Chapter 22: Alliance

Everyone has selfish motives.

At this moment, Lin Nansheng naturally did as well.

He knew very well that to establish a firm foothold in the Shanghai Station, relying on classmate connections was the most reliable path.

Therefore, he first notified this circle of classmates about the intelligence he had gathered.

Lu Qiaoshan was left out this time due to various reasons...

To be precise, it was because that fellow was far too self-righteous.

Coupled with his hostile relationship with Li Ya, who currently served as the leader of the intelligence squad, Lin Nansheng chose to exclude him.

After Lin Nansheng recounted what he had seen and heard, the remaining five grew immensely excited.

The Communists! This was the first time they had ever been so close to the Communists!

Although Li Ya also put on an excited facade, his heart remained entirely calm.

Perhaps the others viewed this as a tremendous contribution, but to Li Ya, it amounted to precisely nothing—such affairs were invariably the work of students, among whom there were never any big fish. Catching ordinary students would at best extort a sum of money, and they could not be detained for long anyway.

Unwilling to dampen his classmates' enthusiasm, however, he feigned interest and joined them, brainstorming alongside the group to formulate an arrest plan.

During the discussion, Gong Shu suggested, "I think during the arrests, we could try playing a long game to catch a big fish!"

Jiang Sian was startled: "What do you mean?"

"We can deliberately let a few important figures escape, and then track them to determine their lair!"

Qi Siyuan said helplessly, "We don't have enough manpower!"

"We might not have enough, but the Action Team has plenty of men! The Action Team is more than enough just to round up underground party members distributing flyers!"

"Agreed!"

By the afternoon of the following day, the six of them applied to lead two squads of Action Team members on a mission. The superiors did not ask many questions and swiftly approved the application.

That night, the six of them, accompanied by eighteen Action Team operatives, laid an ambush around the underground printing shop. Once a large gathering of students had formed, Li Ya gave the order, and the secret agents rushed out from all directions, surrounding the printing spot.

For reasons unknown, gunshots suddenly rang out.

The gunfire startled the students inside. Someone spotted the closing agents and immediately raised the alarm, causing the students who were sorting propaganda materials to scatter and flee in all directions.

The agents swarmed forward in disarray to make arrests. Unexpectedly, gunfire erupted from the darkness, and two agents were successively hit. Seeing this, the remaining agents scrambled for cover to return fire, while the students bolted wildly in the chaos, leaving only a handful captured.

Meanwhile, Gong Shu, Lin Nansheng, Jiang Sian, Qi Siyuan, and Yu Zecheng, lurking in the shadows, locked onto a few individuals suspected of being genuine Communists and trailed them in secret.

The damned author was dead-set on forcing this romance trope.

Consequently, the following scene unfolded:

While tailing a secret agent, Lin Nansheng suddenly encountered a female student being harassed by local ruffians. Seeing that the two ruffians were about to drag the girl into a pitch-black alley, Lin Nansheng, after a brief hesitation, abandoned his pursuit of the target and lunged into the alley.

As one of close-combat instructor Zheng Yaoxian's most favored disciples, Lin Nansheng's combat prowess was no exaggeration. The two petty ruffians were knocked flat by Lin Nansheng in a matter of moments, and realizing they were outmatched, they had no choice but to flee in a panic.

The female student's clothes were disheveled, and she was consumed by shame and embarrassment. Not daring to raise her head to look at Lin Nansheng, who had saved her, she kept her gaze lowered, clutching her schoolbag tightly, and whispered in a soft voice:

"Thank you for saving my life."

Stealing a fleeting glance at Lin Nansheng, she clutched her schoolbag with one hand and the collar of her shirt with the other, then hurried out of the alley.

Lin Nansheng fell into a brief trance.

In that fleeting glimpse just now, he had taken in her face, which unexpectedly etched itself into his mind, lingering long and refusing to fade.

After a long while, he finally left the alley. Before departing, he discovered a book that had been dropped on the ground.

Picking it up and stepping back into the range of the streetlight, he found three delicate handwritten characters on the flyleaf that compelled him to read them aloud:

"Zhu Yizhen?"

Leaving aside how Lin Nansheng saving Zhu Yizhen had set the gears of fate into motion, Gong Shu, trailing an individual suspected of being a Communist, chased him all the way into the International Settlement.

Gong Shu possessed a high standard of shadowing skills, ensuring the target never detected him the entire way. Following closely behind, Gong Shu witnessed with his own eyes as the man entered a tavern through the back door.

Without a moment's hesitation, he quickly strode around to the front door of the tavern. Confirming that the target had not emerged, he simply stepped inside.

He lingered inside for a long time without spotting his target, and just as he began to suspect he had been tricked and thrown off the scent, the very person he had been tracking appeared—now dressed in a waiter's uniform and bustling about the tavern.

Overjoyed, Gong Shu realized he had blindly stumbled into a Communist stronghold.

He downed two glasses of wine, feigned drunkenness, and left the tavern.

Upon departing, Gong Shu immediately located a nearby public telephone and called the headquarters.

