374: Chapter 374 Cleaning Markers

Night Owl gave two silent hand signals.

The twelve team members split into four groups—Group A to take the top-floor executive office directly, Group B to infiltrate the fourth underground level via ventilation ducts, Group C to secure the first-floor lobby and monitoring center, and Group D to blockade the rooftop helipad.

Twelve near-transparent silhouettes slid out from the rotorcraft simultaneously.

They were not parachuting—the palms of their gloves were embedded with microfiber adhesive material, allowing them to descend silently down the curtain wall glass like geckos: thirty meters, fifteen meters, ten meters—

Inside the building's monitoring room, two security guards on duty were staring at the screen wall—a total of sixty-four split screens, alternately displaying live feeds of hallways, elevator lobbies, and basements on each floor.

Neither of them noticed anything unusual.

Because every split-screen feed had already been taken over by the CMC-I electronic decoy device that Night Owl carried—the footage on the screens was actually a thirty-second cached loop.

In the real hallways, twelve ripples were flowing silently.

The rotors of the Bell 407 were spinning faster and faster.

Chen Feng stumbled as he pushed open the rooftop door; the pilot was already in the cockpit, giving him a thumbs-up.

The briefcase was heavy—it contained an encrypted hard drive, three 500-gram gold bars, a key card for a Cayman Islands bank safety deposit box, and that photograph with Hun Sen.

He gripped the cabin door handle and stepped his left foot onto the boarding step—

Then the ceiling collapsed.

To be precise, it was Night Owl dropping down from the top of the rooftop power distribution room, completing a standard rappelling kick in a fraction of a second.

The sole of his right foot landed precisely on Chen Feng's chest, compressing his ribcage backward by four centimeters—just enough to make his spine bend along its neutral position without fracturing, but all the air was squeezed out of his lungs, forcing a dry heave muffled in his throat.

The briefcase flew out, landing right under the tail boom of the Bell 407.

The hard drive inside rolled out, bounced twice on the anti-slip floor of the helipad, and stopped at the edge of the drainage grate.

Chen Feng struggled to turn his head, lying face up, and saw the treaded sole of a boot pressing down on his chin, while the rest of the boot—along with the person wearing it—he could not see.

That was not because his eyesight was poor, but because the person stepping on him had no intention of leaving any outline on his retinas.

A pair of carbon-fiber gloved hands reached over from behind, pinning his arms behind his back and instantly locking his wrists with a heat-shrink zip tie.

He heard the pilot's panicked shouts from the direction of the helicopter—two equally invisible attackers had already pulled open the cockpit door, dragged the pilot from his seat, and pinned him to the ground.

Then, a voice pressed down from above.

"Chen Feng."

When the voice spoke his name, the articulation was as precise as print; it carried no malice, yet also completely lacked any lingering tone that could be mistaken for "negotiation."

"We have found all ten of the telecom fraud compounds under your command, from Poipet to Pursat, from Pailin to Sihanoukville."

"We have also seen the underground server room behind your office bookshelf, four levels down, with twelve hundred workstations."

"Your encrypted hard drive is in my hands now."

He felt the boot pressing on his chin loosen slightly, just enough to allow him to speak, but not enough to let him sit up.

"You want money—" Chen Feng said, his voice forced into a sharp distortion by the pressure on his throat, "I have it, I have it—the keys in the hard drive, overseas accounts, real estate, I can transfer it all—transfer it right now—"

"We don't want money," Night Owl said.

Chen Feng froze for a moment. "Then what do you—"

Night Owl pressed his suppressed pistol against Chen Feng's thigh and fired a shot.

The gunshot was compressed by the suppressor into a very short, muffled thud; the bullet precisely pierced the rectus femoris muscle, searing the sciatic nerve without severing the femoral artery.

Chen Feng's scream was pressed back into his throat by Night Owl's knee.

"This is your 'Cleansing' mark. It hurts, but it won't kill you."

"You will be taken back to the estate alive, along with your hard drive, ledgers, and all the financial flows that nurtured you from a wanted fugitive into the head of this transnational criminal syndicate today."

Night Owl leaned down two centimeters.

Chen Feng finally saw that face—the mask was pulled down, revealing a pair of eyes framed by the temples of night-vision goggles.

There was no anger in those eyes, no disdain, only a calmness that was more chilling than either.

"Also, that commentary of yours—'The Last Revelry of the Northern Myanmar Warlord Remnants'—was not written by you."

"We don't need you to confess the ghostwriter now. The server records, encrypted communications, and content comparison have already formed a complete chain of evidence."

"The original author underwent a leg-clearing procedure yesterday afternoon in a tasteful small apartment in Phnom Penh; the process was clean."

"What they confessed and what you are about to confess will be placed in the same folder."

Night Owl released the pressure from his knee.

Two team members hoisted Chen Feng up from the ground, tore open an automatic hemostatic patch, and pressed it onto his thigh wound with precise movements and no unnecessary contact.

"We won't be using the helicopter. We've arranged a car for you—the air conditioning is already on."

The wind on the rooftop picked up.

The rotors of the Bell 407 were still spinning, but the pilot had been bound to the side.

Over a dozen optical camouflage silhouettes appeared one after another from the ventilation duct openings, the power distribution room, and the steel trusses; Group C reported that the first-floor lobby and monitoring center were fully secured, and all security guards had been disarmed without a single shot being fired.

Group B reported that the image copying of the fourth underground level server array was complete, twelve hundred telecom operators were being disconnected from their terminals one by one, and the detainees were being numbered and registered; two men claiming to be "HR managers" were subdued with stun guns when they attempted to destroy personnel files.

After listening to the report, Night Owl placed the encrypted hard drive into his chest gear pouch.

He typed three words into the encrypted channel: "The fish is in the net."

Naypyidaw, Presidential Palace Strategic Command Center.

Zhang Cheng received those three words.

He loaded the coordinates of all ten compounds under Chen Feng's name into the tactical strike module.

Each coordinate was attached with a label, which contained the compound's scale, number of detainees, armed guard configuration, and evaluated escape routes.

These data sources were the 67 million call recordings cross-referenced by the "Vega" system last night, encrypted dark web transaction packets, and drone thermal imaging darkroom records.

He circled these compounds one by one on the touchscreen map—his movements were light, without the sound of a firing pin, only the faint pulse of electronic ink lighting up under his fingertips.

Then he wrote the annotation: "Designate all as strike targets. Rescue personnel as priority. Armed resistance—no survivors."

East of Poipet, 4:00 AM.

The night in this border town had never truly been quiet.

In peacetime, the soundscape of Poipet consisted of the hum of neon lights from the Thai-Cambodian border casinos, the diesel engine idling of cross-border trucks, and the clanging of woks from street food stalls.

But tonight was different.

Tonight, starting from midnight, all the neon lights had gone out.

The casinos had closed their doors.

Trucks were parked on the roadside, their drivers nowhere to be found.

The metal rolling shutters of the food stalls were locked tight, and the stoves had long since gone cold.