louisehourcade Chapter 720 Preparing to Find Another Way Out!
Chapter 720 Preparing to Find Another Way Out!
Rachel's interrogation room was at the very back.
Unlike Michael's disheveled state, this room was clean and almost quiet. Rachel had changed into dry clothes, and her wounds had been simply treated; a small dressing covered the bruise on her forehead. He sat upright, his hands cuffed to the table ring, having taken a couple of sips of water, even the paper cup was neatly arranged. He seemed not there to be questioned, but rather to sit in on a briefing that had little to do with him.
When Lynn went in, he glanced up, his gaze so calm it was irritating.
“I thought you would look at the box first,” Rachel said.
“I’ve seen it.” Lynn sat down opposite him.
"Then you should understand that catching me doesn't mean you've already won."
"Whether we win or not is another matter," Lynn said. "Let's talk about you first."
Rachel smiled faintly: "I have nothing to say."
Jason leaned against the wall, his voice low: "Then I'll explain it for you. You used legal counsel and ethical reviews as a shell to create a hidden transfer chain for several foundations and private research facilities. The gray box in the bank doesn't store money, it stores indexes. Adrian finds you buildings, mezzanines, and old interfaces; Leon is in charge of paving the way and dismantling the delivery; Ada and Derek are in charge of closing the deal, monitoring people, and eliminating the situation; people like Michael and Helen buy you time within the system. You don't directly touch most of the samples, nor do you directly sign the final acceptance, so you think you're always half a step away."
Rachel's expression remained almost unchanged after hearing this.
“That sounds pretty complete,” he said.
“We’re missing just one piece,” Lynn said. “Who’s the buyer?”
Rachel didn't answer.
Lynn pushed a freshly printed scan in front of him.
That's a partial original text recovered after the metal slice and decoding board were initially aligned. There's a short internal workflow note above:
"Secondary screening targets are stratified by availability; high-fidelity samples are prioritized for transfer to St. Alban; unstable targets are transferred to North Port; the remainder are sent to Green Ark; eliminated targets are not returned to the database."
Below that is a line of handwritten numerical annotations, the corresponding permission abbreviation being "RW".
Rachel glanced down for a second.
“Your handwriting is quite beautiful,” Jason said.
“That’s not my handwriting,” Rachel said.
“But that’s within your authority,” Lynn said.
Rachel was silent for two seconds, then suddenly laughed: "The most interesting thing about you guys is that even though you've already seen the most disgusting part, you still want to keep scrolling down. Do you really think knowing who's at the end will make it easier to sleep tonight?"
“I wasn’t planning on sleeping tonight anyway,” Jason said.
Lynn didn't respond to that sentence, but simply pushed the second picture over.
This time it wasn't a scanned copy, but a list for comparison.
This isn't a complete list, but rather a patchwork of overlapping entries pieced together from multiple shell companies, research funds, medical logistics, and unusual referral records. The three organizations highlighted above are: St. Alban Biological Repair Center, Beigang Behavioral Rehabilitation Program, and Green Ark Genetic Adaptation Fund.
Judging from the names, they are all respectable enough to appear on the sponsorship wall of a charity gala.
“St. Alban is a private, high-end rehabilitation project,” Lynn said. “North Port is ostensibly about behavioral rehabilitation and stress research, while Green Ark is about genetic matching and aid for children with congenital abnormalities. But their joint funding structure ultimately leads to the same offshore trust. And going back further, there are two joint guarantors, one of whom is dead and the other is on the run.”
Rachel's face finally tightened slightly.
“You guys translated it faster than I expected,” he said.
“Because you’re too confident,” Lynn said. “You think that with the gray box dismantled, even if someone digs up the vault, they won’t be able to read it. You also think that even if things go wrong today, the execution team like Leon and Aida will at most only reach you one level. But you’ve forgotten that what people like you fear most is not betrayal from those below, but that those above will run away faster than you.”
Rachel looked at him without saying a word.
Lynn leaned forward slightly, his tone still flat: "You didn't intend to hold onto that room on the Upper East Side. Derek, Michael, and even yourself, were all trying to buy the last bit of time for the person who should really disappear to leave. Right?"
Rachel's eyes flickered slightly.
“So the buyer isn’t the end point,” Lynn said. “The end point is the person who sets the screening rules.”
The room was quiet for a few seconds.
