The flophouse on Dragon's Tail Alley was a monument to human misery. It smelled of cheap liquor, unwashed bodies, and the damp, cloying rot that seeped up from the nearby canals. It was a place where men came to disappear, and it was here that Corporal Riley, formerly of the United States Marine Corps, was preparing to do just that. His nerves were a frayed, screaming mess. For days, he had felt the walls closing in, the sense of being watched growing from a paranoid suspicion to a suffocating certainty. He had secured passage on a Swedish timber freighter leaving at dawn. One last meeting with a corrupt shipping clerk to finalize the papers, and he would be gone.
He took a deep breath, clutching the small bag containing the last of his silver, and opened the door to his grimy, third-floor room. He stepped into the narrow, dimly lit hallway and froze.
His training, buried under layers of guilt and fear, screamed at him. At the far end of the hall, near the main staircase, stood two men dressed as merchants, their hands hidden in their sleeves, their eyes fixed on him. At the near end, blocking the route to the back stairs, were two more men, big, rough-looking figures dressed as common dockworkers. They were not looking at him yet, but their positions were not accidental. It was a classic pincer movement. A trap.
Before either team could make their move, before a single word could be spoken, Riley's survival instinct took over. He didn't think. He reacted. He slammed the heavy wooden door shut, the sound echoing like a gunshot in the tense silence. He threw his weight against it, fumbling with the flimsy iron bolt, ramming it home.
It was a desperate, futile gesture, and he knew it. He was trapped. He scrambled back, pulling the pistol from his belt, his heart hammering against his ribs. He aimed at the door and fired, the explosion deafening in the tiny room. The bullet tore through the thin wood, a visceral, splintering sound of defiance.
That single gunshot was the starting gun for a race to hell.
In the hallway, both teams of hunters were momentarily stunned. They had expected to corner a single, unsuspecting man. They had not expected each other.
The two "merchants" at the far end were Shen Ke's elite agents. Their orders were to capture the target alive. The two "dockworkers" were Yuan Shikai's private enforcers. Their orders were to leave no witnesses.
"Ministry of State Security! Drop your weapons!" one of Shen Ke's men shouted, his training taking over as he drew his own pistol.
Yuan's men had no interest in jurisdiction. Their master's orders were absolute. One of them, a man with a scarred face and dead eyes, simply raised his own weapon and fired. The bullet slammed into the chest of the agent who had shouted, sending him staggering back against the wall, a look of shocked disbelief on his face before he slid to the floor.
The narrow, squalid hallway erupted into a hurricane of violence. It was a close-quarters gun battle of shocking brutality, fought in a space no wider than a man's outstretched arms. Shen Ke's agents, trained for stealth and capture, were caught off guard by the sheer, murderous ferocity of their opponents. Yuan's men, ruthless ex-soldiers, fought with the cold efficiency of a death squad, firing to kill.
Bullets tore through the thin plaster walls, splintering wood, shattering the oil lamp that provided the hallway's only light and plunging the scene into a chaotic twilight of muzzle flashes and shouting men.
Inside his room, Riley heard the chaos erupt. He knew this was his only chance. He scrambled to the room's single, grime-caked window, smashed it open with the butt of his pistol, and clambered out onto a rickety, rust-eaten fire escape. The structure groaned and swayed under his weight. Without looking back, he dropped ten feet into the filth of the alley below, landing hard but rolling with the impact. He pushed himself up and began a frantic, desperate sprint through the maze of the dockyards, the sounds of the gun battle fading behind him.
The fight in the flophouse was over in less than a minute. It was short, savage, and decisive. Yuan's enforcers, more ruthless and better armed for a lethal engagement, had won. One of them lay dead, but they had killed two of Shen Ke's agents and gravely wounded a third. They had failed to acquire their primary target, but they had successfully silenced the opposition. Without a word, they vanished back into the shadows of the city, leaving behind a scene of carnage that screamed a clear and bloody message.
Section Chief Ling arrived minutes later, his face a mask of cold fury. He stepped into the wrecked hallway, the air thick with the smell of gunpowder and blood. He saw his own men lying dead or dying on the floor. His perfectly laid trap had not just failed; it had been blown apart, and it had exposed the existence of a second, unknown, and incredibly dangerous player in the game.
He knelt beside one of his fallen agents, his expert eyes scanning the scene. He found what he was looking for. A single, spent shell casing that had rolled into a corner, overlooked in the chaos. He picked it up. The casing was of a unique, high-grade brass alloy. It was not standard military issue. Ling recognized the maker's mark on the bottom. It was the stamp of one of Yuan Shikai's own private arms factories, a company that supposedly only manufactured components for naval artillery.
Ling stood up, the warm shell casing clutched in his fist. He now had the proof. This was not an American counter-intelligence team. This was a domestic enemy. This was Yuan Shikai's ghost army, and they were willing to murder agents of the state to protect their secrets.
Meanwhile, Corporal Riley, a searing pain in his side where a stray bullet had grazed him, stumbled through the labyrinthine dockyards. He was bleeding, exhausted, and hunted. Every shadow seemed to hold a new killer. He was out of money, out of allies, out of time. The government wanted to capture him. Another, more shadowy group wanted to kill him. He was a dead man walking.
He had one last, desperate, unthinkable option. A final roll of the dice. He burst out of the alleys and onto the main thoroughfare that led away from the port. He headed, with the last of his strength, for the one place in the entire city that might offer him sanctuary from every faction of the Chinese government. The one place his hunters could not easily follow without creating an international crisis of the highest order.
He began to run toward the heavily fortified walls of the American Legation. He was going to turn himself in. He was going to confess everything. He was about to bring the entire secret war, with all its dirty secrets and high-level betrayals, crashing down onto the official diplomatic stage, right at the front door of his own country.