75: Chapter 75 The Sphincter That Couldn't Hold On Anymore: Funding Cut Off

The President's back shifted slightly away from the chair back he had been leaning against. He leaned his upper body forward, his fingers lightly pressing on the closed diplomatic security briefing on the desk.

When hearing about the Hopkins Family hiring assassins to silence witnesses, the President interrupted Heinlein, pressing for details on the verification path of the ballistics source used in the hiring, as well as the spillover risks of the Colt Association in the existing White House archives.

Heinlein answered every question with precision and conciseness.

But when Heinlein mentioned the Limb Regeneration serum in Musk's possession,

the President's attention spiked to its absolute peak in that instant!

Biden's fingertips lifted an inch or two from the desk. In his grayish-blue eyes, a flash of brightness appeared—one that did not belong on an octogenarian president triggered by any routine briefing.

It was not national security concern, nor was it a restructuring of political interests,

but rather a sharper, more personal, and more direct sharpness triggered by the instinct for physical survival at the prospect of longevity.

'Limb Regeneration...'

'You mean missing limbs can grow back within a single day, looking exactly like they did before?'

His voice was clearer and had less hesitation than during any of his previous questions.

Heinlein nodded in confirmation and added,

'Based on current fragments from our inside sources, the efficacy of this drug has been confirmed by more than one person, and it is highly synchronized with Musk's unusually high-intensity technological bets of late.'

'But so far, reports regarding deep, long-term side effects on the circulatory and nervous systems remain at zero... This involves test privacy protection, and all relevant information is completely blocked within the core inner perimeter of Starship.'

'Then this thing... if it can regenerate limbs, it can regenerate myocardium, and regenerate nerve endings... Does this mean...?' the President pressed.

'It means that, theoretically, it could be used to reverse degenerative tissue atrophy caused by aging, and even the decline of organ function.'

'If it can be applied systematically, it would be, in a sense...'

Heinlein paused for a moment, choosing the term that best conformed to professional intelligence standards rather than the most sensational one,

'...life-extension technology, or even the biological foundation for something close to rejuvenation.'

The President straightened up from his chair, propped both hands on the edge of the desk, and suddenly leaned forward, his lower back completely leaving the backrest.

As he leaned forward, his lips parted as if he were about to say something,

but inside his body, a certain sphincter group reacting to intense emotion failed to withstand the sudden pressure of his elderly physique.

Inside his suit trousers, it let out a faint sound of mixed liquid and air, but in that enclosed space, it was loud enough for the three people nearby to hear.

In the very same second, Biden's expression switched from excitement to freezing up, and then that frozen expression was forcefully locked onto his face by an overly quiet restraint.

His lips parted slightly, then closed, his chest rising and falling only about a third of its usual amplitude.

Heinlein had just picked up the glass of mineral water poured for him by a White House clerk and instinctively took a sip,

preparing to follow up on the President's unfinished question and continue laying out the data regarding the serum's general applicability...

Then, he smelled something.

It wasn't perfume.

It wasn't coffee.

It was a warm, fermented, sour scent characteristic of digested matter—something that should not have appeared in a highly dense, enclosed space filled with suited politicians and intelligence bureaucrats.

Heinlein's sense of smell identified it extremely quickly.

He had experienced too many similar suffocating odors in enemy detention rooms in the Middle East, and had also dealt with involuntary diarrhea caused by food poisoning among his own team members in remote stations in Africa.

But within that second, his brain did not have time to translate the olfactory signal into a concrete physical event cognitive realization.

All he saw was the people around the President suddenly springing into action.

White House National Security Advisor Ronald Sawyer leaned down from the side, tucked the folder in his hand under his arm, and tapped the back of Heinlein's chair. His voice was calm and smooth, as if he had rehearsed this countless times beforehand:

'Director, the President has a pre-scheduled call with John Country Prime Minister coming up next, and the time is just about here. We will end today's briefing here.'

Another of the President's personal assistants had already stepped quickly through the small door on the right side of the desk, holding a dark towel in his hand.

With extreme speed, he silently slipped around to the side of the President's chair and spread the towel over the area where the President's lower back and hips met the seat cushion before he stood up.

A third staffer, a face Heinlein didn't recognize—likely the White House Medical Liaison—was already half-squatted in the corner of the desk, speaking in an extremely low voice into the portable communicator on his wrist:

'Prepare a nearby private restroom. Do not use the one off the main corridor.'

Biden said nothing.

His lips were slightly pursed, his face half a shade grayer than before, but his shoulders remained rigidly squared, just as they would be at a diplomatic dinner,

allowing his staffers to form an airtight corridor of concealment with their arms and bodies in front of and beside him,

and then slowly stood up, his movements nearly twice as slow as usual. Under their shield, he retreated through the small door on the side of the Oval Office that led to his private quarters.

Heinlein was politely and firmly ushered to the door by Sawyer's gentle yet irresistible gestures,

and the moment his heels stepped onto the carpet of the corridor outside, the door shut tightly behind him with a soft, precise click.

