7: Chapter 7: Reviewing Surveillance Footage to Find the Truth

Nevada, Las Vegas, Spring Mountain Manor.

Edward Warren's estate was situated on a private plot at the end of Spring Mountain Avenue, covering twelve acres.

The main building was a three-story villa in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, with honey-colored stucco walls and a red terracotta tile roof.

In the residual heat of the Las Vegas evening, it quietly exuded the warm, dry scent of having been baked by the sun all day long.

He shouldn't have been driving himself back.

The meeting held at City Hall this afternoon was a closed-door session of the State Senate Public Safety Committee, concerning police budget adjustments for several counties in southern Nevada, and after the meeting concluded, he had spoken with the mayor privately for fifteen minutes.

By custom, his son, Link, should have been driving.

That silver-grey Porsche Cayenne of his was usually driven by Link.

He would sit in the passenger seat, closing his eyes to rest or reviewing meeting minutes, occasionally taking a call from an aide, and would be home in thirty minutes.

But today was different.

After leaving the Level B2 parking lot at City Hall, Link's hands had been unable to grip the steering wheel.

It wasn't because of alcohol; Edward knew that although his son was a playboy, he never drank before driving.

It was because of something else.

Link's expression, that complexion, that look in his eyes...

Edward Warren had lived for fifty-seven years, having spent half a lifetime fighting with all sorts of people in the state legislature; there was no situation he hadn't seen.

But he really hadn't seen his son like this before.

So, he was the one driving.

Along the way, Link sat in the passenger seat, slumped against the door, staring blankly at the rapidly receding Las Vegas streetscape outside the window, occasionally muttering a few indistinct words.

Edward heard a few scattered fragments:

"Aliens," "Grey," "Eyes were glowing," "That woman," "Parking area," "Don't tell anyone"...

But he didn't press him.

Decades of political life had taught him one fundamental rule:

Never react without complete information.

He drove into the manor gates, parked the car, and helped Link out of the passenger seat.

Link's legs were weak; when his feet touched the ground, his body swayed twice, and Edward steadied him by the shoulders.

"Come in," he said briefly.

Link was helped into the living room on the first floor of the villa.

Edward had him sit on the dark brown Chesterfield sofa and poured him a glass of water.

Link didn't drink, clutching the glass in his hand, the water level inside sloshing slightly.

Edward sat down opposite him.

He didn't press him or urge him, just sat there quietly, hands crossed on his knees, his gaze steady and sharp, like an experienced hunter observing a wounded prey.

He needed to wait for Link to speak first.

After about five minutes, Link's composure eased slightly.

He raised his head to look at his father, his lips moving several times before he spoke in a hoarse, dry voice, as if he had just recovered from a major illness:

"Dad... I saw something in the parking lot."

Edward did not reply, only signaling him to continue with his gaze.

"It wasn't a prank. It wasn't a movie. It wasn't a hallucination from drugs."

Link spoke quickly, as if afraid that if he stopped, he wouldn't dare to continue,

"It was an Alien. A real Alien."

"Right in the Level B2 parking lot, crawling out of the ventilation duct."

"Grey skin, a head this big, two black eyes that glowed blue."

"It saw me, and it made this gesture at me..."

He mimicked the shushing gesture, finger held to his lips,

"It told me not to make a sound. Then it ran off."

Edward still didn't speak.

His expression didn't change at all, like a seasoned poker player waiting for an opponent to reveal their hole cards.

"Then two more people came out of the ventilation duct. Two men in black suits."

"They were much faster than humans; in the blink of an eye, they pinned down that grey-skinned thing."

"One of them had some kind of arc weapon in his hand, a ghostly blue color,"

Link's voice was trembling,

"It stunned the Grey Alien instantly."

"Then they put it into a grey bag."

"The thing inside the bag was struggling; I saw it moving..."

"And then?" Edward finally spoke.

The voice was low and steady, like the sound of a chair shifting in front of a fireplace.

"Then a woman walked over. A middle-aged woman in a grey suit."

"She walked over, got into my car, and showed me her ID badge..."

"What was written on it?"

"Federal Urban Pipeline Maintenance Department."

Edward's eyebrows twitched slightly.

The movement was so small that if it hadn't been someone who had observed him for years, they wouldn't have noticed.

"What else did she show you?"

"She flipped the ID badge over; there was an emblem on the back."

"A triangle with an eye in the center, split down the middle by a line."

