Chapter 2 — Never Blame a Janitor

The yellowed business card in the wooden box was just a piece of stiff paper, but every time he touched it, Dac Long felt himself falling freely back to a morning eight years ago - the last morning he was himself before the world collapsed.

At that time, Chiem Dac Long was a name that was not unfamiliar to anyone who followed Saigon's business world. Thirty-five years old, Chairman of the Board of Directors and founder of Hac Thinh Group, he was known by the media as "the man who built an empire from nothing" - from a young construction engineer who started out with a small design studio with only four employees, he had turned Hac Thinh into a multi-industry corporation with more than five thousand employees, activities ranging from real estate, construction to technology and finance.

The person who stood by him from the most difficult early days was none other than Tang Bach Nguyen, his college friend in the same Construction course, the person he trusted so much that he gave him the position of Vice President and direct manager of the group's financial sector. For twelve years, Tang Bach Nguyen had never made Dac Long suspicious even once. In every important meeting, he was always the one sitting to the right of Dac Long. In every major decision, his opinion was always listened to first. Dac Long once told his wife, Dinh Thao Ngan, that if there was one person in the world he could give his life to, it was Tang Bach Nguyen.

That statement, later, became the most expensive mistake of his life.

It all started with a big deal - Hac Thinh is in the process of negotiating to buy a chain of commercial real estate in Singapore, a deal worth nearly VND 2 trillion that could bring the group to the regional level. Dac Long put all his effort into flying to Singapore continuously for three months to directly negotiate and hand over full domestic management authority to Tang Bach Nguyen. That was the time when, as Dac Long later learned, Tang Bach Nguyen secretly colluded with three other major shareholders and a partner bank to orchestrate a sophisticated plan to usurp complete control of the corporation.

That plan is implemented in three steps. As a first step, Tang Bach Nguyen forged a Board of Directors resolution, using the meticulously copied signatures of absent members, through a huge loan with unfavorable interest rates from the colluding partner bank, pushing Hac Thinh's cash flow into a state of artificial stress. In the second step, he leaked false information about the group's financial situation to the press, causing internal stock prices to plummet and small partners to panic and withdraw capital. In the final step, and also the cruelest step, he took advantage of the crisis he created to convince — or rather force — Dac Long to sign an agreement to transfer the majority of shares to a new group of investors, with the promise that it would only be a temporary measure to save the company from collapse.

Dac Long, at that time exhausted by the pressure of the Singapore deal, had absolute trust in his best friend and signed that fateful agreement on the night of the flight home, without having time to carefully check each clause. Only three days later, he discovered that the "new group of investors" were actually just shell companies controlled by Tang Bach Nguyen himself. He was deprived of control of the corporation he built with his own hands by his best friend, legally on paper, unable to sue, irreversible.

But that's still not the worst.

The next night, when Dac Long was still trying to contact the lawyers to find a way to save the situation, a group of strangers, hired by Tang Bach Nguyen in the name of "protecting company assets according to the new resolution", broke into his family's private villa in Thao Dien under the pretext of sealing the business assets mortgaged in the agreement. Dinh Thao Ngan, who was home alone at the time with Bao Tran - an eight-year-old girl at that time - tried to prevent the group of people from breaking into her daughter's bedroom, where some important documents that Dac Long told his wife to keep carefully were kept.

During the struggle at the top of the stairs, Thao Ngan was pushed hard by one of the intruders. She fell from the second floor to the main lobby, her head hitting the marble steps, a dry sound that the butler later said he heard so clearly that he never forgot it, even though he was standing nearly twenty meters away. When Dac Long, who was on his way home after the housekeeper's panicked call, arrived, the main door was still wide open, the hall light was smashed, and his wife lay motionless at the foot of the stairs, a pool of dark blood slowly spreading on the white marble floor that he and his wife had personally purchased in Italy. Bao Tran, an eight-year-old girl at that time, was trembling in the corner of the upstairs wardrobe, her hands covering her mouth tightly to keep from letting out any sobs, just as her mother had told her in the last second before being pushed down.

