Chapter Three: A Tempting Business (2)
The people kneeling on the ground actually began to stiffen at a mere gesture from him.
Cheng Muyang sighed. “The country changes hands, and it’s always you old hands who suffer.” He straightened up, seeming to have no intention of questioning them any further, and smiled as he shook his head.
All four gunmen chambered their rounds, aiming at the backs of the heads of the few people who remained.
Just when it was a matter of life and death, someone suddenly called out, “Young Boss.”
Cheng Muyang stopped.
A small, thin person tried to stand up, but because the blood circulation in their legs had been cut off, several attempts ended in vain. In the end, they could only shout in panic toward the direction they guessed he was in, “Cheng Muyun is in Moscow!”
After shouting those words, the person’s body remained taut.
Yet they had not expected the surroundings to fall into an even deeper silence.
“Those words are of no use to me anymore.” Cheng Muyang slipped one hand into his trouser pocket and turned to leave.
After walking a dozen or so steps, he finally gave a slight wave of his right hand to the gunmen behind him.
He was silently telling everyone that this was the final verdict:
No forgiveness.
Nan Bei did not watch the final scene. She turned and went down into the cabin.
By the time the yacht was about to pull alongside the cruise ship, they were already outside Chinese territorial waters.
The two of them came out of the cabin. The hem of her skirt was lifted by the sea wind, fluttering and trembling.
Cheng Muyang had one hand resting on the railing, speaking into his earpiece the entire time.
He was speaking French. Thanks to the several years she had spent in Belgium, she could still understand it.
“These anti-government guerrillas have plenty of money. Raise it another ten percent.” He beckoned to her, signaling for her to stand beside him. “Be friendlier to our business partners. Tell them that if they don’t accept this price, tomorrow someone will airdrop weapons into the jungle for their rivals. Yes, twelve noon tomorrow. After twelve, our price will go up another thirty percent.”
What a ruthless businessman.
Nan Bei walked over, unable to stop herself from laughing.
Cheng Muyang patted her forehead with his palm, signaling for her not to make a sound. “We have eighty surface-to-air missiles, anti-armor rocket launchers, five thousand AK-47s and C4, and four million rounds of ammunition here. Today’s asking price is seven million U.S. dollars, and it remains valid until twelve noon tomorrow.” After saying this, he added lightly, “Tell them I mean Beijing time. When doing business with Cheng Muyang, you always need to be prepared with another watch.”
The conversation that followed switched into Russian.
She could no longer understand it.
Cheng Muyang gave a few brief instructions before finally hanging up.
“If someone doesn’t buy your weapons, you just give them to his rivals for free?” She stood beside him, sheltered from the wind. “You really are a ruthless businessman.”
“Not for free. After I airdrop the weapons, the prices of all the weapons will go up thirty percent,” he explained his calculations to her. “In other words, they’ll have to pay for the cost of those weapons too, including the wear and tear on the aircraft and the fuel consumption.”
Nan Bei was both amused and speechless. “You really refuse to take a loss.”
The corner of Cheng Muyang’s mouth moved, as though he were smiling. “Of course I can’t afford to take a loss. Employees need to be paid, and there have to be benefits at the end of the year. Most importantly, all our employees have lifelong compensation insurance. If they meet with an accident, we’ll also have to support their children until they turn eighteen.”
She thought about it and found that there was quite a bit of sense to it.
In this line of work, once you stepped into it, there was no way back. How could money earned by risking your life be allowed to come up short?
Besides, the weapons the Cheng family could provide already belonged to the top tier of the arms trade. They had never had to worry about buyers.
Unlike Myanmar, Russia itself was a major arms-trading power. The environment determined everything. The world’s best arms dealers were in Russia, and now, within Russia’s arms-trading circles, the Cheng family alone stood at the very top.
Even Nan Huai had to admit that they were, in every sense of the word, the “Lords of War.”
