25: Chapter 25: All those who knew the truth were silenced.

Trent knew his boss very well.

When the boss asked this, it meant he didn't want a rough idea, nor a direction; he wanted everything.

The reason he was able to pull Trent out of the Naval Intelligence Department and bring him to where he was now was because Trent was the type of person who, once he grabbed the loose end of a thread, would never stop.

"Following Gore's lead, I discovered something."

Trent pushed the relationship diagram on the table half an inch toward Walsh, his finger sliding along the line to point at the next node,

"The newspaper that conducted an in-depth exclusive interview with Gore back then, the one that publicly published his remarks about important figures planning major events, ran into trouble shortly after the report was released."

"The newspaper's reporter became unemployed immediately after the paper shut down, and not long after that, became a missing person registered by the local police."

"Their whereabouts remain unknown to this day."

He paused for a moment, then continued.

"And the owner of that newspaper, in the same period, declared bankruptcy due to insolvency. Less than a month later, he jumped off the roof of a four-story office building in the old district of Los Angeles."

"The police concluded it was suicide."

"What was the name of the newspaper? And the owner?"

"The newspaper was called the 'West Coast Observer'," Trent said,

"The owner was named Burton Cramer. The newspaper's address was in Los Angeles, California."

He pushed a copy of an old file in front of Walsh.

The paper had yellowed. On it was a portrait photo of a man, about forty-five years old, wearing old-fashioned round glasses and a neatly trimmed beard, looking like a typical American newspaper editor from the forties.

Walsh looked down at the faded ID photo and fell silent.

Trent continued: "This suicide case of Cramer's, it's very wrong."

"I spent nearly two days going through all the relevant records I could find from that time—bank records, police records, files from various departments."

"Cramer's 'West Coast Observer' was indeed struggling at the time, on the verge of bankruptcy."

"That is a fact."

"So Cramer…" Walsh raised his eyes.

"So Cramer was in desperate need of a bombshell story to save the newspaper," Trent nodded,

"He wanted to use a big story to boost circulation and pull the newspaper back from the brink of bankruptcy."

"And he bet this life-saving story on Gore."

Walsh's gaze narrowed slightly, and he mused:

"This is why Gore, an old engineer who had been retired for eight years, was able to be found by a reporter for an exclusive interview."

"It wasn't that the reporter accidentally found a lead, but that the newspaper owner was actively digging into the story behind the Hoover Dam."

"That is indeed the case." Trent's voice was steady and certain. "Cramer actively sought out this story."

"And he didn't just prepare one exclusive interview."

"According to the internal scheduling records of the newspaper at the time, after Gore's exclusive interview was published, Cramer had also prepared a news series, intending to continue exposing the secrets behind the Hoover Dam."

"But on the seventh day after the first piece of this series—Gore's interview—was published in the newspaper, Cramer became a different person."

"What did he become like?"

"Mentally unstable," Trent said. "Deranged."

"People around him said he couldn't sleep during those days, getting up in the middle of the night to pace around the room."

"He also repeatedly went to the police station to report, one moment saying someone wanted to harm him, the next shouting at the police, desperately saying he didn't know anything and wouldn't say anything."

"Police records show that Cramer said something very specific when he had his breakdown:"

"'I haven't reported anything that shouldn't have been reported. That secret will rot in my stomach forever; I will never say it out loud.'"

Walsh didn't speak.

A newspaper owner who had once proactively dug into the secrets of the Hoover Dam, just after starting the reports, suddenly became a person desperately trying to distance himself, repeatedly emphasizing that he wouldn't say anything.

This kind of change…

If someone could threaten him, the person threatening him was no longer an ordinary threatener.

Only one kind of power could make a newspaper owner go from ambitious journalistic aspirations to a mental breakdown within seven days—

A power that could convince him that if he said just one more word, he would definitely die.

"How did the police record this case?"

"The police didn't take it seriously at the time," Trent said,

"The assessment written in their records was—the reporter suffered from persecutory delusions due to excessive mental stress caused by business bankruptcy."

"After Cramer jumped off the office building roof, the police naturally attributed the cause of death to depression caused by bankruptcy."

