On the way back, I received a call from Jiang Xiaohui.
He said A Tai had arrived with his people, and the mechanical people A Wu had lent us were in position as well. There were only five of them, but they should be enough when it mattered. They were currently at an abandoned training base at the foot of East Mountain, a place Xie Yi had arranged for the local military to provide. Though it had been abandoned, the training base was still classified as a military restricted zone. No one would be coming or going, ensuring absolute safety.
He was gathering the team and preparing to head to Sanjiangyan.
I was tempted too. If we went now, perhaps we could still catch Mu Xue and her people. But Mu Shuang said it was already night, and by the time we left, Mu Xue's group had probably already withdrawn.
I still wasn't willing to give up and decided to take another look. Even if Mu Xue's people had left, we could at least find some clues there.
Ye Jinghong immediately turned the car around. I checked the time. It had taken us seventeen minutes to get here from Sanjiangyan, so a round trip would take over half an hour. If, as Mu Shuang said, Mu Xue's people withdrew as soon as we left, they couldn't have gone very far in half an hour. There were quite a few of them—over a hundred, according to Mu Shuang. I wondered if we could have the nearby military and police set up an interception and capture them all.
But Mu Shuang told me to abandon that idea. She said Peng Hui's greatest specialty was its ability to split up and scatter during an emergency, eventually blending into the crowd.
Peng Hui's people