Chapter 11 — Never Blame a Janitor

Dac Long couldn't sleep that night. He sat in the darkness of the living room, his phone on the table with the text message still displayed on the screen, pale blue light illuminating his tense face. Eight years of silence, eight years of careful attention to every smallest detail, yet with just one short text message, all his efforts to hide it seemed to have become meaningless.

He immediately called Ho Trong Nhan and reread the message content and phone number sent. Less than an hour later, Ho Trong Nhan called back, his voice heavy with anxiety.

"That phone number is a junk SIM card, the owner cannot be traced directly," he said. "But I checked the broadcast location of the nearest tower when the message was sent. It was within a five hundred meter radius of Tang Phat Group headquarters."

Dac Long closed his eyes and took a deep breath to stay calm. What he feared the most had finally come true: Tang Bach Nguyen knew, or at least suspected with almost certainty, that the school guard named Tran Van Phuc was the Champa Dac Long he once believed had completely disappeared from life.

"What did he text me for?" Dac Long wondered aloud, although that question was more for himself than for Ho Trong Nhan. "If he really wanted to harm me, he could have done it directly without warning."

"Maybe it was a test," Ho Trong Nhan analyzed, his voice cautious. "He wants to see your reaction, wants to confirm for sure before taking the next action. Or..." he hesitated for a moment, "...he wants to show you that he knows, to put psychological pressure, forcing you to reveal yourself or withdraw yourself before he needs to act."

Both theories make Dac Long shudder. He remembered the entire chain of events over the past two years since Khai Phong transferred to the same school and class as his daughter - a coincidence that now, in the new light of the information he had just collected, could no longer be considered a coincidence. He recalls how the bullying started with small things and gradually escalated, right around the time when he recently began to show signs of abnormality in his daily life — like the night he had to react quickly to save his child from a lake in front of dozens of witnesses, revealing skills that a normal security guard could not have.

A terrifying possibility gradually formed clearly in his mind: was the entire bullying incident, from the initial isolation games to the dangerous drug incident at the picnic, all part of Tang Bach Nguyen's deliberate plan to provoke and put enough pressure to force the "mysterious guardian" to react in a way that revealed his true identity? If that's true, then his son, despite his truly childish jealousy towards Anh Thu, has also unintentionally — or perhaps partly intentionally following his father's tacit guidance — become the perfect tool for a much larger conspiracy.

The next morning, Dac Long came to see Ho Trong Nhan earlier than usual, bringing with him all his deductions. The two spent hours reviewing every single detail of the past eight years of surveillance records, looking for any sign that could confirm or refute this terrifying theory.

"I found something remarkable," Ho Trong Nhan said, pointing to a note in an old file. "Two and a half years ago, right before Khai Phong transferred to Sunrise Saigon School, there was an unusual personnel change in the school's admissions department - three old admissions staff all quit within a month, replaced by new people who I later discovered were indirectly connected, through family relationships, to one of Tang Phat Group's subsidiaries." He turned to the next page. "But don't think for a moment that this is just targeting you. I've had people check out four other international schools with similar tuition fees, where the children of big businessmen often send their children anonymously - all four have at least one admissions officer or accountant with similar traces. In other words, he spread people around almost every school that could be where a child with a hidden identity studied, waiting for the day to have a name to compare, without knowing for sure where he was for two and a half years. over."

Dac Long tightened his grip on the armrest of the chair, a cold current running down his spine and spreading down to his fingertips. "So that means, until recently, he never knew I was here. He just spread his net everywhere, waiting for a matching name to fall into his hands."

"That's right," Ho Trong Nhan nodded heavily. "And that name only really fell into his hands the night Khai Phong accidentally mentioned 'a good or classy kid' during a family meal. From that moment, he only needed to look up the admission records that his people had access to two and a half years ago, and immediately matched the name Tran Van Phuc with the list of suspects. The fact that Khai Phong was in the same class as Thu was still a coincidence - but the network that helped him realize that coincidence was just a coincidence. in one night, it's not random at all."

That answer did not make the cold feeling in Dac Long's body ease, but it tightened even more - not fear for himself, but for the safety of his daughter, who had accidentally become a pawn in a cruel game of chess that she was completely unaware of. For the past two years, while he still believed that he had kept his daughter absolutely safe behind a veil of false identity, in reality, she had lived within the reach of a surveillance network spread throughout schools like this, just waiting for the slightest loophole to tighten.

"We must act now," Dac Long said, his voice more determined than ever. "I can't let Thu continue to go to school in such a dangerous situation anymore. But if I suddenly let her leave school or change schools, it will make Tang Bach Nguyen even more certain of his suspicions, and may push him to take more drastic action before I can fully prepare."

"So what are you going to do?" Ho Trong Nhan asked, his eyes full of worry.

Dac Long was silent for a long time, thinking clearly according to the instincts of a strategist who had to consider every move in the most life-or-death situations of the marketplace. "I will increase the security around you discreetly, without revealing it. At the same time, I need you to speed up the verification of all new employees in the school who have contact with Tang Phat, and I need to know exactly what Tang Bach Nguyen is planning next. If he knows I'm still alive, he won't sit still and wait. We have to be one step ahead of him, even if it's just a small step."

That afternoon, while standing at the school gate, observing students leaving school, Dac Long saw Anh Thu walking out with Dieu Khanh, smiling and talking happily as if there was nothing worrying lurking around him. He tried to keep a calm face, but in his heart, an iron determination was gradually forming: no matter what the cost, even if he had to face the monster that destroyed his life sooner than expected, he would not let anyone, including Tang Bach Nguyen himself with all the power and assets in his hands, have the opportunity to touch his daughter again.

When Anh Thu ran up, smiling a familiar smile, Dac Long bent down to pat his daughter's head, his eyes softened for that brief moment, but right behind his daughter, when she was not looking, his eyes became sharp again, scanning a vigilant circle around the schoolyard, remembering every strange face, every car parked unusually near the gate - a habit he knew he would have to maintain more strictly than ever, until this war came to its final end.

That afternoon, after bringing his daughter home safely, Dac Long took advantage of Anh Thu's bath time to make another important phone call to principal Minh Chau, tactfully asking about the recruitment process for new staff in the last two years, using the excuse of wanting to learn more because "heard there were some changes in the school team". Minh Chau, without any doubt, impartially recounted that there had indeed been a change in personnel in the admissions office more than two years ago, due to "financial pressure forcing the school to cut some positions and recruit new people at a more reasonable cost", and at the same time said that the cost of operating the new admission office was partly indirectly supported through an educational sponsorship from Tang Phat Group itself - something she had never thought was suspicious before, because many large corporations often sponsor it. international schools to build brand image.

That conversation, although brief, confirmed another important piece in the picture that Dac Long is gradually completing. He hung up the phone and sat quietly in the darkness of the living room for a long time, feeling as if each layer of safety that he had painstakingly built for eight years was being peeled away little by little, revealing a naked truth: perhaps, from the first days he brought his daughter to this school, believing that it was the safest place where his hidden influence could still reach, his enemy had silently spread a much larger net, waiting for the right moment to tighten.

He looked into the bathroom, where the steady sound of running water still echoed, where his daughter was carefreely enjoying a normal evening like thousands of other evenings in her life, completely unaware of the storm that was silently gathering on the horizon. Dac Long clenched his hands, telling himself that no matter how big that net was, no matter how sophisticated and cruel the enemy was, he would find a way to tear it apart, with the same hands that once built an empire, before it had a chance to tighten its grip on the people he loved most.