(Speaking of spy thrillers, there are always segments involving communication via public phones. I don't quite understand the technology of that era—how did public telephone billing actually work? Can some expert teach me?)

Gong Shu kept a covert watch on the tavern.

Over half an hour later, an action squad from the Intelligence Department of the Shanghai Station, led by Wang Shi'an, discreetly entered the Settlement.

Because this was the International Settlement, the Shanghai Station could not carry out arrests with great fanfare and had to infiltrate the tavern in staggered batches.

To ensure the Communists did not escape, Wang Shi'an ordered the action team to refrain from making premature arrests, instructing them instead to scout the location and assess the situation inside first.

As ill luck would have it, a waiter carrying a tray accidentally bumped into an agent, exposing the weapon the agent was carrying.

Terrified, the waiter shrieked, and somehow managed to knock the agent's pistol to the floor.

The fallen pistol startled the patrons inside the tavern. Realizing their cover was blown, Wang Shi'an immediately issued the order to capture the waiter and search the premises.

During the search, an agent caught the scent of burning coming from the back of the tavern, instantly realizing that important documents were being destroyed. After a brief search, they uncovered a heavily concealed secret door. However, the door was bolted from the inside, leaving the agents with no choice but to smash against it with heavy objects.

It took a considerable effort to break the secret door open. Rushing in after forcing the entry, they were met with a pile of burning files, while another secret door stood wide open, suggesting the perpetrators had escaped through it.

Several agents lunged forward to salvage whatever burning materials remained, while Wang Shi'an roared:

"After them!"

A few agents charged into the secret passageway, but mere seconds later, a thunderous explosion echoed, directly burying and killing the pursuing operatives with the blast.

The sound of the explosion infuriated Wang Shi'an, for this was the International Settlement, and the blast would soon attract patrolling police.

Left with no alternative, he could only order his subordinates to confiscate the partially burned document materials, conduct a thorough ransacking, and take the four arrested tavern waiters into custody as they hurried out of the Settlement.

...

The raid in the Settlement had failed to catch any big fish, leaving Wang Shi'an exceptionally furious. He attributed the setback to his own ill fortune, little suspecting that the very next day, his subordinates would hand him an astronomical surprise.

"Station Chief, take a look at these materials!" Gu Shenyan cautiously laid out the partially burned documents one by one across the desk.

"Among these are four Communist Party membership applications—three of them had their dates burned away, making them hard to identify, but this one's date is completely preserved: July 8th."

"I suspect these Communist membership applications all belong to the same batch."

"Partial names are visible on these two; this one contains the name of the referrer—this fellow is named Li Muqing, and I suspect he is the courier contact that Station Chief Chen failed to capture." Kô

"On this one, only the surname of the oath witness is visible: Bai—he might be that Department Chief Bai from the Communist Shanghai Municipal Committee."

"And this one, only part of the applicant's name is visible: Zhang, and this character feels like Hao? Unfortunately, the middle name was burned away, so it's illegible!"

Zhang? Hao?

Wang Shi'an pondered for a moment, failing to derive any particular conclusion.

Seeing this, Gu Shenyan pointed to another fragment of the file and said:

"Station Chief, look at this one. It's quite interesting!"

"This is a remittance statement. A good portion of it is burned away, leaving only thirteen transaction amounts visible, totaling nearly one hundred thousand US dollars! Why does this feel fake to me?"

"One hundred thousand US dollars?"

Wang Shi'an was startled and quickly leaned in to examine it.

Upon doing so, a wave of shock involuntarily washed over him.

For within the charred and scorched section, he caught sight of the character "Qun" (Masses).

The day before yesterday, Li Ya had reported to him about seeing a receipt recording a sum of over four thousand US dollars.

Yesterday, Li Ya mentioned that while making small talk with the contact, he deliberately steered the conversation toward finances, and the contact revealed that the organization possessed a wealthy merchant who, over the course of just a few years, had donated over two hundred thousand US dollars to the cause!

And the code name of this wealthy merchant was... Masses!

[This is definitely the remittance ledger for 'Masses'! ]

Fixating on the individual sums, Wang Shi'an experienced a flash of inspiration and said, "Old Gu, since we have the remittance statement, can we trace the transfer information through foreign banks?"

"We should be able to, though it will require some alternative methods."

"Spare no expense on the funds! We must track this down!"

"Yes, sir!"

...

Wang Shi'an felt as though his fortunes were finally on the rise!

His men had discovered the crew members!

To be precise, his men had located the crew members from those two cargo ships that had been mysteriously hijacked.

The Secret Service immediately arrested the crew members. Interrogation revealed that all of them had been secretly detained for five days before being quietly released, with the sole condition that none of them return to Shanghai in the near future; each of them had also been made to sign a document known as a Non-Disclosure Agreement.

Wang Shi'an perused the interrogation records, puzzled: "A non-disclosure agreement? What sort of thing is that?"

Lu Qiaoshan, who had overseen the interrogation, thought nothing of it and explained, "It's a kind of confidentiality contract. I recall it was seemingly invented by my teacher."

"Your teacher? You mean an instructor from the Guanwangmiao Special Training Class? What's his name?" Wang Shi'an asked curiously.

