Homo Sapiens

The sun shone brightly in San Francisco, while in Peng City, the night was deep and quiet.

But the sudden ringing of a phone jolted the short, round-faced young man, who had just fallen asleep, wide awake. He grabbed the phone:

”Hello? What’s wrong?”

”Boss, we lost the target in San Francisco. And he’s aware of us.”

Du Jianxin’s expression darkened. ”Useless!”

”Boss...” The person on the other end of the line quickly explained what had happened.

After hearing the explanation, Du Jianxin’s expression grew even darker. He wouldn’t have been this angry if they had simply lost the target by accident.

He calmed himself, hung up, and thought for a moment. His wariness of Li Qingye grew. He then picked up the satellite phone from his nightstand and dialed a special number.

「Two minutes later.」

”Hello, Du?”

”Thomas, it’s me.”

The man on the other end sounded surprised. ”Isn’t it the middle of the night for you? What’s going on?”

Du Jianxin chuckled. ”Just a small matter I need to trouble you with, my friend.”

”Heh, a small matter? Let’s hear it.”

”A friend of mine went missing in North America. I’d like to ask your family to find him.”

”Looking for someone? Okay. Send me his information. I’ll have an answer for you within half a month.”

”Thank you, my friend.”

...

「Seattle, America.」

On a private beach, a middle-aged man in shorts lay sunbathing. He casually tossed the satellite phone to his butler.

Half an hour later, the butler approached with a file. The middle-aged man waved his hand, dismissing two women in bikinis.

”Sir,” the butler stated concisely, ”the person Du is looking for is named Li Qingye. He’s the son of the former chairman of the Xinxin Group. He arrived in San Francisco yesterday and promptly disappeared.”

The middle-aged man lifted his sunglasses, took the file, and flipped through it.

”I see,” the middle-aged man said, a look of understanding on his face. He handed the file back to the butler and ordered, ”Have someone look into this Li.”

”Understood.”

...

「Meanwhile.」

「Transvaal Republic, Cape Town International Airport.」

After a private plane landed, Li Qingye, carrying only a shoulder bag, quickly found the UBS branch in Cape Town.

He opened two new anonymous accounts and split the funds from his previous one, transferring the money into the new accounts.

He then made his way to Cape Town’s financial services district.

Inside a company that specialized in agency services.

”Mr. Andrew, please,” a curly-haired Boer man said, pouring him a cup of coffee.

Li Qingye took a sip of coffee. ”Manager Kate, I hear you’re the most professional agent in Cape Town. I want to obtain Transvaal citizenship. What would that entail?”

”Oh? That depends.”

”Here’s a deposit of 100,000 US dollars. How long will it take?” Li Qingye said, casually tossing a check onto the table.

”One month. It only takes one month,” Kate said, his eyes glinting.

”Too slow.” He tossed another check for 100,000 US dollars onto the table.

GULP. ”One week,” Kate said hastily.

”Two days. That’s my requirement. If you can do it, it’s five hundred thousand US dollars. Otherwise, I’ll find someone else.” Li Qingye placed five handwritten sheets of paper in Kate’s hands.

Hearing the fee of five hundred thousand US dollars, Kate couldn’t think about anything else. He quickly replied, ”No problem. I can have it done for you in two days.”

”Are you sure? You should look at my requirements first.”

Having calmed down slightly, Kate understood this money wouldn’t be easy to earn. But as a Boer, he desperately needed money to emigrate. For money, he would sell anything.

He picked up the five sheets of paper and began to read through them.

Of course, Li Qingye wasn’t going to get naturalized through just any means. The conventional channels would easily leave a trail.

He had to take an unconventional route.

The new identity he had devised was for a 35-year-old Malaysian Chinese man named Jack Zhang. The backstory was that he had failed at an investment in Africa, married a local tribal woman, and become a citizen of Transvaal three years ago. His wife had passed away in an accident earlier this year.

”This...” Kate gave Li Qingye a long, hard look. ’Clearly, anyone wanting an identity like this is in some kind of trouble.’

But he quickly dismissed the idea of digging deeper. ’It was obvious. If the client didn’t have a problem, he wouldn’t be spending half a million US dollars on a new identity.’ As a professional agent, Kate understood one thing very well: don’t ask about a client’s private affairs.

