Chapter Eight: The Shadow of a Traitor
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In the early hours of the morning, the command center of the “Shadow Bureau” was ablaze with light. Yet the atmosphere was utterly transformed from its earlier gravity, now brimming with a kind of excitement that had been pent up for too long and at last could be unleashed.
“Data stream is stable!”
“The first layer of decoy data packets has been fully copied!”
“Core data is being transmitted... progress at 10%... 20%...”
Lin Feng sat in his “cyberpunk doghouse,” fingers flying over the keyboard. Behind him, the core technical agents of the special task force stood in a dense line, every eye fixed on the screen, watching the inching progress bar with anticipation.
They had succeeded.
They had pulled a tooth from the tiger’s mouth.
Standing on the edge of the group, Xiao Ran folded her arms. Her face was as impassive as ever, but for once, the tension in her eyes had eased a little. She watched the man before the screen who seemed fused with the digital world, and for the first time, she felt her certainty in “playing by the rules” begin to waver.
Perhaps Director Wang was right. To deal with the devil, sometimes you really do need a madman—someone even crazier.
“Data copy complete!” Old K, the head of the tech team, shouted, barely able to contain his excitement.
A collective sigh of relief swept through the room.
“Beautiful job!”
“Incredible! 'Zhurong’ lives up to the legend!”
Praise resounded from all sides.
But Lin Feng ignored the accolades. He took off his headphones, grabbed an icy can of energy drink from the pile on his desk, and downed half of it in one go.
Then he began the first layer of decryption analysis on the data they had recovered.
Yet as the decryption program ran, the trace of satisfaction on his face slowly, bit by bit, froze.
His frown grew deeper and deeper.
The office gradually quieted. Everyone sensed that something was wrong.
“What is it?” Xiao Ran stepped forward, her voice low and steady.
Lin Feng said nothing. He merely pointed at the screen.
The decrypted data was not the core directives or financial records they had imagined. Instead, it was a jumble of miscellaneous trivia.
Anderson’s Michelin restaurant reservations for the past week, itemized bills from the upscale clubs he frequented, even the contact info for his private tailor and his suit measurements.
All of it—utterly worthless, publicly available, easily found... garbage.
“What... what is this?” Old K’s face turned ashen in an instant.
Lin Feng leaned back in his chair, pressing his temples hard with his fingers, feeling as if his mind had just been ruthlessly mocked by a giant invisible hand.
“We’ve been played.” His voice was hoarse and dry.
“This bastard... his phone was running two parallel virtual operating systems at the same time! All that effort, and what we hacked into... was just a specially crafted ‘visitor mode’ designed to mislead us, dressed up like a palace!”
Boom—
The conclusion crashed through everyone’s minds like a bomb.
In an instant, the office’s earlier sense of victory plummeted into icy despair.
Everyone’s cheeks burned with humiliation.
They were like a troupe of clever clowns, performing a ham-fisted theft on stage while the true master sat in the audience, watching and smiling at their foolishness.
“I don’t believe it!” Xiao Ran’s face twisted with anger. She shoved Lin Feng aside, sat down at the computer herself. “There must be something! Run through all the data again! Don’t miss a single byte!”
She was unwilling to accept it.
She could not accept that a career-defining gamble had yielded such a mocking result.
Frantically, she began combing through the garbage data, searching for a needle in a haystack.
Lin Feng watched the slight tremor in her back—humiliated, but determined—and said nothing more.
An hour passed.
“Found it!” Xiao Ran suddenly cried out, her voice tinged with the wild hope of a drowning person grasping at straw.
She pointed to a line in the schedule on the screen.
“Look! On Anderson’s private calendar, there’s an entry tomorrow at 9 a.m., marked ‘Top Priority.’ The location is Pier 6 on the east side. The contact is codenamed ‘The Cleaner’!”
“This must be their in-person handoff info!” a young agent exclaimed with excitement.
Everyone crowded around again, hope rekindled on their faces.
Only Lin Feng remained where he was, watching coldly, his eyes full of pity.
“Team Leader Xiao,” he said quietly, “don’t you think... this clue appeared just a little ‘too conveniently’?”
“What do you mean?” Xiao Ran turned, her gaze icy.
