Spying

03 The Traitor

In his final moments before death, the last thought lingering in Qiao Mingyu's mind was: How had he been exposed?

He had been lured into No. 1 Honggongci by Lu Peng from the Confidentiality Bureau under the pretense of "a farewell gathering for a colleague transferring out of the capital." After all, as Chief Qiao of the Third Department of the Ministry of National Defense, forcibly arresting him either at his office or home would inevitably cause a significant stir. Considering the reputation of the Third Department, the Confidentiality Bureau also preferred not to escalate tensions.

In the interrogation room, Lu Peng adopted a strategy of courtesy before force. He even reminisced with Qiao Mingyu about their "old ties." They had once been colleagues in the Military Intelligence Section, but in the 30th year of the Republic, Qiao Mingyu left Chongqing and joined Qiu Qingquan's Fifth Army in western Yunnan—later known as one of the units of the "Chinese Expeditionary Force."

"Back then, we were setting up the Sino-American Cooperative Organization in Chongqing. Everyone said we’d have to send someone to the CIA for training someday, and Director Dai said you were the only one who could go—the only one who spoke a bit of English. But before the organization was even fully established, you suddenly announced you were enlisting in Qiu the Madman’s engineering corps. Director Dai cursed you on the spot, saying you were rushing to your death..." Lu Peng recounted the past as if it were yesterday, admitting that he had secretly admired Qiao Mingyu’s choice back then, because serving on the front lines was fundamentally different from staying in the rear.

On the table before him sat a pot of freshly brewed tea. He poured a cup for Qiao Mingyu, but even as the steam dissipated completely, the other man didn’t take a single sip.

"Afraid it’s laced with truth serum?" Lu Peng asked.

Qiao Mingyu looked at him and countered, "Is it?"

Lu Peng laughed. "Of course not! The Americans’ tricks only work on pampered weaklings. You, Brother Qiao, were trained by the Military Intelligence Section. Even under hallucinogens, you’d keep full control of your mind."

Qiao Mingyu neither refuted nor engaged. He remained expressionless, but his mind raced. Had they captured his superior and thus uncovered his identity, or were they merely acting on suspicion without concrete evidence?

After the reminiscing, Lu Peng speculated, "I’d guess you joined the Communist Party after that. Otherwise, they’d have had no reason to let you leave the Military Intelligence Section. They’d have kept you embedded in our intelligence apparatus—they don’t care how dangerous it is for you if you’re discovered. Did they also tell you to be ready to die for their so-called revolution at any moment?"

Faced with such insinuations and provocations, Qiao Mingyu naturally didn’t take the bait. He shook his head, feigning helplessness. "Who exactly told you I’m a Communist?"

But Lu Peng wasn’t about to reveal the answers he sought either. "Who’s your handler now? Li Kenong, Dong Biwu, or Zhou Enlai?"

"I know the pressure’s on you to crack down on the Communist Party after the recent student protests at Central University, but coming after me? Really... Deputy Chief Lu, your work hasn’t been thorough."

"I’m doing my job. Should I invite Section Chief Lan over as well? Living under the same roof, she might provide us with some leads. Or perhaps she’s in league with you—another name missing from our list.""You mentioned earlier that Old Shen is going to Yunnan? Does that mean you're getting promoted? Congratulations! But if something goes wrong now—if you trust the wrong intel and arrest the wrong person—when the truth comes out, it won’t be as simple as being exiled to some remote province as a station chief..."

Both men were answering questions with non-answers, yet their words clashed like crossed blades. Lu Peng wanted to provoke Qiao Mingyu into losing his temper, hoping to expose a flaw, while Qiao Mingyu sought to probe why they had targeted him.

The outcome was clear: not only did Lu Peng fail to rattle Qiao Mingyu, but he repeatedly found himself on the defensive—first being reminded of his lower administrative rank, then threatened about his unstable position in the Confidentiality Bureau. Meanwhile, Qiao Mingyu had shrewdly gleaned one crucial piece of information—there was a list.

What kind of list?

But before he could fish for more details, Lu Peng had already risen impatiently. The "courtesy" was over. He turned to his subordinate interrogator and said, "It seems Chief Qiao doesn’t care for tea. Let’s serve him water instead."

Qiao Mingyu was subjected to water torture throughout the night.

It was a favorite method among enforcers and interrogators—effortless and leaving no visible marks.