”I can do it. You’ll have the ID documents by tomorrow.”

”Okay. Make sure it’s clean—no loose ends,” Li Qingye said, taking another sip of coffee. ”Oh, and if you don’t want any trouble, you’d better launder those two checks. I assume that won’t be a problem for a man of your talents, Manager Kate.”

Kate glanced at the two checks and saw they were from a UBS anonymous account. But then it dawned on him. To certain powerful organizations, UBS’s anonymous accounts were practically transparent.

”Thanks for the reminder.”

”Tomorrow at noon. Private room 35 at the Black Rose Restaurant.”

”Okay.”

After Li Qingye left, Kate sprang into action. The identity profile was already laid out, so he didn’t need to create it from scratch. He just needed to contact a friend in the civil registry department and have Jack Zhang’s information inserted into the system.

In any other country, this would have been extremely difficult. But the Transvaal of today was a far cry from the Transvaal of the old Boers.

They weren’t called the ”BRICS Wastes” for nothing.

This was precisely why Li Qingye had chosen this place.

Chaos created opportunity.

Soon, with the help of Kate’s friend, the records for a Jack Zhang who had been naturalized in Transvaal three years prior, complete with a plausible backstory, were quietly generated.

The next day at noon, Li Qingye kept his word. After receiving the identity file, he paid Kate the remaining three hundred thousand US dollars.

His new identity secured, he didn’t linger in Transvaal but instead boarded a flight to Xiangjiang.

Upon arriving in Xiangjiang, he found several more professional agents. He had them launder the funds from his anonymous accounts and inject the money into offshore companies.

For added security, he had the agents spread the laundering operation across the entire Commonwealth. It was, after all, just over one hundred million US dollars. This process cost Li Qingye a significant sum, but it greatly increased his security.

The assets now under Jack Zhang’s name had no connection to Li Qingye. The two identities were completely separate.

Meanwhile, back in Transvaal, someone else purchased a ticket to Mad Island under Li Qingye’s name.

「June 8th.」

「Seattle.」

”Sir, we’ve found a trail on that person.”

Thomas Morgan flicked the ash from his cigar, exhaling a cloud of smoke.

The butler reported, ”According to immigration, he has no record of leaving North America. However, there’s nothing on any domestic public networks about him traveling to Maple Leaf.”

”Finally, our people combed through some special channels and discovered that on the day he arrived in San Francisco, he visited a local UBS branch and withdrew funds from an anonymous account. That account held 180 million US dollars.”

A flicker in his eyes, Thomas Morgan smiled. ”180 million? It seems our young friend is quite the handful.”

”Through his connections at UBS, he made it look like he was planning to emigrate to Northern Europe, but then he took a private jet to Transvaal. While reviewing the UBS account information, I discovered he spent over a million US dollars in Cape Town. Three days after that, unusual expenditures began appearing from the anonymous account under his name. As of four days ago, all the funds in the account were gone.”

Thomas Morgan took a drag from his cigar. ”Very clever. It seems he knew UBS might leak his information and moved all the funds ahead of time.”

The butler continued, ”The funds were scattered among various countries in the Commonwealth, which makes tracing their final destination extremely difficult. Shall we continue the investigation?”

”No need,” Thomas Morgan said with a wave of his hand. ”Just tell Du he was last seen in Transvaal.”

His family could have used its connections in Great Britain to investigate the Commonwealth’s entire network of underground money laundering channels, but the cost would have been immense.

Besides, there was no guarantee it would even find Li Qingye. If he used traditional laundering methods, like exchanging physical currency or gold, and avoided international settlement channels, he could evade the investigation entirely.

Furthermore, Thomas could see that Li Qingye’s counter-surveillance skills were formidable. When the potential reward didn’t justify the effort, he had no intention of taking on such a thankless task.

Back in Peng City, Du Jianxin received the email and realized the situation was becoming very tricky.

After all, his family’s influence was limited to East Asia and Southeast Asia; other regions were beyond his reach. Since he couldn’t conduct an open search, he had no choice but to abandon the idea of finding Li Qingye.