14: Chapter 14: The Engineer's Last Words Reveal the Truth

Then, Raymond Carter stood up from his canvas folding chair.

He walked to the area in the middle of the coffee table, which was piled high with documents, bent down, and pulled a file bound in a transparent folder from the very bottom, placing it on the stack of materials in front of Hawthorne, Sloan, and Margaret.

"That's what those three thought at first too," Raymond's voice was soft, but very clear.

"Just follow the hydroelectric resources line, that's all. Since there's a gap, there must be a destination, and since there's a destination, one can trace it to the source."

"So they kept digging, all the way up to the man who built the Hoover Dam."

He pulled a photocopy of an old photograph out of the transparent folder.

The man in the photo was about fifty, wearing a hard hat common on construction sites, with a sturdy build, a square chin, and a gaze that held the certainty and confidence of an engineer.

"Frank Gore," Raymond said, "Chief Engineer of the Hoover Dam."

"He led the entire project from planning to construction."

"His status in the Lighthouse Country civil engineering association is equivalent to Newton's in the field of physics."

"After the dam was completed in 1936, he was awarded the highest honor medal by the Federal Government and received a standing ovation from all the members in Congress."

"Then he retired."

"After he retired, Gore's family and neighbors often said he drank heavily, going crazy after drinking, ranting and raving. Some said he was crazy, others said he was just a pitiful old drunkard."

Raymond slowly pushed the photo toward Edward, then changed the subject, his voice dropping.

"And Hawthorne and Margaret checked the old newspapers from that period and discovered something."

Hawthorne finally spoke.

He put his glasses, which he had wiped three times, back on, opened his notebook marked with colorful sticky labels, his voice steady and carrying the precision unique to a legal professional:

"In 1944, Gore had already been retired for eight years."

"One day, when he was dead drunk in a bar in Las Vegas and being kicked out by the bar owner, he shouted at everyone on the street."

"What he shouted was very rare, and very specific —"

"He said that when the Hoover Dam was built in 1931, the original schedule was seven years, but the big shots above gave him a death order to finish it within five years."

"To rush the schedule, safety measures at the construction site were significantly reduced."

Hawthorne looked up, his old eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses looking unusually sharp.

"The result was — 112 workers lost their lives due to various accidents."

"And Gore said in his shouting that he was not the one who ordered the rush. He was not the murderer who killed those 112 people."

"It was the big shots who gave him the death order, forcing him to fill the cracks in the stones with the lives of workers."

Edward's brows furrowed slightly.

This expression was extremely rare on his face; even people who had known him for decades might not have seen it a few times.

"And then?" he asked.

Raymond took over, his voice as calm as if he were reading an autopsy report:

"Then, in 1946, two years after Gore said those things, he suddenly died of a heart attack."

The air in the room seemed to be sucked out for a moment.

Edward Warren did not speak.

But his left hand, the one resting on the armrest of the armchair, had his ring finger and little finger twitch very slightly.

Not out of fear, but a kind of instinctive, conditioned recognition.

This way of dying—an old engineer who held the secrets of a major project, after publicly expressing dissatisfaction with the "big shots above," dying of a sudden illness within two years.

As a professional politician who had lived in the political jungle of the Lighthouse Country for most of his life, this set of procedures was all too familiar to him.

He took a few seconds to digest this information.

Then he spoke again, his voice still steady, but a little slower than before.

"In the two years between 1944 and 1946..." Edward asked, enunciating each word,

"Apart from saying that he wasn't the one who ordered the rush that killed the construction workers, what else did Gore say?"

Raymond looked at Margaret.

Margaret opened her laptop again.

She took a deep breath, tapped a few keys, and maximized a document on the screen.

It was a scan of an old newspaper.

The paper was yellowed, with worn edges, but the words on it were still clearly legible.

It was a small local newspaper from Nevada published in August 1944.

"I found this from some old newspaper archives," Margaret said, her voice slightly tight,

"The date of this newspaper is August 1944. That is the same year Gore made a scene at the bar entrance."

"The reporter clearly followed this lead and did an exclusive interview with Gore."

She highlighted a paragraph of text on the screen with the cursor.

"In this interview, besides reiterating that he was not the murderer who killed the workers, Gore also said a paragraph."

"This paragraph was recorded verbatim by the reporter at the time."

"The content is —"

Margaret cleared her throat and began to read word for word.

" 'They didn't just kill those 112 workers; they are planning something even bigger."

"Three years later, at most three years, that big event they planned will happen."

"By then, the entire Federal Government will be destroyed."

"No one can stop them, because they are hiding out of everyone's sight."

"They know more than anyone else in the world.' "

After reading, Margaret closed her laptop, her fingers trembling slightly as she did so.

The room fell into silence again.

This silence was deeper, longer, and heavier than the one before.

Three years.

Gore's original words were "three years later."

Then, Edward asked a question that everyone knew the answer to, but no one wanted to be the first to say out loud.

"What happened three years later?"

Raymond reached into his coat, took out a USB drive, plugged it into the TV, and the screen played an old, black-and-white news clip with a lot of static —

"In July 1947, an unidentified flying object of unknown origin crashed into a farm in Roswell."

This voice echoed in the fishing cabin.

At the same time, black-and-white images appeared on the screen — military trucks, cordons, people in military uniforms carrying some kind of wreckage covered with canvas.

This was news footage from 1947, with quality as grainy as if it were filmed through frosted glass.

But the five people sitting there stared at those blurry outlines on the rough screen, every pair of eyes sinking like lead.

Then, Edward spoke.

"In other words..."

His tone maintained its usual steadiness, but those who knew him could hear something in his slightly lowered inflection that rarely appeared in his voice,

"Hoover Dam, construction started in 1931, completed in 1936."

"On the surface, it was to solve the water and power supply problems in the West."

"In reality, it was to fill the bottom of the dam with over a hundred lives in order to finish it in 1936."

His speaking speed was not fast, and each word seemed to be precisely cut with a scalpel from a dense block of information.

"Then, starting from 1947, exactly the year of the Roswell Incident, the Hoover Dam began to systematically show a 20% to 30% gap in hydraulic power, and a 30% to 40% gap in electricity."

"These water and electricity resources did not flow to any casino in Las Vegas during these years, did not flow to any new residential area in southern Nevada, and did not even flow to any industrial project that needed to report its power consumption to the Federal Government."

"The destination of these water and electricity resources is blank; in all Federal databases, they are blank."

He paused.

His hand resting on the armrest did not tap again but gripped the edge of the leather armrest tightly.

"And after putting all this information together,"

Edward's gaze slowly swept across the faces of each staff member,

"The story is — the Hoover Dam was not built to supply power to Las Vegas from the beginning."

"It was built to provide water and electricity resources for a secret agency researching Aliens."

"Those 112 construction workers were the first batch to be silenced."

"Gore was the second batch."

"Then the third, the fourth, the fifth... everyone who has approached the truth."