Chapter 5116 — Meeting Brother Dafeng
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
"That's true enough..." Wei Zhao nodded. If the Center truly was an organization of the utmost rigor, then the moment suspicion arose it would surely strike at the root at once to forestall future trouble; it could not possibly hold back for a full six months without acting. It seemed he had indeed been overthinking.
"Honestly, Leader, your sudden return this time was quite a surprise. When you called me before, I thought you were joking—never imagined it was real..." Brother Dafeng laughed.
"It's been hard on you these past few years." Wei Zhao said with feeling. True, these years he had not asked Brother Dafeng to do anything especially dangerous, but even if he did nothing at all, the sensitive identity of mole alone carried enormous risk—to say nothing of his having to find ways to probe into the Center's headquarters. Every attempt he had made was in fact a gamble, a trade with his head strapped to his waist. Most people truly might not be able to withstand such crushing pressure.
"What are you saying, Leader Wei Zhao? This is all what I ought to do." Brother Dafeng chuckled.
Wei Zhao clapped him hard on the shoulder. In truth, Brother Dafeng's inviting him directly to this cruise-ship branch this time showed not only that he had the branch fully under his control—it was not hard for Wei Zhao to guess his other, more important purpose: to pledge his loyalty.
Being a mole is the least secure and least belonging profession in the world. Take Brother Dafeng at this moment: to the Center he was a traitor, and to Wei Zhao and the others he might not win a hundred percent of their trust either—after all, who could say whether he might secretly turn coat again?
Originally, the best way for a mole to pledge loyalty was to provide important intelligence, but because the Center's headquarters was so mysterious and unfathomable, in all these years Brother Dafeng had never managed to dig up intelligence of real value. Now, suddenly summoned by Wei Zhao, it would be an outright lie to say he felt not the slightest panic—and so came today's meeting aboard the cruise ship.
In doing so, Brother Dafeng was laying everything he had before Wei Zhao's eyes. If in the future he ever wished to turn traitor again, the underlings of this cruise-ship branch alone would be a fatal liability; at that point, any one of them could tip off Wei Zhao, and he would have no place to be buried.
To go this far was no different from signing a pledge of allegiance. Wei Zhao could believe in his loyalty a hundred percent, but Brother Dafeng had to pay a tremendous price for it. He was walking a tightrope—should any one of the cruise-ship branch's underlings prove unreliable and secretly inform the Center's headquarters, he would likewise have no place to be buried.
Still, he trusted his own grip on things. Moreover, throughout the entire cruise-ship branch, he alone held the means of contact with the Center's headquarters—and even that was one-way: headquarters could relay orders to him, but he could not call headquarters at will. So even if a traitor did appear among his underlings, passing word along would not be so easy. The risk was not as great as imagined.