Chapter 13 — Profile 9:17

The kraft paper envelope and three jagged photos weighed like a heavy block of lead on Le Nhu Van's heart in the days after the Medal award ceremony. During the day, she still goes to Trinh Vu's lawyer's office to work, still smiles gratefully every time he asks, still plays the role of a young girl who has just escaped the darkness of injustice. But when night fell, in her small rented room, Van spread those photos out under the yellow light, staring at Vu's mysterious smile and the suitcase containing the original tapes.

She didn't dare ask Vu directly. If what she speculated was true, pulling the trigger at this time would be tantamount to committing suicide. A person capable of setting a perfect trap to bring down a powerful billionaire like Do Trong Thang is definitely not someone an undergraduate law student can confront head-on. Van chose to stay silent and silently observe.

Three months after the first instance trial, the aftershocks of the Tan Cang Bridge collapse and the collapse of Dinh Phat Group created a strong wave of apparatus cleansing from the Central Government. A "Steering Committee for Restructuring the Acceptance Process of National Key Projects" was urgently established in Ho Chi Minh City, bringing together leading experts in construction and legislation.

And one thing that surprised Van the most: Trinh Vu, thanks to his explosive reputation after overthrowing Do Trong Thang, was specially appointed as Senior Legal Advisor to this Steering Committee. From a private lawyer specializing in small civil cases, Vu stepped onto the stage of those with the right to decide the fate of trillion-dollar mega-projects.

"This is a great opportunity to clean up the built environment, Van," Vu told her one morning as he was packing up his belongings to move into his new office at the Steering Committee headquarters. "I've nominated you to be my intern secretary at the Steering Committee. Would you like to come with me?"

Van gently bit her lip, trying to hide her wariness behind her innocent eyes. "It is always an honor for me to work with you, lawyer Vu."

The Steering Committee headquarters is located in a majestic administrative building right in the center of District 1. Van's job is to arrange schedules, classify bids and prepare documents for meetings. This position gave her a great opportunity to access Vu's personal workspace.

One Friday evening, when everyone had gone home, Van made an excuse for forgetting an important document and returned to the building. Using the backup key card that Vu gave her, Van entered the private office of the senior legal advisor.

The room was in darkness, with only glimmers of light from high-pressure street lights shining in through the glass window. Van turned on the small flashlight and walked towards Vu's giant oak desk. The computer was turned off, but she knew Vu had a habit of backing up all important data to a tiny portable hard drive hidden at the bottom of the third drawer - a detail she accidentally discovered during her days working at her old law office.

Van carefully pulled the drawer out, using her fingernails to pry off the black felt lining. Just as she expected, a silver USB hard drive as small as a thumb lay neatly in the corner. She quickly plugged it into the laptop she brought with her.

Hard drive required password. Van was sweating profusely. She tried Vu's date of birth, the date the law office was founded, and even the date the Tan Cang case was prosecuted, but all returned errors. In the midst of despair, Van suddenly remembered a detail. During the sleepless nights together solving cases, Vu once told her: "The fairest thing in this world is not the law, but death. It treats everyone equally."

Van trembled and tried typing the phrase "JusticeIsDeath" into the password box.

A small "beep" sounded. A row of yellow folders appears on the screen. Van's heart was pounding as if it wanted to jump out of her chest. She didn't have time to look at the details, just hastily copied all the data with a capacity of more than 10GB to her computer, then pulled the USB back to its original place, wiped off her fingerprints and hurriedly left the building like a ghost.

The next morning, Van went to journalist Hoang Minh's messy apartment. The reporter was still sleepy, holding a cold cup of coffee when he opened the door for her.

"Van? Why did you come to find me this early in the morning?" Minh yawned, making way for her to enter.

Van placed the laptop on the table, her expression so serious that it made Minh wake up completely. "Mr. Minh, do you know anyone who understands cryptography and data security? I have some documents... very sensitive, which were double-layer encrypted after I copied them to my computer."

Minh raised his eyebrows, his journalistic instincts immediately arose. "Where did you get this? Wait, don't tell me. The fewer people who know the origin, the better. I have a cousin who works as a cybersecurity engineer for an international bank, he's a genuine white hat hacker. Let me call him."

Two hours later, Minh's cousin named Dat showed up. After connecting Van's laptop to his personal decoding system, Dat spent more than five hours straining his eyes working with long rows of binary codes on the black screen.

"The person who set the password for these documents is not an amateur," Dat mumbled while cracking his knuckles. "It uses the AES-256 encryption algorithm combined with a rotating key sequence. Without a supercomputer, a normal person could spend their whole life decoding it."

"But can you open it?" Minh asked impatiently.

Dat smirked complacently, hitting the Enter key hard. "Of course. It's done. Enjoy reading, you two." Dat packed his things and quickly left, leaving Minh and Van sitting facing the screen displaying hundreds of document files, tables and audio recordings.

Van clicked on a folder named "Nam Huong Project". Her eyes widened when she saw detailed planning drawings of a giant reclamation urban area, a project ten times larger than Dang Tuan's Blue Horizon resort, expected to swallow the entire southern stretch of the city's coastline.

"What is this?" Minh leaned forward and read the disbursement numbers of hundreds of thousands of billions of dong recorded on the screen. "This is a never-before-announced project! Who is behind this terrible project?"

Van opened another audio file. An online meeting is recorded. Trinh Vu's familiar voice rang out clearly:

"Dear gentlemen of the Council, Do Trong Thang has become too wild and difficult to control. The fact that he caused the collapse of the Tan Cang scaffolding for personal gain is a stupid act, attract too much government attention. Our plan is to use engineer Le Van Sang's daughter as a pawn to turn the case around. Under the banner of reclaiming justice, we will borrow the hands of C03 to wipe out the factions of Do Trong Thang and Dang Tuan. When Dinh Phat Group collapses, a power vacuum in the real estate market will open up. That's when we put 'Project Nam Huong' in place, through a new acceptance process that I will personally restructure from the inside out."

Another voice, hoarse and with a foreign accent, replied: "Good job, Vu. Has bodyguard Tung handed over the original tape?"

"Received, sir. Tung will be given a new identity in Canada. The original tape has been destroyed. What C03 used to accuse Thang was just a copy edited by us ourselves, but perfect enough to fool Vietnamese criminal technicians."

The recording ends. The silence in Hoang Minh's motel room became so scary that you could hear the sound of your heart pounding.

Minh turned pale and put his head down on his hands. “Oh my god… We were taken advantage of. From beginning to end, we are just puppets in a much larger game."

Van sat quietly, her eyes dry with no tears left to fall. The pain of being betrayed had surpassed the limits of emotions, giving way to a terrifying coldness that was freezing every cell in her body. Trinh Vu is not a knight fighting for justice. He is a high-ranking "cleaner" working for "The Council" - a transnational financial crime organization that manipulates large corporations from the shadows.

They orchestrated Do Trong Thang's death, not because of justice for Le Van Sang, but because Thang had become a mad dog who had to be destroyed to clear the way for other trillion-dollar deals.

"What will you do now, Van?" Minh asked worriedly, holding her shoulder. "If Vu finds out that you touched his computer, he will kill you mercilessly. He's a demon in human form!"

Van slowly closed the laptop screen, looking straight ahead, an unprecedented steely gaze. "Winning is just a small link. The real enemy who killed my father, who destroyed this country, is the 'Council' and that hypocritical lawyer. I won't give up, Minh. I will bring down this rotten system."