By the time Lu Peng returned to the interrogation room at dawn, the man before him was unrecognizable.

Gone was the composed and unflappable director of the Third Department of the Ministry of Defense. In his place was a disheveled prisoner, shackled to the interrogation chair.

Qiao Mingyu’s limbs were bound, his head covered with a cloth sack that blocked his vision. Ice-cold water poured relentlessly from above. At first, he could still discern it was just a single stream, but soon the soaked fabric clung to his mouth and nose, suffocating his thoughts. Even holding his breath couldn’t stop the relentless flow of water invading his nostrils and throat, drowning him again and again in a horrifyingly vivid sensation.

Lu Peng approached his former colleague and comrade, yanking off the sack that blinded and suffocated him. He watched as Qiao Mingyu gasped like a drowning man pulled ashore at the last moment—eyes bloodshot, teetering on the edge of collapse.

"The Communist Party’s transit stations in Nanjing, personnel lists, contact methods, cipher keys for their radios—if you’d just give us one detail, you wouldn’t have to suffer like this."

But between agonized gasps and coughs, Qiao Mingyu still insisted, "I’m not a Communist. You’ve got the wrong man."

Lu Peng responded by shoving the cloth sack back over Qiao Mingyu’s face, pressing down hard. With a glance at the Confidentiality Bureau enforcer beside him, the water resumed its torrential downpour. Qiao Mingyu thrashed violently, as if plunged underwater once more, liquid flooding his airways and stealing every breath.

"I despise people like you," Lu Peng spat. "Playing the noble martyr for whom? You’re just rats in the shadows, betraying your masters for personal gain, switching loyalties like changing clothes... But remember—if you could betray the Military Intelligence Section, others can betray you too..."

Qiao Mingyu struggled weakly, coughing up water, when suddenly—before any new thought could form—his head lolled to the side, motionless.

The enforcer kept pouring. It was the interrogator behind them who sensed something wrong, stepping forward to call out, "Director Lu, something’s—"

Lu Peng released his grip. The sack slid off. Qiao Mingyu’s eyes stared wide, water trickling from his nostrils.

He had drowned.The term "spy" has always carried a negative connotation. Even in the past, when the Military Intelligence Section planted agents in Wang Jingwei's puppet regime or Japanese collaborators, Director Dai would always emphasize that they were operatives, not spies. Terms like "Japanese spy" or "Communist spy" were only used to label enemies, highlighting their illegitimacy.

However, today, accusing someone of being a Communist spy within the Ministry of National Defense is an entirely different matter.

Although, under the National Government’s Measures for Handling Communist Suspects in the Rear Areas , the crackdown on suspected Communists in major cities was in full swing, uncovering a Communist within the Ministry of National Defense would be tantamount to admitting that such a vital core institution had been thoroughly infiltrated. This would be a massive scandal—not only a failure of counterintelligence but also something no successfully infiltrated department would ever willingly acknowledge.

In such cases, of course, fabricated charges had to be invented to pin on those who would bring shame to the Ministry of National Defense.

Lu Changhai, the chief of the Fourth Department, understood these dynamics. But when conveying the orders to Ren Shaobai for execution, he adhered to the directive from above to handle the matter discreetly. He didn’t explain the full truth, allowing Ren to draw the most common assumption—that they had simply offended higher-ups.

Ren Shaobai would never have imagined in his wildest dreams that Qiao Mingyu could be a Communist.

And it wasn’t just Ren who couldn’t believe it.

In the Second Department office, as soon as the words "Communist spy" were uttered, someone immediately protested, "How is that possible? Chief Qiao is a veteran who joined the Party during the Northern Expedition!"

"So what? Ye Ting and Zhou Enlai were once members of the Nationalist Party too."

"Ahem—" Ren Shaobai cut off the discussion as he closed the office door. "That’s enough. Do you really want to be overheard discussing Communist leaders so loudly? You’re just asking to be accused of Communist sympathies."

The speaker immediately hunched his shoulders and covered his mouth, physically demonstrating his fear.

The others quickly dispersed.

Ren Shaobai returned to his desk. As usual, the first thing he did every morning was eat the breakfast he had bought from Wangjin Market. Today, it was a sweet sticky rice roll—glutinous rice wrapped around a crispy fried dough stick, layered with a sprinkle of sugar. The first bite was a dense, rich mix of sticky, crispy, oily, and sweet, something that usually brought him immense satisfaction.

