Chapter 2026
Chapter 2026
Chapter 2026
There is nowhere to find it, and it takes no effort to get it. The Haihan intelligence department tried every means to investigate the source of the object, but he showed up shortly after Jose and others arrived in Cebu.However, this also just shows that Sanya's order to request Manila to send intelligence personnel to Cebu is indeed wise. Jose and others successfully found a breakthrough in the investigation work when they first arrived in Cebu.
But for Jose and others who are performing missions overseas alone for the first time, every step they take must face an unknown situation. Although the current situation is not dangerous, they cannot tolerate mistakes and must maintain a high altitude at all times. Be vigilant, beware of showing your feet in front of the colonial authorities.
The next day, Jose and others acted according to the plan, and in the name of going to the city to purchase daily necessities, they were divided into three groups and dispatched, leaving only a few sailors guarding the boat at the port.Jose found that the colonial authorities had really left them alone, and did not send anyone to watch them today, and it seemed that he completely believed in their identities and experiences.Probably for the colonial authorities, their role has come to an end, and there is no need to continue to pay more attention.
This is naturally a good thing for the tasks undertaken by Jose and others. The less the Cebu authorities pay attention to them, the easier it is for them to act locally.Immediately, according to the plan discussed the night before, everyone separately walked around the city to inquire about the local Han businessmen and related information.Their Hispanic identities are undoubtedly the best cover. Walking around the city and talking to people is not easy to attract the attention of others.
Compared with Manila, which has been occupied by Haihan, the city size and infrastructure level of Cebu are undoubtedly much worse.In Jose's view, the city center of Cebu is comparable to the situation in the suburbs of Manila. The narrow streets, low and old buildings, and garbage dumps can be seen everywhere. It does not seem to be "prosperous". How can it touch the edge.
This is also because most of the resources owned by the Philippine colony under Spanish rule are concentrated in the Manila area, and places like Cebu have only really begun to receive the attention of the authorities after this year's big defeat, due to lack of sufficient funds And the labor force, the urban construction status is still stuck in the last century.
The colonial authorities do not want to invest too much resources in local urban construction at the moment. Rebuilding the armed forces and trade routes requires a lot of money and manpower, and these are the real urgent tasks.If the arming and trade of the Philippine colony cannot be restored as soon as possible, it is meaningless to build the city of Cebu more prosperous than Madrid, because the Haihan people will attack again at any time to plunder the achievements of the colonial authorities.
The overall situation is the top priority. With limited resources, the colonial authorities can only temporarily abandon urban infrastructure and focus on restoring strength as the top priority.But for outsiders like Jose, the intuitive feeling is that the social situation here is not optimistic. It is hard to imagine that the Spaniards will use Cebu as their base in the future to launch a counterattack to the Manila area.
The city of Cebu is much smaller than what Jose expected, and the Han Chinese maritime merchants are a relatively small group here, so it is not difficult to find out where they settled. The porter who got up early to pick up the work asked about the location of the storehouse run by the Han merchants.
When Jose was living in Manila, he had seen large trading houses outside the city run by Chinese sea merchants. Some of them could even be called small fortresses. However, the same trading establishments in Cebu were much simpler. , just a small two-story building facing the street, behind which there is a small warehouse for stacking goods.However, this kind of business scale can be regarded as in line with the local trade situation. After all, there were few Han Chinese who came here to do business in the past. After the end of the Manila war this year, they came to Cebu to do business because they were worried that maintaining trade relations with the Spanish would be liquidated by Haihan. There are even fewer Han Chinese who buy and sell.
There are only a few Han Chinese merchants resident in Cebu, probably out of the consideration of helping each other, and the shops they operate are also concentrated in the same block next to each other, so Jose and others who came to find them don't have to spend too much money. If there are many things, you can have a panoramic view of everything here.
However, considering their identities, they didn't dare to go door-to-door to visit. If they were bumped into by the man surnamed Chen yesterday, they might make him suspicious.So Jose chose a more traditional monitoring method, first observing the people coming and going nearby, and seeing if he could get some useful information from the Spaniards living in this neighborhood.
Regarding how to find the target in Cebu and how to investigate and confirm the identity of the target, the intelligence department gave special training before Jose and others set off, but the time was too tight, and the teaching of relevant professional skills was a bit hasty. How much a newcomer can learn depends on personal qualifications.
Jose's qualifications are definitely not "talented". Coupled with language barriers, the training he received has to be discounted, and the final result is just a half-baked rookie intelligence agent.It is also because of this that Jose was very cautious during the execution of the mission, and adopted a relatively conservative attitude in the face of various situations, and did not dare to make rash advances at all.However, in this way, they avoided the attention of the outside world as much as possible, and greatly reduced the risks they faced in their actions.
