Yuan Shikai stood in the center of his private intelligence headquarters, a discreet, elegant townhouse in the French Concession of Tianjin. The air here was different from his grand public office; it was still and cold, the silence broken only by the quiet, purposeful movements of his staff. These were not government bureaucrats. These were his true instruments of power: former military officers, disgraced spies, and ruthless enforcers who owed their loyalty to him and him alone. This was the nerve center of his ghost army.
He was in a state of controlled, incandescent fury. The composure he had displayed before the Spymaster had been a masterful performance, but it had shredded his nerves. He felt exposed, cornered. The meeting had been a declaration of war.
His chief of operations, the severe and impeccably dressed Madame Song, stood before him, her face as impassive as ever. She listened as Yuan recounted the confrontation, his voice a low, venomous hiss.
"He knows," Yuan finished, slamming his fist down on a heavy oak table. The sound was like a muffled gunshot. "Shen Ke knows everything. He has a witness who connects my aide to the American. He has a name. He has the face of our asset. He has Riley."
Madame Song did not react to his outburst. She was a creature of pure, cold logic, immune to the heat of emotion. "Then the witness must be silenced," she said, her voice calm and even. "And the asset must be erased."
"Precisely," Yuan snarled. He fixed her with a burning gaze, his new mandate absolute and lethal. "Find Corporal Riley. I do not care what it costs. I do not care who you have to bribe, threaten, or break. Use every resource we have, every string we can pull. Scour this city. Find him before Shen Ke's hounds do. And when you find him," he leaned closer, his voice dropping to a whisper, "I do not want him captured. I do not want him interrogated. I want him to vanish. I want him erased so completely from this world that not even his ghost remains to whisper my name to the Spymaster."
Madame Song gave a single, sharp nod. There was no moral hesitation, only a swift, professional assessment of the task. "It will be done, Minister."
She immediately began to outline her strategy, her mind a ruthlessly efficient machine, showcasing the terrifying reach of Yuan's private network. The hunt would be two-pronged, a simultaneous assault from above and below.
"First," she said, "we will unleash the streets. I will activate our contacts within the Green Gang and the Red Fists. A bounty will be placed on the head of a 'foreign devil' matching Riley's description. We will make it the largest bounty the Tianjin underworld has ever seen. Every thief, every beggar, every rickshaw puller, every opium den owner will become our eyes and our ears. Shen Ke may have his disciplined agents, but we will have a thousand desperate, greedy informants."
"Second," she continued, "we will use the official channels we own. I will alert our assets within the Qing bureaucracy. The harbormaster will flag any travel permit issued to a foreigner matching Riley's description. Our clerk inside the municipal police will provide us with copies of their patrol reports every hour. Our man at the railway station will watch the passenger lists for every train leaving the city. We will seal every official exit."
It was a brilliant pincer movement, using the chaos of the underworld and the corruptibility of the state to create a city-wide trap.
The scene shifts. The world shrinks to a filthy, cramped room in a flophouse near the docks, a place that reeked of cheap wine, unwashed bodies, and despair. Here, Corporal Riley was living out the last moments of his freedom. He was disguised as a down-on-his-luck Russian merchant, his face half-hidden by a heavy woolen cap, but his disguise could not hide the frantic, hunted look in his eyes. His paranoia, which had been a low hum, was now a constant, screaming siren in his head. Every footstep in the hall outside was Shen Ke's men. Every shout from the street below was someone calling his name. He was trying to buy passage on a Swedish timber freighter leaving at dawn, his last, desperate hope of escaping China forever.
He left his room and descended the creaking stairs to the street, heading for a pre-arranged meeting with a corrupt shipping clerk. As he stepped into the crowded, muddy alley, a beggar, his face a roadmap of grime and misery, shuffled toward him, his hand outstretched.
"Mercy, master, a single coin for a starving man," the beggar whined.
Riley, his nerves stretched to the breaking point, shoved the man aside with a muttered curse. "Get away from me."
He hurried on, completely unaware of the beggar's eyes. The beggar was not just a supplicant. He was an informant. And his sharp, street-honed eyes had registered Riley's face, his height, his military bearing despite the slouch. He had seen the poster, circulated that very morning by the Green Gang. He had found the foreign devil. He had found the walking fortune. The beggar turned and scurried away into the labyrinthine alleys, his heart pounding with a greed that was far stronger than his hunger.
Back in Yuan Shikai's townhouse headquarters, the first thread was pulled. A runner, a young boy from the docks, burst into the operations room, his message breathless and urgent. He had come from the beggar. They had a location. A positive identification. The flophouse on Dragon's Tail Alley.
A cold, thin smile touched Madame Song's lips. "Excellent," she said. "The Spymaster may have the power of the state, but we have the speed of the street."
She turned to a group of men who had been waiting silently in the corner of the room. They were her enforcers, a team of six ruthless ex-soldiers whose loyalty was to Yuan's silver, not the Emperor's throne. They were hard, quiet men with dead eyes, masters of the silent kill. "You have the location," she said simply. "Go. No witnesses. No remains."
The team nodded once and melted out of the room.
The scene splits, the tension ratcheting up to an unbearable degree. We see the six enforcers, now dressed as common dockworkers, their weapons hidden beneath their rough coats, moving with silent, predatory purpose through the crowded, chaotic alleyways toward the flophouse.
Simultaneously, we cut to Shen Ke's official Tianjin headquarters. An agent rushes into Section Chief Ling's office, his face flushed with excitement. He is a mole from inside the municipal police, one of Madame Song's counterparts in the official world. "Sir!" he reports. "A patrolman just filed a report! A suspicious foreigner matching the target's description was seen near the Swedish consulate, paying an informant for information about outgoing ships! We have a name for the informant—a corrupt shipping clerk who lives two streets away from Dragon's Tail Alley!"
Ling's eyes lit up. He was a step behind, but he was on the same trail. "Seal the district!" he commanded. "I want teams at every intersection! Move!"
The race was on. Two separate armies of hunters, one official, one secret, were now converging on the same shabby flophouse. And at the center of the storm, Corporal Riley sat in his small, squalid room, counting the last of his money, completely, blissfully unaware that the price of his treason was about to be collected, one way or another. The walls were closing in.