Chapter 2026
There was no place to be found after breaking through the iron shoes, and it took no effort to get it, so the Haihan Intelligence Department tried every means to investigate the origin of the target, but he showed up soon after Jose and others arrived in Cebu. However, this also shows that Sanya's order to request Manila to send intelligence personnel to Cebu was indeed wise. Jose and others successfully found a breakthrough in the investigation when they first arrived in Cebu.
But for Jose and others, who are performing a mission overseas alone for the first time, they have to face unknown situations every step they take. Although the current situation is not dangerous, they cannot allow them to make mistakes and must maintain a high altitude at all times. Be wary of exposing yourself to the colonial authorities.
The next day, Jose and others followed the plan. In the name of going to the city to purchase daily necessities, they divided into three groups and set out, leaving only a few sailors to guard the ship at the port. Jose found that the colonial authorities actually left them alone and did not send anyone to look at them today. It seemed that they completely believed their identities and experiences. Probably for the colonial authorities, their role ended here, and there was no need to continue to invest more attention.
This is naturally a good thing for the tasks undertaken by Jose and others. The less attention the Cebu authorities pay to them, the easier it will be for them to act locally. At that moment, everyone followed the plan discussed the night before and slowly walked around the city to inquire about local Han businesses and related situations. Their Hispanic identity is undoubtedly the best cover. It is not easy to attract others' attention when walking around the city and talking to people.
Compared with the city of Manila, which has been occupied by Haihan, Cebu's city size and infrastructure level are undoubtedly far behind. In Jose's opinion, Cebu's city center is comparable to the conditions in the suburbs of Manila. The narrow streets, low and old buildings, and garbage dumps everywhere do not look like the word "prosperous". How can I get involved?
This is also because most of the resources owned by the Philippine colonies under Spanish rule were concentrated in the Manila area, and places like Cebu only began to really receive the attention of the authorities after this year's defeat, due to the lack of sufficient funds. and labor force, urban construction conditions are 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 massive funds and manpower, and these are the real priorities. If the armed forces and trade in the Philippine colonies cannot be restored as soon as possible, it will be meaningless to build Cebu City more prosperous than Madrid, because the Haihan people will strike again at any time to plunder the construction achievements of the colonial authorities.
The overall situation is the most important thing. At present, with limited resources, the colonial authorities can only temporarily abandon urban infrastructure and focus on restoring strength as their top priority. But for outsiders like Jose, the intuitive feeling is that the social situation here is not optimistic. It is difficult to imagine that the Spaniards will use Cebu as a base to launch a counterattack in the Manila area in the future.
The urban area of Cebu is much smaller than Jose expected, and the Han merchants here are considered a relatively small group, so it is not difficult to find out where they settled. Jose did not spend much time and found out from several The porter who got up early to pick up the work asked for the location of the business inn run by Han maritime merchants.
When Jose was living in Manila, he had seen the large business inns outside the city run by Han merchants. Some of them were even called small fortresses, but the same trading institutions here in Cebu seemed much simpler. , just a two-story building facing the street, with a small warehouse behind it for stacking goods. However, this scale of operation is considered to be in line with the local trade situation. After all, there were few Han Chinese who came here to do business in the past. After this year's Manila War, they came to Cebu to do business because they were worried that maintaining trade relations with the Spaniards would lead to liquidation by Haihan. There are even fewer Han people doing business.
There are only a few Han merchants stationed in Cebu, probably out of mutual support. The business stores they operate are also concentrated in the same neighborhood and adjacent to each other, so Jose and others don't have to worry too much when they come to visit. With so many things to do, you can see everything here.
However, considering their status, they did not dare to go door-to-door. If they were bumped into by the man named Chen yesterday, they might become suspicious. So Jose chose a more traditional surveillance method, first observing the comings and goings of people nearby, and by the way seeing if he could get some useful information from the Spaniards living in this neighborhood.
Regarding how to find a target in Cebu and how to investigate and confirm the identity of the target, the intelligence department gave Jose and others special training before they set off. However, time was too tight and the teaching of relevant professional skills was a bit hasty. How much a newbie can learn depends on their personal qualifications.
Jose's qualifications are definitely not "talented", and coupled with language barriers, the training he received had to be somewhat discounted, and the final result was just a half-baked new intelligence agent. Because of this, Jose was very cautious during the execution of his mission. He adopted a relatively conservative attitude in dealing with various situations and did not dare to take any risks. However, in this way, they can avoid the outside world's attention to them as much as possible, greatly reducing the risks they face in their actions, which can be regarded as a blessing in disguise.
After spending a day here, Jose and others did not see the man named Chen appear here, but they had already inquired that this man should be Chen Bin, the shopkeeper of the "Hai Fa Ji" store on the street. It’s not that this person is famous in the local area, but that there are only four business shops run by Han people here, and three of them have old shopkeepers. Only the shopkeeper of Haifaji is a middle-aged man, and his surname also happens to be Chen. It is said that He has always been close to the Cebu authorities, and his image already closely resembles that of the person he met yesterday. So Jose and others focused their main attention on Haifaji Store and began to slowly collect relevant information.
In order to keep a close eye on him without arousing suspicion, Jose even found a job as a handyman nearby. The pay was extremely low and did not include food and accommodation. The employer felt that he was getting an advantage, but Jose only wanted to complete the task as soon as possible. , and don’t care about remuneration.
