Unrest in the Syndicate

Jakarta’s monsoon air clung to the safehouse like a curse, the ceiling fan groaning as it churned the humidity into something suffocating. Wei Long stood at the head of the teakwood table, his scarred hands braced against its surface—a map of Southeast Asia spread before him, marked with crimson Xs where Nine Dragons operations had unraveled. The room’s lone bulb flickered, casting jagged shadows over the faces of the syndicate’s elite: smugglers with ice in their veins, money launderers with souls polished smooth as banknotes, and Lian Zhu, her posture serene as a lotus in a poisoned pond.

“Phi-Trust isn’t some street gang,” Wei Long said, his voice a blade drawn slowly. “They’re surgeons. Cutting where it bleeds us most.”

Tian Hao leaned back in his chair, a jade worry bead rolling between his knuckles. For months, he’d tracked the leaks—offshore accounts drained, shipments seized, informants vanishing. All trails led to Lian’s inner circle. “They knew our routes. Our encryption keys,” he said, locking eyes with her. “This isn’t incompetence. It’s treason.”

Mei Ling, her hair a sleek black guillotine, slammed a dossier on the table. Photos spilled out: security footage of Lian meeting a silver-haired man in a Macau casino, bank transfers flagged by their Zurich contacts. “Phi-Trust’s puppetmaster,” she hissed. “Care to explain how he knew about the Dragon’s Vault?”

Lian didn’t blink. “You think I’d trade decades of loyalty for what? A few million?” She tapped the photo, her nail gloss catching the light. “This man approached me. Offered a deal to dismantle Phi-Trust from within. Or did you skip that part of the transcript, Mei?”

A muscle twitched in Wei Long’s jaw. The syndicate had thrived on secrets, but this—this-this reeked of rot. Lian had brokered their peace with the Burmese cartels, charmed Interpol agents into blind compliance. Yet here she sat, the air around her charged like a live wire, while their empire frayed.

“You went rogue,” Mei Ling spat. “No approvals. No oversight.”

“And if I’d come to you,” Lian countered, her smile sharp, “would you have hesitated? Or would you have slit his throat and lost our only lead?”

The room stiffened. Tian Hao’s bead snapped against the table. Click. Click. Click.

Wei Long straightened, his shadow swallowing the map. “Phi-Trust took the Vijaya cargo last week. Executed the crew. Left their tongues in envelopes addressed to me.” He flung a photo of the massacre—bodies arranged in the shape of a nine-tailed dragon, Phi-Trust’s twisted mockery of their emblem. “They’re not hiding anymore. They’re laughing.”

Silence pooled like blood. Somewhere in the city, a call to prayer wailed through the static of rain.

“The enemy’s inside our walls,” Tian Hao muttered, rising. He circled the table, a predator sizing up the herd. “And until we purify this infection, trust is a luxury we’re dead without.”

Mei Ling’s hand drifted to the pistol holstered beneath her blazer. “Then we vote.”

Lian folded her arms, her composure a dam holding back the room’s rising fury. “You’d kill your best weapon over whispers?”

“No,” Wei Long said, cold as a scalpel. “We’d kill you to save what’s left.”

The vote was unanimous.

As guards moved in, Lian laughed—a sound like shattered porcelain. “You’ll miss me when they come for you next.”

Tian Hao watched her go, the worry bead still in his grip. Phi-Trust’s symbol taunted him from the photo. A nine-tailed dragon. Nine, not eight.

Someone in the room had counted wrong.

—

The neon glare of Jakarta’s skyline blurred into a smear of red and gold as Lian Zhu ducked into another nameless alley, her breath ragged behind the surgical mask. Four days on the run had honed her instincts to a razor’s edge. She’d dyed her hair jet-black, swapped her tailored qipaos for a faded moto jacket, and scrubbed the jade polish from her nails—small metamorphoses to slip through the Nine Dragons’ tightening net. But the syndicate’s eyes were everywhere: the taxi driver who lingered too long, the fruit vendor texting beneath his stall, the static hum in her burner phone that suggested a tracker.

They won’t kill me quickly, she thought, recalling Wei Long’s fondness for symbolism. A traitor’s death required poetry.

—

Menteng’s labyrinth of alleys offered temporary shelter, its colonial facades leaning close as conspirators. Rain slicked the cobblestones, muffling her footsteps. She’d chosen this district for its chaos—the late-night noodle stalls, the drunk tourists—but the hour had leached the crowds away, leaving only the drip of gutters and the distant wail of a police siren.

A flicker of movement in a shop window’s reflection.

Lian froze, her hand sliding to the knife strapped beneath her sleeve. Nothing. Just the tremor of a moth battering a streetlamp. She exhaled, forcing her pulse to slow. Paranoia is a trap, she reminded herself. Yet the itch between her shoulder blades persisted.

She zigzagged for blocks, doubling back twice, pausing in the oily dark beneath a bridge to scrub her fingerprints from the burner phone before ditching it in the river. Phi-Trust’s last message still burned in her memory: Safe passage, 3 a.m., Glodok docks. A gamble, but what choice did she have? The syndicate had voted for her death; her only currency now was the secrets she’d hoarded—the location of the Dragon’s Vault, the names buried in Zurich accounts. Phi-Trust would pay dearly for them.

Or so she’d believed.

The ambush came not in the neon-soaked port, but here, in a narrow cut between two shuttered textile shops. Lian sensed the shift too late—the absence of stray cats, the reek of cloves and gun oil. She spun, knife flashing, as figures materialized from the shadows. Not Nine Dragons enforcers with their dragon tattoos and swagger. These were ghosts: black tactical gear, faces obscured by infrared lenses. Phi-Trust.

