The Confession in Warehouse Four

Warehouse Four smelled of stale seawater, rat poison, and fear. The air was thick and humid, clinging to the skin. A single, harsh, bare bulb hung from a long cord, casting a cone of merciless yellow light that threw monstrous, dancing shadows against the corrugated steel walls. At the center of the light, the Dutchman, Van der Meer, was tied securely to a simple wooden chair. His face, bruised and swollen from his capture, was a mask of defiant hatred.

Admiral Meng Tian stood before him, a silent, imposing figure in the gloom. He had shed his uniform, but he could not shed the weight of his office. He placed a thin dossier on the small table that separated them. It contained the details of Van der Meer's life: his lost plantation, his ruined fortune, his known associates.

"Mr. Van der Meer," Meng Tian began, his voice calm and measured, a deliberate counterpoint to the brutal setting. "Before my fleet arrived, you owned the largest rubber plantation in West Java. A man of wealth and standing. Now, you live in a rented room in the poorest quarter of Batavia and conspire with foreign agents to sink civilian ships, killing your own former countrymen in the process."

He leaned forward, his hands resting on the table. "I am not interested in your motives. I am interested in facts. I want to know who you are working for. I want the name of your British contact."

Van der Meer stared at him, his eyes glittering with a fanatic's courage. He drew a gob of bloody saliva into his mouth and spat it onto the floor, inches from Meng Tian's immaculate boots.

"I work for no one," he hissed, his voice a ragged snarl. "I am a patriot. You are thieves and murderers. You are yellow dogs who stole my country, and I would see every one of your ships at the bottom of the sea before I told you anything."

Meng Tian's expression did not change. He had hoped for a quick confession, a clean resolution. He had hoped the man's spirit was already broken. He saw now that he would have to break it himself. A profound, weary sigh escaped him, a sound of deep disappointment in the man before him, in the situation, and most of all, in himself.

He gave a single, almost imperceptible nod to Captain Dai, who stood by the door, a grim sentinel wrapped in shadow.

Then, Meng Tian did something that felt like a betrayal of his own soul. He turned his back.

He walked to the far wall of the warehouse and stood facing the cold, corrugated steel, his eyes closed. He could not watch. But he could not escape the sounds. The scrape of Captain Dai's boots on the concrete floor. The soft, methodical sound of knuckles being cracked. A sickening, wet crunch, followed by a choked, agonized gasp. The high-pitched, animalistic scream, quickly muffled.

The sounds were an assault, but it was his own mind that was the true tormentor. The voice of his conscience, which he had so carefully cultivated over a lifetime of discipline and honor, was screaming at him.

'This is Yuan Shikai's work,' it whispered. 'The work of butchers and thugs. This is the path of the tyrant, the expedient solution of the morally bankrupt. My ancestor, the great Meng Tian, built the Great Wall with the sweat and honorable labor of soldiers. He faced his enemies on the field of battle. I am reduced to this… breaking a man in a dark room like a common criminal.'

He heard another sound, a man begging in Dutch, then a sharp cry of pain.

'Is this what it takes to build an empire? Is this the price of order? To sacrifice principle for security? Every blow that falls on him is a blow against my own code. I am becoming the thing I swore I would never be.'

He hated the necessity of it. He loathed the weakness in Van der Meer that made this necessary, and he despised the weakness in himself that made him turn away. He was a commander. He should have the fortitude to watch the consequences of his own orders. But this felt different. This was not the clean, terrible violence of battle. This was dirty. This was a stain.

The sounds stopped. The only noise in the warehouse was the ragged, whimpering gasps of a broken man.

"He is ready to talk, Admiral." Captain Dai's voice was flat, professional, untroubled.

Meng Tian took a deep breath, steeling himself. He turned around. The Dutchman was a wreck, slumped in the chair, his head hanging low. Blood trickled from his nose and the corner of his mouth. One of his hands was bent at an unnatural angle. The fire of defiance in his eyes had been extinguished, replaced by a vacant, pleading terror.

Meng Tian walked back to the table and sat down. He looked at the ruined man before him. He felt no triumph, only a deep, hollow ache. He repeated his question, his voice a dead, emotionless monotone.

"The name."

"Clog…" Van der Meer whimpered, his voice a broken rasp. "His name… the man I met… they called him Clog."

"His real name. His rank. His affiliation."

"I don't know… I swear… He was English. A brute. The muscle." Van der Meer began to sob, a pathetic, broken sound. "He's not the one you want… he's just an errand boy."

Meng Tian leaned forward. "Then who is?"

"There was another man," the Dutchman gasped, eager now to trade any information for an end to the pain. "Clog was careless. He talked when he was drunk. He mentioned an observer… a professional… someone important who was watching from the sea. A botanist, he called him. On a fishing junk. The Sea Dragon. He said the man's name was Finch."

The name struck Meng Tian like a physical blow. Finch. The Sea Dragon. His private, controlled intelligence operation. His secret listening post. It had been compromised. His entire web was about to be torn apart.

Or was it? He forced himself to think, his mind racing past the shock. Van der Meer knew. But did Finch know that Van der Meer knew? Unlikely. It sounded like Clog, the brutish field agent, had let the name slip in a moment of drunken carelessness. This was not a systemic breach. It was a mistake. A mistake that gave Meng Tian a colossal advantage. He now knew the structure of the British operation. He knew about the muscle in Batavia and the eyes at sea. He was not compromised. He was enlightened.

He looked at the broken man in the chair. Van der Meer was a loose end. If he were ever found, if he ever talked to anyone else, he could expose everything. He was a liability that could not be permitted to exist. Meng Tian's heart grew heavy. The price of this knowledge was not yet fully paid.

He stood up and looked at Captain Dai. He did not need to speak the order aloud. His eyes conveyed the grim, final command. Dai nodded once, his expression unchanged.

"Dispose of him," Meng Tian said anyway, his voice a whisper, as if to make the order less real. "Make it look like a drunken brawl with local smugglers that went wrong. Dump the body in the fisherman's channel. The tide will do the rest. No traces. No connections. He was never here."

He turned and walked towards the warehouse door, not looking back. He stepped out into the pre-dawn light. The sky to the east was beginning to blush with the first hints of pink and orange. A new day was beginning, but Meng Tian felt as though he would forever be trapped in the darkness of that room. His hands were clean, but his soul felt irrevocably stained. He had the critical intelligence he needed to outmaneuver the British. But he had paid for it with torture and murder, a secret forged in pain and blood. It was a secret he could never report to the Emperor. He had become a hypocrite to protect his province, and in doing so, had become a far more effective, and far more dangerous, commander.