Chapter 141 — Old Buffon's Origins

Only occasionally on the internet could one find some international news. It was on a rather small portal site that Yang Ce saw the report that Dorsk had mysteriously died aboard the Alice.

Interpol had confirmed Dorsk's identity: he was one of the major drug lords active in Europe. The cause of death was peculiar—he had been killed by iron nails driven into his skull.

Yang Ce searched for similar pages on the English versions of Google and Yahoo; the content of the news items he opened was much the same. It seemed the matter had been deliberately suppressed and not hyped up. Whether that was Horschk's doing, he could not say, but in any case the affair ended there—Interpol did not pursue it to the end.

Yet someone did care very much about Dorsk's death, and that person was Dorsk's son, young Dorsk. What he cared about was not that his old man had died, but where the money in his father's bank account had gone. The tens of billions of euros in the Swiss bank had simply vanished into thin air.

To be continued

667. Young Dorsk

This person was Dorsk's son, young Dorsk. Dorsk was dead, and he felt little about it. Young Dorsk knew exactly what his father had been—a great villain who had made enemies far and wide in his time. Who knew which of them had taken a disliking to him and finished him off?

What bothered young Dorsk was that his father's deposits in the Swiss bank had actually disappeared. Yes—over thirty billion euros! For various reasons, young Dorsk had not followed in his father's footsteps but instead headed a casino. Still, he was clearly no good either—just not as conspicuous as a drug trafficker.

This too had been Dorsk's idea, because if something really did go wrong, it would be he himself who went down; his son must not be caught up in it. Gambling, after all, was legal in their city.

So when he got the news that his father had been killed, young Dorsk's first reaction was not to investigate how his father had died, but to hurry to the safe in his father's study and find his father's Swiss bank account details.

The safe in his father's study used fingerprint verification; if it was forced open, a self-destruct device would be triggered. When it was set up, the safe recognized only the fingerprints of father and son.

And young Dorsk was an only child, so he had no worry that anyone would contest the inheritance. He had never bothered about the family's wealth before; this was the first time he had activated the safe.

Following the steps his father had told him, young Dorsk opened the safe. Inside were some precious jewels, a Swiss bank account certificate, and a few scattered fund accounts.

Young Dorsk paid no attention to those scattered fund accounts; they held only loose cash, none of it in large amounts, adding up to just over a hundred million euros altogether. The bulk of it was still in the Swiss bank.

The Swiss bank account was a numbered account. Dorsk had set it up as numbered because he too feared that one day something might happen to him and Interpol would dig up his black money.

A numbered account did away with that trouble: as long as one had the account number and password, anyone could operate it, but without the account number and password, no one could touch a single cent inside.

Young Dorsk did not know how much was in his father's numbered account, but he reckoned it could not be little. He dialed the Swiss bank's number, and following the voice prompts, entered the account number and password. The result astonished him: the account actually held only one hundred and thirty-eight euros.

Young Dorsk was greatly alarmed and hurriedly called the Swiss bank's customer service hotline to ask whether something had gone wrong with the system. After the service staff verified young Dorsk's account number and password, they informed him that a sum of money had been transferred out of the account a few days earlier—and the date and time of the transfer were precisely around the moment his father, Dorsk, had been killed.

Little Dorsk was instantly dumbfounded. He hurriedly inquired after the money's whereabouts, but unfortunately all he could trace was another anonymous account, with no way of learning who had opened it.

Of course, Little Dorsk was no fool. Connecting the timeline at once, he arrived at a horrifying conclusion: the man who had killed his father had, in the very act of murder, also drained the money from his father's account. Little Dorsk went berserk. Over thirty billion euros! He had already found the exact sum in the transfer records.

So Little Dorsk had no choice but to begin investigating the circumstances of his father's murder. But to his dismay, he found his inquiries blocked at every turn.

The local police, citing confidentiality pending the resolution of the case, refused to disclose a single detail. The crew of the Alice were even worse—they paid him no mind at all. Whenever he mentioned the name Dorsk, the staff looked at him with open contempt. Evidently his father's reputation had been poor indeed.

Still, from a few of his father's old unsavory cronies, Little Dorsk managed to glean something.

At the time of his father's murder, the only person his father had fallen out with was a Hong Kong starlet named Shu Ya. His father had wanted to bed her and been refused, and both sides had parted on very sour terms. Not long afterward, his father had been killed.

But Little Dorsk did not believe Shu Ya could have killed his father—she simply did not have the capacity. Those who died alongside his father included Eagle Temple of the Mingyue Group and several of his men, whereas the only ones who had boarded with Shu Ya were herself and her father, Shu Haikuo.

Little Dorsk studied the files on Shu Ya and Shu Haikuo in detail and concluded that the two were hardly likely suspects. There could have been no prior connection between them and his father at all. Europe and Asia were far apart, and his father's business had been confined to Europe; it had not yet expanded into Asia, and the collaboration with Eagle Temple had been no more than an experiment.

So there was no history between Shu Haikuo, Shu Ya, and his father. The conflict aboard the ship had arisen on the spot, and it had been nothing more than a simple quarrel. Little Dorsk did not think Shu Ya would have gone and killed his father afterward, and so he naturally ruled her out.

But having ruled out Shu Ya, Little Dorsk found himself in a dead end. The whole ship had been full of tycoons and celebrities. Many of them had disliked his father, true, but there had been no real clash of interests. Who on earth could have harbored such hatred for his father?

Could it have been an outsider? At this thought, Little Dorsk felt as though he had seized hold of something. That was it—everyone aboard had been tycoons and celebrities, and the likelihood of any of them committing murder was not great, especially on the Alice. Everyone knew the background of the ship's owner, Alice; to stir up trouble on that vessel, once exposed, would bring endless trouble down upon one's head.

Even if the police let the matter drop, Alice would never let the troublemaker off. The Alice had always been renowned for safety and serenity—how could Madame Alice tolerate anyone disrupting that?

Especially since Little Dorsk had vaguely heard certain things about Alice's background and the rumors surrounding her. Surely the others aboard could not have been ignorant of it either. And so his theory became plausible.

The time of his father's murder coincided exactly with the period when the Alice was docked at Henry Island. What if someone had slipped aboard during that stop to carry out an assassination?

It was not impossible. At this thought, Little Dorsk's head began to ache. If that were truly the case, the investigation would become a real nightmare.