louisehourcade Chapter 719 Daring not to deliver the goods alone!
Chapter 719 Daring not to deliver the goods alone!
Jason closed his eyes briefly and chuckled, "Good. At least getting soaked in the rain today wasn't a complete waste."
Lynn turned to look at Rachel.
Rachel stood between the two agents, handcuffed behind her back, her wet hair plastered to her forehead, her face finally devoid of the previous almost bored calm. She looked at Lynn, as if for the first time truly looking into the person in front of her.
“You can continue not to explain now,” Lynn said. “Anyway, I’ll take things apart and show you piece by piece.”
Rachel remained silent for a moment before saying, "Then you'd better think about it first. After you break it up, who are you going to believe?"
“I’m not in a hurry to believe any of them,” Lynn said.
Rachel's lips twitched slightly; it was hard to tell if it counted as a smile.
The rain was still falling. New York this morning felt long and sluggish, from the hole dug in the bank's basement to this damp, chilly alleyway, every breath felt heavy. Finally, police lights flashed at the street corner, red and blue beams reflecting off the wet bricks like paint splashed into dirty water. Passersby were stopped outside, craning their necks to look inside, seeing only a group of plainclothes officers escorting several suspects of varying appearances into a car; no one knew what this had to do with the bank case that morning.
Jason leaned against the car, his hand on his ribs, and turned to look at Lynn: "Shall we go back and open the box now, or take out the piece in my mouth first?"
“Separate the two sides first,” Lynn said. “The boxes will be isolated in the lab, and the thin films inside the dentures will be scanned non-destructively. Michael, Derek, Ida, Leon, and Rachel will all be in separate rooms. Helen and the head office security will continue to detain them. The bank’s lockdown will be extended tonight.”
Blake walked over and shook his soaked coat: "The board will skin me alive."
“Then let them line up,” Jason said.
Blake made a jabs and then looked at Rachel, who was being put into the last car: "I have to admit, your fishing method is dirty, but it really works."
“Because the smartest people aren’t the ones who came today,” Lynn said.
"And what about the smartest one?"
Lynn looked at the dark box wrapped in the evidence bag, then glanced at the car that was pinning Leon down in the distance, and said in a low voice, "The smartest one should already know who we caught and which parts we didn't take back."
Jason looked up: "Do you think anyone will make a move?"
“Yes,” Lynn said. “Because now it’s not a question of whether they got it or not, it’s a question of whether they’re afraid we’ll understand.”
Blake frowned: "So, does that mean your branch won't be getting any sleep tonight?"
Jason chuckled: "Today, I'll suspect anyone who mentions sleeping is a mole."
Blake snorted and turned to call for reinforcements. The alleyway in the rain was slowly cleared out, evidence boxes, sampling bags, and cordon tape were moved out one by one, and the technicians took pictures of the messy footprints on the wall and the bloodstains in the puddles.
Before Lynn got on the bus last, she looked back at the alley.
Where Rachel had stood, only a wet patch remained on the wall from the impact. Where the motorcycle had crashed, black paint mingled with rainwater, flowing down the ground into the drain. The old brick walls, the iron stairs, the trash cans—everything looked like a typical New York back alley, as if nothing had been remembered.
He opened the car door and got in.
Jason fastened his seatbelt, let out a long breath, and tilted his head to ask, "Do you think this thing in the gray box could be the heart that Raphael has been hiding all along?"
Lynn started the car, and the windshield wipers swept away the water lines on the windshield once again.
"Don't guess yet," he said.
Jason looked at him and clicked his tongue: "You just can't get rid of this habit of yours."
“You are the same,” Lynn said.
"I'm the same as everyone else."
"Even though he was in so much pain his face was pale, he pretended that he had just finished warming up."
Jason glanced down at his side and chuckled, "You're starting to sound like a bad boss."
Lynn drove the car out of the alley, the police lights blurred into a hazy mess in the rearview mirror by the rain.
"You only realized that today?"
When the car drove back to the branch, the rain had changed from fine, needle-like lines to a heavier curtain of water.
The afternoon rain hushed New York, the wheels crunching over puddles, sending white sprays cascading onto the vehicles. The radio never stopped, and all lines of communication—technical, fieldwork, bank operations, and the lab—were pushing forward simultaneously. No one mentioned lunch, no one mentioned rest. Everyone knew the case had reached its most precarious and easily shattered stage—once the chain of evidence closed, no matter how stubborn they were, they couldn't outmaneuver the scans and the timeline.
