449: Chapter 449 I've got the Prime Minister of Putrajaya under my thumb

Zhang Cheng switched the phone to his left hand, his right hand pulling up the map of Bangkok on the holographic screen. He looked at the location of Sanam Luang in Bangkok and let out a short snort through his nose.

"When Sabri said that, did he know someone was listening?"

"He didn't. He was using the military internal network; under standard encryption protocols, it shouldn't have been interceptable. He doesn't know we upgraded 'Vega'."

"Good. Then let him keep not knowing. Write the full transcript of the call between Sabri and the Army Commander into tomorrow's intelligence briefing and send it to the Prime Minister's Office in Putrajaya via Shuguang Cloud. Only to the Prime Minister's Office. Let the Prime Minister be the first to know—that his Minister of Defense is discussing with his Army Commander how to deal with the Chinese in Penang."

Zhang Cheng hung up the phone, stood up, and walked over to the situational map.

On the map, Butterworth Air Base, Kuantan Air Base, Merdeka Square in Kuala Lumpur, the Johor Strait—every key facility of the Malaysian military was marked in yellow. Yellow represented: Targetable assets.

"Li Lanzhi."

"I'm here."

"Notify the Prime Minister of Malaysia. Tell him—I am willing to postpone the joint management negotiations for the Strait of Malacca by one week. There is only one condition."

"What condition?"

"Keep Tan Teik Cheng in the Penang Parliament Building. Do not transfer him. Do not grant bail. Open trial. Streamed in its entirety."

Li Lanzhi noted this down on her tablet. She hesitated for a moment, then looked up: "Do you think they will comply?"

"They won't." Zhang Cheng looked at the eastern entrance of the Strait of Malacca marked as "Controlled" on the situational map, his voice devoid of inflection. "They will want to get him out. They will want to make him disappear. And then I will get the recording of the last call Tan Teik Cheng made in the final minute before being transferred—a call made to the Prime Minister's Office in Putrajaya."

He turned around and looked at Li Lanzhi. "That recording is the real target."

Outside the Penang Parliament Building, the rain had stopped.

Chen Shunfa put away his placards and stood among the crowd, which had thinned by seventy percent. Lin Meihua was helped up; her knee was scraped, oozing blood. She clutched her phone, the screen still displaying the photo of the arrest warrant.

She looked up at the third-floor window of the Parliament Building. There was no one behind the window. The shadow of the man named Tan Teik Cheng had already vanished from behind the curtains.

But she knew—the people in this building were not leaving today.

Chen Shunfa walked up to her and handed over the placards in his hand. The words on the placards were blurred by the rain, but she could still recognize the line—"On my father's fishing boat are the knife marks from when the British Navy rammed and sank it."

"Coming back tomorrow?" he asked.

Lin Meihua took the placards and picked up the megaphone from the ground, wiping off the water stains.

"Yes. I'll print a thousand copies of the lesson plan—stuff them into the crack of every office door. Let them see, it can't be burned away."

Chen Shunfa looked at her and slowly began to smile. He was missing two teeth, and when he smiled, it revealed a dark, gaping hole.

"Good. I'll take a photo of the knife marks on my boat—blow it up and paste it at the entrance of the Parliament Building. Let the people inside step on that photo the moment they get out of their cars."

Behind them, on the third floor of the Parliament Building, the last light went out.

Ten hours later. 2:31 AM.

The Prime Minister's Office in Putrajaya.

The Prime Minister of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, sat in his office with the intelligence briefing sent by Shuguang Cloud spread out before him. The first page of the briefing was the transcript of the encrypted call between Minister of Defense Sabri and the Army Commander—verbatim, without even removing the modal particles.

He turned to the second page. The second page contained the details of all of Tan Teik Cheng's overseas accounts since 1987—Swiss banks, Grand Cayman, Jersey. Each account was accompanied by the transferor, and the transferor was consistently the same code: CIA-STN-017.

The third page was the last encrypted message intercepted by "Shadow Blade" that Tan Teik Cheng had sent before being detained in the hallway of the Parliament Building—the recipient was marked as "Putrajaya Contact," and the phone number was the extension of the Political Secretary to the Prime Minister.

Anwar closed the briefing. His fingers pressed down on the cover, his knuckles turning white.

He locked the briefing in the bottom drawer of his desk, stood up, and walked to the window. The night in Putrajaya was very quiet. He pressed his hand against the glass, his palm print blurring on the surface.

Then he picked up the phone and dialed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

"Notify the Federation of Myanmar—Malaysia agrees to begin joint management negotiations for the Strait of Malacca within forty-eight hours."

The person on the other end said something.

Anwar's voice suddenly rose: "I said notify—not request permission!"

He slammed the phone onto the receiver. Then he dialed a second number—calling Washington.

The phone rang twelve times; no one answered.

One hour later, on the second basement level of the Kuala Lumpur Army Headquarters building.

Three black armored vehicles silently drove into the underground garage. The seven people who stepped out of the cars were all senior officers of the Malaysian Armed Forces. The one leading them had four stars on his epaulets—General Muhammad Abidin, the Army Commander.

They walked into a windowless conference room. On the table lay a document, with a line of Malay printed on the cover:

"OPS GELORA—Operation Codename: Torrent."

Abidin opened the file. The first page had a high-definition satellite photo attached—Kuantan Air Base, with four F/A-18Ds on the tarmac and a radar station at the end of the runway.

A red circle was drawn on the photo. Beside it, written in red ink, were the notes: "Target 1: Radar station. Target 2: Ammunition depot. Target 3: Tarmac. Create a diversion—fabricate the appearance of a Myanmar airstrike."

Abidin pulled a pen from his pocket and wrote his name in the signature line.

He wrote very slowly. Every letter felt like carving his own Tombstone.

The date field in the bottom right corner of the document was empty. He filled it in with a line of text: "Operation Date: Forty-eight hours later."

Then he threw the pen on the table and said only one sentence to the other six people in the room:

"Putrajaya has surrendered. We cannot."

No one in the conference room answered him. The air conditioner in the corner blew cold air, flipping up a corner of the first page of the document, revealing a larger satellite photo on the second page—

On the outskirts of Kuantan Base, the Federation of Myanmar's "Thor" long-range rocket artillery unit launch position. Six PHL-191 box-type rocket launchers, their muzzles pointed west-southwest. The red concentric circles on the range coverage map encompassed the entire West Malaysian Peninsula.

The outermost circle cut exactly across the end of the runway at Kuantan Base.

Abidin did not see this photo. After signing, he left the conference room and disappeared into the streets of Kuala Lumpur in the dead of night with the three armored vehicles.

And this photo—was at this very moment appearing simultaneously on Zhang Cheng's situational map, Li Lanzhi's encrypted tablet, and the micro-holographic terminal on the wrist of the captain of "Shadow Blade"'s Third Squad.