"Zhang Shihao—my teacher studied abroad, and it is said that he also..." Lu Qiaoshan began to boast.

Yet Wang Shi'an failed to take in any of his subsequent words, for at that exact moment, only three characters echoed within his mind:

Zhang Shihao!

And just yesterday, among the fragmented documents handed to him by Gu Shenyan, a membership application contained an incomplete applicant name:

Zhang, X, Hao!

Zhang Shihao?

Zhang X Hao?

Zhang Shihao? Zhang Shihao, the Deputy Chief of the Shanghai Special Group?

Wang Shi'an involuntarily drew a sharp breath.

It seemed he had made a monumental discovery!

Before that, however, he suppressed his surging excitement and asked the interrogated crew members:

"During the five days you were detained, did any of you suffer beatings?"

"No. Aside from forbidding us from speaking or going outside, nobody struck us, and we were provided with three full meals a day."

The style of the Communists!

This was unmistakably the style of the Communists!

Only the Communists would treat innocent people in such a manner!

...

It seemed to be the season of harvest, with favorable news arriving one after another.

The Nationalist Party's Party Affairs Investigation Office in Shanghai had arrested a Communist operative, extracting a piece of intelligence through interrogation:

The Communists were actively searching for workers familiar with German production lines!

Initially, the Shanghai Office had not paid much attention to this piece of news—until their mole inside the Shanghai Station transmitted a report:

According to the Shanghai Station's investigation, the machinery hijacked from the Jin-Sui Army was a German hand grenade production line!

Only then did the Shanghai Office realize that the machinery had somehow fallen into Communist hands!

The previously sluggish Shanghai Office panicked.

Damn it all, they had originally assumed it was just Yan Xishan getting what he deserved, but it turned out to be such a monumental piece of hardware—there was simply no room to slack off anymore. They had to scramble for clues immediately, lest this stuff find its way into what the Communists called the Soviet Area.

The Shanghai Office resumed its investigation, only to discover that by this time, the Secret Service's Shanghai Station had already outpaced them in the direction of the inquiry.

Seeing that seven days had passed since the two ships carrying the production line were intercepted, and fearing that within a few more days the goods would reach the Communist-controlled Soviet Area, the Shanghai Office grew desperate and resolved to join forces with the Nationalist Secret Service's Shanghai Station.

Director Huang rushed to the headquarters of the Shanghai Station, demanding an audience with Station Chief Wang Shi'an.

At that very moment, Wang Shi'an was wearing a grim expression as he examined the remittance ledger that Gu Shenyan had "purchased" from an American bank for five thousand dollars.

Every month, a transaction matched the figures on the midnight ledger, and the sender bore a single, simple English name:

Hao!

Hao?

Zhang Shihao?

Wang Shi'an had confirmed that this individual was none other than Zhang Shihao, Deputy Chief of the Shanghai Special Group!

The initiator of the Guanwangmiao Training Class, a member of the preparatory committee, an instructor, an elite valued by the Superior...

Such titles made Wang Shi'an hesitate. Could he afford to arrest such a person?

Or should these materials be handed over to headquarters instead?

Just as he vacillated, Director Huang of the Party Affairs Office's Shanghai Branch arrived.

"Station Chief Wang! I've come here today to skip the pleasantries!" Director Huang declared bluntly the moment they met:

"The two shipments of supplies belonging to the Jin-Sui Army—I know they are a hand grenade production line!"

"This equipment must never enter Communist territory!"

"Regardless of how you and I contend with one another on ordinary days, those are internal matters. But this affair is of paramount importance. My purpose in coming here today is to hope that our two sides can join hearts and hands to crack this case and prevent these goods from falling into Communist hands!"

Director Huang's words stirred a thought within Wang Shi'an's mind.

The Party Affairs Investigation Office handled internal anti-Communist operations. Since Zhang Shihao was likely a Communist, the case could be handled entirely by the Party Affairs Office!

That way, he could bypass the pressure originating from headquarters!

Naturally, Wang Shi'an's primary concern remained profit.

Suppressing his inner excitement, he asked with an impassive expression, "Joining hands is not out of the question, and working with one mind is certainly fine, but how shall the credit be divided?"

"You and I split it evenly!"

Wang Shi'an chuckled, offering no response.

Director Huang gritted his teeth: "Four-six! Four for the Party Affairs Office, six for you. How about that?"

"Three-seven!"

"Out of the question! Station Chief Wang, you show no sincerity in cooperating. In that case, let's just wait for the whip to fall on both our houses!" Enraged, Director Huang made a motion to leave.

"I can provide an extremely useful clue: this person has a one-hundred-percent chance of being a high-ranking Communist sleeper agent planted within the Nationalist Government! A seven-to-three split on the credit—does that sound acceptable?" Wang Shi'an asked leisurely.

Director Huang paused: "Is this true?"

"A gentleman's word is as good as a team of four horses!"

"If this proves true, the credit for this operation goes seven parts to you and three to me!"

Wang Shi'an extended a hand: "Pleasure doing business with you!"

...

(Three chapters totaling 11,000 words, likely three more tonight.)

(End of this chapter)