The Seven-Hundred-Million-Dollar Trick - Chapter 4

The others gathered around the van. Voices murmured outside the window.

“Five of us. How do we split it? First come, first served?”

Someone snorted. “First come, my ass. I’m a professional boxer. Anyone wants to try taking it, be my guest. I’ll fucking kill you.”

“You—you might be good, but you can’t take all four of us!”

“Stop arguing. Let’s work something out.”

“Oh, shut up!” the last man snapped impatiently. He was young. “Listen to me. I have a solution.”

“What solution?”

The young man looked them over and sneered.

“Know who I am? If not, let me introduce myself. Shang Yun. Son of the chairman of Yundun Group.”

“You want the coin. Have you thought about whether you can hold on to it?”

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll end up like him?”

“It’s simple. I take the coin. Each of you gets a check for ten million yuan. Then we all go home and pretend we never met. Deal?”

The others exchanged looks. After a long silence, someone said shakily, “Deal!”

“Me too!”

Pens scratched across checks as they rushed to agree.

Satisfied, all five walked around to the back and opened the cargo doors together.

Then they froze.

The compartment was empty. There was nobody inside.

I closed the monitoring app and the dashcam feed went dark.

I couldn’t imagine the arguments that would erupt once they realized there was no coin. How mad they would become.

How they would take it out on Zhao Cheng.

I didn’t dare watch. I didn’t want to.

The truth was, this was a two-man trick.

A13. Its proper name was the Empty Carriage.

The principle couldn’t have been simpler. Before parking, Zhao Cheng had moved a manhole cover while nobody was looking.

The van was modified, with a trapdoor in the cargo floor. The moment I climbed in, I dropped straight out through it.

Once underground, I slid the manhole cover back into place.

Any magic enthusiast watching would have recognized that old, simple trick instantly.

Luckily, not many people cared about magic anymore.

I smiled and whistled as I walked through the sewers.

For historical reasons, the city had an unusual sewer system: German-style tunnels built a century ago, five meters wide and two meters high. An underground corridor.

Zhao Cheng and I had been down here countless times while practicing the trick. We knew the layout by heart.

On the next street, there was a vending machine in a camera blind spot. After midnight, I could go up for drinking water and food.

The Empty Carriage actually had one final step.

Once the assistant had sent everyone looking in the wrong direction, the magician had to appear somewhere utterly unexpected. That was what made the illusion spectacular, what drew gasps from the audience.

I planned to reappear on the seventh day.

Until then, I would stay underground.

Surely nothing could go wrong this time?