36: Chapter 36 Anomaly Detected, Disguised Excavation Begins Operation

Washington, Department of Homeland Security, three days later.

Walsh stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window in his office, holding a cup of lukewarm American coffee, his gaze passing over the gray silhouette of The Pentagon on the other side of the Potomac River and landing on the skyline further away.

His chief of staff, Trent Molloy, had already reported the progress to him.

Everything was proceeding according to plan.

Three point seven million dollars, allocated from the budget of the Department of Homeland Security's "Science Bureau", had already been transferred to a research project named "Deep Geological Structural Stability and Dark Matter Detection" at the California Institute of Technology's Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, disguised through three layers of shell companies.

The nominal head of the project was an old professor at the California Institute of Technology with a high international reputation in geology, while the people actually operating the data collection and analysis on the front lines were all reliable personnel planted by Walsh through old CIA connections.

These people did not receive extra salaries and did not sign external contracts; they relied solely on old friendships.

In the intelligence community, some relationships are more effective than written contracts.

The research group had publicly set up multiple "environmental monitoring stations" around 124 Colter Street.

Today, this place had become a forty-two-story glass-curtain office building called "Westfield Center".

Each monitoring station was ostensibly equipped with solar panels, anemometers, air quality sensors, and some geological monitoring equipment that looked completely harmless from the outside.

The office workers nearby who passed by every day thought at most that a few university atmospheric or geological observation projects had moved in, nothing to make a fuss about.

But the sensors inside were not ordinary acoustic probes.

Their micro-seismic arrays buried deep underground, along with modified passive rock density scanners, could obtain approximate stratigraphic structural feedback without drilling deep holes.

Its resolution was sufficient to circle an anomalous area within a depth range.

Trent called the code name for this system "Watchdog".

The research group's work continued to advance.

Walsh did not rush.

Intelligence work cannot be rushed; the more you rush, the more loopholes you create.

He only received the data summary sent by Trent from the site via an encrypted channel twice every morning and evening.

Until the third evening.

A red indicator light lit up on the encrypted communication terminal on Walsh's desk, with the highest priority, readable only by the Director himself.

He put down his coffee cup, walked to the terminal, passed dual authentication with his fingerprint and iris, and then opened a newly arrived message.

The message was sent by Trent, and the text was extremely short: "124 Colter Street underground data has a discovery."

"Report in person tonight."

Walsh did not reply; he just took a glance at the setting sun that was gradually sinking across the Potomac River outside the window.

The sky was still bright, but by the time Trent drove to the meeting place, it should be just at nightfall.

He changed into casual clothes, and the spare car borrowed from an old retired friend at the CIA was still parked in the dedicated parking space, with the engine fueled up.

Three hours later.

The evening sea fog drifted in from the direction of Santa Monica Bay, shrouding the entire Los Angeles in a blurry gray-blue.

In a temporary office near Westfield Center, Trent brought Walsh a detection briefing just generated by the research group.

On the briefing, the sensor array originally used to detect micro-vibrations in the strata detected a significant density mutation near the target depth.

That depth was confirmed after revision to be one thousand and three meters.

The seismic wave reflections nearby showed an obvious anomalous density zone, about a few dozen centimeters in size, appearing extremely out of place in the stable structure of the surrounding tens of meters of sedimentary rock.

"The surroundings above and below are all this kind of very uniform Tertiary sedimentary rock," Trent flicked his fingertip on one of the waveforms.

"It suddenly changes at this small piece, as if it were embedded."

"It is not a density variation formed naturally by the strata, but some kind of independent solid object."

Walsh did not speak.

His face was reflected on the glass, and the faint light revealed the tight lines of his mouth.

A chill poured into the depths of his abdominal cavity.

That chill had almost nothing to do with his instinctive fear.

What he felt was a deeper shiver, slowly crawling along his nerve endings.

It was the instinct of a hunter who had chased for too long, finally seeing clear prey tracks on the edge of a gray forest.

He knew very well.

That unusual object buried one thousand meters underground was by no means any geological phenomenon.

Even if it never made a sound again and remained buried deep beneath the rock layer, it still pointed to the root cause:

The thing that caused Kramer to be poisoned and then faked as a jump, caused Gore to die suddenly of a heart attack, and made the guillotine of an entire Deep State system operate for nearly eighty years—

Alien technology.

Others might be guessing or fantasizing when they said these words; he, however, was less than one thousand vertical meters away from it.

"Continue monitoring," Walsh handed the briefing back to Trent.

"Do not actively excavate, do not move anything at least until our cover well project enters the site."

