Chapter 34 The Real Secret of the Videotapes

The restaurant wasn’t far from my shop, so I hurried back. Wang Meng got off work at 5:15, and never stayed more than half a minute over, so everything was already locked up. I quickly unlocked the door, headed to the back room, and dug out my two tapes (A Ning had taken the two she brought with her back to her hotel). Fatty, having finally managed to catch up with me, turned on the VCR and TV.

But I wasn’t planning on watching the tapes again. Instead, I dug through several drawers until I found a screwdriver.

Fatty didn’t understand what was going on, and asked me what I was doing. I didn’t bother answering him as I began removing one of the tapes from its case, my heart pounding in my chest.

If I was right, then this whole thing was very, very simple. Hell, even I had done it many times.

Of the two tapes, one turned out to be blank, which meant that the content wasn’t important at all. What the person wanted to send me was the videotape itself, not whatever was recorded on it, so it didn’t matter if it was blank or not. That left only one reason why this person would send me these tapes, one very, very simple reason. And my theory was very easy to verify.

When I was in middle school, I fiddled with these things a lot, so it was easy to disassemble the one in front me. In just a few quick moves, I removed the tape from the case, picked the case up carefully, and shook it. Fatty, who was watching me work with rapt attention, gasped in shock.

Sure enough, there was something stuck to the inside of the plastic case.

“What the fuck, how did you think of that?” Fatty asked.

I grinned and patted him on the shoulder, “You gave me the idea.” Then I tore the thing off and carefully examined it, my heart thumping in my chest.

It was a post-it note with a few words scribbled on it:

No. 349-5 Deershen Lane, Kunlun Road, Golmud, Qinghai Province.

Anyone who could read would know with a single glance that it was an address in Golmud.

“Hot damn.” I was so excited, I couldn’t help but speak in the Beijing dialect. I wiped the sweat from my brow, feeling an unexpected joy in my heart as I realized that I had finally found something. It looked like I really had been overthinking it.

Sending the note like this essentially killed two birds with one stone. First, it protected the note from being damaged during transit. Second, if the package was intercepted, the other party would never think that something was hidden inside like this, especially if the interceptor was distracted by the content of the other tape.

I knew in my heart that the interceptor the other party was trying to guard against was my Uncle Three, because only he would be surprised by the content of the video. In fact, he really did become distracted after watching it.

Once I came up with the theory, it was obvious to see now—if the person had sent this note directly to me, it would have definitely fallen into Uncle Three’s hands, just like the original copy of the silk book of the Warring States Period.

After solving this mystery, I felt much more invigorated and immediately started disassembling the other tape. There wasn’t a piece of paper in this one, but an old brass key from the twentieth century. The key was one of those that went with the 480 lock, the most popular type of lock mechanism in the 1980s.

I picked the key up and turned it over, finding that it was so old, the brass had turned black with age. On the back of the key head was a bit of tape with faded numbers written on it: 306.

“It looks like this mystery person wants to invite you over,” Fatty said. “They even got you a room.”

<Chapter 33><Table of Contents><Chapter 35>

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Double update! Yay! (don’t get used to it. Those days are far behind me lol)