Cicada Moving

Chapter 991 Secretly Obtaining Documents

In Suzuki Kantaro's mansion, the corridor separated from the banquet hall is extremely quiet, and the thick door panels block out all noise and music.

On the walls full of Western style, wall lamps every few meters emit faint light. The interlacing of light and dark makes the dark red carpet look particularly strange.

At this time, two guards passed by the "T"-shaped intersection at the end of the corridor. One of them stood there and raised his flashlight to shine, making sure there was nothing abnormal and then continued to patrol forward.

More than ten seconds later, a person jumped from the beam of the corridor ceiling. After the person landed, he rolled forward twice, relieving the impact of falling from a high place.

The thick carpet absorbed the noise from the other party. Under the dim light, the figure slowly raised his head and revealed his face. It was Sorge who was in the banquet hall just now.

No one would have thought that a reporter from the German "Frankfurter Zeitung" could possess such superb skills, which was no less impressive than the elite agents of the Second Department of the General Staff Headquarters.

No one knows that thousands of kilometers away in the mountain city of the Republic of China, a piece of intelligence about Sorge is quietly lying in the safe in the office of the deputy director of the Military Command Headquarters No. 29 in Luojiawan.

 Richard Sorge.

Born in Baku, Transcaucasia, Tsarist Russia in 1895, his father is German and his mother is Russian. In 1898, the family returned to Berlin.

In 1914, shortly after the outbreak of the European War, 19-year-old Sorge volunteered to join the German artillery unit. Two years later, he was seriously injured while fighting on the Western Front.

 In the years after the war, Sorge's whereabouts were uncertain. He settled in Frankfurt for a period of time, where he met many industrial and business people and established many useful contacts.

Afterwards, he completely disappeared in Germany. However, in 1928, he suddenly published a right-wing book called "New German Imperialism", which caused a small sensation in the Western world.

In 1929, Sorge joined a certain organization and obtained a German passport. He also obtained the title of special correspondent for the "Deutsche Grain Zeitung" and a contract to contribute to a sociological magazine.

 After this, Sorge came to the Republic of China and visited Shanghai and Northeast China successively. He stayed in these two places for a long time and had an in-depth understanding of the situation in the Republic of China.

In 1933, he met with the Japanese Ambassador to the United States in Washington and obtained a letter of introduction from him to meet with the Director of the Intelligence Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, preparing to enter Japan.

 In that year, Sorge arrived in Yokohama and began his career as a journalist. He often published articles related to the underground party, and gradually became a well-known expert on underground party issues.

As the relationship between Japan and Germany became closer and closer, many top Japanese figures became friends with him for the sake of win-win, allowing him to have access to important intelligence on Japan's military and political aspects.

This is Sorge's experience on the surface, and the information in the military safe only ends here. He seems to be a journalist and writer with some connections in Japan.

But in fact, Sorge was already a member of the Fourth Bureau of the Red Russian General Staff responsible for military intelligence in the late 1920s, and was directly under the command of Berzin, the director of the Fourth Bureau and the legendary Red Russian intelligence expert.

His specific task is to establish an intelligence network in Japan. Ever since Japan intervened in the 1920s to estrange the lives of Red Russia and accommodate the remnants of White Russia, Red Russia has regarded Japan as the most dangerous enemy in the East.

Coupled with the historical grievances between the two countries, it became an important task for the Red Russian intelligence agency to find out the trends of Japan's decision-makers. Knowing yourself and the enemy and being victorious in any battle was not only known to the people of the Republic of China.

 Before joining the job, Sorge received several years of training in secret penetration, radio detection, code deciphering, and operational techniques, and became a qualified intelligence officer.

It is worth mentioning that this fourth game has another name, which is the GRU, the Red Russian intelligence agency that is as famous as NK┴VD. Its motto is "Only the stars are out of reach."

Different from NK┴VD, the GRU is very good at using operations to obtain intelligence, its style is more "violent", and it also performs missions behind enemy lines, so it is very normal for Sorge to have such skills.

Looking back to Tokyo, Sorge squatted on the ground and listened carefully to the direction in which the two guards left. After a while, he stood up, straightened his collar, and walked calmly in the opposite direction.

He quickly recalled the internal structure of the Suzuki mansion in his mind, and kept walking up a staircase, heading towards Suzuki Kantaro's study on the second floor as quickly as possible.

As a close confidant of Tian Locust and the former commander of the combined fleet, Kantaro Suzuki has access to top-secret documents of the Japanese military. That is the purpose of his and Ozaki's visit today.

 Ever since the Saionji Public Security Bureau learned that Japanese high-level officials knew that Zhukov had become the commander of the 57th Army and had therefore changed the deployment of Japanese troops in the Far East, they had been looking for opportunities to obtain Japanese combat plans.

 But this level of strategic intelligence is only in the hands of a small number of people. Although Sorge has developed some intelligence agents in recent years, their status is too low, and they have worked hard for a long time and still achieved nothing.

