The sun was shining brightly in San Francisco, while night had fallen over Pengcheng.
But the sudden ring of the phone jolted the short, round-faced young man awake just as he had fallen asleep. He picked it up.
"Hello? What happened?"
"Boss, we lost the target in San Francisco. And the other party has already noticed us."
Du Jianxin's face darkened. "Useless!"
"Boss..." The person on the other end quickly explained what had happened.
After hearing the explanation, Du Jianxin's expression darkened further. If they had simply lost the target by accident, he wouldn't have been this angry.
After calming himself, he hung up. The more he thought about it, the more wary he became of Li Qingye. He picked up the satellite phone on his bedside table and dialed a special number.
Two minutes later.
"Hello, Du?"
"Thomas, it's me."
The person on the other end asked in surprise, "It's still the middle of the night over there, isn't it? What happened?"
Du Jianxin smiled. "There's a small favor I need to ask of you, my friend."
"Heh, a small favor? Let's hear it."
"I have a friend who's gone missing in North America. I'd like to ask your family to find him."
"Find someone? OK. Send me his information, and I'll get back to you within half a month."
"Thank you, my friend."
Seattle, America, North America.
On a private beach, a middle-aged man in shorts lay in the sand, sunbathing. He casually tossed his satellite phone to his butler.
Half an hour later, the butler approached with a file. The middle-aged man waved away the two bikini-clad beauties.
"Sir, the man Du wants us to find is named Li Qingye. He's the son of the former chairman of Xin Xin Group. He arrived in San Francisco yesterday and disappeared soon after," the butler reported succinctly.
The middle-aged man lifted his sunglasses and took the file, flipping through it.
"I see." The middle-aged man nodded in understanding, then handed the file back to the butler and instructed him, "Have someone look into this Li."
"Understood."
Meanwhile.
At Cape Town International Airport in the Transvaal Republic.
After a private plane landed, Li Qingye, carrying nothing but a shoulder bag, quickly made his way to UBS's Cape Town branch.
He opened two new anonymous accounts, then split the funds from his previous anonymous account into two batches and transferred them into the new accounts.
He then went to an area of Cape Town dedicated to financial services.
Inside a company specializing in agency services.
"Mr. Andrew, please." A curly-haired Boer poured him a cup of coffee.
Li Qingye took a sip. "Manager Kate, I hear you're the most professional agent in Cape Town. If I want to obtain Transvaal citizenship, what sort of procedures would I need to go through?"
"Oh? That depends on the circumstances."
"Here's a deposit of one hundred thousand US dollars. How long will it take?" Li Qingye casually tossed a check onto the table.
"One month. It'll only take one month." Kate's eyes gleamed.
"Too slow." Li Qingye tossed down another check for one hundred thousand US dollars.
Gulp! Kate quickly said, "One week."
"Two days. That's my requirement. If you can do it, you'll get five hundred thousand US dollars. Otherwise, I'll find someone else." Li Qingye placed five handwritten pages in Kate's hands.
Hearing that the fee was five hundred thousand US dollars, Kate stopped caring about anything else. He quickly replied, "No problem. I can get it done for you within two days."
"Are you sure? You should take a look at my requirements first!"
Now that he had calmed down a little, Kate realized this money wouldn't be easy to earn. But as a Boer, he badly needed money to emigrate. For money, he was willing to sell anything.
He picked up the five pages and read through them one by one.
Li Qingye naturally wouldn't obtain citizenship through ordinary channels, since that could easily leave an information trail.
He had to take an unconventional route.
The new identity he'd planned was that of a Malaysian Chinese man named Zhang Jack, aged thirty-five. He had once made an unsuccessful investment in Africa, then married a local tribal woman and obtained Transvaal citizenship three years ago. His wife had died unexpectedly this year.
"This..." Kate took a long look at Li Qingye. Anyone arranging an identity like this was obviously up to something.
