A dreary, persistent fog had rolled in from the Thames, blanketing London in a shroud of grey dampness. It seeped through the window frames of Sir Reginald Thorne's stately study in Mayfair, chilling the room and mirroring the cold dread that had taken root in his soul. He sat behind his large mahogany desk, staring at the piece of paper that had become the focal point of his existence: the gambling marker, his own elegant signature sealing a promise for fifty thousand pounds. It had been a week since that disastrous card game in Venice. A week of sleepless nights, of frantic, secret consultations with his bankers, of staring into the abyss of his own ruin. He was a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown, and the mysterious Mr. Jiang had remained completely, terrifyingly silent, letting the terror build and marinate.
His butler, a man whose impassive face had served the Thorne family for thirty years, entered the study. "A visitor, Sir Reginald. A Signor Valeriano. He says he is an art dealer, and comes with a personal recommendation from a Mister Marco Bellini in Venice."
Thorne's heart seized. He felt a wave of nausea. Bellini. The obsequious Venetian guide. This was it. This was the messenger he had been dreading.
"Send him in," Thorne managed to say, his voice a weak, hoarse croak.
Signor Valeriano entered the room with the fluid, confident grace of a panther. He was impeccably dressed in a dark, perfectly tailored suit, his handsome Italian face graced with a smile that was all smooth surfaces and hidden menace. He did not approach the desk immediately, instead taking a slow, appreciative tour of the study.
"A beautiful home, Sir Reginald," he said, his voice a soft, cultured purr. "You have exquisite taste. My employer, Mister Jiang, also appreciates beautiful things. He especially appreciates things that are… valuable."
Thorne could barely breathe. "What does he want?" he asked, his voice cracking. "I… I don't have the money. Not all of it. I can try to raise it, sell some assets, but it will take time…"
Signor Valeriano finally turned from admiring a landscape painting and fixed Thorne with his dark, unblinking eyes. "My employer is a patient man. He has no interest in bankrupting you, Sir Reginald. That would be so… untidy. And a bankrupt official at the Foreign Office is of no use to anyone, is he?" He smiled again, a flash of white teeth. "No, he is interested in a partnership. A long-term relationship based on mutual benefit. He believes you can be of some small service to him, from time to time."
"Service?" Thorne repeated, the word tasting like ash in his mouth. "What kind of service? I… I will not commit treason!"
Valeriano laughed softly, a sound utterly devoid of mirth. "Treason? Such a dramatic word. We are not asking for military secrets, troop movements, or the Queen's private diary. My employer is a businessman, a global investor. He is interested only in… business. For example." He walked to the desk and placed a small, elegantly sealed envelope on the polished wood. "This is a list of shipping manifests. Specifically, we require the detailed cargo lists for all British-flagged vessels departing from the Port of London for the colony of Sierra Leone in the next month."
Thorne stared at the envelope as if it were a coiled snake. "Shipping manifests? That's… that's confidential commercial information! It's proprietary!"
"Is it a state secret?" Valeriano countered smoothly. "Will providing it cause the British Empire to crumble into the sea? Of course not. It is a trivial piece of administrative paperwork. Something a man in your senior position at the Foreign Office, with your many contacts in the Colonial Office, could acquire with a single, casual request to a junior clerk. A trifle. A matter of professional curiosity."
"And if I do this?" Thorne whispered, seeing the path laid out before him, a dark road with no exits.
"If you do this," Signor Valeriano said, his voice dropping to a business-like tone, "my employer will consider it a down payment of, let us say, five thousand pounds against your outstanding debt. A gesture of goodwill. He will be in touch periodically, perhaps once or twice a month, with similar small, 'trivial' requests for information. As long as you continue to be helpful, your debt will be managed… comfortably. Indefinitely, perhaps. If you are not helpful…" He let the threat hang in the air, unspoken but perfectly, terrifyingly clear. Public ruin. Disgrace. Debtor's prison.
Valeriano gave a slight, formal bow. "I will wait at my hotel for your reply. You have twenty-four hours." He turned and left the study, closing the door softly behind him, leaving Thorne trapped and sweating in the opulent tomb he had built for himself. He knew this was the first step, the first compromise. But the alternative—the utter destruction of his name, his career, his family's standing—was unthinkable. With a trembling hand that betrayed the turmoil in his soul, he reached out and picked up the envelope. He had already made his choice.
Two weeks later. The Hall of Supreme Harmony, Beijing.
The grandeur of the Emperor's new court was a world away from the foggy gloom of London. QSH sat on the Dragon Throne, not in audience, but in a private strategic meeting. Only Li Hongzhang was with him.
"Majesty," Li Hongzhang said, his voice filled with a quiet awe as he read from a decoded transcript. "The intelligence from our new European asset has arrived via the… new method. It is precisely as you predicted. The British are shipping a great deal of heavy mining equipment and several teams of geological surveyors to their colony in Sierra Leone. Our own geological surveys, based on old Portuguese maritime maps from the Ming era, suggest the region is exceptionally rich in bauxite—the ore for aluminum."
A cold, satisfied smile touched QSH's lips. The sympathetic needle, Captain Jiang's impossible communicator, had worked. His investment, his gamble on the man's weakness, was paying its first dividend.
"Aluminum," QSH said, the word tasting of the future. "A metal lighter and stronger than steel. The metal of airships and modern armies. The British, with their industrial might, wish to monopolize it before its true military and commercial value is widely understood."
"What are your orders, Majesty?" Li Hongzhang asked. "Shall we dispatch our own agents to attempt to acquire mining concessions there? A direct challenge?"
"No," QSH replied instantly. "A direct challenge is crude, and it would reveal the source of our information. We will not challenge them for the prize. We will simply make it impossible for them to claim it. We will use their own system against them."
He gestured for a map of the world. "The company that the British government has chartered for this venture, the West Africa Development Syndicate, is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange. Its stock price is currently low, as the venture is still speculative. I want our financial agents in London and Hong Kong to begin quietly shorting that stock. Massively."
Li Hongzhang, a master of traditional statecraft and finance, looked confused. "Shorting it, Majesty? Betting that its value will fall? But if their geologists confirm the presence of bauxite, the price will soar. We will lose a fortune."
"They will not find bauxite," QSH stated with absolute certainty. "Not yet." He pointed a finger at the map of West Africa. "That region is notoriously unhealthy. They call it the 'White Man's Grave' for a reason. It is riddled with malaria and sleeping sickness. The British know this, but they are arrogant. They believe their supplies of quinine will protect their valuable engineers and surveyors."
He turned to a nearby scribe's table, picked up a brush, and wrote a swift, coded message on a slip of paper.
"Send a priority telegram to our new trading houses in Lisbon and Marseille, and to our financial agents in Amsterdam. I want them to use our new gold reserves to buy up the entire European supply of quinine. All of it. Create a sudden, inexplicable shortage. I want them to pay any price. The price will triple overnight. The West Africa Development Syndicate will find that the cost of protecting their expedition has suddenly become prohibitively expensive. They will have to delay their mission until the price stabilizes. Their investors will see the delay as a sign of trouble and will panic. The stock price will collapse." He looked at Li Hongzhang, his eyes gleaming with cold fire. "And we will make a fortune from their failure."
Li Hongzhang stared at the Emperor, his mind struggling to grasp the sheer audacity of the plan. QSH had taken one small piece of commercial intelligence, acquired through blackmail thousands of miles away, and used it as a lever to manipulate global commodity markets, destabilize a rival's colonial venture, and turn a significant profit in the process. The financial war had begun, and its first devastating shot was fired without a single soldier leaving his barracks.