After spending a day here, Jose and the others did not see the man surnamed Chen appearing here, but they had already inquired that this man should be Chen Bin, the shopkeeper of the "Hai Fa Ji" store on the street, but It's not that this person is famous in the local area, but that there are only four shops run by Han people here, and three of them are run by old men. I have always been closer to the Cebu authorities, and my image has already highly overlapped with the person I saw yesterday.Therefore, Jose and others focused their main attention on Haifaji Store, and began to slowly collect information related to it.
In order to facilitate nearby monitoring and avoid arousing others' suspicion, Jose even found a job as a handyman nearby. The salary was very low and no food and lodging was included. , do not care about the issue of remuneration.
If the person performing this task is an experienced intelligence officer, he may choose a more radical method to obtain information at this time, such as letting those indigenous sailor intelligence agents who did not show their faces in the city go to Haifaji to apply for a job in order to obtain first-hand information.
However, Jose did not dare to take such a risky measure to be on the safe side, and he was indeed not at ease with those natives. Although they could obey orders better, they were not very smart. To perform tasks alone in such an environment, and need to temporarily interrupt contact with their companions, Jose worried that they would lose their composure and their identities would be exposed.
It has to be said that ordinary people in this era are still far from being aware of intelligence warfare. Ordinary people have no chance to come into contact with professionally trained intelligence personnel like Jose, and it is hard to imagine that the compatriots around them will be loyal to the enemy country. spies.The difficulty for Jose to collect information here was much lower than his own expectations. In just two or three days, he obtained a lot of information about Han maritime merchants from his employer and colleagues.
There used to be a dozen or so Han merchants doing business in Cebu. However, as the relationship between Spain and Haihan deteriorated in recent years, some Ming maritime merchants chose to join the Haihan camp and gradually broke off with the Spanish colonial authorities. Contacts, and trade organizations based in Cebu have also withdrawn one after another.Today, there are only these four Han Chinese maritime merchants who insist on maintaining trade relations with the colonial authorities and establishing permanent trade organizations in Cebu.
Jose’s employer, Paco, is also a businessman, and has certain trade relations with Han Chinese maritime merchants. According to his opinion, this Haifaji and the other three Han Chinese-run trading stores should actually be from the same source of supply, or To put it more bluntly, the boss behind them is likely to be the same person.
Paco's reason is very simple. The types of goods provided by these shops are similar, and the prices are almost the same.Of course, it can be said that there is an agreement such as a price alliance between them, but Paco found that the goods they sell are actually the same thing, and an expert can easily confirm this from some details such as the production process.
Then why did four shops be divided into four shops to sell these goods to the colonial authorities? Paco is not very clear about the reason behind this. Operation, in order to create the illusion that Cebu still has a certain scale of foreign trade, and stabilize the emotions of local Hispanic businessmen.
"Think about it, if there are no goods brought by the Han sea merchants here, besides the local spices and gems, what other good things can we ship back to China? And those things are all goods monopolized by the government. We can't touch it, there must be a business to do, so that we can continue to stay in this ghost place. The officials don't want us to run away, so we can only find a way to make it look like there is a business to do here." Paco drank too much one day After that, he murmured and complained about the local business environment.
If businessmen engaged in trade think that staying in the local area is unprofitable, they will inevitably leave here to try their luck in other colonies, so it is normal for the colonial authorities to try to stabilize the morale of the army.However, Jose could smell something different from it. If the same operator is actually behind these several shops, it would save the intelligence department a lot of work and no need to investigate and confirm their backgrounds one by one.
It would be difficult to obtain such valuable information if only relying on manual surveillance nearby, and this could be regarded as the harvest of Jose's correct decision.After knowing that his employer, Paco, had business dealings with these shops, Jose also paid more attention to the content of the goods Paco bought and sold daily, hoping to verify his statement about those shops.
However, the "surprise" brought to Jose by the employer did not end there. Another day later, Paco came back cursing and complaining that the authorities had taken away a batch of goods that should have belonged to him.Jose listened for a while with his ears upright, before he roughly understood the whole story.
Originally, the batch of silk and porcelain provided by Haifaji to Paco was agreed to be delivered in these two days, and I heard that the goods had arrived in Hong Kong two days ago, but when Paco came to urge the other party to complete the delivery today, But met the city defense commander Fernando.