In the distance was a brightly lit cruise ship, figures drifting to and fro, indistinct in the light.
They were almost alongside it.
“Have you ever thought about leaving this kind of life?” she suddenly asked him.
Cheng Muyang took out his small silver flask and drank in small sips, as though to him it were nothing more than cool water quenching his thirst. He kept looking at the cruise ship in the distance, seemingly deep in thought. Only after a long while did he tell her, “You know, quite a few Chinese people come to Russia to strike it rich. In just one Chinese market, there are tens of thousands of stalls, and every year nearly ten billion U.S. dollars in ‘black gold’ is handed over to the gangs.”
Nan Bei nodded lightly.
She liked Cheng Muyang when he was like this.
With that unserious expression, yet talking about unexpectedly serious things.
“But their lives are very hard. Usually, several couples share a single room, and they have no security for their lives at all. They can be murdered and have their bodies abandoned at any time,” he said with a smile, continuing to tell her, “Political negotiations can’t solve these things. The only ones who can truly guarantee their safety are us.”
Nan Bei raised her brows slightly, looking at him in disbelief.
And in those pitch-black eyes of hers, something had already begun to slowly melt, spreading into the night that covered the surface of the sea.
At that moment, the words he spoke were so familiar.
Four years ago, Nan Huai, who had ruled the underground markets between China and Vietnam with an iron fist, had said the same thing.
He said, “Beibei, the reason families like ours came into being in the first place was also to protect our own people and our homeland. No matter the chaos of war or poverty, no matter how dynasties rise and fall, we protect this land and the people who live upon it.”
The ever-strengthening sea wind blew her hair across her eyes.
From this angle, looking at him, she could see the vast expanse of stars behind him, along with the increasingly distinct waves of the sea. And he simply leaned against the metal railing, looking at her. His own hair had been tousled by the wind, falling across his face, yet his eyes remained clear and bright.
“A very righteous-sounding reason, isn’t it?” Cheng Muyang smiled faintly as he smoothed her windswept hair behind her ear.
“Yes,” her voice lowered, “and very convincing.”
Amid the heavy snow of those 900 kilometers, she had never truly fallen for him. During their frequent encounters between the library and her residence in rainy Belgium, she had also felt that something was missing. But now, as the two of them were about to board this cruise ship, she suddenly realized that the name Cheng Muyang had truly become different.
A man like this was a temptation simply by virtue of existing. And she had already been seduced.
When the two of them boarded the cruise ship, they almost immediately drew everyone’s attention.
No matter where one looked, there were people whispering and murmuring among themselves. She spotted Master Shen not far away. He glanced at Cheng Muyang, and Cheng Muyang gave her a faint smile and nodded. “Go on. It’s time to return you to your rightful owner.”
Those words also became the last words he and she would exchange over the next three days.
She had thought this would be a grand, spectacular gathering, but aside from the fact that everyone aboard the cruise ship had a specific identity, it seemed no different from an ordinary vacation cruise. During the day, most of the time she stayed by Master Shen’s side, accompanying the old man as he listened to opera and drank tea. Only at night did she occasionally go swimming in the pool on the fifth-floor deck.
The rippling blue pool held only her and Shen Jiaming.
The entire floor belonged to the Shen family, so naturally it retained a pleasant, peaceful quiet.
From below, she could faintly hear music, along with the laughter and curses of men and women, as though it were another world entirely.
After swimming a lap, she came back to find Shen Jiaming already on shore, smoking.
“What was the Cheng Muyang you knew like?”
She rested her hand against the edge of the pool and asked the person standing on shore.
“What do you want to hear?” Shen Jiaming spent a while reminiscing. “I don’t know much about Russia, but when he first emerged out of nowhere, I managed to get hold of some investigative files.”
“What did they say?” She floated on the surface of the water, tilting her head up to look at the person half-crouched beside the pool.
