The British Embassy in Washington D.C. was an island of quiet, dignified civility in the heart of the boisterous American capital. Within its most secure, soundproofed chamber—a room paneled in dark English oak and smelling of old leather and beeswax—a crisis was unfolding. Sir Mortimer Durand, the British Ambassador, a man whose long and distinguished career had been built on caution and protocol, looked as if he had just seen a ghost.
On the polished table between him and his unexpected guest lay a single, multi-page letter. It was written on the stationery of a fine American hotel, but its contents were pure dynamite, enough to shatter alliances and redraw the map of the Great Game.
"My God, Abernathy," Durand whispered, his voice hoarse. "If this is genuine… if even half of it is true… it changes everything."
Michael Abernathy, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, said nothing. He had taken the first and fastest steamer from Liverpool the moment the ambassador's frantic, coded telegram had arrived, the journey a blur of coal smoke and churning anxiety. He had been in Washington for less than an hour, and he was now staring at the most audacious, dangerous, and tempting intelligence proposal of his entire career. He picked up the letter, its heavy, watermarked paper cool to the touch, and read it for the third time.
The words of Yuan Shikai, a man he had only known as a name in a file, seemed to rise from the page with a cold, calculating intelligence that was both repellent and deeply seductive. The partial confession of his secret war, framed as a patriotic act. The clear, precise analysis of the American blackmail attempt. And then, the offer. The crown jewels. Verifiable intelligence on the Emperor's supernatural power. An inside report on the "heretic" general, Meng Tian. It was a masterstroke of treasonous statecraft.
"It could be a trap," Durand fretted, pacing the small room. "An elaborate fabrication. Perhaps even a shared American-Chinese plot to lure us in, to expose our methods. Yuan Shikai is known to be a creature of immense cunning."
Abernathy, the spymaster, saw it with a different, colder clarity. He connected the letter's contents to the web of secrets he already possessed. He thought of the Prometheus data the Americans had shared, the wild theories about the Emperor causing Krakatoa. He thought of the bizarre, worldwide "tremor" event, the energy spike in Shanghai that had been detected by his own instruments. He thought of his "second dragon" theory, the sympathetic resonance that had appeared directly over Meng Tian's position in Siberia. Yuan's letter was not a random anomaly. It was the missing piece. It was the Rosetta Stone that could translate all the terrifying, supernatural nonsense into a coherent, strategic language.
"No, Mortimer," Abernathy said, his voice quiet but firm. "This is not a trap. A man this powerful does not fabricate a story that makes him look this weak. This is an act of supreme, desperate self-interest. Yuan Shikai is a drowning man, and he is offering us the key to his kingdom in exchange for a lifeline."
But it was the subtext of the letter, the clear implication of American duplicity, that truly ignited Abernathy's cold fury. The Americans. His allies. His partners in the top-secret Project Chimera. He now saw their actions in a new, harsh light. They had captured Corporal Riley. And what had they done with this shared asset? They had hidden him. They had used him, secretly and unilaterally, to blackmail Yuan Shikai into a private deal—an exclusive industrial contract for the richest undeveloped territory in Asia. They had used the intelligence that the British had helped them gather to stab their allies in the back and lock them out of Manchuria.
"Roosevelt isn't our partner in this," Abernathy said, his voice tight with a controlled rage. "He is our rival, as he has always been. He has used us. He has used Project Chimera as a tool to advance America's own imperial ambitions at our expense. He tried to lock us out of China. This letter," he tapped the pages with his finger, "is our key to kick the damned door back down."
Durand looked aghast. "But to actively conspire with a known traitor against our primary ally… the risk is immense. If this were ever exposed…"
"The risk of doing nothing is greater," Abernathy countered, his mind now racing, the strategic possibilities unfolding before him. "We are in a new age, Mortimer. The old rules of diplomacy are dying. We are facing a supernatural entity on the throne of China, a man who can seemingly alter reality with a thought. The Americans' approach is to clumsily blackmail his servants. It's a fool's errand. This… this is a chance to understand the master himself. To get inside. To find a weakness in the god, not just in the courtiers."
The decision was made. The cold, pragmatic logic of the Great Game superseded any notion of loyalty to their brash American cousins. They would accept Yuan's offer. They would betray their allies. They would dance with the devil to get a foothold in a game whose stakes were the future of the entire world.
Abernathy sat at the ambassador's desk and began to draft a reply. It was a work of art in the language of espionage, a message of acceptance that contained not a single affirmative word. It spoke of a "shared interest in regional stability" and a "willingness to open a discreet channel for the exchange of information vital to that stability."
Then, he added their first demand, the price of their partnership, a test of Yuan Shikai's good faith. He wrote that his government was particularly concerned about the "destabilizing influence of certain rogue military elements within the Qing command structure." As a sign of their mutual interest in containing such threats, they would require a preliminary intelligence sample. They wanted a detailed report on the "heretical and unorthodox" battlefield tactics of General Meng Tian. They wanted any evidence, however speculative, that Yuan possessed regarding the General's own… "unusual strategic intuition."
He sealed the coded message in a diplomatic pouch. It would be delivered to Yuan Shikai's hotel by a low-level, deniable agent.
Abernathy stood and looked out the grand embassy window, his gaze falling upon the distant, white dome of the Capitol Building. The formal alliance of Project Chimera was dead. He had just given the order to begin a new, far more dangerous secret partnership, a partnership with a traitor, aimed at both his primary adversary, the Emperor, and his primary ally, the United States.
"Roosevelt wanted to play a game of whispers," Abernathy murmured to himself, a cold, thin smile on his lips. "Let's see how he likes it when we start screaming in his ear."
He was no longer just a spy trying to defend the British Empire from a strange new threat. He was now an active player in the game of controlling it, and the Emperor's most treacherous minister was about to become his most valuable, and most dangerous, pawn.