64: Chapter 64 A Century-Old Debt: Making Amends

The door to the boxwood tea room was gently pushed ajar by Diana.

The lighting inside was very dim, with only two old brass wall lamps emitting a faint, warm yellow glow.

The furnishings inside were as simple as she remembered:

A hand-polished boxwood tea table, a few old rattan chairs, a row of purple clay teapot shelves that had been empty for who knows how many years, and outside the window, the silhouettes of cacti rising and falling in the desert night.

Zhang Long sat behind the tea table, using a coarse pottery teapot to pour himself a cup of steaming clear tea.

That set of tea ware was something Keating had people dig out and set up in a matter of minutes,

The tea leaves used were the best Lapsang Souchong from the manor's storage room,

but the aroma wafting from the steam as the tea was poured into the cup was clearly several levels removed from the taste in his memory.

He picked up the tea cup and took a sip, his brows furrowing slightly,

It wasn't annoyance, but rather like an old friend tasting the dimness of a memory that had gone astray halfway,

Then he raised his eyes to look at Diana standing at the doorway.

"Did that kid Leo not pass on his tea-brewing technique to your Hopkins Family?"

Diana was taken aback.

The entire set of greetings, thanks, and expressions of deference she had prepared were thrown into disarray in that instant by this sentence.

She paused for less than a second, then walked into the tea room and stood five or six feet from the tea table, saying in a low voice:

"I wasn't born when my great-grandfather passed away."

"The tea-brewing technique... he didn't pass it down."

Zhang Long set the cup back on the boxwood tea table, producing a very faint sound of porcelain hitting the wood.

He was silent for a moment, then tilted his head, his tone carrying a hint of realization as if gently scratched by a distant memory.

"I had forgotten."

"Ninety years ago, when I was sitting in this tea room, after Leo had just finished learning to brew tea and handed the first cup to me, I told him that the affairs here were not to be mentioned to anyone."

"This is the rule of the Federal Urban Pipeline Maintenance Department."

"I didn't expect that kid to be so tight-lipped. Not only did he not talk about it, he didn't even teach his own son how to brew tea."

Diana stood there, not speaking for several seconds.

It wasn't that she had nothing to say; it was that too many words were crowding her mouth at once, only to be pushed back by her rapidly spinning mind.

Ninety years ago...

The man in front of her had already been sitting in this very tea room where she now stood, drinking the tea her great-grandfather brewed, ninety years ago.

And he now looked no more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, younger than her.

If every word he said was true, then in the world of the Deep State, her previous thirty years of military-industrial competition and power perception framework were all like a layer of paper.

Then she slowly raised her head, her voice very soft, but steady:

"The question you just asked me is actually the one I asked you in the courtyard earlier, which you didn't answer at the time. Can you tell me now?"

Zhang Long picked up the tea cup and took another sip.

There was no extra expression on that handsome face, only a slight turn of his head to look at the desert night outside the window.

"Leo Hopkins and I did know each other."

"That was over a hundred years ago."

"It was night, and the scene of me performing a mission outside was accidentally seen by your great-grandfather."

"According to the confidentiality clauses of the Federal Urban Pipeline Maintenance Department at the time, he had to be silenced."

He paused, a very faint arc suddenly appearing at the corner of his mouth, as if gently scratched by some disobedient old memory.

"But that kid Leo had no idea at the time that he had walked right in front of the gates of hell."

"He thought I was going to kill him because he hadn't polished my leather shoes clean during the day."

"He cried and told me he would polish my leather shoes for free for the rest of his life, begging me to spare him."

Zhang Long put down the tea cup and shook his head, the arc at the corner of his mouth turning from a faint smile into a slightly helpless one.

"Back then, no one in our mission team had ever seen such a simple child."

"So we made an exception and spared his life."

"Later, that kid Leo really did polish my leather shoes for free for the rest of his life, right up until the day his hands shook too much to hold the shoe brush."

His tone paused slightly, his gaze landing on a wood grain knot on the tea table surface that had been polished smooth by time, lingering for a moment.

"Of course, in the meantime, Leo also helped the Federal Urban Pipeline Maintenance Department with some minor peripheral tasks, running errands, passing messages, and helping to sign some documents when a local identity cover was needed."

"He did well, so we gave him some compensation."

"Not much, but enough for him to save up slowly."

"Later, he used that money to buy land, open mines, and do railway business..."

"The earliest initial capital in your Hopkins Family ledger all originated here."

Diana did not speak immediately after hearing this.

She didn't even realize she had been silent for too long,

and when she came to her senses, she realized that her hands, which were clenching her fingers, were gripping too tightly, and she hadn't even noticed her nails digging into her skin.

The Hopkins Family, a century-old family, one of the five major military-industrial giants,

was completely redefined in the three minutes she stood there with her mouth open, not daring to make a sound.

