82: Chapter 82 How can I allow others to sleep soundly beside my bed?

Solomon looked at the corpse for a long time.

He remembered the scene when he first saw it.

It was 1947, he was fourteen, and his father had picked him up from boarding school, putting him on an unmarked military transport plane overnight to fly from the East Coast all the way to Nevada.

The plane landed on a dirt road in the desert, and then they transferred to a jeep, bumping along for several hours in the freezing New Mexico desert.

His father, Orson Crane, a Jewish tycoon and founder of the Crane capital empire, held his hand as they walked past scorched debris surrounded by a military cordon,

then pushed open the door of a field tent,

letting him see a scene he would never forget for the rest of his life:

Two corpses of Aliens lay side by side on a folding table, their bodies still frozen in the death postures they had held before losing their lives to burns and impact.

His father whispered in his ear: "This world will be yours."

"The only prerequisite is that you cannot let those outside who are unaware of their existence know that they should have possessed anything related to this."

His father had participated in the cleanup of the Roswell crash site, not as a government official, but as a member of the Crane family.

From that day on, he and his descendants became the gatekeepers of this secret.

Reverse engineering had been conducted intermittently for decades since 1947, with Crane Capital providing funding from the shadows, while those high-level officials in the Federal Government who also knew the secret were responsible for isolating it from external scrutiny.

Throughout his long career in power, he used this Alien corpse to gradually control the financial skeleton and military nerves of the Lighthouse Country,

first acquiring six member banks on the periphery of the Federal Reserve System, and then, through defense contractor mergers across three different presidential terms, infiltrating branches of Crane Capital into almost every congressional committee that could approve military budgets.

By the time he was sixty, he no longer needed to attend any board meetings in person,

all he had to do was sit in front of the glass container in this underground laboratory, seven miles south-southwest of Groom Lake,

watching those puppets placed in the presidential position read the manuscripts in their hands for him in front of the whole world.

At this moment, standing behind him for about five minutes but not daring to speak first, were White House Chief of Staff Madeline Rasmussen, Ronald Sawyer, and two other assistants closest to the president who also belonged to the Deep State system.

Madeline took half a step forward.

She never needed to be nervous in front of the president, but in front of Solomon, she had to rehearse all her wording twice in her mouth before daring to make a sound.

"Sir, a series of chain events has emerged in recent weeks, involving multiple independent forces that have had no interaction for years."

"The three military giants, Hopkins, Remington, and Augustus Knox, have clearly assembled armed forces and ground resources over the past week;"

"Elon Musk and Edward Warren have also completed multiple rounds of preparatory deployment;"

"Federal Bureau of Investigation Philip Moran and his remaining agents, as well as the entire CIA operation team of Heinlein from Langley, have all left their stations."

"All movements point to the same location: Hoover Dam."

"According to our intelligence confirmation, they have discovered a giant man-made cavity deep underground to the southeast of the dam."

"Various intelligence reports have marked this cavity as: a secret base."

Ronald Sawyer immediately took over, his voice low and precise:

"And this base, through cross-confirmation, is related to Aliens."

"According to the extremely limited fragmented intelligence leaked from Musk's side, what is under the dam seems to be the remains of some kind of Alien technology research facility."

Solomon did not answer immediately.

He slowly raised one hand, placed it on the edge of the glass container, and paused for a long time with his fingertips pressed against the cold glass surface.

Then he turned his head and looked at the people behind him, standing respectfully under the flickering, pale laboratory lights.

"A secret base for researching Aliens? Shouldn't it be here with me?"

Ronald Sawyer's Adam's apple rolled up and down a few times, but he made no sound.

Madeline opened her mouth, then braced herself to speak, her voice even lower than before:

"Sir... all the power structures we have known in the past were built on the fact that we controlled the only crash site."

"But what if the aircraft that crashed in 1947 was not the only one..."

"What if there was a second one, or even one that crashed somewhere else on this continent even earlier..."

"And at that time, it was not the Crane family that contacted it, but some other force that had existed secretly since the founding of the country, operating independently and never included in any public archives..."