But he quickly put aside his curiosity. Come on, if there were nothing wrong with the man's identity, he wouldn't be paying five hundred thousand US dollars to have it arranged. As a professional agent, Kate understood one thing: never ask clients about their private affairs.
"Fine. You can have the identity documents tomorrow."
"OK. Make sure there are no loose ends." Li Qingye took another sip of coffee. "By the way, if you don't want trouble, you'd better launder these two checks. I imagine that should be easy for you, Manager Kate."
Kate glanced at the checks and saw that they were anonymous UBS checks. Then it dawned on him: to certain powerful groups, anonymous UBS accounts were practically transparent.
"Thanks for the warning."
"Tomorrow at noon. Room 35 at the Black Rose Restaurant."
"OK."
After Li Qingye left, Kate got to work at once. The identity information had already been prepared, so he didn't need to make anything up himself. He only had to ask a friend in the household registration department to add Zhang Jack's information to the system.
This might have been very difficult in another country, but Transvaal was no longer the Boer Transvaal of old.
The "BRICS' Four Failures" label wasn't for nothing.
That was also why Li Qingye had chosen this place.
Chaos created opportunities.
With help from Kate's friend, Zhang Jack's identity was quietly created, complete with reasonable supporting documents showing that he had obtained Transvaal citizenship three years earlier.
The next day at noon, Li Qingye kept his word. After receiving the identity documents, he paid Kate the remaining three hundred thousand US dollars.
Once he had his new identity, he didn't stay in Transvaal. Instead, he boarded a flight to Hong Kong.
After arriving in Hong Kong, he found several professional agents and had them launder the money in his anonymous accounts, then inject it into offshore companies.
To keep things discreet, he also had the agents spread the money laundering across the entire Commonwealth. After all, it was only a little over one hundred million US dollars. This cost Li Qingye quite a bit, but it made things safer.
The assets under Zhang Jack's name now had nothing to do with Li Qingye. The two had no connection whatsoever.
Meanwhile, in Transvaal, someone else had bought a ticket to Madagascar Island under the name Li Qingye.
June 8.
Seattle.
"Sir, we've tracked down that man's movements."
Thomas Morgan tapped his cigar. "Phew..."
The butler reported, "According to immigration records, he has no record of leaving North America. But there's nothing on the domestic public information network indicating that he traveled to Maple Leaf."
"Then our people went back through information from several special channels. We found that on the day he arrived in San Francisco, he went to a local UBS branch and withdrew the money in an anonymous account. There was 180 million US dollars in it."
Thomas Morgan's eyes flashed. He smiled and said, "180 million? Looks like this young man really is trouble."
"He used his connections at UBS to try to immigrate to Northern Europe, then took a private plane to Transvaal. But when I checked his UBS account information, I found that he spent over a million US dollars in Cape Town. Three days later, unusual payments began appearing in the anonymous account under his name. By four days ago, all the money in the account had disappeared."
Thomas Morgan took a puff of his cigar. "Very clever. Looks like he knew UBS might leak his information and moved all the money in advance."
The butler continued, "Since the funds were spread across Commonwealth countries, tracking them down would be very difficult. Should we keep investigating?"
"No need. Just tell Du that the man was last seen in Transvaal." Thomas Morgan waved his hand.
His family could use its connections in Britain to investigate the underground money-laundering channels across the entire Commonwealth, but doing so would come at a great cost.
And it wouldn't guarantee they could find Li Qingye. If he used traditional methods like exchanging paper money or gold, bypassing international settlement channels, he could avoid an investigation.
Thomas could also see that Li Qingye was extremely good at counter-surveillance. When the potential reward didn't justify the effort, he wasn't about to waste time on a thankless task.
After receiving the email in Pengcheng, Du Jianxin also realized how difficult things had become.
His family's influence was limited to East Asia and Southeast Asia. They couldn't reach much further. And since they couldn't search openly, he had no choice but to give up looking for Li Qingye.
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