If the person performing this task is an experienced intelligence officer, he is likely to choose a more radical method to obtain intelligence at this time, such as asking the indigenous sailor intelligence agents who have not shown their faces in the city to apply for Haifaji in order to obtain First-hand information.
However, for the sake of safety, Jose did not dare to take such risky measures, and he was indeed uneasy about the natives. Although they could obey orders relatively well, their brains were not very good. If they were asked to go to a completely unfamiliar place, Performing tasks alone in an environment where they need to temporarily interrupt contact with their companions, Jose is worried that they will lose their composure and expose their identities.
It has to be said that ordinary people in this era are far from aware of the precautions against intelligence warfare. The average person has no chance to come into contact with professionally trained intelligence personnel like Jose, and it is difficult to imagine that the compatriots around them will be loyal to the enemy. spies. It was much easier for Jose to collect intelligence here than he expected. In just two or three days, he got a lot of information about Han maritime merchants from his employers and colleagues. There were originally about a dozen Han Chinese merchants doing business in Cebu. However, as the relationship between Spain and Haihan has worsened in recent years, some Ming Dynasty merchants have chosen to join the Haihan camp, gradually breaking away from the Spanish colonial authorities. Contact, trade agencies based in Cebu have also been withdrawn one after another. Today, these are the only four Chinese maritime merchants that still insist on maintaining trade relations with the colonial authorities and have permanent trading institutions in Cebu.
Jose's employer Paco is also a businessman and has certain trade relations with Han maritime merchants. According to his opinion, Haifaji and the other three merchants run by Han people should actually have the same source of supply, or To put it more bluntly, the boss behind them is probably the same person.
Paco's reason is simple. The types of goods provided by these storehouses are similar, and the prices are almost the same. Of course, it can be said that there is an agreement between them such as a price alliance, but Paco discovered that the goods they sold were actually the same thing. An insider could easily confirm this from the production process and other details.
So why were they divided into four shops to sell these goods to the colonial authorities? Paco was not sure about the reasons behind this. He had a very unethical view, thinking that this was the colonial authorities deliberately asking these shops to do this. The operation was carried out in order to create the illusion that Cebu still had a certain scale of foreign trade and calm the mood of local Hispanic businessmen.
"Think about it, if there are no goods shipped by Han merchants here, besides local spices and gems, what other good things can we transport back to China? And those things are all officially monopolized goods. We can't touch it, there must be business to do in order to continue to stay in this damn place. The officials don't want us to run away, so they can only find ways to make it look like there is business to do here. "Paco drank too much one day. After that, he muttered some complaints about the local trade environment.
If merchants engaged in trade believe that staying here is unprofitable, they will inevitably leave here to try their luck in other colonies. Therefore, it is normal for the colonial authorities to try to stabilize the morale of the military. However, Jose smelled something different from it. If there was actually the same operator behind these business stores, it would save the intelligence department a lot of time and they would not have to investigate and verify their backgrounds one by one.
It would be difficult to obtain this kind of valuable intelligence by just relying on manual surveillance nearby. This can be regarded as a reward for Jose's correct decision. After knowing that his employer Paco had business dealings with these shophouses, Jose also paid more attention to the contents of the goods Paco bought and sold on a daily basis, hoping to verify his statement about those shophouses.
But the "surprise" brought to Jose by his employer did not end there. Another day later, Paco came back cursing, complaining that the authorities had taken away a batch of goods that should have belonged to him. Jose listened carefully for a long time, and then he roughly understood the whole story.
The batch of silk and porcelain originally provided by Haifaji to Paco was agreed to be delivered within these two days, and I heard that the goods had arrived at the port two days ago, but when Paco came to urge the other party to complete the delivery today, But he met the city defense commander Fernando.
Fernando told Paco that since an important transaction 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 government to offset its previous arrears, so no goods will be provided to Paco for the time being. Or other local businessmen. The shopkeeper Chen Bin also confirmed Fernando's statement in person and suggested that Paco 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 angrily: "They requisition merchants' goods to fill the gap of insufficient official trade volume, and what is used for trading is not silver coins, but weapons! Yes! The weapons that the governor claimed to have reorganized were used! Can you imagine that they actually traded the weapons to a group of Han people? This is so crazy!"
Someone immediately questioned Paco's statement: "Boss, did you drink too much today?"
Paco said angrily: "God testifies, I didn't drink at all today! I saw with my own eyes Fernado's men carried the wooden box containing the muskets into Haifaji's warehouse! He probably thought I didn't recognize it. What the hell, but I’m not blind, and I served in the army before I came to this damn place. 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 meet such a complaining guy like Paco. And Paco probably felt that everyone present was one of his own, and he didn't even think about what kind of information these words would leak, so he said them casually. He didn't expect that the speaker was unintentional and the listener had intentions. There was an intelligence agent like Jose next to him. Came here specifically to investigate this matter.
Before this operation, the Haihan Intelligence Department had basically determined that the source of the firearms in several recent gun cases came from the Spaniards, so they set the circulation channel as the focus of the investigation. The main purpose of Jose's coming here is also working with this. The information obtained from Paco has basically confirmed the previous speculations of the Haihan Intelligence Department, and confirmed the means by which the Spaniards and Han merchants jointly exported weapons and equipment.
From the perspective 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. However, the weapons reserves and manufacturing capabilities of the colonies should be relatively limited. If they want to provide large quantities of weapons to outsiders, it will definitely be too late to rely on existing weapons. Then they can only first transfer the weapons originally planned to be used to arm their own troops.
(End of chapter)