“I mean, would someone cunning enough to design dual virtual systems to fool us really be stupid enough to leave such critical handoff info in the ‘trash,’ just waiting for us to pick it up?” Lin Feng shook his head. “It’s a trap.”
“Enough!” Xiao Ran slammed her palm down, her nerves raw from Anderson’s earlier taunt. “I don’t need a so-called ‘consultant’ to lecture me! I trust evidence!”
She turned to her team, her tone brooking no argument.
“Deploy the arrest operation immediately! Target: Pier 6!”
...
9 a.m. the next day, Pier 6
The “Shadow Bureau” command center was as tense as a steel plate.
“The operation has failed.”
As Xiao Ran’s voice came cold and emotionless over the comms, every agent at headquarters felt as though an invisible hand had tightened around their heart.
On the main screen, the action team’s live feed from the deserted pier warehouse played.
In the dead center of the warehouse, there were no enemies, no traps.
Only a long conference table.
On the table, neatly arranged, sat a dozen brand new, unopened iPhones—identical in model to the encrypted internal comms phones used by every core member of the “Shadow Bureau” task force.
Beside the phones was a handwritten note in Anderson’s elegant script.
A single, simple sentence and a signature dripping with mockery.
“A gift. —For my ‘friends.’”
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Half an hour later.
When Xiao Ran, exhausted and humiliated, brought these malicious “gifts” back to the command center, the office was plunged into a deathly silence.
Everyone stared at the pile of pristine phones on the table, faces burning with shame.
This was more than a failed sting.
This was humiliation.
This was Anderson—this devil, thousands of miles away—publicly and brazenly executing the entire national security elite team.
He was like an omniscient god, smiling as he sent the message:
“I see every move you make.”
...
Where had it all gone wrong?
A terrifying thought slithered like a snake into everyone’s heart.
But no one dared say it aloud.
“Lin Feng. Check these phones. See if there’s any malware or trackers hidden in them.”
“Understood.” Lin Feng’s usual irreverence had vanished, replaced by a chilling gravity.
The next hour became Lin Feng’s solo performance.
He subjected one of the phones to the highest level of “cellular” deep analysis.
But the result was a crushing disappointment.
“...Clean.” Lin Feng shook his head slowly. “From hardware to software, chip to system, I checked everything. It’s just a regular new phone, straight off the Foxconn assembly line.”
The oppressive air in the office thickened.
Why had Anderson gone to such lengths to give them a set of perfectly ordinary phones? It made no sense.
What was his real aim?
...
While everyone was at a loss, Lin Feng wasn’t ready to give up.
His eyes—which always found flaws in the least likely places—were fixed on the string of numbers representing the phone’s unique identifier, the IMEI code.
He seemed to have noticed something.
He said nothing.
Silently, he powered up all the phones on the table and checked their serial numbers.
Then he displayed those numbers side by side on the main screen.
At first, no one saw anything amiss.
Until Old K, the number-obsessed tech lead, stared at the sequences—then, as if seeing a ghost, shot upright from his chair!
“They’re... consecutive!” he stammered, voice shaking violently with shock. “These serial numbers... they’re in order!”
The words cut through the fog in everyone’s mind like a bolt of lightning.
They all rushed to the screen.
Sure enough—the last digits of the numbers formed a seamless sequence: ...35, ...36, ...37, ...38...
“What does it mean?” Deputy Team Leader Zhao Yi still looked confused.
“It means...” Lin Feng’s voice was as cold as a glacier from the Antarctic.
“...We’re finished.”
He projected another record onto the screen—a factory log he had just “requested” from Apple’s backend servers.
It clearly showed:
This batch of consecutive phones had passed final quality control at the Zhengzhou factory three hours ago.
And, two and a half hours ago, the entire lot had been bought out by a shell company registered in the Cayman Islands, named “Never Miss,” via emergency air transport.
Destination: Shanghai Pudong International Airport.
...
The truth, in that moment, was like a horror story, sending cold sweat soaking down the backs of all present.
Xiao Ran’s face was white as paper.
At last, she understood.
She understood the true, venomous intent behind Anderson’s “gift.”
She turned slowly, her gaze almost judicial in its iciness as she looked at her comrades—those who had once fought at her side, her closest allies.
She spoke, word by word, the conclusion that could shatter the team in an instant.
“Three hours ago, Anderson was in New York.”
“He could not possibly know how many core members are in our ‘Shadow Bureau’ task force.”