He did not leave immediately.

To a veteran of the intelligence system, a soundproof door only meant 'the people inside think they can't be heard.'

He set his briefcase down on the floor line next to the corridor carpet, folded his hands in front of him, leaned forward slightly, and tilted his ear about half an inch toward the gap in the door.

It was not completely silent inside.

The hurried footsteps of White House administrative staff and conversations lowered to the absolute limit leaked through the gaps between the walls and the wooden frame.

'Hurry, get some paper! The President has soiled himself again!!'

'He's still going!! It won't stop, get his pants off first...'

'Has the doctor arrived? Give him an injection, quick...'

'Towels! Get another one!! The one on the chair is already dirty...'

Heinlein stood up straight in the corridor, picked his briefcase up from the floor, tucked it under his arm, and stared straight ahead at the gilded wall lamps at the end of the hallway and the reproduction frames of past presidents' portraits.

Just earlier at the agency, he had analyzed how Walsh being shot eight times in the back had been written off as suicide, and how three FBI agents had shot themselves immediately after watching a video;

at a closed-door meeting in Langley, he had calmly summarized the anomalous joint deployment on the same day by Limb Regeneration, Raytheon, the Aliens, and the three major defense giants.

Now, he placed all of these puzzle pieces right alongside the President's inauguration oath photo on the corridor wall.

Then, he waited for nearly an hour and a half.

The one who finally came to see him was Madeline Rasmussen, the White House Chief of Staff. In her fifties, her tenure spanned the administrations of three presidents, and her expression was perpetually like a cutting board fresh out of a cast-iron furnace.

'Director, the President is very interested in Musk's Limb Regeneration serum.'

'A special CIA appropriation of fifty million dollars has been approved for you to investigate the specific source, technical pathway, and transferability of this matter.'

Heinlein's eyes twitched slightly when he heard the funding figure, but he did not ask further.

'What about the Aliens part? Did the President have any instructions on how to follow up?'

'The non-human intervention signals from the Starship Base already have more than one source...'

Madelyn raised her hand and interrupted him.

It wasn't brute force, but rather the gentle yet non-negotiable gesture a woman who had held power for many years would use when she had to cut off a sensitive topic, cutting off the rest of his words.

'The President has his own plans regarding the Aliens...'

'The CIA does not need to investigate this area.'

'It is strictly forbidden to investigate this area, Richard.'

'Do not dig any deeper into any clues related to this.'

Heinlein fell silent for a moment.

He had sat in the commander's leather chair at the central hub of eighteen global intelligence gathering system terminals for nearly four years now.

Don't ask what shouldn't be asked.

This principle was the first piece of advice passed down to him by previous CIA directors upon their retirement.

He did not press on what 'the President's plans' were, nor did he try to decipher the unspeakable, higher-level source of authority that clearly lay behind her words.

He simply committed the verbal resolution—which approved fifty million in funding but strictly prohibited investigating the Aliens line—entirely to memory, gave Madelyn a slight nod, and took his leave.

But on the way back, he already knew:

Even if the appropriation document earmarked fifty million for the CIA, the amount that actually landed in their account was usually not that figure.

...

The seventh-floor conference room in Langley.

CIA Chief Financial Officer Bernard Tuttle,

a silent man who had done budget auditing at the CIA for nineteen years and knew exactly how many external interception points every single federal dollar had to pass through before entering the agency's account,

projected the funding deposit notification onto the large screen.

The bank debit deposit amount displayed on the screen was: $5,000,000.

A full zero less than the figure the White House Chief of Staff had just mentioned.

Kevin Mosby was the first to stand up, his voice practically exploding:

'Wait!! Fifty million became five million?'

'They reported fifty million to the White House, and only five million is left by the time it hits our account?'

'A ninety percent cut? This isn't just taking kickbacks! This is swallowing the entire table of food and leaving us with nothing but a layer of broth!'

Tuttle pulled up a tracking record from the terminal and pointed to several encrypted paths labeled as 'midway compliance diversion,' his tone flat but carrying a resentment that could grind steel nails:

'Twenty million was disbursed from the Department of the Treasury's cash pool, routed through the auxiliary ledger for special external counter-terrorism appropriations.'

'Ten million was transferred directly to the Department of Defense's black budget account, under the guise of a collaborative satellite monitoring project.'

'Another ten million was siphoned off by the Department of Justice under the name of "inter-agency intelligence sharing platform upgrade fees".'

'And another five million was transferred to the Department of Energy, with the justification of "emergency supplementary funding for new material energy-related experiments".'

'The five million that reached us is just the bare skeleton left after being stripped layer by layer by four administrative departments.'

'Commissioner Smith,' the Deputy Director of the Operations Division sneered, tossing the encrypted signing pen in his hand onto the table.

'Commissioner Smith has a fucking great appetite this year, swallowing forty-five million in one gulp and leaving us with five million, yet still expecting us to thoroughly investigate the Alien serum for them.'

'No Commissioner Smith in history has ever been this arrogant while pocketing such massive kickbacks.'