"I hadn't seen that emblem before, but I could tell that thing was high-level. Much higher than the 'Pipeline Maintenance Department' she claimed."

Link swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing with difficulty,

"She warned me not to tell anyone about what happened."

"She said that parking area was a privileged zone for high-ranking state officials, and that while I had used your privilege to park there, I had better not tell anyone about what I saw."

"She said you wouldn't want me to do that either. Then she left. They all left."

"As if nothing had ever happened, the ventilation cover was put back, and I was the only one left in the whole parking lot."

"Dad, I didn't..."

"Stop," Edward raised a hand.

He looked at his son, looking very intently.

His gaze scanned Link's face,

Not scanning with his naked eyes, but with the honed, tempered ability to read people that he had cultivated over decades in the political trade.

He watched the look in Link's eyes, the state of his pupils, the subtle trembling of his facial muscles, the whiteness of his knuckles from gripping too hard, and the vibration frequency of his vocal cords as he spoke.

Link was not a good actor.

If it were fake, it couldn't be acted this realistically.

That look in his eyes, that emotion of fear, those dazed fragments remaining in his eyes after his worldview had been smashed by a single blow... it wasn't fake.

Edward Warren reached out and picked up the landline phone on the table next to him.

"Dr. McPherson? This is Edward Warren."

"I called you just a moment ago. I'm sorry to trouble you, but you don't need to come over. Yes, not for the time being. Thank you."

He hung up the phone and placed the landline back in its place.

Then he picked up his mobile phone.

He flipped to a name in his contacts.

That name was saved as "RA," an abbreviation whose meaning only he knew.

He pressed the dial button.

The phone rang twice before it was answered.

"BOSS."

On the other end of the line was a steady male voice, a baritone with a hint of that unhurried rhythm typical of Silicon Valley engineers.

"Raymond," Edward said.

His voice was not much different from when he spoke to the doctor just now; restrained, steady, with no obvious fluctuation in tone,

"Go to City Hall right now."

"Retrieve all surveillance footage from the Level B2 underground parking lot from this afternoon, from 3 PM to 6 PM. All cameras, leave none out."

There was a silence on the other end of the line for a second.

Not because of hesitation, but because he was processing the information.

"Can you tell me what this is about?"

"Get the footage first. Then come to me. Do it secretly; don't alert anyone."

"Understood." The phone hung up.

Raymond Carter.

His chief of staff for ten years.

A Stanford PhD in electronic engineering, one of the first people in Silicon Valley to work on image recognition algorithms in the nineties, who had sold his first company for 240 million dollars at the age of thirty-one.

Then he suddenly quit the tech world and joined Edward's campaign team.

No one understood why he did that, including all his peers in Silicon Valley at the time.

But Raymond had never explained.

For ten years, he had been his most trusted person, loyal and devoted, with a mouth as tight as a welded-shut safe.

Edward hung up the phone and sat back down on the sofa.

He made no superfluous movements, just waited quietly.

The second hand of the grandfather clock in the living room ticked along, one notch at a time.

Link clutched that empty glass, the bottom of it tapping out a faint, rhythmic sound on the marble coffee table.

He didn't speak, and his father didn't speak either.

From City Hall to Spring Mountain Manor, the fastest normal drive takes thirty minutes, and that's without traffic.

Although it was past the evening rush hour in Las Vegas, the drive from the city center to Spring Mountain Avenue would still take at least twenty-seven or twenty-eight minutes.

However, less than ten minutes later, the screech of brakes came from the driveway outside the manor.

It wasn't the sound of tires rubbing smoothly against the ground during a normal stop, but a sharp, violent, near-out-of-control braking sound.

Accompanied by the smell of burnt tire rubber, it drifted through the air into the half-open window of the living room.

Edward stood up.

He walked to the door and pushed open the heavy front door.

Parked in the driveway was a dark blue Tesla Model S, the bumper on the right side of the front end smashed in a large dent,

The lens of the right headlight was cracked into a spiderweb pattern, the front fender was twisted and deformed, and there was still some white wall dust on it, scraped from who knows where.

This car had raced all the way here at top speed.

The car door opened, and a man stumbled out of the driver's seat.

Raymond Carter, forty-seven years old, about 1.8 meters tall, wearing a dark grey business casual outfit, no tie, the top two buttons of his shirt torn open at some point.

He wore silver-rimmed glasses, and behind the lenses were a pair of bloodshot eyes.

Those eyes were wide open now, his pupils constricted to an abnormal state,

This was a physiological reaction of extreme fear.