11: Chapter 11 Mysterious Force, Powerful Equipment

Northern Nevada, Gold Lake, 9:58 AM.

Gold Lake, if you can call it a lake, is more like a large puddle forgotten by God in a mountain hollow.

The water is grayish-blue and still, surrounded by a ring of fir and dwarf pine trees, beyond which lies an endless expanse of desert scrub.

The nearest road is seven miles away; the only way to the lake is a gravel dirt road, and the road conditions are so bad that driving a car with a low chassis here is basically suicide.

The Warren Family's fishing cabin squats on the eastern shore of the lake, about fifty meters from the water's edge.

It is one of those old log structures, its outer walls covered in deep green ivy, the tin chimney on the roof rusted to a dark brown.

From the outside, it looks like a dilapidated vacation home abandoned for years, but the interior is fully equipped with soundproofing, anti-eavesdropping measures, signal shielding, and an independent generator set.

At 9:58 AM, the five people attending the meeting had all arrived.

Edward Warren sat in the old leather armchair next to the fireplace; the leather on the back was worn smooth and shiny, but the cushion remained thick and firm.

He wore a dark gray casual jacket over a white shirt, no tie—a style completely different from the one he wore at City Hall yesterday.

At City Hall, he is a Senator; here, he is the head of a century-old political family.

His posture is neither upright nor relaxed. His right hand rests on the armrest, his index finger tapping the leather surface rhythmically, producing a dull, steady sound.

The coffee in front of him has been refilled for the third time, leaving a dark brown ring of coffee stains around the rim.

Spread out on the coffee table in front of him are the tablet computer brought by Raymond, several printed documents, and a hand-drawn sketch of the Nevada water and power pipeline distribution.

Hawthorne, the Warren Family's chief legal counsel, sits on the wicker chair by the window.

He is sixty-one years old, his silver-white hair combed meticulously, an old-fashioned pair of gold-rimmed glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, exuding the rigidity and rigor typical of an old-school legal professional.

The blinds on the window are half-drawn, and a few narrow beams of light slant across his face, deepening the wrinkles on it.

He has been up since 3:00 AM, scouring the Federal Government legal database for all clauses regarding the establishment authority of secret government departments, and the more he read, the colder he felt.

Sloan, the Warren Family's campaign financial advisor and fund manager, sits on the right end of the sofa.

Forty-nine years old, a former Wall Street hedge fund manager, lean build, prominent cheekbones, habitually squinting slightly, as if constantly calculating the ratio of risk to reward.

He does not speak much during meetings, but every sentence carries weight.

At this moment, three financial analysis reports, organized from last night until the early hours, are spread out on the table before him, covered in circles and arrows drawn with red and blue markers.

He is drinking his sixth cup of black coffee, no sugar, no milk—as bitter as the conclusions he read from these reports at dawn.

Margaret Chen, the Warren Family's media strategy consultant, sits on the left end of the three-seater sofa, on the side closer to the fireplace.

Fifty-two years old, Chinese-American, Las Vegas's top public relations operator, once had a glorious track record of suppressing a scandal that was about to hit national headlines right under the nose of the Federal Bureau of Investigation within thirty-six hours.

At this moment, she is the opposite of her usual refined and calm self.

She is not wearing makeup, revealing her nasolabial folds and crow's feet, and her hair is simply tied back in a ponytail.

A laptop as thick as a brick sits before her, with over a dozen windows open on the screen: databases, old newspaper archives, municipal records, census data.

She has been switching between these windows for eleven straight hours.

Raymond, the Warren Family's chief of staff and the "fuse" of this meeting, sits on the folding canvas chair directly opposite the fireplace.

He is the most exhausted-looking of the five.

After returning from Spring Mountain Manor last night, he did not sleep at all.

He analyzed the surveillance video he copied frame by frame three more times, confirming that there were no traces of forgery in any of the frames.

Then he pulled up surveillance footage from a wider area around City Hall.

Every exit extending from the City Hall B-2 parking garage, every street camera, every piece of private surveillance footage from shop entrances—anything he could get his hands on, he copied.

And what was presented in the footage he copied back was even more hair-raising than what he saw on the tablet yesterday.