“He could not possibly know the exact model of our internal encrypted phones.”
“Unless...”
She paused.
For the first time, a trace of heartbreak passed through her frozen eyes.
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“...Someone among us.”
“Someone sent our entire... ‘shopping list’...”
“...to him, intact.”
She slowly closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, only endless, icy killing intent remained.
“—There’s a mole among us.”
...
Boom—
Trust shattered in that instant!
The once-united office became a locked room full of suspicion and fear.
Everyone’s gaze began to flicker and dart across their colleagues’ faces.
In the end, almost all eyes fixed, almost reflexively, on the sole “outsider”—Lin Feng.
He felt their suspicion, but showed neither anger nor haste to defend himself.
He simply smiled.
A smile full of mockery and disdain.
“Suspect me?” He stood up slowly, step by step making his way to the center of the office, into the focus of every eye.
He offered no explanations.
He simply connected his own laptop to the command center’s mainframe with a snap, almost provocatively.
“Warning! Unknown external device detected!”
“Warning! Core firewall under attack!”
Shrill alarms blared through the office.
“You want to suspect me? Fine!” Lin Feng ignored the alarms, his fingers a blur over the keyboard, line after line of code cascading like a waterfall across the main screen.
He was subjecting himself to the most comprehensive, no-holds-barred digital strip search.
“These are my last twenty-four hours of internet activity! Down to every byte! Check for yourselves—did I send a single suspicious packet abroad?”
“These are the records of all my bank accounts! Down to every cent! See if there’s a mysterious ‘sponsorship’ big enough to pay for takeout I can’t afford!”
“And these! These are all my phone’s communications! Including the order I placed for spicy hotpot last night! Want the delivery guy’s number? Ask him if I gave him a secret code!”
His words came faster and faster, his tone more and more defiant, his skills more dazzling.
Like a master magician, he laid all his “secrets” bare for all to see, beyond argument.
When the final keystroke landed, a massive green badge appeared on the main screen, marked—“100% CLEAN.”
The office was dead silent.
Every agent who had doubted him bowed their heads in shame.
Lin Feng straightened, eyes blazing, sweeping the room with a pressure that felt almost physical.
Then, in a voice that made everyone burn with embarrassment, he spoke.
“My entire life is here—cleaner than your faces.”
“Now...”
“...it’s your turn.”
“Do you dare?”
No one answered.
Xiao Ran looked at this unruly, domineering man, her feelings a stormy mix. She knew he had used the most extreme method to prove his innocence—and slapped them all in the face.
Amid the crushing silence, Lin Feng unplugged his laptop and picked it up.
“This place leaks like a sieve. I’m done here.” He stopped before Xiao Ran and tossed out a sentence. “I’ll keep working on that ‘secret compartment’ decryption. But I’ll do it at my place. When I have results, I’ll let you know.”
This time, Xiao Ran did not stop him.
She knew she had no right to.
She could only watch as Lin Feng, under everyone’s gaze, walked out of what was once their “fortress”—now no longer safe—without looking back.
...
An hour later. Shanghai’s western suburbs. Inside a creative complex transformed from an abandoned factory.
Lin Feng swiped open a nondescript, rusty iron door and stepped inside.
Beyond the door was a different world.
A vast loft, packed with “black tech” gadgets and anime figurines. A server array thrummed in the corner. Several industrial robotic arms quietly soldered circuit boards at a workbench. On the wall hung a life-sized replica of Cloud’s Buster Sword from Final Fantasy VII.
Here was his kingdom.
Singularity Security Studio.
He tossed his laptop on the desk, then snapped his fingers at a discreet ceiling camera.
“Mouse.”
A cheerful, synthesized girl’s voice piped up from the speakers.
“Welcome home, boss! Shall I order you a deluxe seafood ramen?”
“No need.” Lin Feng walked to a terminal and pulled up a complex security interface. “Set the home anti-plague system to maximum.”
“Roger! ‘Why defend against mice when they’re so cute’—Ultimate Defense Mode activated!”
Lin Feng watched the intricate defense matrices bloom on the screen, his gaze turning cold and dangerous once more.
He knew the moment he left the Security Bureau, he had also become the mole’s next target.
But here, on his home turf, he would weave an inescapable net and wait... for the rat to come.