71: Chapter 71 Three Shots Ring Out in the Train Car, Angrily Cursing the Mastermind

Lewis opened his mouth to say something, but Agent Hawkins cut him off. Tears streamed down his contorted face, and though his hand was still shaking, his voice suddenly shifted from hoarse to incredibly hollow:

"Do you know what happened to Walsh's wife after he died? She was hit by a car and killed!"

"Right on her way to the supermarket, an 'accidental traffic collision'!"

"Do you know what happened to his son? He was shot eight times in the back, and the police concluded it was suicide."

"His son held a rifle and fired eight shots into his own back—that was Ricky Walsh, only twenty-three years old."

"His little daughter saw her brother commit suicide with an AR-15, and she was subsequently sent to a mental hospital."

"The reason these things came to light is because the police's explanation for the suicide was inconsistent, and a neighbor who was a nurse exposed it."

"So you know, I am fully aware of all these inside details!!"

His voice was completely shattered, every word laced with sobbing and fragments of saliva.

"I have a wife, I have a son too. They don't know anything, but the Deep State doesn't care about that!!"

"They will have his school bus hit by a truck, or plant drugs in her tennis bag to get her thrown into federal prison. They will all die..."

"And all of this is just because I took these videos, this video..."

He pressed the muzzle of his gun against his temple, his lips trembling so much he could barely speak, his breathing becoming heavier and more ragged.

Finally, he gasped in incoherent, low breaths, his eyes fixed on the imprint of the wireless charger cast on the floor by the carriage's cold fluorescent light.

Then he said a sentence in an almost monotone voice.

"I'm not afraid to die."

"But I cannot let them die with me."

Lewis couldn't even take a half-step forward.

The gun went off.

Agent Hawkins's body slumped to the side on the carriage floor, the blood from the back of his head, along with his finger still clutching the gun grip, slamming against the edge of the aluminum table leg.

The Glock slid from his loosening palm, spun half a circle in the blood, and stopped next to Moran's sole.

The carriage filled with the charred, sweet smell of gunpowder mixed with rust.

And Agent Hawkins was not the last.

Brian Cole, that veteran intelligence analyst who had worked at the FBI for twenty-one years, the portly man who never missed a day of work all year and never drew his gun from his shoulder holster,

at the same moment Agent Hawkins fell, Cole pressed his back tightly against the carriage wall and said in a dull, listless voice, as if all his vitality had been drained:

"I have three daughters."

"The youngest is only seven."

Then he drew his service weapon from its holster, aimed it at his temple, closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger.

The second gunshot was more muffled than the first, because the muzzle was pressed against his skin.

The third person was Dennis Rosen, the leader of the FBI Los Angeles field office's Counter-Terrorism Assault Team, forty years old, who had once run four hundred meters through RPG fire in the street fighting of Mogadishu.

He had three sons and two daughters.

He crouched down in the pool of blood, picked up the service weapon Cole had dropped on the floor, stood up, and quickly said something to the wall that Moran didn't manage to hear clearly,

then bit down on the barrel and fired a shot into the ceiling.

The carriage was filled with the mixed scent of gunpowder, blood spatter, and burnt metal.

The blood spattered on the walls overlapped from different angles.

The overhead lights remained on, pale and even, while the seat cushions absorbed some of the impact sounds.

In the confined space, three corpses were distributed within less than six feet of each other.

Moran stood where he was, his fingernails digging into the flesh of his palms.

He had just tried to persuade them; he had said everything he could.

About staying calm, about the team, about how things hadn't reached the final step yet,

but every word he spoke felt as light as paper ash in the face of the gunshots.

It wasn't that he hadn't experienced death; he had gone head-to-head with hardened criminals when he was a field agent at the Philadelphia field office, and he had seen convoys blown apart by IEDs when he was a military liaison officer in Iraq.

But this time was different.

The three people who fired their guns this time were not enemies; they were their own people.

They died by their own hands, not through interrogation, nor were they silenced.

Instead, they committed suicide by gunshot out of sheer despair.

The only ones left standing in the carriage were himself, Lewis Parker, Paul Rivera, and Michael Owens.

Moran took a deep breath of the foul air filled with the smell of gunpowder and spoke in a hoarse voice:

"No matter how afraid I am... we've stumbled upon the secrets of the Deep State; there's no turning back now."

"Since we're going to die anyway, we might as well see what the people from the Deep State look like before we die."

He paused, swept his gaze over the dirty profiles of Lewis, Rivera, and Owens, and deliberately raised his tone a notch,

"...It wouldn't be a loss."

After saying this, he waited a few seconds,

expecting someone to reply with something like "The Deputy Director is right" or "Fight them to the end," to lift the atmosphere.

But no one replied.

Lewis silently crouched down, unzipped the first-aid kit he had placed under the folding chair, looked inside, then put it back;

Rivera wiped the slide of his Beretta M9 with his cuff, checked the magazine after wiping it, and reloaded the gun;

Owens leaned against the carriage wall, let out a sigh, and then turned his head slowly:

"Deputy Director, my parents died a long time ago; I have no family."