As for those "friends" in high positions, such as Konoe Fumiya, they would not reveal such important information at all. Using the banquet to search Suzuki Kantaro's study became the only opportunity.

Since most of the servants of the Suzuki family were serving guests in the banquet hall at this time, and few people moved around in other places, Sorge escaped several waves of casual guards and successfully arrived in front of a beautifully decorated wooden door.

He pressed his body tightly against the door. He opened his arms and groped around the door frame to make sure there were no safety marks. He looked at the left and right sides cautiously and pulled out two metal needles from his sleeves. Perhaps because of confidence in the guards, or perhaps because he believed that no thief would dare to steal from the Suzuki family, Kantaro Suzuki's office door only had a pin lock.

The security of this kind of lock is very low. Just fix the keyhole and use a tool to change the length of the pins inside until all the pins of different lengths are aligned and the lock can be opened.

Sorge put the steel needle into the keyhole, locked the keyhole with one, and slowly pressed the pin with the other. In this way, he kept trying, and the pin lock was opened in a few seconds.

He gently pushed open the door. The well-maintained door shaft made no sound. After a few seconds, the quiet porch became empty, leaving only a faint moonlight.

 In a dark study room.

Sorge did not search for documents immediately. Instead, he used the cloth strips he had prepared to stuff the bottom of the door tightly to prevent the guards from seeing figures or lights through the door.

He then confirmed that the curtains were closed and the lights in the room could not be seen from the outside. Then he took out a flashlight from his pocket and turned it on, and carefully checked behind the door and under his feet.

 Obviously, the servant of the Suzuki family was very conscientious. The floor was spotless, not even a hair. Then he took off his leather shoes and carried them in his hands towards the desk on the other side of the room to avoid leaving footprints.

Walking on the cold floor, Sorge paid attention to the movement outside the door, lowered the flashlight light and observed the furnishings of the study, and soon came to the large desk.

 The order of intelligence collection has always been to start with the easier part and then the more difficult part, starting with the easiest part first, so that if the operation is interrupted, at least it can be ensured that it will not return in vain.

So, Sorge gave up the safe under the desk and the bookcase on the wall. He quickly memorized the placement of the items, put on gloves and quickly rummaged through the file boxes on the table.

 《Ministry of Finance Annual Financial Book》

 "Domestic Intelligence Sample"

 《Combined Fleet Training Summary》

 …

Sorge couldn't believe his eyes. Suzuki Kantaro just put the highly confidential documents on his desk like this. Is this a trap?

But there was no sound outside the door. Perhaps it was because the other party was used to this. He didn't have time to think too much. He suppressed the doubts in his heart and sped up the movements of his hands.

Just when he was rummaging through the last few documents, he suddenly saw a document bag labeled "extremely confidential" from the General Staff Headquarters.

 "Response to Conflict in the Far East"

Looking at the words on the document bag, Sorge calmed down, put the end of the flashlight in his mouth and bit it with his teeth. He picked up the document bag with both hands and turned it over. He immediately found that the seal on the bag had been opened.

He looked at his watch and found that seven or eight minutes had passed since he started taking action. He immediately carefully took out a stack of documents from the document bag and placed it on the table. He took the pocket watch in his outer pocket and pointed the hour hand at the third A page of documents was pressed down on the watch.

This is of course no ordinary pocket watch. This is a pocket camera made by the British in 1904. Although its structure is primitive, it is very reliable and its appearance can be camouflaged.

With a silent shutter, Sorge opened the documents one by one, then held the pocket watch tightly with both hands, taking pictures of all the contents above under the illumination of a flashlight.

While taking photos, he also verified the authenticity of the document, checking all the writing habits, professional titles, typewriter spacing, and seals in the document.

After making sure that all the details were consistent with the Japanese military documents he had seen elsewhere, Sorge finally relaxed and took less than a minute to photograph the documents and restore them to their original state.

After completing the most important task, he found that there was still time and the camera's 25 negatives had not been used up. Sorge opened another document and spread it on the table, raised the camera and pressed the shutter.

 Ten minutes passed quickly.

The banquet downstairs has come to an end. The guests are full of wine and food, and the atmosphere is getting more and more lively. Ozaki quietly glanced at his watch and stood up from his seat to join the crowd again.

Soon a conflict broke out in the crowd due to a collision. This time, there was no need to remind the crowd. The surrounding guards immediately surrounded them and separated the troublemakers.

Hashifu Ichiro heard the sound and looked around, and immediately saw Ozaki and Sorge among the onlookers as if nothing had happened. He lowered his head and whispered a few words to Suzuki Sonoko before striding towards the small door.

When order was restored in the banquet hall, he was already standing in the toilet of Suzuki Kantaro's study, watching the "extremely secret" document turn into a pile of ashes in the toilet, and then pulled the drawstring of the water tank, completely eliminating the possibility of false information. The last trace.