12: Chapter 12: Teleportation Appearance, Mystery of Backing

The room was quiet for two seconds.

Then Margaret continued, "And the lighting control."

She turned her laptop screen toward everyone; on it was a sequence of screenshots from surveillance footage that she had analyzed frame by frame.

The screen was divided into three columns:

The left showed the state of the ceiling lights before the middle-aged woman appeared, the middle showed the state when the dark red lights turned on, and the right showed the state after the middle-aged woman made a gesture and the lights went out.

"I counted, and the timing of the lighting changes perfectly matches her hand movements, with a margin of error of no more than 0.1 seconds."

Margaret said, gesturing on the screen, "And did you notice that when she made that gesture, the tiny movement on her wrist—"

She zoomed in and in, until the image was almost entirely pixelated, then pointed her fingertip at the middle-aged woman's left wrist.

"Do you see the position of her watch?" Margaret's voice lowered slightly. "Before the dark red lights turned on, her finger touched the watch face. It wasn't an unconscious touch, it was a press."

"After the press, the lights turned on."

"At the same instant of the press, the lights went out."

"This is not some malfunction of the building's lighting system."

"This is a high-tech controller hidden inside the watch on her wrist that can remotely control all surrounding lighting equipment."

"These two items, the arc weapon and the lighting controller, are not things you can find on the market," Hawthorne pushed up his glasses, his voice as dry as if he were reading a verdict in court. "From a legal perspective, possessing these devices itself violates at least four federal weapons control regulations. But they are not only possessing them, they are using them."

"Which means they have immunity."

"And an agency that can obtain this kind of immunity within the federal legal system..."

"Can be counted on one hand," Sloan finished the second half of the sentence for him.

"There is a third one." Raymond's voice suddenly dropped.

He switched off the screenshots on the screen and replaced them with a set of side-by-side video feeds.

The left was the surveillance of the City Hall B2 parking lot, the middle was the surveillance of the parking lot exit, and the right was a composite view of all road and store surveillance within three blocks of City Hall.

"Those two Men in Black disappeared after stuffing that gray bag into the ventilation duct."

"I checked every exit connected to the ventilation duct they crawled into."

"Starting from City Hall B2, for all ventilation system manhole covers, access ports, and exhaust vents—every exit covered by surveillance—no one came out within the next four hours."

He paused, picked up a laser pointer, and drew a circle over a certain area on the screen.

"Here."

"Two hundred meters northeast of City Hall, at the intersection of Fir Street and Fourth Avenue, there is a ground exhaust vent for the ventilation system."

"Theoretically, if those two Men in Black moved along the ventilation duct, the distance from the B2 parking lot to this exhaust vent would take about six to eight minutes to walk."

"But I checked the records of all cameras near this exhaust vent, and no one came out."

"What's even more bizarre is—"

He switched to the next image.

"That middle-aged woman."

"She walked about thirty meters in the direction of the parking lot exit, then turned into a surveillance blind spot."

"I found the surveillance from the convenience store across from the blind spot; the angle just happened to cover a part of the edge of the blind spot."

"After the woman entered the blind spot, she didn't come out from the other side."

"This blind spot is a dead end, with walls on three sides; the only way out is the direction she walked in from."

"But she didn't turn back, nor did she come out from any direction."

"It's as if the whole person..."

Raymond paused, his lips moving slightly as if looking for the most appropriate word, but in the end, he gave up on rhetoric and chose the most straightforward way to say it,

"Vanished into thin air."

The fishing cabin fell silent again.

The wind on the lake suddenly picked up, making the pine trees roar, and the ivy leaves outside the wooden cabin rustled against the walls.

Other than that, there was no other sound.

Edward Warren leaned back in his armchair; the rhythm of his right index finger tapping on the leather armrest stopped.

He looked at the image on the screen, examined it for a long while, and then turned his gaze to Raymond.

"In other words," Edward's voice was unhurried, as if leaving himself a gap for thought before speaking in the Senate, "this so-called 'Federal Urban Pipeline Maintenance Department,' this organization that captures and studies Aliens, really possesses weapons and equipment far exceeding current technology?"

He reached out and listed them off one finger at a time.

