her hands and feet bound.
Only the thin ropes that had cut into her flesh were replaced with strips of cloth.
She realized she could not perform even this simple movement. Without saying a word, she closed her eyes.
The old doctor, with blind eyes, his gray pupils facing her direction, kept telling her how to pay attention to her diet, how to move, how to nurture the pregnancy.
He spoke with utmost propriety, as if unaware that her hands and feet were bound.
Du feared anyone leaking his whereabouts. After the old doctor arrived, he kept him confined in the house as well, promising to release him once he left, and offering an extremely high reward. As for Nan Bei’s imprisonment, he only said that she had severe mental problems, that he feared she would harm the child in her womb.
“America is going to sell four hundred bunker-buster bombs to the UAE,” Du said, watching the international news on television. “Very soon, it will surpass Moscow’s arms sales.” There was a habitual pride in his tone. “Very soon.”
Nan Bei said nothing.
She knew this man was already close to madness.
And she had to keep Cheng Muyang’s child safe.
At the thought of that name, it felt as if someone had seized her heart and squeezed hard. It suddenly contracted, the pain making her body curl in on itself.
The old doctor was taking her pulse. As if noticing something off about her, his hand paused slightly. Then he suddenly said toward Du, “Sir, your wife has been bound for too long. Her hands and feet need to be massaged, otherwise—”
Du waved his hand and cut him off, ordering the young girl to cuff Nan Bei’s right wrist to the bedpost. Only then did he have the coarse cloth strips binding her hands and feet untied.
Du’s gun remained in his hand, as though it were part of his body.
The old doctor held one of her hands and began to massage it slowly, easing the flow of blood.
She had been bound for more than ten days. Even when she went to the toilet, her feet had been tied, a gun pressed to her forehead. This was the first time her feet had been freed. Under the old doctor’s massage, her left foot gradually regained some movement.
Then the right foot, the left hand.
She kept her eyes closed, feeling the blood slowly begin to circulate.
Only her right hand remained cuffed to the bedpost.
Du was still watching news from his home country. From the television, one could vaguely hear the host saying, “The United States and the United Arab Emirates have conducted substantive discussions on cooperation in refining, military, aviation, and tourism.” Du suddenly turned off the television and tapped the table irritably. “Is it done yet?”
“Almost, almost,” the old doctor said.
Nan Bei suddenly let out a low groan, as if something had been pressed painfully.
Du looked at her.
Her body suddenly seemed to spasm. With her left hand, she tightly gripped her right leg. Because her mouth was sealed, she could not speak, but her pain was obvious. Du was already irritable, and her condition made him even more tense. He stood up and walked over. “What’s wrong with her all of a sudden? What exactly is her problem? Could she miscarry?”
The string of questions was all directed at the old doctor.
Before his words had even fallen, Du suddenly felt a sharp pain in his scalp. Nan Bei had grabbed his hair and slammed his head toward her knee. In that instant of pain and dizziness, he tried to pull back, but the old doctor tightly wrapped his arms around his waist.
Everything happened too quickly.
Nan Bei twisted her legs around his neck and flung him against the wall. Du’s head crashed hard into it. With a heavy, muffled thud, she seized his gun with one hand and pressed it against his temple.
The brief struggle in the room terrified the young girl.
Seeing her patron captured, she immediately ran to the door and twisted it open, only to be frozen by what she saw outside. Four or five guns were pointed straight at her forehead.
Under the dim, dark-red lighting, a very tall man bent down.
“Scared?” he asked the little girl in Filipino, without any emotion.
The girl did not even dare shake her head. This man was a hundred times more frightening than what had just happened.
Black eyes, so dark they held almost no reflection.
Eyes filled with a dense, violent aura.
Nan Bei was breathing hard, lowering the gun. There were already too many guns aimed at Du’s head. She no longer needed to defend herself. But just looking at the person at the door, her chest suddenly began to ache. More than ten days of torment, combined with just recovering from serious illness, and Cheng Muyang, and the child. She had truly used every last bit of strength just now.
Before the old doctor had given her that signal, she had not even known such an opportunity existed.
The man walked toward her. Nan Bei was already losing strength. She reached out one hand to him. He reached back and gripped her hand tightly. Behind him, someone took the key from Du and unlocked the handcuff on Nan Bei’s wrist.
Nan Huai could not bear to look too closely at her current state. In a low voice, he said, “I’ve been outside guarding for more than ten days. Afraid of hurting you, I didn’t dare force my way in.”
Like when she was little, she curled into his arms, not making a sound.
Not crying, not moving.
She could not hear, could not see. Only in Nan Huai’s arms was there any sense of safety.
A name was pressed deep in her heart. She did not dare think of anything related to Cheng Muyang again.
Nan Huai lifted her entire body from the bed and said to the men behind him, “From this moment on, Nan Bei is dead. The Nan family will hold a grand funeral. For the next ten years, I don’t want to see anyone from the CIA appear in Southeast Asia.” He glanced at Nan Bei in his arms. “Tell them every word I’ve said is not a joke.”
He would not allow anyone else to know Nan Bei’s whereabouts.
And even more, he would not allow anyone another chance to threaten her safety.
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