The five people, starting at 10:00 AM in this isolated cabin by the lake, would open a pack of compressed biscuits or tear open a bag of microwaveable instant sandwiches when hungry, and drink coffee when thirsty.

The coffee in the pot never ran out from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM.

No one mentioned eating, no one looked at their phone, and no one left the room.

The only sounds in the room were the turning of pages, the clicking of keyboards, the clinking of coffee cups against the coffee table, and the rising and falling of increasingly heavy breathing.

By 3:00 PM, the coffee table was piled high with documents, printed surveillance screenshots, densely marked financial tables, and four laptops.

After five hours of repeated sorting, the information on the four screens was finally integrated into several mutually verifiable conclusions.

Raymond pushed the thickest stack of documents in front of him to the center of the coffee table and tapped it twice with his finger.

This action drew everyone's attention.

"Let's start with the first question," Raymond's voice was hoarse, like sandpaper rubbing against a wooden board.

"The identities of those two Men in Black and the middle-aged woman."

"I've finished running facial recognition: the Federal Bureau of Investigation database, the Department of Homeland Security database, the CIA's, the Department of Defense's, the Department of the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even the Postal Inspection Service—I ran them all."

"At the Federal Government level, as long as it was a database with photos, I went through it twice."

He paused briefly, took a swig of coffee, and then slammed the cup back onto the coffee table.

"Zero."

"No matches at all."

"The faces of these three people have no record in any federal system."

"They don't exist."

"As if we'd find a record anyway," Hawthorne pushed up his gold-rimmed glasses, his voice carrying the characteristic sarcasm and calm of an old lawyer.

"Maybe the Federal Government doesn't keep meticulous records, but someone tapped their fingers on a keyboard, and then someone else wiped their information clean."

"I checked all the clauses in federal law regarding the establishment authority of secret departments; there are at least six laws that allow the Federal Government to set up non-public, secret agencies under specific circumstances."

"The National Security Act passed in 1947 gave the Department of Defense and the intelligence community the greatest degree of freedom, and the 1954 Atomic Energy Act amendment classified the very existence of certain classified projects as top secret."

"So you mean..." Sloan interrupted, his voice low but sharp as a blade.

"I mean," Hawthorne closed the legal code index he had been flipping through until the edges were frayed,

"Whoever is in charge of this 'Federal Urban Pipeline Maintenance Department,' the people who set it up used the loopholes left by the law."

"And these loopholes have been there since the end of World War II. It's been more than half a century."

Margaret Chen looked up from her computer screen, rubbing her sore eyes:

"I checked media channels simultaneously. Mainstream media, zero reports."

"There are a few posts on conspiracy theory forums on social media that mention similar things—people around Area 51 have said they've seen Men in Black—but those posts have very low engagement, and they get inexplicably cleaned up every so often."

"I tracked several accounts; quite a few have already been deleted."

"The operation is very professional; it doesn't look like the platform's own content moderation, but rather like someone is regularly conducting information cleanup."

"That matches up," Raymond said, picking up the remote and pressing a button toward the screen on the wall.

The screen lit up, showing an enlarged surveillance screenshot—the ghostly blue electric arc on the Men in Black's right hand.

"This is the second conclusion. Their equipment."

Everyone's gaze converged on the screen.

"Last night, I asked Sloan to reach out to a few of his contacts in the defense industry, and without revealing specific information, I made some indirect inquiries."

Raymond said, looking at Sloan.

Sloan put down his black coffee and pulled a printed sheet of paper from the bottom of his pile of financial reports, which contained several technical briefs on defense contractors marked with code.

"I asked three people; two have acquaintances in Lockheed Martin's R&D department, and one has a good relationship with a senior project manager at Boeing."

"The military does have research on non-lethal incapacitating weapons using electric arcs."

"DARPA launched a project called 'Directed Plasma Suppression System' in 2005, the principle of which is to deliver high-voltage pulses by ionizing the air to form a conductive path."

"But that project was shut down in 2012 because the problem of miniaturizing the energy core couldn't be solved—to generate enough of an electric arc, the battery pack required was bigger than an adult's head."

He pointed to the image on the screen.

"But in this image, the man in black has nothing in his hand. The electric arc is generated directly from his fingertips."

"This means their energy core can already be miniaturized enough to be implanted into the human body."