Fernando told Paco that since an important deal between Haifaji and the colonial authorities has not yet been completed, the goods arriving at the port this time will be given priority to the official to offset their previous arrears, so there will be no goods provided to Paco for the time being. or other local merchants.The shopkeeper, Chen Bin, also confirmed Fernando's statement in person, and advised Paco to wait patiently for two months. When the next batch of goods arrives at the port, Paco can get the goods he ordered.
"This is robbery! Do you understand?" Paco vented his dissatisfaction very angrily: "They expropriate goods from merchants to fill the gap in the official trade volume, and what is used for trading is not silver coins, but weapons! Weapons that the Governor claimed the reconstituted army would use! Can you imagine? They traded weapons to a bunch of Han Chinese, it's crazy!"
Immediately, someone questioned Paco's statement: "Boss, did you drink too much today?"
Paco said angrily: "God bear witness, I haven't even touched a drop of alcohol today! I saw with my own eyes that Fernando's men carried the wooden box containing the muskets into Haifaji's warehouse! He probably thought I didn't know who it was. What, but I'm not blind, and I served in the army before I came to this damn place, and I can smell gun oil and gunpowder even through the box!"
After hearing this, Jose couldn't help but secretly lamented that Fernando was really unlucky to run into such a complaining guy like Paco.And Paco probably felt that the people present were all his own people, and he didn't think about what kind of information these words would leak, so he just said it casually. He didn't expect that the speaker had no intention of listening to the listener, and there was an intelligence agent like Jose next to him. Came here to investigate this matter.
Before this operation, Haihan's intelligence department had basically determined that the source of the firearms in several recent gun cases came from the Spaniards, so they set the distribution channel as the focus of the investigation, and the main purpose of Jose's coming here was also matching with this.The information obtained from Paco can basically confirm the previous speculation of the Haihan intelligence department, and confirm the means of exporting weapons and equipment by the Spaniards and the Han Chinese maritime merchants.
From the point of view of the transaction method, this is actually almost the same as Haihan’s early foreign arms trade method. Buyers exchanged various goods for weapons and equipment.It's just that the colony's weapons reserves and manufacturing capabilities should be relatively limited. If they want to provide a large number of weapons to outsiders, it is definitely too late to rely on off-the-shelf manufacturing, so they can only use the part of the weapons that were originally planned to be used to arm their own troops.
(End of this chapter)
There is nowhere to find it, and it takes no effort to get it. The Haihan intelligence department tried every means to investigate the source of the object, but he showed up shortly after Jose and others arrived in Cebu.However, this also just shows that Sanya's order to request Manila to send intelligence personnel to Cebu is indeed wise. Jose and others successfully found a breakthrough in the investigation work when they first arrived in Cebu.
But for Jose and others who are performing missions overseas alone for the first time, every step they take must face an unknown situation. Although the current situation is not dangerous, they cannot tolerate mistakes and must maintain a high altitude at all times. Be vigilant, beware of showing your feet in front of the colonial authorities.
The next day, Jose and others acted according to the plan, and in the name of going to the city to purchase daily necessities, they were divided into three groups and dispatched, leaving only a few sailors guarding the boat at the port.Jose found that the colonial authorities had really left them alone, and did not send anyone to watch them today, and it seemed that he completely believed in their identities and experiences.Probably for the colonial authorities, their role has come to an end, and there is no need to continue to pay more attention.
This is naturally a good thing for the tasks undertaken by Jose and others. The less the Cebu authorities pay attention to them, the easier it is for them to act locally.Immediately, according to the plan discussed the night before, everyone separately walked around the city to inquire about the local Han businessmen and related information.Their Hispanic identities are undoubtedly the best cover. Walking around the city and talking to people is not easy to attract the attention of others.
Compared with Manila, which has been occupied by Haihan, the city size and infrastructure level of Cebu are undoubtedly much worse.In Jose's view, the city center of Cebu is comparable to the situation in the suburbs of Manila. The narrow streets, low and old buildings, and garbage dumps can be seen everywhere. It does not seem to be "prosperous". How can it touch the edge.
This is also because most of the resources owned by the Philippine colony under Spanish rule are concentrated in the Manila area, and places like Cebu have only really begun to receive the attention of the authorities after this year's big defeat, due to lack of sufficient funds And the labor force, the urban construction status is still stuck in the last century.
The colonial authorities do not want to invest too much resources in local urban construction at the moment. Rebuilding the armed forces and trade routes requires a lot of money and manpower, and these are the real urgent tasks.If the arming and trade of the Philippine colony cannot be restored as soon as possible, it is meaningless to build the city of Cebu more prosperous than Madrid, because the Haihan people will attack again at any time to plunder the achievements of the colonial authorities.