But today, the food tasted bland.

Perhaps it was the weather.

"How is Nanjing even hotter than Chongqing? And it’s not even the summer solstice yet," a colleague by the window grumbled.

But this was pure amnesia about past hardships. During their years in Chongqing, they hadn’t even had electric fans. Now, the office had cooling units, but in line with the President’s austerity policy, they were only turned on during the peak of summer.

"Last year, the air conditioning wasn’t turned on until mid-July. This year..." Wei Ningsheng, a local, counted on his fingers. "We’ll have to wait until the dog days of summer." He then turned to look at Ren Shaobai sitting behind him and, noticing the fine beads of sweat on his forehead, asked considerately, "Chief, should I go to the General Affairs Department and request another fan?"

Ren Shaobai glanced at him, then suddenly stood up and walked straight to the door. "I’ll go myself."

It wasn’t the weather.But it was a sudden lack of confidence in something that made him unable to sit idly by, yet even more unwilling to act rashly and misstep. It wasn’t until Wei Ningsheng mentioned the General Affairs Department that an idea struck him.

In the Ministry of National Defense’s General Staff Headquarters, the Second Department was in charge of intelligence, but the true intelligence officers when it came to internal gossip were in the General Affairs Department.

Ren Shaobai sat in the General Affairs Department’s office for half an hour and quickly learned several things: which offices had been closed off for pest control after hours in the past few days, yet hadn’t involved the General Affairs Department’s own staff; the secretarial office had come to handle a batch of poorly printed documents, which turned out to be military reports from the Laiwu Campaign that should have been destroyed long ago; and the Second Department had requisitioned a batch of dry-cell batteries, with the registration revealing that it was actually a Confidentiality Bureau project being funded through their budget...

On the surface, these seemed like trivial workplace matters, but pieced together, they revealed plenty of information hidden beneath the surface.

Offices closed for pest control likely meant unannounced internal searches; military documents that hadn’t been destroyed weren’t just an oversight by some careless staffer with connections—they’d been deliberately kept; the Second Department and the Confidentiality Bureau were collaborating, most likely on counterintelligence...

At this moment, Ren Shaobai held onto a slim hope—that Qiao Mingyu and the others, now branded as “embezzlers,” had simply backed the wrong faction within this bureaucratic system.

“Oh, by the way, Deputy Section Chief Ren, you’ve also pulled off quite the feat.” The deputy director of the General Affairs Department suddenly waggled his eyebrows, looking both excited and restrained. “That ‘ice beauty’ from the First Department’s First Section—she’s divorced.”

Ren Shaobai found his expression irritating and instinctively retorted, “What does that have to do with me—” But the words caught in his throat like a fishbone, impossible to spit out or swallow—the “ice beauty” he referred to was unmistakably Qiao Mingyu’s wife, the very woman Ren had successfully framed with a single charge.

“They say the moment Qiao Mingyu was taken into custody, Lan Youyin sent over divorce papers. Chief Qiao was so furious he had a heart attack on the spot...”

“A heart attack?” Ren Shaobai asked urgently. “What’s his condition now?”

“He was rushed to Central Hospital—should be fine. But either way, isn’t that woman just ruthless?”

Ren Shaobai exhaled slightly in relief but thought to himself, who said women were the gossips? When men indulged in rumors, they were even worse. This was the epitome of smug self-satisfaction, laced with the thrill of prying into private affairs—his words were truly unpleasant.

“Pretty women really are unreliable. The moment their man’s in trouble, they rush to cut ties, afraid of being dragged down. Poor Qiao Mingyu—everyone knew how much he doted on his wife, but turns out she was only there for the good times, not the bad.”

“That’s a bit harsh. Besides, she’s not exactly young anymore—how easy will it be for her to remarry after this?”

Ren Shaobai forced himself to feign interest to keep extracting information, but before he could finish, the man’s expression suddenly changed. In an instant, a terrible premonition crawled up his spine, followed by a voice from behind—

“Deputy Section Chief Ren, I never realized you were so concerned about my marital status, given how little we usually interact.”

Ren Shaobai turned around, heart pounding, to see Lan Youyin leaning against the doorframe—true to her nickname, her beautiful face icy, her gaze sharp as it fixed on him.