She had heard since childhood that her ancestors started from scratch, earning their first pot of gold through mining and railways.

No one told her that the money didn't actually come that way,

it was her great-grandfather, Leo Hopkins, polishing leather shoes for a lifetime for a "Federal Urban Pipeline Maintenance Department" field officer who looked only a few years older than him, saving up little by little from that compensation.

Northrop Grumman, the b-2 bomber, the Hoover Dam...

These things all connected to the same source.

That mysterious force that provided them with the reverse-engineered blueprints for alien spacecraft was never an enemy, nor did it appear out of thin air.

Her grandfather, Frederick Hopkins, in the same year he merged the two old aviation companies, Northrop and Grumman,

was able to obtain the actual reverse-engineered aircraft and enough material samples of unknown origin from some unknown channel, not because he was lucky.

It was because they were all on the same team.

From the night Leo polished Zhang Long's leather shoes, until now:

The Hopkins Family had never operated independently.

Instead, it had always been an organization doing peripheral work for the Deep State.

She had previously worried that the Deep State would come to hunt down the Hopkins Family, and even sent the Colt Association to excavate the relics of the twelve geniuses from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

and deployed five hundred heavy troops at the Arizona desert manor, trying to resist their "hunt."

And the thing she feared most deep down—that the Deep State would crush the Hopkins Family like they crushed the Grey Alien—was invalid from the start.

Everyone was from the same organization, and with her great-grandfather's friendship beforehand, the hunt was unlikely to happen.

She had a feeling of having narrowly escaped death, feeling drained, yet not daring to show it.

Then Diana slowly took a step back,

not intentionally, but an adjustment made spontaneously by her legs after bearing too many emotions that had been running at high speed,

and then raised her eyes to look at Zhang Long again.

Her deep brown eyes, which were always sharp, were for the first time free of any traces of calculation, as if a layer of skin had been peeled back, revealing a kind of reality she hadn't yet had time to re-adapt to.

"Mr. Zhang, I only now know that the Hopkins Family has been your people from the very beginning."

"I didn't know before; my great-grandfather never passed these words down."

"But we have always been executing that order: whoever investigates the Hoover Dam is to be hunted down."

"We have guarded it for four generations, and we have never stopped."

Zhang Long looked at her.

In the tea room, only the brass wall lamps and the faint starlight of the desert night outside the window shone together on his profile.

He did not answer immediately, picked up the tea cup and took a sip, then put the cup back on the tea table, his tone still calm and unhurried.

"The order you have guarded for four generations has indeed never been interrupted."

"There is merit, and there is labor."

"But..."

His tone pressed down on the word "but," carrying as much weight as a whole paragraph,

"Not completing the mission is not completing the mission."

"You let Edward and Musk slip through, and the secret of the Aliens has now spread to the hands of two independent forces."

"And these two people: one has a private military base in Texas, and one is a political machine that has been operating in Nevada for over a hundred years."

"This is your mistake."

"Mistakes must be punished."

"This is the rule of the Deep State."

Diana stood there, the bit of warmth that had just surged up, before it could even permeate her veins, was completely drained away by these words.

She knew the other party was not exaggerating at all.

She treated those who made mistakes the same way; those five snipers who failed to kill Edward and Musk, she had left none of them alive.

Diana's palms began to grow cold, but her voice did not waver: "I understand."

"I have not completed the mission, and I am willing to accept any punishment."

Zhang Long put the tea cup back on the boxwood tea table.

The desert night wind outside passed through the old window, blowing the white steam rising from the spout of the teapot so it swayed slightly.

"However, for the sake of that kid Leo polishing my leather shoes for free for a lifetime, I can give your Hopkins Family a chance to make amends."

Diana raised her head.

Her hands were still not warm, but that despair, which had already chilled her to the bone, suddenly had a very thin, very bright opening.

She asked: "What chance?"

"Musk currently has the right eyeball of a Grey Alien in his possession."

"The secrets involved with this eyeball are heavier than anything your family has handled in past generations."

"Therefore, what the Hopkins Family needs to do next is not only to silence Musk and Edward, but also to bring that eyeball back intact."

"At the same time, everyone involved in this matter, everyone who has heard content related to alien technology, everyone who has received any clues from Edward and Musk, are to be left with no survivors."

Diana did not respond immediately after hearing every word, letting all the conditions arrange themselves in her mind.

Silencing Edward and Musk:

This was already in her own plan, and she hadn't succeeded yet.

Retrieving the eyeball:

This is a new condition, but since it is to bring it back, rather than finding it from scratch, it means this thing is already in Musk's hands, and the clarity of the target is high enough.

Clearing out all those in the know:

This scope sounds large, but she is clear about the scale of information spread on Edward's side;

The Colt Association's records of every information node over these past few months are still locked in the quiet room archive folders.

So she raised her eyes and asked only one question in a steady voice:

"What support will the Deep State provide us?"