Jason stood by the wall and suddenly spoke up: "Let me guess, is it that person who runs a charity foundation under his name? The one who loves to say 'give abnormal people more dignified choices' but actually stratifies people according to their stability, malleability, and exploitability? The 'inspectors' you talk about aren't checking whether something is real or fake; they're checking whether a person is still worth keeping."
Rachel slowly looked at him.
That one glance, so light, was enough.
Lynn didn't wait for him to put on that calm expression again, and directly placed the third document on the table.
“Adrian left a backup before he died,” he said. “He didn’t give it to the police, nor to any of you. He split it into two parts: one in a grey box, and the other hidden in the redundancy of his old interface’s engineering records. The tech team retrieved that part at noon today. There was a short audio summary in it, just one sentence—'Don’t make me pave the way for “her” anymore, this building isn’t for her to swallow people.'”
This time, a crack finally appeared on Rachel's face.
Very detailed, but very real.
Lynn stared at him: "Who is 'she'?"
Rachel remained silent.
“It’s okay if you don’t tell me,” Lynn continued, “because the person you really want to protect, after we matched the box with the slice, only has one most plausible name left.”
He turned over the last page of the document.
It was a publicly available identity document, accompanied by a photo from a charity gala.
The woman in the photo, dressed in a very simple dark dress, smiles restrainedly, standing among a group of foundation directors and academic advisors, appears unremarkable at first glance. Yet, her name is quite prominent.
Evelyn Morrow.
One of the common donors behind St. Alban, Northport, and Green Ark is publicly known as the founder of the "Abnormal Rehabilitation and Adaptation Support Initiative".
It was also the person who indirectly approved the transfer level when Raphael's old line last appeared two years ago.
Rachel finally stopped laughing.
“You won’t find her,” he said.
“We’ve already looked.” Samantha’s voice came through the earpiece, clear as a knife slicing through the air. “Just confirmed. Evelyn Morrow attempted to take off from Tetborough at 11:47 this morning, the flight was registered as a private medical transport. The plane is still on the ground.” Jason’s eyes lit up: “Who held it down?”
“The Federal Aviation Administration and the state police worked together,” Samantha said. “The reason is simple: her inventory list included an undeclared cryogenic sample cabinet.”
The room fell silent.
That kind of true stillness is like someone finally extinguishing all the remaining hope when the last piece of the puzzle falls.
Rachel looked up, and for the first time, she was clearly tired.
“You guys are really quick,” he said.
“It’s not that we’re fast,” Lynn said, “it’s that you’re all in too much of a rush today.”
Rachel looked at the photo on the table for a long time before softly saying, "She won't recognize it."
“Then let the evidence speak for itself,” Lynn said.
For the next eight hours, the entire branch was like an overheated machine that never shut down.
The decoding board and metal slices completed their first full alignment on the isolation table, and the recovered index was far more complete than initially imagined. What Raphael left in the gray box was not a single list, but a set of cross-index keys that could connect the flow of all the "screened targets" over the past two years. Who entered which project, who was marked as a high-fidelity sample, who disappeared during transport, who was disguised as long-term rehabilitation, and who never left the initial containment point—these things, which were originally hidden in different systems, different shell companies, and different legal memos, were all revealed by that alignment slice.
Adrian's old interface filing fragments then filled in the gaps between the building and the transfer point.
St. Alban is not a single location, but a group of private containment floors under the name of the rehabilitation center. Northport ostensibly conducts behavioral rehabilitation, but it also has independent sample observation rooms underground. Green Ark is the dirtiest; under the guise of child aid and adaptation research, it provides a second round of screening for those "unstable but potentially valuable" individuals—in short, it treats people as commodities still awaiting evaluation, constantly reselling them.
By 5 p.m., the federal prosecutor had issued the first round of emergency search warrants and freezing orders.
At 6:20, an upstate facility in St. Alban was simultaneously raided, and undeclared abnormal suppressant drugs, falsified referral records, and a batch of anonymous medical records were found.
At 6:50, an underground behavioral observation room in Beigang was successfully sealed off, and eleven people who were still alive were taken out for transfer. The identities of three of them matched the index directly.
At 7:05, the Green Ark Foundation's financial server was taken over, and all offshore trust paths were mirrored.
At 7:40, Evelyn Morrow was taken away from the airport VIP lounge. Before being handcuffed, she was still asking to contact a lawyer, but her face truly turned pale when she heard the words "the grey box index has been recovered."