Trent nodded, packed up all the testing equipment, and exited the door.

Walsh stood alone by the window of the temporary office, looking at the square window panes lit up at night at Westfield Center.

In his heart, he had already begun to plan an excavation, a tunneling scheme that could extend one thousand meters downward without arousing anyone's suspicion.

The procedures for this project must be absolutely public, harmless, and free.

Nobody can refuse a free lunch.

Two days later.

Los Angeles City Hall received a proposal submitted by a company called "Triton Deep Earth Energy Solutions".

This company was registered in Delaware, and the legal representative was a retired businessman who owned a few abandoned oil wells in Wyoming.

The actual capital chain, however, had gone through five shell conversions personally designed by Walsh, finally anchored in the budget already allocated by the Department of Homeland Security.

The content of the proposal was so simple that it was almost boring:

Upgrade the new generation of composite ground-source heat pump circulation systems for Westfield Center for free, and extend three to four pipeline wells from the basement in exchange for carbon credits at the federal level and clean energy subsidies from the state government.

The reaction of the building's property management was completely without suspense.

The president of the property management company called the afternoon he received the proposal, his tone as excited as if he had won the lottery, and he agreed without even thinking.

The Los Angeles municipal government's side was even more standard procedure: carbon reduction, green energy, environmental protection demonstration—every tag was a bonus item for the city's annual work report.

The approval document from the Municipal Administration Bureau was signed within twenty-four hours of receiving the application, and even the approval meeting only lasted fifteen minutes.

Two days later.

A construction company called "Western Geological Engineering", which appeared to have no business dealings with Triton Deep Earth Energy Solutions, drove into the underground parking lot of Westfield Center.

The workers wore uniform orange safety vests and yellow hard hats printed with the company logo, and set up temporary construction hoardings on the second basement level.

The hoardings were plastered with construction permits, environmental assessment reports, and fire safety inspection certificates that complied with municipal regulations.

Any white-collar worker who occasionally parked in the parking lot and passed by the hoardings would only see a few well-drilling rigs rumbling, and a few groups of technicians in work clothes wearing headphones and staring at equipment screens, which was completely a normal operation scene of serious commercial geothermal renovation.

The construction drawings showed that four standard heat pump wells would radiate in a fan shape at uniform angles, each with a depth of about sixty to eighty meters.

However, for the one marked as "Well No. 3", during the late-night maintenance shift, specially selected technicians would operate the directional drill.

The drill pipe would slowly turn at a very small, almost horizontal angle, and then extend almost vertically downward.

The excavated rock debris was mixed into unrecognizable dark gray mud by high-pressure slurry in a sealed container, then mixed into ordinary mud trucks, and transported out of the city according to the "industrial non-hazardous waste" treatment path.

All data monitoring was remotely controlled by Trent's team, correcting drilling pressure, angle, and mud pressure in real-time.

...

And on the north side of Westfield Center, separated by a civilian fountain plaza and two rows of carefully pruned palm tree green belts, stood a sixteen-story high-end office building called "Arlington Business Center".

The top floor of this building was an entire floor of private club, nominally belonging to an offshore investment company registered in the Cayman Islands, but in fact, it had not been open to any outside guests for two years.

At this moment, in front of the floor-to-ceiling window of this private club, Edward Warren and Elon Musk were standing side by side, their gazes passing through the glass, over the fountain plaza and palm trees, and landing on the entrance to the underground parking lot of Westfield Center, which was blocked by construction hoardings.

Musk had set up a monitoring system here that he considered "decent enough".

It included two synthetic aperture acoustic detectors transferred from the SpaceX satellite mapping department, which could penetrate shallow concrete and soil layers to track the depth and orientation changes of the drill bit.

Coupled with a set of passive underground micro-vibration analyzers, it could extract feedback on mud flow velocity and rock density based on the characteristic vibration waves emitted by the drilling tools.

These devices were theoretically sufficient to accurately capture the real-time path of Walsh's secretly deflected "Well No. 3".

The result was faster than they expected.

The detection data feedback showed that the acoustic detection array clearly marked a foreign object with obvious non-geological source characteristics near one thousand meters directly below.

It was not large, about the size of a small container, but its acoustic reflection pattern was different from all the surrounding sedimentary rock; it was a regular echo frequency band that only artificial synthetic materials would produce.

That thing, that thing buried one thousand meters under 124 Colter Street, was indeed alien technology.

"He is almost there."

Edward put down the real-time printed depth marker map in his hand, his voice very light.

"As long as Walsh's engineering team pushes down another three hundred meters, he will see that thing."