“You knew this was coming, didn’t you?” A woman’s voice, crisp and accented. Swiss?

Lian’s blade wavered. “I have what you want. The vault codes. The ledger pages—”

A chuckle, dry as a bone. “You thought we’d let you live? A woman who betrays her own?”

The truth struck like a bullet—a single, silenced thwip that punched through her sternum. Lian crumpled against a damp wall, her vision fracturing. Above her, the operative tilted her head, a sliver of streetlight catching her necklace: a nine-tailed dragon, one tail more than the syndicate’s emblem.

Phi-Trust wasn’t the enemy. They were the mirror.

Blood bubbled on Lian’s lips as she slid to the ground. The last thing she saw was the glint of her own pendant—the fractured lotus—as the operative ripped it from her neck.

“A message,” the woman murmured, pressing a cold thumb to Lian’s eyelids, closing them with mock reverence. “From one dragon to another.”

When the body was found at dawn, the Nine Dragons would assume credit. But Tian Hao, studying the crime scene photos, would note the precision of the shot. The absence of torture. The missing pendant.

—

Dawn clawed its way over Hong Kong’s skyline, gilding the cables of the Tsing Ma Bridge in pale gold. Below, the harbor churned with police boats, their lights staining the water red and blue. Lian Zhu’s body hung limp, swaying in the salt-kissed wind, her silhouette a grotesque marionette against the steel-gray dawn. Tourists snapped photos; detectives muttered into radios. The scene was textbook Nine Dragons—a spectacle of fear dressed as suicide.

But Wei Long, watching the news feed in his bulletproof Rolls-Royce, saw the cracks in the script.

“This wasn’t us,” he growled, his thumb pausing on the screen. The camera zoomed in on Lian’s neck—not the bruising choke of a noose, but a single, surgical gunshot wound, clumsily concealed beneath a silk scarf. Their style was brutality with flair: shattered bones, carved emblems, messages in blood. This was clean. Professional.

Tian Hao leaned forward, his reflection ghosting over the tablet. “Then who?”

The car idled outside the Dragon’s Vault, their underground treasury buried beneath a sham jewelry store in Central. Inside, vault doors hissed open as accountants scrambled to audit what remained of their holdings. Phi-Trust’s last hack had siphoned millions, but this—this-this was a different kind of theft.

“Look at her hands,” Tian Hao murmured.

Wei Long zoomed in. Lian’s fingers, usually adorned with obsidian rings, were bare. Her jade pendant—the dragon-and-lotus symbol of her rank—was missing. A trophy.

“Phi-Trust,” Wei Long said, the name a curse.

The syndicate gathered at dawn in their ancestral hall, a relic of incense-stained wood and embroidered dragons coiled on silk. Wei Long paced before the altar, where Lian’s file now lay burned to ash in a bronze brazier. “They’re mocking us. Using our methods. Our symbols.”

Mei Ling scrolled through encrypted messages on her phone. “The Triads are already gossiping. They think we’re losing grip.”

Tian Hao stood apart, studying the crime scene photos pinned to a corkboard. The forensics told a story: no struggle, no trace of the synthetic opioids the syndicate used to pacify targets. Just a single bullet, NATO-grade, untraceable. The scarf—Indonesian silk, he noted—matched the one Lian had worn to the Jakarta meeting. A detail only someone in that room would know.

“They’re not just hackers,” he said quietly. “They have eyes here.”

A murmur rippled through the room. The Nine Dragons had survived coups, crackdowns, even betrayal from within. But this—an enemy that mirrored their precision, their theatrics—this was new.

Wei Long slammed a fist onto the altar. Incense bowls jumped. “Find the leak. Burn every asset tied to Phi-Trust. I want their heads quiet.”

“Quiet?” Tian Hao turned, holding up a photo of Lian’s body. “They’re not hiding. They’re teaching. Showing they can reach anywhere. Even here.” He tapped the bridge in the image—their bridge, the one they’d used for decades to dump rivals into the sea. “This isn’t a war. It’s a lesson.”

The room chilled. For the first time in his 20 years as enforcer, Wei Long hesitated.

By midday, the syndicate’s brokers reported chaos. Dockworkers in Manila are demanding double pay. Informants in Macau have gone silent. And in Zurich, a safety deposit box—registered to a shell company even Tian Hao had forgotten—was emptied hours before Lian’s death.

Phi-Trust wasn’t just moving money. They were erasing history.

Tian Hao found Wei Long on the rooftop helipad, staring at the bridge where Lian still hung, now shrouded in police tarps. “They knew about the vault,” Tian Hao said. “The codes she stole… they were bait. To make us doubt each other.”

Wei Long lit a cigarette, the wind snatching the smoke. “You think I don’t know that?”

Below, the city teemed, oblivious. Tian Hao’s phone buzzed—a notification from an anonymous channel. A video, timestamped 3 a.m.: Lian, alive, speaking directly to the camera. “If you’re watching this, they’ve already won.”

He didn’t show Wei Long. Some truths were too sharp to hold.

As the sirens faded, Tian Hao studied the pendant in his palm—Lian’s, recovered from a pawnshop in Kowloon. The lotus was intact. The dragon, though…

Nine tails, he counted. Not eight.

Phi-Trust’s signature. Their declaration.

Somewhere, the game had already turned.