Gibson, who had arrived to provide support, was struck deadly by a classic female self-defense technique. Harry, attempting to restrain Helen, was then viciously bitten.
After much effort, he subdued the screaming Helen. The restrained Harry finally gathered his strength and hoisted her into the van.
"Catch her! She's yours! Please don't kill me!"
Jack, annoyed by the noise, struck Simon in the neck with a slashing blow, finally silencing him.
Only after the van doors closed and the van pulled away did Gibson, clutching his crotch, curse loudly. "Damn it! It hurts, you bastard Harry!"
Having
had his hood removed and forcefully shoved into the darkened room, Helen stumbled twice before finally finding her balance. Hearing the door close behind her, she instinctively turned to pull the handle, only to find it locked.
Just as she panicked, a glaring light flickered on, and Helen found herself in a bare room, barely thirty or forty square meters. Instead of
a ceiling, the room was covered in a grid of sound-absorbing tiles. The walls were made entirely of gray rubber panels, and the floor was a similar, slightly springy material.
Having lost one of her high heels in her struggle, Helen trudged to the center of the room, where a round, backless bar stool stood as the only furnishing.
She looked panicked at the glass wall facing her, only to see her own disheveled reflection reflected in it.
Meanwhile, across from Helen, on the other side of the one-way mirror, Jack was curiously examining the array of equipment before him. "These antiques are older than me, aren't they?" There
were large monitors, tape recorders, several analog cameras, and a super-old infrared spectrometer, apparently used to analyze the facial temperature of interrogators.
Gibson angrily tossed the ice pack he'd been using to cover his eggs onto the table and turned off the blurry monitor. "This place's been abandoned for almost 20 years. It took Fisher and I a whole day to barely clean it up."
He glared at Harry, who remained nonchalant. "Borrowing a Little Bird helicopter is already the most we can do. I can't possibly use the bureau's resources just to help someone deal with his wife, can I?"
Jack was genuinely curious. "Just how much leverage does he have on you?"
He could empathize with Gibson; after all, his phone was still active, and someone on the other end was eavesdropping.
Harry coughed softly, moved the microphone in front of him, signaled the two people to shut up, and pressed the talk button.
"Sit down!" Synchronized electronic voices seemed to come from all directions, startling Helen, who was trying to see through the one-way glass.
"I told you to sit down,"
the strange voice repeated, and Helen hurriedly sat down on the round bar stool in the center of the room.
"Who do you work for?"
"Uh, Stern, Kessler, and Krupnik." Helen stretched out her hand to block the glare of the light and answered tremblingly, "I'm just an ordinary clerk in a partnership law firm."
Harry sneered, "Really? Mrs. Tasker, then what are you doing with the international terrorist Simon Carlos? How long have you been a member of his organization?"
Helen, nearly paralyzed by the sheer volume of information revealed, stammered, trying to clarify, "I don't know what organization. I've only known Simon for a few weeks. What Carlos? Is that his last name? I know next to nothing about him."
Before Harry could speak, a partner, eager to stir up trouble, leaned over to the microphone. "But when we went in just now, you two acted so intimately that it didn't seem like you'd just met."
Harry glared, wanting to punch his partner, and skipped the subject. "How did you two meet?"
Previously, he'd been blinded by anger, but now, recalling it, he realized that both of them had been fully clothed when they broke into the house, and the flirtatious gesture was simply a natural reaction to being startled.
Helen's account of the events confirmed their earlier speculation.
Simon, though only in his 30s, was a thief with a taste for both raw and savory fare, specifically targeting housewives with ordinary lives.
A few weeks ago, at lunchtime in the same Chinese restaurant, Simon, pretending to be pursued, forced a "spy" briefcase into Helen's safekeeping, claiming it was a matter of national security, and then vanished without a trace.
Having never encountered such tactics before, Helen spent the entire afternoon back at the office, secretly using a paperclip to open the briefcase. Inside, she discovered a wad of international banknotes, several passports, some unidentified documents, a map of Europe, and a pistol.
Terrified, Helen didn't even bother to check the gun's authenticity, closing the briefcase and hiding it under her desk.
Then, much like Jack had previously, posing as a car buyer and extracting pickup tips from Simon, after half-heartedly convincing Helen of his spy identity, Simon began to employ a variety of subtle tactics.
He taught her various anti-stalking techniques, instructed her to remove an envelope covered in strange symbols from a safe deposit box at the train station, and even arranged for her to sneak into a party, where he would disguise himself as a waiter and deliver trinkets to her.
"
My mom actually fell for such a moronic trick?" Jessie was incredulous.
"It's just like a telecom scam; someone will always fall for it. But honestly, this guy is a natural genius in certain areas of psychology,"
Jack said with a shrug. He drove the Audi R8 up to an abandoned dam, circled it, and made sure no one was around before pulling over to the guardrail atop the dam.
Pulling a small box from his pocket and stuffing a silicone block into his mouth, he muttered incoherently, "What a hassle! Your dad actually left that problem to me."
Once his square chin and mustache were back, Jack opened the trunk and pulled Simon out, stripped down to his shorts and a tank top.
He removed the handcuffs and earmuffs, but kept the hood on, and pushed him to the edge of the dam, several dozen meters above the ground.
Jessie followed them, donning a mask and a bulletproof vest. She then inserted Jack's sidearm and struck a few poses, looking in the rearview mirror for a moment. Feeling like she had the aura of an elite agent, she hopped up and followed.
"Ah! Ah! Ah! Don't let go! Don't let go!" Simon, his hood removed, glanced down and nearly peed himself at the sheer drop of several dozen meters.
(End of Chapter)