"Electric discharge, arc weapons, capable of subduing an Alien lifeform in one hit."

"Lighting control, the remote device on the wrist, capable of controlling the lighting system at will within a two-hundred-meter range."

"And teleportation, or perhaps some kind of spatial displacement technology that we cannot currently understand, capable of letting a living person, carrying a gray bag filled with Aliens, completely disappear from a surveillance-covered area within seconds."

"Are these the three?"

Raymond nodded: "To be precise, that's it when added together."

Edward was silent for a few seconds, then said slowly:

"The arc weapon and the lighting control device, does the military have..."

"Yes."

Raymond immediately replied, obviously having prepared the answer to this question long ago,

"I cross-verified it with Sloan."

"Arc weapons like the one in the footage, although they don't appear on public arms lists, if you include non-public, classified, DARPA-level special projects, the military should have similar experimental equipment."

"As for the lighting control device, it goes without saying; infrared remote controllers have been used in the industrial sector for decades, and military models would only be more advanced."

"So while these two items themselves are unconventional, they are still within the explainable scope of human technology."

He paused.

Then, "But teleportation," Raymond's voice dropped a few notches, "the military did indeed conduct relevant theoretical research and early experiments in the past."

"The most famous one is the 'Philadelphia Experiment' of 1943; of course, that has already been debunked by the authorities, who claimed it was a baseless urban legend."

"But some subsequently declassified documents show that the Navy was indeed interested in spacetime anomalies caused by electromagnetic fields during World War II."

"It's just that those studies, according to public records, were all terminated in the 1950s."

"At least... that's what the officials say."

Edward Warren's fingers started tapping on the armrest again.

One, two, three.

Then the tapping stopped.

"Does this Federal Urban Pipeline Maintenance Department have the military's shadow behind it?"

His voice was very soft, but in this quiet room, every word was as clear as if it had been amplified.

Raymond did not answer immediately.

Hawthorne put down his code index.

Sloan slowly pushed those three financial analysis reports to the center of the coffee table.

Margaret closed her laptop.

The four people's gazes met in the air for a moment,

a tacit communication that could only be generated after working together for ten years, which required no language.

Then Hawthorne spoke first.

This sixty-one-year-old lawyer, his voice rarely showing a trace of instability:

"Boss, in the Lighthouse Country, anything, as long as it involves the military, is destined to be a big deal."

"It's a big deal that could cost you your life." Sloan added, his tone as flat as if stating a financial fact,

"Those of us who deal with money know this better than anyone."

"Who the money is distributed to, where the money comes from—every thread here can eventually be traced back to a door covered in steel seals."

"And the military's door is that final one; you push it open, and you either see the truth, or you remain outside the door forever."

"Or both happen at the same time."

Margaret leaned back against the sofa, her face revealing a kind of indifference and exhaustion that only comes after spending half a lifetime struggling in the PR industry:

"The five people sitting here today, I'm sure, before everyone arrived, all made the worst-case preparations."

She looked around, her gaze lingering on everyone's face for a second, "Otherwise, you wouldn't have driven here."

"The fishing cabin at Gold Lake, I've only been here twice in ten years."

"Every time I come, it's a matter of life and death."

Raymond nodded, his voice still hoarse, but steadier than before:

"When I went home last night, I drove in circles for an hour. I circled the overpass three times, confirming no car was following me before I dared to go back."

"I know this sounds like something is wrong with my brain, but I just feel like someone is watching."

"I felt it all night, someone was watching."

Hawthorne took off his glasses and slowly wiped the lenses with the hem of his shirt, his movements very slow, so slow that it seemed like he was deliberately delaying the time to put his glasses back on.

"My wife asked me why I got up at three in the morning to flip through the legal code."

"I said I was preparing a very complex case."

"She didn't ask again; she has been with me for so many years, she knows when to shut up."

Sloan picked up his cup of black coffee from the coffee table, which had already gone completely cold, tilted his head back, drank the last sip, and then turned the cup upside down on the coffee table.

This man, who had been rolling in Wall Street for twenty years, one of the craziest investment decisions he had ever made in his life was to give up an eight-figure annual salary to manage campaign funds for a Nevada senator.

And he had never regretted it.

"And the way out," he said, "who among us has a way out?"