The overall situation is the top priority. With limited resources, the colonial authorities can only temporarily abandon urban infrastructure and focus on restoring strength as the top priority.But for outsiders like Jose, the intuitive feeling is that the social situation here is not optimistic. It is hard to imagine that the Spaniards will use Cebu as their base in the future to launch a counterattack to the Manila area.
The city of Cebu is much smaller than what Jose expected, and the Han Chinese maritime merchants are a relatively small group here, so it is not difficult to find out where they settled. The porter who got up early to pick up the work asked about the location of the storehouse run by the Han merchants.
When Jose was living in Manila, he had seen large trading houses outside the city run by Chinese sea merchants. Some of them could even be called small fortresses. However, the same trading establishments in Cebu were much simpler. , just a small two-story building facing the street, behind which there is a small warehouse for stacking goods.However, this kind of business scale can be regarded as in line with the local trade situation. After all, there were few Han Chinese who came here to do business in the past. After the end of the Manila war this year, they came to Cebu to do business because they were worried that maintaining trade relations with the Spanish would be liquidated by Haihan. There are even fewer Han Chinese who buy and sell.
There are only a few Han Chinese merchants resident in Cebu, probably out of the consideration of helping each other, and the shops they operate are also concentrated in the same block next to each other, so Jose and others who came to find them don't have to spend too much money. If there are many things, you can have a panoramic view of everything here.
However, considering their identities, they didn't dare to go door-to-door to visit. If they were bumped into by the man surnamed Chen yesterday, they might make him suspicious.So Jose chose a more traditional monitoring method, first observing the people coming and going nearby, and seeing if he could get some useful information from the Spaniards living in this neighborhood.
Regarding how to find the target in Cebu and how to investigate and confirm the identity of the target, the intelligence department gave special training before Jose and others set off, but the time was too tight, and the teaching of relevant professional skills was a bit hasty. How much a newcomer can learn depends on personal qualifications.
Jose's qualifications are definitely not "talented". Coupled with language barriers, the training he received has to be discounted, and the final result is just a half-baked rookie intelligence agent.It is also because of this that Jose was very cautious during the execution of the mission, and adopted a relatively conservative attitude in the face of various situations, and did not dare to make rash advances at all.However, in this way, they avoided the attention of the outside world as much as possible, and greatly reduced the risks they faced in their actions.
After spending a day here, Jose and the others did not see the man surnamed Chen appearing here, but they had already inquired that this man should be Chen Bin, the shopkeeper of the "Hai Fa Ji" store on the street, but It's not that this person is famous in the local area, but that there are only four shops run by Han people here, and three of them are run by old men. I have always been closer to the Cebu authorities, and my image has already highly overlapped with the person I saw yesterday.Therefore, Jose and others focused their main attention on Haifaji Store, and began to slowly collect information related to it.
In order to facilitate nearby monitoring and avoid arousing others' suspicion, Jose even found a job as a handyman nearby. The salary was very low and no food and lodging was included. , do not care about the issue of remuneration.
If the person performing this task is an experienced intelligence officer, he may choose a more radical method to obtain information at this time, such as letting those indigenous sailor intelligence agents who did not show their faces in the city go to Haifaji to apply for a job in order to obtain first-hand information.
However, Jose did not dare to take such a risky measure to be on the safe side, and he was indeed not at ease with those natives. Although they could obey orders better, they were not very smart. To perform tasks alone in such an environment, and need to temporarily interrupt contact with their companions, Jose worried that they would lose their composure and their identities would be exposed.
It has to be said that ordinary people in this era are still far from being aware of intelligence warfare. Ordinary people have no chance to come into contact with professionally trained intelligence personnel like Jose, and it is hard to imagine that the compatriots around them will be loyal to the enemy country. spies.The difficulty for Jose to collect information here was much lower than his own expectations. In just two or three days, he obtained a lot of information about Han maritime merchants from his employer and colleagues.
There used to be a dozen or so Han merchants doing business in Cebu. However, as the relationship between Spain and Haihan deteriorated in recent years, some Ming maritime merchants chose to join the Haihan camp and gradually broke off with the Spanish colonial authorities. Contacts, and trade organizations based in Cebu have also withdrawn one after another.Today, there are only these four Han Chinese maritime merchants who insist on maintaining trade relations with the colonial authorities and establishing permanent trade organizations in Cebu.