When Lynn parked the car in the underground garage, the first batch of non-destructive scan results had already arrived.
Samantha waited personally at the elevator entrance, holding a tablet and two evidence transfer boxes. The dark circles under her eyes were even more pronounced than in the morning, but her eyes shone with a fierce light.
"Would you like to hear the good news first, or the even better news?" she asked.
Jason said as he walked in, pressing his ribs, "First, tell me that I didn't take that hit for nothing."
“That’s even better news.” Samantha handed the tablet to Lynn. “The piece of wax-sealed metal in Leon’s mouth isn’t an ordinary thin sheet; it’s an ultra-thin etched substrate. It has a secondary protective layer on the surface, which can protect it from oral moisture for a period of time. We’ve done preliminary imaging, and it doesn’t contain the full list; it contains index slices.”
Lynn glanced down at the image.
On the black background of the scanned image, extremely fine lines resemble a map shrunk to the size of a pinhead, divided into several regular blocks, each with a number, timestamp, and a very short code string. This is not something for laymen, or even for ordinary executors—it is a part of the catalog that can only be reconstructed by those who know the corresponding dictionary.
"What's in the box?" he asked.
“There’s no paper or the sample itself in the box,” Samantha said, pulling up another page. “It’s a decoding board.”
Jason paused, looked up, and asked, "What did you say?"
“A custom-made physical decoding board,” Samantha said. “The dark box contains two detachable structures. It looks like a sample box, but inside it is a set of microporous alignment sheets and an old-fashioned transfer base film. Simply put, the sheet in Leon’s mouth alone is useless, and the box that Rachel took away alone is also useless. Only by combining the two can the imprint on the index slice be re-projected into the original text sequence.”
Jason smiled, but his smile was cold: "No wonder none of them dare to deliver the goods alone."
“That’s not all.” Samantha looked at Lynn. “What was actually taken from the gray box wasn’t a single document, but a set of disassembled items. You guessed it. Raphael—or rather, the original custodian of G-17—didn’t believe that either side would keep their promise completely, so he split the most crucial information in two, or even three, and packaged them in different media.”
Lynn took the tablet and flipped to the next page.
That was a portion of a projection diagram that the lab had just pieced together. The text was small, but clear. It wasn't a bank ledger, a simple record of abnormal samples, or a regular shipping manifest.
That was a "transfer and filtering cross-index".
Three types of information appeared simultaneously: one was the anonymized subject or transfer object number; another was the corresponding containment point, transfer hospital, private research foundation, and shell laboratory code; and the third was the status notes with time series—screened, retained, eliminated, lost, transferred.
The last column contains another set of internal permission signatures, with different abbreviations but a time span of nearly three years.
Jason, who had initially maintained a somewhat nonchalant expression, slowly darkened his expression after reading those lines.
“This is not ordinary smuggling,” he said.
“It never was.” Lynn handed the tablet back. “This is a person.”
The elevator doors opened, and the cold white light illuminated the entire corridor ahead. The interrogation room, the technical observation room, and the legal office were all lit up, doors opened and closed one after another, and figures came and went incessantly; this building would never truly be quiet all night.
"Who spoke first?" Lynn asked.
Samantha followed: "Michael was the fastest, almost unsightly. Ten minutes into the room, he started demanding exemptions and protection agreements. Derek was tough, Leon was even tougher. Ada only cared about the route and responsibilities, not the core chain. Rachel—"
She paused for a moment.
"What's wrong with Rachel?" Jason asked.
“Rachel is still smiling,” Samantha said.
Jason clicked his tongue: "Then let's beat Michael up first. The kind of person he is most afraid of being the only one who can talk."
“It’s already underway,” Samantha said. “In addition, Adrian Cooper’s old interface line has also come out. There are three structural compatibility projects in the municipal outsourcing, nominally underground moisture-proofing and access control upgrades, but in reality, they all involve old building mezzanine and old pipe shaft blueprints. He’s not just temporarily paving the way for someone; he’s been selecting buildings that are ‘accessible, concealable, and extinguishable’ for this chain from the very beginning.”
"Who did you see before you went missing?" Lynn asked.
“Derek,” Samantha said, “and an outside legal counsel for a foundation. You might be interested in the name.”
She pulled up another page of information.
"Rachel Wayne".
Jason whistled softly: "She's not just temporarily on-site; she's always been in the legal department."