“The files were more than four hundred pages long. Three things about him left the deepest impression on me. First, he’s extremely intelligent, a linguistic genius. He’s fluent in six languages, and if he lives somewhere for more than six months, he’ll pick up the local language.” Shen Jiaming smiled. “Second, he’s a businessman with absolutely no scruples. The thing he says most often is, ‘As long as you can afford the price, whatever weapon you want, if it exists in this world, I can sell it to you.’”
Nan Bei remembered their conversation on the yacht a few days earlier and couldn't help smiling.
He really was a ruthless businessman.
With a snap, Shen Jiaming lit his lighter. “Speaking of business, he really does have a talent for it. The Cheng family has the largest fleet of cargo aircraft in the world. In every bloody conflict in Africa, South America, and even the Middle East, both sides come to him to buy weapons. The money just keeps rolling in.”
She gave a soft “Mm.” “And the other characteristic?”
“There’s one more, and you absolutely wouldn’t imagine it.” Shen Jiaming held the cigarette between his teeth, his words muffled. “He often participates in United Nations humanitarian relief efforts. In several localized wars, he’s helped peacekeeping forces transport supplies, even soldiers.”
She nearly choked on the water.
And in the next second, she saw someone coming down the stairs.
It was Cheng Muyang, who had disappeared for three days aboard this cruise ship. He was wearing nothing but a pair of white casual trousers, his upper body bare, clearly here to swim as well. The moment she saw him, he saw her too.
More precisely, it was hard not to see her, because she was the only person in the pool.
Shen Jiaming noticed the change in her expression, turned around to look, and laughed quietly. “Beibei, you’d better be careful. He took you swimming around Qiandao Lake, punished the mole right there at the dock in front of everyone, and personally brought you aboard. All of that is a little too high-profile. I just feel like something about this isn’t right.”
She lightly tread water and smiled. “Really? Don’t forget, it was Master Shen who told me to go with him.”
“I find that strange too, but my grandfather really does admire him.”
Shen Jiaming stood up, took the cigarette from his lips, and gave Cheng Muyang a smiling nod in greeting. The two passed each other, one walking farther and farther away, while the other stopped at the edge of the pool.
Cheng Muyang began taking off his white casual trousers and tossed them onto a lounge chair to one side, leaving only his black swimming trunks. His body was well trained, yet beneath the poolside spotlights, several faint scars across his abdomen stood out.
Nan Bei’s heartbeat became strangely unsteady. When she tried to swim away, he bent down and reached out, firmly catching her by the wrist. “Why is your face so red? Have you been in the water too long and run out of oxygen?”
She raised her eyes. Cheng Muyang’s fingers happened to slide over her pulse, and he said softly, “Your heart is beating pretty fast too.”
Suddenly, many girls’ screams and laughter came from the fourth floor.
The extravagant clamor only made the quiet here seem even more pronounced.
“It’s time to get out.” She tried to pull her hand back.
Cheng Muyang did not let go. Instead, he had already slipped into the water, his right hand slowly threading into her long hair and supporting her head.
He looked into her eyes, as though trying to see something in them. There was something strange about him tonight. Before him were a pair of eyes with the dark luster characteristic of an Eastern girl, with an unusually slight upward curve at their corners. They were very beautiful.
“When I was little, the elders in my family often said I had a connection with Buddha. They would tell me stories about the Buddha. I didn’t believe much of it back then, but I remembered one story: if a person wants to become a Buddha, they must go through one hundred and eight tribulations,” he lowered his head and kissed from the corner of her eye, all the way to the side of her ear. “I cannot walk the path of goodness in this lifetime because of you. For Cheng Muyang, you alone are already one hundred and eight tribulations.”
The words were vague, something she only half understood.
But her heart had already softened.
Everything else he wanted to say was pressed between their lips and teeth.
This kiss was one of a kind, and utterly devoted. Like a boy experiencing love for the first time, kissing the girl he had cherished for a long time.
There was no woman who could escape a man like this when he treated her with such tenderness.
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