After 8 p.m., the scales in the interrogation room finally tipped completely.
Aida was the first to fall.
After her demands were strictly written into the temporary protection agreement, she handed over the half of the execution chain she knew. She wasn't the core planner, but she knew how Rachel used the term "ethical risk" to stratify people, and that each inspection wasn't about inspecting the goods themselves, but whether the object's state still met a certain purpose. She also knew why Leon had kept a slice—because when Leon pulled something out of the gray box, he realized he hadn't just obtained "accounts," but evidence that could kill everyone involved. He wanted to keep a backup plan, a way out for himself.
After learning that Aida had spoken, Leon held on for nearly an hour before finally breaking down.
It wasn't an emotional breakdown, it was a logical breakdown.
He discovered he had truly become the most easily discarded execution tool, and that Rachel had long assumed Aida could dispose of him if necessary. The ruthlessness and pride that had sustained him crumbled faster than anyone else's once he realized he was merely "the one who could pave the way." He recounted the entire process of what happened that night at the gray box, explaining how he removed the disassembled parts from behind the G-17 base plate, how he only handed over half as agreed, and how he secretly tucked the other piece into the denture socket, preparing for another solution.
Derek was the slowest, but he didn't make it to midnight either.
With Michael, Helen, Leon, Aida, and Derek's testimonies contradicting each other, Rachel could no longer keep herself aloof from "providing only legal and risk advice."
What truly broke him was the confirmation call from the airport at 9:17 p.m.
The cryogenic chamber that Evelyn was taken down from contained no legitimate medical samples, only three abnormal physiological materials transported under the guise of a children's rehabilitation project, and a set of internal status markers that perfectly matched the gray box index.
At that moment, Rachel finally stopped laughing.
When Lynn entered his interrogation room for the second time, it was completely dark outside, and the rain had stopped. Only the shadows reflected from the city night were visible on the window. Rachel wasn't sitting as straight as the first time, and she looked tired; the glass of water on the table was empty.
Lynn sat down and placed a voice recorder on the table.
"Did Evelyn admit it?" Rachel asked.
"Not yet," Lynn said. "But whether she admits it tonight or not won't affect you."
Rachel stared at the recording pen for a long time before saying, "She kept saying she was doing 'necessary screening.' She really believed it. She felt that the world's tolerance for abnormal people was fake, and that the public system would collapse sooner or later, so she had to pick out the parts that were worth investing in, worth maintaining, and worth optimizing in advance. The rest, those that were unstable, uncontrollable, and had poor recovery, shouldn't be wasted resources."
“So you help her,” Lynn said.
“I wasn’t helping her at first.” Rachel leaned back in her chair, her eyes calm. “I was just doing ethical compliance packaging for a few projects. Later I saw the list and found that the whole system was lying. Charity lied, shelters lied, rehabilitation lied, even protection itself lied. Everyone said they were doing it for their own good, but when it came to the actual costs, everyone wanted to send the most difficult cases further away and hide them deeper. At least she was honest.”
“Honestly categorize and price people,” Lynn said.
Rachel chuckled softly, a tired laugh: "Yeah. It sounds awful, but she never pretends to be gentle."
Lynn looked at him: "Neither do you."
Rachel was silent for two seconds, then asked, "Who told you to dig up the gray box?"
“It wasn’t someone else who told you,” Lynn said. “It’s because you’re all too afraid of it.”
Rachel actually laughed this time, a short laugh that was almost like a cough.
“In the end, Raphael was better at leaving a way out than any of us,” he said.
"Who is Raphael?" Lynn asked.
Rachel looked at him for a long time before finally giving him a direct answer for the first time.
“A registrar who should have died in the first round of screening,” he said. “He had access to the index, could see the status codes, and was more patient than we thought. Two years ago, he quietly removed a section of the main index and several permission comparisons, intending to replace the external protection. But he was caught before he could hand them over completely. The part in the gray box was left for anyone who still had the patience to dismantle the building.”
The room fell silent.
"He's dead?" Lynn asked.
“Dead,” Rachel said. “On that chain you’ve now shut down, the way you died isn’t anything special.”
Lynn didn't say anything more.
Some names, in the end, need no further description; silence itself is the answer.
"So that's all?" he asked. (End of Chapter)