Ninety-Six: Blackmail Letter

Jakarta grew quiet, but Wei Hua set himself in motion.

In the course of more than ten days, he had already prepared the extortion letters for those plantation owners. They all followed the same format; only the amounts demanded from each man differed. The intelligence A Liang had provided was extremely detailed, and the sums he demanded were everything each of those men owned. In Wei Hua's view, those estates had been stolen from Chinese hands in the first place. What he was doing now was no more than taking them back for those Chinese Indonesians.

Wei Hua had already thought it through. Once this operation was over, he intended to go back and discuss matters with Ding Peng, He Xiaoya, Lin Jihan, and Yu Xiaomeng, and sort out the assets in Indonesia that A Liang was managing for him. On paper, those properties would still belong to Wei Hua, but in reality they would all be handed over to the resistance organization that was being formed, including the plantation estates that A Liang was about to purchase.

Wei Hua planned to carry this extortion scheme out as if it were a real extortion scheme. In that way, once he got the ransom, it would be as though he had quietly reclaimed the Chinese-owned assets. Wei Hua's company would pay to buy the blackmailed owners' plantations, and the money would end up back in Wei Hua's hands. It would be as if he had spent nothing at all, yet the plantations would still fall under his name. Since these plantation estates had originally belonged to Chinese owners and would one day have to be returned to their countrymen, Wei Hua did not want to take advantage of his own people. It would be better to gather all these assets together and secretly turn them over to the resistance organization for management. He did not need those properties. To Wei Hua, money was nothing more than numbers; it held little real meaning.

On one day at the end of May, Wei Hua went to three mailboxes in different parts of Jakarta and dropped in three extortion letters, then strolled back to the small room he had rented in the Chinese district. That room had already been searched after the bombing, but there had never been much in it to begin with, since it was only a temporary place for him to stay: just a table, a chair, and a bed. When the Indonesian police came to search, the landlord, seeing that Wei Hua was not there, claimed that the room had once been occupied by his own son. His son was now working out of town and only came back occasionally.

In truth, the landlord really did have a son working in the suburbs. Because the pay was too low to afford the travel costs, he only came home once in a while, and the police did not pursue the matter further. After the bombing, no Indonesian suspected that the bombers were Chinese, because in their eyes the Chinese would never resist.

Long Maqi Agujia was the biggest plantation owner on the outskirts of Jakarta. He had originally been a somewhat powerful gangster boss in the city. During the coup on September 30, he led his thugs to storm the plantation he now owned, killed the Chinese family who owned it, and then moved in with his men. For reasons no one quite understood, the government later recognized the estate as Long Maqi Agujia's property, and thus he became the largest plantation owner in the Jakarta suburbs.

Long Maqi's plantation covered dozens of hectares. There were several hundred laborers working on it, and he also kept a band of enforcers, former underlings from his days as a gang leader, numbering sixty or seventy men. Although he was now a successful businessman and no longer a gangster, he still went out with a large crowd at his heels; those enforcers served as his bodyguards.

Today Long Maqi was in a rather foul mood. When he got up in the morning, he received a letter. It was an extortion note, and the amount demanded was enormous. That put a damper on Long Maqi's spirits, which had only just been lifted after a romp with his young mistress. No one would be pleased to see such a thing first thing in the morning, and before long he heard even more annoying news.

His son truly was his own flesh and blood. In both temper and appearance, he was just like him. Instead of behaving like a proper young master, he had gone and taken up the life of a hoodlum. The night before, he had gotten into a fight with another gang, and now he was being held at the police station, waiting for his father to bail him out.

Long Maqi casually threw the extortion letter aside, put on his coat, and went out.

A week passed quickly. The night before, Wei Hua had already gone to the location specified in the extortion letter to Long Maqi Agujia, carrying enough equipment to wait and see whether there was an ambush. It was always best to be careful.

Wei Hua figured he probably would not actually meet anyone there today, but he still came. During this period, Jakarta had been suffering frequent, large-scale blackouts. Of course, those blackouts were Wei Hua's doing as well, though he had not deliberately caused them for the sake of this operation. Only when he arrived at the scene did he realize just how much convenience those outages had given him. In a world swallowed by darkness, no one could catch Wei Hua, and naturally no one could stop him, no matter how many dangerous items or weapons he carried.

Sure enough, when the appointed time came, Long Maqi Agujia did not appear. Everything unfolded exactly as Wei Hua had expected.

Achim Agujia was Long Maqi Agujia's son. He was an utterly detestable thug, skilled in drink, women, gambling, and troublemaking, but since his father was the richest plantation owner in the Jakarta suburbs, no one wanted to offend him.

A few days earlier, after being arrested for a brawl, his father had paid to get him out. He had then been confined to the plantation for a week and was only allowed out today. Fortunately, there was no blackout again today, so Achim had once more brought a pack of wastrels to the bar he frequented.

At dawn, Achim and a few others left the bar, planning to find a hotel to stay in. Just then, a crisp gunshot rang out. Achim's head burst open like a watermelon struck by a club, and red blood and white brain matter splattered onto the clothes of the drunken men nearby. The sight sobered the group instantly. Two of them began screaming at the top of their lungs, while the others simply fainted on the spot.

Very quickly, a large crowd gathered at the entrance to the bar, and the police arrived soon afterward. Not long after that, Long Maqi Agujia received the news that his only son had been shot to death outside a bar in Jakarta.

Everyone, click, recommend, and bookmark!