Ronald Sawyer took over when she paused, his tone even more cautious,

"Plus, with the Lighthouse Country having been founded for nearly three hundred years, with various hidden forces intertwined, it is not impossible that an independently operating Alien research organization exists without our knowledge."

"What they are interested in might not be finance, but military industry, or something else."

Solomon stood in front of the glass container.

He was turning over in his mind all the historical archives he had previously directed:

He thought he had monopolized all the results involving reverse engineering of Alien technology in the Lighthouse Country since the mid-20th century, including stealth composite materials, low-observability coatings, thermal-hiding propulsion layouts...

Every single thing eventually fell into the patent pool controlled by the Crane family.

For decades, he had been satisfied to think that among everyone in the country, only he held a complete network of Alien remains and fragments,

and in his view, this was equivalent to him being the one who had long existed in the riddles of conspiracy theories—

The Deep State that controls this country from behind the scenes.

But now he knew.

Without his knowledge, someone had built a secret base to study Aliens beneath his own land,

not one year, not ten years, but a traceable timeline that could overlap with or even predate Roswell itself.

And he, the person who thought he controlled everything, only heard about it for the first time after Diana dragged all the informed people into it, and after the CIA pieced together the intelligence with radar cavity screenshots.

He had always thought he was the Deep State.

But now it seemed... he was not.

At least, not entirely.

If he were, he should have known about the existence of that base before the first concrete foundation pile was driven at Hoover Dam.

Silence spread in the laboratory for a while, and then Solomon spoke.

His voice was not loud, just as unhurried as before, but the temperature in his tone had dropped to deep winter.

"How can one allow others to sleep soundly by one's own bedside?"

"The Dragon Country people understood this principle thousands of years ago."

"No matter who these people are, no matter how long they have been hiding under Hoover Dam, studying Alien secrets that I do not control under our land, this matter itself must be eliminated."

He turned away from the container to face Madeline and Ronald Sawyer, his tone calm and logically rigorous, as if he were arranging the final step of a routine asset restructuring plan.

"A puppet president who still dreams of immortality at his age does not need to know any technology related to outer space."

"We just need to show him that agent from Musk."

"Limb Regeneration is enough to make him nod and mobilize any necessary resources from The Pentagon and the Special Operations Command."

"The military does not need to know the true goal of the operation; call it a counter-terrorism exercise, call it a Homeland Security special response operation."

"The target location is in the old spillway area southeast of Hoover Dam, near the ancient channel of the Colorado River, where the bedrock can be penetrated directly even by bunker-buster bombs."

Ronald Sawyer heard this and took the opportunity to add the most critical sentence: "Sir, the president is very interested in Musk's liquid zero."

"His recent mental decline has become obvious to the point where he himself is occasionally panicked during moments of clarity."

"So after hearing the words Limb Regeneration from Heinlein, his entire attention is almost glued to that agent."

"Therefore, after the operation is completed, we will immediately send all the liquid zero obtained from Musk directly to you."

"Send a replica to the president; he already forgets the presidential decrees he signed in the morning, so he won't be able to tell the difference."

Madeline nodded slightly at the side, her tone calm and stable, as if she were adding the final terms to a deal that was already set in stone:

"I will ensure that the White House press office and the Department of Defense public affairs office release counter-terrorism training reports during the operation window to cover all media inquiries."

"If the president's condition deteriorates during this period, the doctors can switch the injection back to a placebo at any time."

Solomon glanced at them, turned around, and faced the compound-eyed, cockroach-shaped corpse in the glass container that had been soaking in pale yellow preservative since 1947, his tone flat but heavy with hidden currents.

"Mobilize the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, two squadrons of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and draw one battalion from the 75th Ranger Regiment, combined with Air Force personnel to form a mission task force."

"Before deployment, issue a regional blockade notice in the name of a counter-terrorism exercise, prohibiting all non-military aircraft from entering the fifty-mile airspace around Hoover Dam."

"Control the operation window to within three hours."

"Leave no one who doesn't belong to us."

"Since someone has been hiding under my land for so many years, then let them be buried underneath forever along with that base!"