Read Chapter 15: — THE BLIND RANSOM

A surgeon of Zou’s stature did not simply fail to arrive for work.

Within hours, rumours filled social media.

Debt.

Political pressure.

Medical malpractice.

Business revenge.

An affair.

A foreign company.

A patient’s family.

Then Hongda Hospital received a three-minute video.

A man sat in a wheelchair with his face partly obscured. His eyes were covered. His voice had been altered. He claimed responsibility for Zou’s abduction and demanded an enormous ransom.

The bizarre detail was not the money.

It was the messenger.

The man appeared blind.

Yet the video had been distributed through a technically sophisticated route designed to frustrate tracing.

“Either he is not what he appears to be,” Chenxi said, “or someone else built the machinery around him.”

Old Zhao nodded.

Li watched the clip again and again.

Medical habit made him study posture, breathing, involuntary movement. Investigative habit—if he could call it that—made him hate himself for turning a human body into clues.

The hospital wanted Zou back.

Police wanted the sender.

Investors wanted to know what would happen to the GTP5 programme.

And somewhere inside the noise, Li developed a growing conviction that everyone was asking the wrong question.

They were asking who had taken Zou Shiming.

No one was asking which Zou Shiming they meant.

He did not say that aloud.

Not yet.

The ransom video changed Hongda overnight. Security guards appeared outside administrative offices. Staff were instructed not to speculate publicly, which ensured they speculated privately with enormous enthusiasm.

The communications department released careful statements that said almost nothing.

Tang turned off the waiting-room television after the video played for the third time.

“Patients don’t need this while waiting for cancer results.”

Li nodded.

One man’s disappearance dominated the city. Another patient’s scan could destroy only one family.

Both were catastrophic to someone.

That night, police found evidence that the digital route used for the ransom touched accounts associated with people around Jiang Haozhe.

Jiang disappeared before they could question him.

Old Zhao stared at the evidence board.

“This is no longer a hospital quarrel.”

Li looked at Zou’s photograph.

“I don’t think it ever was.”