Chapter 147 — The Long-Awaited...

Zheng Shaopeng gritted his teeth and sat in the car. So long as Wang Yanqiu made no move along the way, everything would be easy once they reached the villa. There would be no need to keep up appearances then; the two men the boss had sent would step in and take care of Wang Yanqiu for him.

Seeing the villa just ahead, Zheng Shaopeng let out a long breath. He had skirted the gates of hell and come back around. He had been terrified Wang Yanqiu might put a cold shot in his back—he had a bulletproof vest on his body, but there was none on his head.

Wang Yanqiu was in fact anxious herself, for a simple reason: sitting in a taxi, she could not make her move on the road, unless she killed the cabbie along with the target.

But Wang Yanqiu did not want to harm the innocent. She had her own code of good and evil. Zheng Shaopeng might work in the gambling trade, but in Macau that was legal. Yet even if it was legal, Wang Yanqiu loathed the man.

After taking on this job, Wang Yanqiu had looked into Zheng Shaopeng. Eight years in the business, small games beyond counting, but seventy-six high-stakes ones, more than half of which had left the other party utterly ruined—either suicide on the spot, or afterward driven to death by loan sharks along with their families, with nowhere left to turn.

Gambling, well, of course the consequences of losing were severe, but in Wang Yanqiu's eyes all of it had been forced by Zheng Shaopeng. He could well have left people a way out.

So once she had understood what sort of man Zheng Shaopeng was, Wang Yanqiu felt not the slightest pity for him. Kill him and be done with it.

Zheng Shaopeng's Buick rolled slowly into the courtyard of his Coloane villa, and he could not help letting out a heavy sigh of relief. It seemed he should be safe now.

The two bodyguards got out of the car and went off to attend to their own tasks, making preparations for Wang Yanqiu's arrival, while Zheng Shaopeng hid himself inside the villa and did not dare come out.

His task was more or less complete; as bait he had broken out in a cold sweat, and now he meant to have a good bath and a cup of hot tea to settle his nerves.

Wang Yanqiu naturally had no idea that people inside the villa had long since made ready to welcome her, and she foolishly believed she had come and gone without a trace.

Wang Yanqiu had the cabbie stop beside a vending machine not far from the villa. "Just stop here," she said.

The driver assumed she lived nearby and was stopping to buy a few things from the machine before heading home, so he asked no questions. He parked, took the fare, and left.

As for Yang Ce, he held his phone and put on the air of being deep in conversation: "Oh, oh, I see. It's here, is it? All right, all right, I've arrived, that's it then, see you in a bit. Master, if you'd just stop here, please."

The driver naturally assumed the friend on the phone had given Yang Ce the destination, and promptly pulled over. Yang Ce put away his phone, paid the fare, and got out.

Yang Ce did not care in the least whether Zheng Shaopeng lived or died. He had followed Wang Yanqiu here purely out of curiosity about what organization she belonged to, and to take the opportunity to see just how skilled she was.

Wang Yanqiu waited until the taxi had drawn well away, then glanced around and, finding no one else about, cautiously opened her backpack and took out a small lipstick-style silenced pistol, along with a dagger, which she kept in her hand.

Wang Yanqiu had never had much in the way of proper assassination gear to begin with; this lipstick pistol was already rather good. The mainland was the hardest place in the world to get hold of a gun, likely the most strictly gun-controlled place on earth.

But frankly, this lipstick pistol, like the dagger, was a close-quarters weapon; at a distance it was of little use.

With everything ready, Wang Yanqiu crept toward the villa on tiptoe. Yang Ce followed leisurely behind her, and when he saw the two assassination tools in her hands, he shook his head, and the wariness in his heart toward Wang Yanqiu dropped considerably.

The assassin organization Wang Yanqiu belonged to was surely not a particularly large one; that much could be seen from the things she used. When a top-tier assassin went out, they either carried the finest equipment, or they carried nothing at all.

Fine equipment, of course, meant professional firearms like infrared sniper rifles—the sort suited to long-range assassination. Close-range work generally required nothing at all in hand, and Yang Ce belonged to the latter school. Anything placed in his grasp could become a lethal weapon.

As he pondered, Wang Yanqiu had already reached the outside of the villa. Thick walls and solid iron gates the villa had, yet not a single surveillance system anywhere—a fact that set Wang Yanqiu's heart secretly rejoicing.

Such a chance was rare, and this was the perfect place to strike: remote, isolated, a single household standing alone. Whatever happened here would be difficult for anyone to discover.

With that thought, Wang Yanqiu began to scout for a way into the villa. Circling the compound, she found the outer walls much the same all around—except at the back, where a transformer box stood, and from atop that box one could climb into the villa with relative ease.

It never occurred to Wang Yanqiu that the transformer box was pure decoration—not a single transformer inside, an utter empty shell. Zheng Shaopeng had planted it there deliberately, a false convenience to lure Wang Yanqiu into the villa.

Wang Yanqiu did not know this, but someone else did—Yang Ce. As it happened, when Yang Ce saw Wang Yanqiu's gaze lock onto that transformer box, he knew at once she meant to use it to scale the wall and enter the villa.

Instinctively, Yang Ce meant to use his ability to glance inside the villa, and as his gaze naturally passed through the transformer box, he was astonished to find it empty inside—and not merely empty, but brand new, without so much as a trace of dust.

This roused Yang Ce's suspicion. How could a transformer box contain no transformer? Very well—even granting it was a long-abandoned box, it should still bear dust and rust. How could it be this clean? Plainly impossible.

With that suspicion planted, Yang Ce examined the villa's interior more carefully—and no sooner had he looked than he nearly jumped out of his skin. Inside the villa's walls stood two men, poised and waiting.

Yang Ce was badly startled—was the villa's security truly so tight? But the next moment he dismissed the thought, for these two were the very bodyguards Zheng Shaopeng had brought back, and apart from this spot there was no one else anywhere about.

It seemed these two were waiting specifically for Wang Yanqiu. Could it be that Zheng Shaopeng had caught wind of something, and posted these two here to wait for Wang Yanqiu to take the bait?

That seemed unlikely. Yang Ce carefully reviewed everything Wang Yanqiu had done that day, and found nothing in the least suspicious—she had spent most of her time with him, and had not so much as made contact with Zheng Shaopeng.

Unless Zheng Shaopeng could foretell the future, there was no way he could know Wang Yanqiu meant him harm. Of course, that was under ordinary circumstances; there remained another possibility—that Zheng Shaopeng had long known someone meant to harm him and had deliberately set today's trap, with that transformer box the best evidence of all.

Of course, clever as Yang Ce was, he could never have guessed that all of this was a play staged by Zheng Shaopeng and the boss behind him—because it had never crossed Yang Ce's mind that there might be any private score to settle between them and Wang Yanqiu.

In Yang Ce's view, advertising for a hired killer brought one a killer chosen somewhat at random, by chance—and so it had simply never occurred to him that these people were targeting Wang Yanqiu herself.