73: Chapter 73: Limb Regeneration Revealed, Intelligence Network Locked Down

Musk placed the terminal on the table, rubbed his brow with his right hand, and remained silent.

Joshua's figure walking out of the lightning and knocking down over a hundred people with a single wave of his hand,

as well as the words he had spoken to him in the private reception room—"Longevity Faction are sending people to kill you. If you survive the pursuit and find the Hoover Dam base, it will prove you are qualified to live"—

were all weighing heavily on his mind right now, tangled with a cold, hard conclusion.

That evening,

Edward Warren's plane landed on the private runway of the Starship Base.

This flight from Nevada was a last-minute addition.

The night before, Musk had already synchronized the full details of Joshua's visit through an encrypted channel, including the internal factional division between Tech Faction and Longevity Faction.

The two men stood face-to-face in the communications room, neither of their expressions looking good.

Musk leaned his back against the edge of the communications console, crossing his arms over his chest, and first gave a concise and accurate recount of the entire "San Antonio dinner invitation" incident from earlier that day:

SpaceX's launch license being frozen, The Pentagon's national security justification, and the Joint Base as the banquet venue.

Then he looked at Edward and said, "Why do you look so terrible... Don't tell me you received an invitation too?"

Edward didn't answer immediately.

He retrieved a thin, brown folder from his briefcase, placed it on the console, and slid it forward half an inch.

"What I received wasn't an invitation."

"It's a shroud."

He tilted his chin, gesturing for Musk to open it.

Inside the folder were the original records of all the Warren Family's secret land transactions over the past twenty years,

including scanned copies of documents signed by the former Nevada governor from three terms ago accepting bribes, falsified internal appraisal reports from the Bureau of Land Management, and a forty-five million dollar kickback trail that flowed through four layers of shell companies to the Cayman Islands.

Every single document was enough to send the Warren Family to prison for two hundred years in federal court.

The last page wasn't a document, but a postscript typed out with an old-fashioned typewriter:

"By tomorrow night, these documents will either be on the Attorney General's desk, or in your shredder."

"The choice is yours."

Musk closed the folder and fell silent for a moment.

Then, he replayed the image of Joshua walking out of the lightning in his mind. He looked up at Edward, his eyes devoid of hesitation.

"So we have no choice."

"They froze my launch license and dug up your family's leverage. They are telling us that they have the power to kill us without ever pulling a trigger."

"Since that's the case, instead of hiding, we might as well sit directly at the table and lay our cards out face-to-face."

Edward leaned both hands on the edge of the console, his brow furrowed, not replying immediately.

"Ever since Walsh was assassinated, both of our sides have been tracking down the mastermind."

"The intelligence fragments we've gathered so far can basically piece together a complete picture: Diana Hopkins, the head of the Hopkins Family."

"She hired those five snipers, and after Walsh died, she sent people to clean up those five gunmen."

"But if the Hopkins Family were the only ones behind this, she wouldn't have been able to sway The Pentagon."

"For them to mobilize the commander's banquet hall at the Joint Base, the Hopkins Family's influence alone wouldn't be enough."

"There must be other forces involved, and they've already gathered at the same table."

"They've joined forces to cut off my Starship license and your Nevada foundation," Musk pushed the folder aside, his lips twitching slightly, though it wasn't a smile.

"They've prepared a massive trap, waiting for us to stick our necks in."

"But I think we might as well stick our heads in and take a look."

Musk turned his left hand over, staring at the new hand that had completely regrown after he chopped it off just a few days ago, curling his five fingers one by one into a fist.

Then he looked up at Edward, his tone shifting from teasing back to calm.

"In the face of liquid zero, danger itself is no longer in the same dimension."

"Even if we really get close to being killed after going in, as long as we have a vial of liquid zero left in our hands, a severed hand or leg is just a matter of waiting another twenty-four hours."

"Besides, Joshua of the Deep State's Tech Faction has already dumped the mission on us: survive the pursuit of Longevity Faction and find the base beneath the Hoover Dam."

"This isn't a multiple-choice question; it's a pre-written to-do list."

"No matter how grand the Hongmen banquet set by the military-industrial giants is, can it possibly compare to a man who walks out of lightning?"

Hearing this, Edward didn't reply, only tilting his head slightly.

Joshua, Tech Faction, Longevity Faction... he had heard Musk mention these names in their video calls before,

but due to the time limits of the encrypted video calls, many details hadn't been expanded upon.

He only knew that there was a factional split within the Deep State and that Tech Faction had approached Musk,

but he hadn't heard the full story of what exactly Musk had experienced on the second basement level, or how he had reached the conclusion that "Longevity Faction are sending people to kill us."

"You said last time that Joshua ordered you to survive the pursuit of Longevity Faction and find the base beneath the Hoover Dam."