Jose’s employer, Paco, is also a businessman, and has certain trade relations with Han Chinese maritime merchants. According to his opinion, this Haifaji and the other three Han Chinese-run trading stores should actually be from the same source of supply, or To put it more bluntly, the boss behind them is likely to be the same person.
Paco's reason is very simple. The types of goods provided by these shops are similar, and the prices are almost the same.Of course, it can be said that there is an agreement such as a price alliance between them, but Paco found that the goods they sell are actually the same thing, and an expert can easily confirm this from some details such as the production process.
Then why did four shops be divided into four shops to sell these goods to the colonial authorities? Paco is not very clear about the reason behind this. Operation, in order to create the illusion that Cebu still has a certain scale of foreign trade, and stabilize the emotions of local Hispanic businessmen.
"Think about it, if there are no goods brought by the Han sea merchants here, besides the local spices and gems, what other good things can we ship back to China? And those things are all goods monopolized by the government. We can't touch it, there must be a business to do, so that we can continue to stay in this ghost place. The officials don't want us to run away, so we can only find a way to make it look like there is a business to do here." Paco drank too much one day After that, he murmured and complained about the local business environment.
If businessmen engaged in trade think that staying in the local area is unprofitable, they will inevitably leave here to try their luck in other colonies, so it is normal for the colonial authorities to try to stabilize the morale of the army.However, Jose could smell something different from it. If the same operator is actually behind these several shops, it would save the intelligence department a lot of work and no need to investigate and confirm their backgrounds one by one.
It would be difficult to obtain such valuable information if only relying on manual surveillance nearby, and this could be regarded as the harvest of Jose's correct decision.After knowing that his employer, Paco, had business dealings with these shops, Jose also paid more attention to the content of the goods Paco bought and sold daily, hoping to verify his statement about those shops.
However, the "surprise" brought to Jose by the employer did not end there. Another day later, Paco came back cursing and complaining that the authorities had taken away a batch of goods that should have belonged to him.Jose listened for a while with his ears upright, before he roughly understood the whole story.
Originally, the batch of silk and porcelain provided by Haifaji to Paco was agreed to be delivered in these two days, and I heard that the goods had arrived in Hong Kong two days ago, but when Paco came to urge the other party to complete the delivery today, But met the city defense commander Fernando.
Fernando told Paco that since an important deal between Haifaji and the colonial authorities has not yet been completed, the goods arriving at the port this time will be given priority to the official to offset their previous arrears, so there will be no goods provided to Paco for the time being. or other local merchants.The shopkeeper, Chen Bin, also confirmed Fernando's statement in person, and advised Paco to wait patiently for two months. When the next batch of goods arrives at the port, Paco can get the goods he ordered.
"This is robbery! Do you understand?" Paco vented his dissatisfaction very angrily: "They expropriate goods from merchants to fill the gap in the official trade volume, and what is used for trading is not silver coins, but weapons! Weapons that the Governor claimed the reconstituted army would use! Can you imagine? They traded weapons to a bunch of Han Chinese, it's crazy!"
Immediately, someone questioned Paco's statement: "Boss, did you drink too much today?"
Paco said angrily: "God bear witness, I haven't even touched a drop of alcohol today! I saw with my own eyes that Fernando's men carried the wooden box containing the muskets into Haifaji's warehouse! He probably thought I didn't know who it was. What, but I'm not blind, and I served in the army before I came to this damn place, and I can smell gun oil and gunpowder even through the box!"
After hearing this, Jose couldn't help but secretly lamented that Fernando was really unlucky to run into such a complaining guy like Paco.And Paco probably felt that the people present were all his own people, and he didn't think about what kind of information these words would leak, so he just said it casually. He didn't expect that the speaker had no intention of listening to the listener, and there was an intelligence agent like Jose next to him. Came here to investigate this matter.
Before this operation, Haihan's intelligence department had basically determined that the source of the firearms in several recent gun cases came from the Spaniards, so they set the distribution channel as the focus of the investigation, and the main purpose of Jose's coming here was also matching with this.The information obtained from Paco can basically confirm the previous speculation of the Haihan intelligence department, and confirm the means of exporting weapons and equipment by the Spaniards and the Han Chinese maritime merchants.
From the point of view of the transaction method, this is actually almost the same as Haihan’s early foreign arms trade method. Buyers exchanged various goods for weapons and equipment.It's just that the colony's weapons reserves and manufacturing capabilities should be relatively limited. If they want to provide a large number of weapons to outsiders, it is definitely too late to rely on off-the-shelf manufacturing, so they can only use the part of the weapons that were originally planned to be used to arm their own troops.
(End of this chapter)