Thao Ngan was taken to the emergency room that night but her brain injury was too serious. She was in a coma for three days before passing away in the hospital bed, her hand still holding Dac Long's hand tightly until the last moment. He will never forget his wife's last look, a look without resentment, only a silent message: protect the children.

Thao Ngan's death was concluded by the media and police investigation to be an unfortunate accident during "a clash with the group protecting corporate assets in accordance with legal procedures". No one was prosecuted for criminal liability, because on paper, everything was legal — from the resolution to transfer shares to the sealing of assets. Tang Bach Nguyen, at Thao Ngan's funeral, even stood up to give an emotional speech, calling it "the biggest loss in my career", causing Dac Long, who was almost petrified with pain, to muster all his last strength not to rush to strangle the man who killed his wife right in the middle of the crowd.

After the funeral, Dac Long spent a whole week just sitting in his old office, now half sealed, looking at every document and every piece of evidence he could find. He realized a cruel truth: Tang Bach Nguyen had been preparing this plan not for a few months, but possibly for many years. All legal loopholes had been closed. Every witness who could have testified for him had been bribed or threatened. The three shareholders who colluded with Tang Bach Nguyen now hold the majority of votes. He, who was once the head of an empire, was now left with only a name smeared in the media as "a weak leader who caused the company to fall into crisis", and a meager compensation from the transfer agreement, enough to live but not enough to fight.

What Dac Long fears most is not the loss of property, nor the loss of honor. It was an anonymous text message he received exactly one week after his wife's funeral, with just one sentence: "The baby is still there. Don't do anything foolish if you still want it to live." He never found out who sent that message, but he clearly understood the message behind it. How far was Tang Bach Nguyen, or those behind him, willing to go to ensure Dac Long never had a chance to reclaim what was lost.

That night, Dac Long sat beside his daughter's bed, watched Bao Tran sleep soundly after many nights of crying for his mother, and made the most difficult decision of his life. He will disappear. Not running away in fear, but a calculated retreat, a deliberate sacrifice. He contacted the only close friend he could still trust absolutely - Ho Trong Nhan, the former head bodyguard who had followed him since the early days of his career - and lawyer Lam Gia Bach, a college classmate who had repeatedly warned him about Tang Bach Nguyen but was never listened to.

The plan was drawn up in absolute secrecy. Dac Long officially announced his complete withdrawal from the business world due to mental health reasons after his wife's death, sold the remaining shares at a cheap price to an intermediary investment fund secretly controlled by Lam Gia Bach, and then left the Thao Dien villa with his daughter forever. He changed his daughter's name from Chiem Bao Tran to Le Anh Thu, using legal documents obtained through an old acquaintance in the law industry, with the legitimate reason of protecting minors from the risk of being kidnapped for ransom after a family incident. He himself also changed his name to Tran Van Phuc, re-learned the skills of a normal worker from scratch, applied to work as a security guard at a school that he, under another legal intermediary, had secretly contributed capital to build many years ago - the only place he still retained some influence to ensure absolute safety for his daughter.

During the next eight years, Ho Trong Nhan quietly ran a small security company as a cover, essentially to collect every piece of evidence about the old conspiracy — unusual bank transactions, forged signatures, recorded calls from old witnesses ready to testify when the time came. Lawyer Lam Gia Bach quietly built legal documents, calculating every step so that one day he could turn the entire case over without revealing that Dac Long was still alive. As for Dac Long, every night after his daughter fell asleep, he still spent hours re-reading every document and every financial report of the Tang Phat Group that Tang Bach Nguyen built from his own stolen assets, waiting for the day when there would be enough evidence and enough strength to reclaim everything.

But above all calculations, all secret revenge plans, the most important thing to Dac Long is always the safety of his daughter. He promised Thao Ngan, in his last moments at his hospital bed, that he would protect his child at all costs, even at the cost of giving up himself. For eight years, he kept that promise, never once wavering, never once revealing a loophole, even though his heart still smoldered with a fire of revenge that never went out.

But the latest danger threatening the daughter he tries so hard to protect, turns out, is no longer in the past eight years ago. It's sitting right in his daughter's classroom every day, with the surname Tang, and calls out to the person who took everything from him with one word - three.