"But you didn't have time to explain clearly what exactly this man did to you to make you change from someone who formed the Long Live Alliance just to avoid being silenced, to how you are now, acting like a military-industrial Hongmen banquet is nothing."

Musk stood up straight, leaving the edge of the console, and gestured with his head toward the corridor.

"Let's talk inside."

"Once you know what Joshua did to me and see what's inside, you will understand that the Hongmen banquet set by the military-industrial giants really poses no threat to the Long Live Alliance."

...

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia.

The atmosphere in the conference room on the seventh floor had been extremely heavy since seven in the morning.

The sides of the long conference table were packed with directors from various core departments of the CIA:

the Operations Division, the Directorate of Intelligence Analysis, the Counterintelligence Department, the Directorate of Science and Technology, and the Homeland Security Liaison Group, which was specifically responsible for domestic intelligence coordination.

In front of everyone lay a stack of folders of varying thicknesses, the classification markings on the covers uniformly deep red.

The people in the conference room had been in a closed-door analysis meeting for nearly three hours straight. Scattered across the table were paper coffee cups and wrappers of compressed biscuits they hadn't had time to eat.

A series of seemingly unrelated intelligence items scrolled across the large screen, each marked with its source and timestamp,

from signal intelligence interceptions to satellite imagery analysis, and from field agent reports to internal briefings from federal agencies, fragments of information covered the entire wall.

Nevada Senator Edward Warren, representing an established political family that had operated in Nevada for over a century, had shown a drastic shift in his behavioral patterns over the past few months.

According to intelligence compiled by the CIA from the Department of the Treasury, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and local Las Vegas channels,

Edward had mobilized a massive amount of private resources to systematically retrieve all hydroelectric operational data for the Hoover Dam from 1947 to 1997.

He and his core staff team had repeatedly traveled to a private fishing cabin near Gold Lake in northern Nevada, with each meeting lasting for hours.

Shortly after, Eli Walsh, Director of the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis and a veteran who had been immersed in the intelligence system for nearly thirty years, suddenly began having intensive interactions with Edward.

The two dined together at a private club on Chestnut Street in Georgetown, Washington, D.C.,

and subsequently, under the guise of "defending against Russia's deep-earth drilling technology," Walsh utilized the Department of Homeland Security's classified budget to secretly excavate something a thousand meters beneath the Westfield Center in downtown Los Angeles.

Then Walsh died.

The public announcement was a sudden heart attack, dying in the line of duty.

However, the CIA had already confirmed through cross-referencing ballistic evidence from the Los Angeles Police Department:

Walsh died of a sniper wound, killed instantly by a single shot to the forehead. The executioners were five professional snipers, and the person who hired them was the Hopkins Family.

The family controlling Northrop Grumman from behind the scenes had directly ordered the silencing of the number three figure in the Department of Homeland Security.

And that wasn't all.

Not long after Walsh's death,

Diana Hopkins ordered that all living people within a hundred-mile radius of Casablanca Manor be completely cleared out.

Satellite imagery deployed by the CIA around the manor showed that within a few hours, the Hopkins Family's armed squads pushed outward with the manor as the center, conducting a carpet-style sweep of all roads, villages, and isolated buildings.

Around almost the same time,

three agents under FBI Deputy Director Philip Moran committed suicide one after another by swallowing their guns at an investigation site in an abandoned warehouse in Los Angeles,

According to informal briefings obtained by the CIA from within the FBI, before their deaths, these three individuals had just watched a video leaked from outside Casablanca Manor.

The content of the video had not yet been acquired by the CIA, but it was enough to make three active-duty FBI agents simultaneously choose to shove guns into their own mouths.

Then there was Edward Warren and Elon Musk's "Long Live Alliance,"

Two people who previously had zero intersection suddenly became extremely close,

Edward's private plane made multiple round trips between Nevada and Boca Chica, Texas,

In recent weeks, Musk's Starship Base had continuously received multiple batches of private armed personnel arriving from the direction of Nevada.

What was even stranger was that the internal communication encryption level of the Starship Base had suddenly spiked dramatically in recent days, completely locking out even the peripheral signal interception points previously planted by the CIA with a new quantum encryption protocol.

Viewed individually, each of these intelligence fragments seemed like an unrelated, isolated event.

But if they were arranged in a line along a timeline, and red lines were used to connect the intersections between the figures:

Edward connects to Walsh,

Walsh connects to the Los Angeles underground excavation,

the Los Angeles excavation connects to the silencing by the Hopkins Family,

the silencing by the Hopkins Family connects to the clearing of the manor,

the clearing of the manor connects to the FBI agents' suicides...

all the red lines ultimately converged on an extremely unusual direction:

Someone knew something they shouldn't, and someone was desperately trying to cover it up.

And the scale and methods of this cover-up had already surpassed any domestic security incident the CIA had handled in the past thirty years.