“Yes,” Samantha said. “Her public identity is that of an external consultant for three bioethics consulting and risk management firms, and a part-time compliance reviewer for two private foundations. She looks so clean she could almost be featured in a magazine interview. But her initials are highly similar to a set of authorization labels we just read from the index.”
Lynn didn't stop walking, only saying, "Let's look at Michael first."
Outside the third interrogation room, Blake stood behind a one-way mirror, holding a cup of now-cold coffee. His shirt was still damp, his hair was disheveled, and he looked like he'd just been pulled out of the water and shoved back into work. Seeing them approach, he raised his cup as a greeting.
"The bank's security chief probably never imagined he would cry in a room like this," he said.
On the other side of the glass, Michael Dean was indeed on the verge of tears.
He took off his coat, leaving only a wrinkled shirt with the collar askew; his fingers trembled, and sweat mingled with the dampness of the rain on his forehead. An unopened bottle of water sat on the table, untouched. Angela sat opposite him, a stack of printed pages and a pen spread out in front of her, and remained completely silent throughout.
"How much did he vomit?" Lynn asked.
Blake handed over the few pages of notes he was holding: "That's enough to take down the head office's legal department, the bank's internal audit department, and the security director's office, but it's not at the core yet. He keeps emphasizing that he's only responsible for 'risk cleanup' and 'window coordination'."
“What is window coordination?” Jason asked.
"It's about deciding, when something goes wrong, which incident should be classified as a system false alarm, which should be suppressed as an internal accident, and which should be handled by external legal counsel." Blake sneered. "To put it bluntly, it's about buying time for the real thing."
Lynn flipped through the records and quickly stopped at a timeline page.
"I started frequently contacting Rachel seven months ago. Four months ago, I connected to an old interface monitoring whitelist. A month ago, I approved temporary repairs on the second basement level without review. At 1:12 AM last night, I received an abnormal notification from the gray box's automatic summary. At 1:17 AM, I took a screenshot of the summary with only the number and saved it to my private email drafts. At 1:29 AM, I sent Helen Page a 'priority legal intervention' notification. At 2:03 AM, I received a call from an unknown number. At 2:31 AM, the bank's underground surveillance began to show a 37-yard gap. After 7:00 AM, I repeatedly confirmed with the police whether they mentioned biomarkers and injection caps."
As he read the last sentence, he looked up at Blake.
“He cares about the ‘hat ban’ not because he knows if it’s true or not,” Lynn said, “but because he was asked to monitor who was spreading it.”
“Yes,” Samantha continued. “He said the unknown call only gave him two tasks. First, to keep an eye out for any mention of words like ‘needle,’ ‘blood sample,’ or ‘cap.’ Second, if the lockdown at the scene exceeded expectations, to immediately send a small silver box to the Upper East Side as instructed.”
“That’s the one we stormed into,” Jason said.
“Yes.” Samantha nodded. “But he wasn’t qualified to open the box, nor did he know how to actually read it. He was just giving it away.”
Jason turned his head to look through the glass. Michael was talking frantically with his head down, as if afraid that if he was even a second too slow, someone else would sell him out first.
"Does he know where the people are being screened?" Jason asked.
“I only know a small part of it.” Angela pushed open the door and continued, “He said he first realized something was wrong last fall. There was a group of anonymous individuals labeled ‘long-term abnormal recovery tracking’ who had set up high-value insurance trusts and nominee holdings at banks. On the surface, it was to protect their identities and estate arrangements, but in reality, it was to provide a legitimate financial shell for a certain transfer chain. Those names are invisible, but their status codes change. Some went from ‘under treatment’ to ‘out of contact,’ some went from ‘transferred to another hospital’ to ‘loss of health,’ and a few were directly marked ‘retained’.”
Jason's smile had completely vanished.
Why didn't he report it?
Angela glanced at him: "Because he took the money first, and later found out he knew too much, and it was too late to report it."
Blake said coldly, "Classic."
Lynn closed the notebook: "Where's Helen?"
“Helen is a little cleaner than Michael, but only a little,” Angela said. “She knew about the gray market, but always thought of it as some kind of illegal and unusual goods transfer and a cleanup pool for the powerful. It wasn’t until the bank was actually broken into today that she realized what was stored in the gray box wasn’t ‘accounts,’ but ‘keys’ that could uncover the whole chain.”
"Is she willing to cooperate now?" Samantha asked.
“Ken,” Angela said, “especially after learning that Michael had already begun seeking a waiver.”
Jason let out a sigh of relief: "Okay. Let's bring Rachel out." (End of Chapter)