"So I'm not afraid. I just want to see what the real Deep State looks like before I die."

Rivera spoke up next, clicking the magazine back into the grip, and said softly:

"I've never been married, have no children, and no living parents."

"No ties, so I'm fine too."

Moran's gaze swept across their faces one by one.

He thought his speech about "we're going to die anyway" had worked, and a faint sense of relief had vaguely welled up in his heart,

only to be crushed to pieces by these two emotionless statements from Owens.

He opened his mouth, wanting to say something, but in the end, he couldn't say anything at all.

It wasn't that his speech was effective.

It was just that the remaining people happened to have no family.

He leaned against the carriage wall and closed his eyes.

In that moment, he truly understood the weight of the four words "Deep State"!

It was a kind of absolute oppression that crushed even the Deputy Director of the FBI to the point where he couldn't say a word.

Among his agents, all those with families had committed suicide by gunshot, leaving only those who were alone.

After Walsh died, his wife was hit by a car, and his son was shot eight times in the back—suicide.

And then there were these few; they simply took care of it themselves.

If all his agents today had families, there wouldn't be a single living person in the carriage right now except for the corpses.

And he himself was no exception.

Moran suddenly gripped the metal clipboard beside him and slammed it hard against the carriage wall.

The clipboard bounced off, knocking over the stainless steel water cup next to him; the lid rolled to the edge of the pool of blood, and water spilled all over the floor.

He suddenly straightened his back, nearly tearing his throat apart, and cursed at the encrypted communicator that had long since disconnected:

"Whitfield! You old bastard! Fuck you!"

"You tricked me into coming here to investigate some major military industry case! Some Hoover Dam project corruption! And what's the result?!"

"It's Aliens! It's the Deep State! They kill your whole family if you touch classified secrets!"

"How did Walsh die? How did his wife die? How did his son die? You goddamn knew it all!!"

"You goddamn shoved me here to be a scapegoat!!"

He punched the carriage wall again, his knuckles cracking, white marks scraped onto the knuckles of his blood-stained fist, but he felt absolutely no pain, shouting at the air with a hoarse voice.

"Whitfield! You just wait!!"

"I'll keep a tab on the debt of your whole family dying in the future until the day I die!"

"I curse you, you old geezer, to a terrible death!"

"Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!!!"

...

Arizona, Casablanca Manor, East Wing Archive Room.

Diana hadn't stepped through this door in twenty years.

Twenty years ago, she had dug out old memos from before and after the merger of Northrop and Grumman here, and then, with the pure curiosity of a twenty-three-year-old, she walked into her father's study and asked that question:

"How did you build the b-2 bomber in three years?"

And then the trajectory of her life was completely rewritten.

Since then, this archive room had become the only place in the entire manor she avoided.

Not because of fear, but because every time she passed this door, she would remember the look in her father's eyes when he looked up from his book—a gleam she hadn't understood at the time, but later realized was fear.

But today, she had to come.

The things Zhang Long said in the boxwood tea room yesterday:

Leo Hopkins shined shoes for officials of the Deep State, and the original capital of the Hopkins Family came from the compensation for running errands for the Deep State—

these pieces of information were explosive for anyone.

She needed evidence.

Not because she doubted Zhang Long was lying—

with the power the other party displayed, there was simply no need to lie to her—

but because she needed to see with her own eyes those fragments left behind by family history, needing to use them to piece together a complete understanding:

where the Hopkins Family really came from, and why it became tied to the Deep State.

The air in the archive room was dry and stale, carrying the mixed scent of paper that had been stored too long and leather covers.

On the iron shelves against the wall were stacked all the family documents from the late nineteenth century to the end of World War II:

land deeds, mining extraction licenses, railway stock certificates, private correspondence, ledgers, and diaries.

She stopped in front of the dedicated compartment for the period of her great-grandfather Leo Hopkins, crouched down, and opened a rusty iron file box on the bottom shelf.

Inside the box, on the very top, was a notebook with a cover so brittle it was crumbling into dust.

Leo Hopkins's handwriting was scrawled and compact, the ink having faded to a deep brown.

She flipped through a few pages; it was all trivial notes: who he met today, where he went, what he did.

Diana didn't rush to flip to the next entry.

She continued to read page by page, paragraph by paragraph.

Certain fragments in Leo Hopkins's records were gradually picked out by her from the mundane daily life—

such as several late-night outings, briefly written down as "went to the north of the city to deliver something,"

such as an unfamiliar location name that appeared repeatedly, crossed out and rewritten several times,

such as several consecutive weeks of diary entries that almost stayed between "waiting for news" and "nothing tonight."

In the eyes of others, these records would probably only be seen as the trivial itinerary of a low-level merchant soliciting work everywhere,

but she had just met someone who walked out of lightning yesterday, so she knew these were not trivialities.

These were missions.

They were the mission records of her great-grandfather running errands for the Deep State,

deliberately filtering out all key information, leaving only minimal prompts sufficient for the person himself to retrace the actions.