"The entire case file was impeccably clean from beginning to end."

"The records for every step were complete, orderly, and logically self-consistent…"

Trent didn't finish his sentence.

He saw a barely perceptible sneer appear at the corner of Walsh's mouth.

There was no humor in that sneer, only insight,

only the instinctive judgment of a veteran who had been grinding away in the intelligence system for decades regarding this kind of "perfection."

"The more normal it is, the more abnormal it is," Walsh said slowly.

He didn't preach anymore.

There was no need.

For an old bureaucrat like him, who had worked his way up from the bottom of the intelligence system to become the third-in-command at the Department of Homeland Security, this rule was already etched into his marrow.

The upper echelons of the Lighthouse Country, whether or not it was the legendary "Deep State," never left traces when they truly wanted to do something.

It wasn't about cleaning up the traces; that was a low-level tactic.

The real method was: make the traces more real than reality itself.

Attach timestamps to every document, attach standard procedural records to every investigation, and provide reasonable and logical testimonies for every witness.

Let everyone who investigates later see only an impeccable case file that is logically rigorous, causally complete, and without any loopholes.

Then they would nod with satisfaction, put the file back on the shelf in the archives, and turn to investigate the next thing.

But intelligence veterans don't need to look for loopholes.

They only need to look at the logic—

If a newspaper owner jumps off a building due to bankruptcy-induced depression, then before jumping, he should be despondent, depressed, and hiding from people.

Not repeatedly going to the police station to report that someone wants to kill him.

The label "persecutory delusions" was applied too perfectly,

so perfectly that it seemed like it was meant to help those who came later, pre-sealing all suspicion of this case within the three words "mental illness."

Trent waited.

After a few seconds of silence, just as he had expected, Walsh spoke.

The voice was light, but every word was as heavy as a stone pulled up from a deep well.

"Reporter missing, owner jumped off a building, Gore heart attack…"

"Everyone who came into contact with this secret, not one survived."

"The timeline is spread out enough, the methods of death are all different, and each case has a clean, beautiful file that leads the investigation in a harmless direction."

"This is not something ordinary people could do."

"It's not even something an ordinary government agency could do."

He placed his hands on the table, fingers interlaced, his knuckles shining slightly white under the fluorescent light:

"This is a systematic silencing."

"From top to bottom, from inside to outside, completely severing the entire chain that could potentially leak secrets."

"The way each link was severed is different, but the result is the same."

"Everyone who touched the truth has been silenced."

"Silenced forever."

He was silent for a moment, then took the yellowed slip of paper that had been tucked into the last page of the file from Trent's hand.

On it was only one address—

Los Angeles, California, Rose Hills Memorial Park, Section C, Row 12, Plot 21.

Below it was a note: Grave of Burton Cramer. Buried in 1945.

Walsh didn't speak immediately.

He placed the slip of paper on the table, looked down at the words, and stared at them for a long time.

Rose Hills Memorial Park, one of the largest cemeteries in Los Angeles, also the final resting place of many Hollywood celebrities.

Cramer being buried there meant he was at least once a person of status.

But now no one knew his name.

What was written on that tombstone was just the end of an ordinary person recorded by the police as "jumped off a building due to bankruptcy-induced depression."

Not the end of the truth.

Believe the epitaph?

Better not to.

Walsh picked the slip of paper up from the table, his movements very light, so slow that it was as if the paper weighed a thousand pounds.

Then he folded the slip twice and put it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

The position of that pocket was right against his heart.

"Trent,"

He spoke, his voice very calm, but the way he addressed his subordinate was different from before,

changing from a business-like tone to a more personal, heavier tone,

"The next steps, you don't need to investigate further."

Trent Molloy was silent for a moment.

Fifteen years of working together allowed him to understand the boss's full meaning in this instant.

Some things needed him, Trent, to do—pulling files, digging for leads, searching databases, tracking targets; for these technical intelligence tasks, he was the sharpest knife in Walsh's hand.

But for some things, in those matters where the decision-maker needed to walk into the darkness personally, this knife of his had to be returned to its sheath.

This was not a lack of trust.

Quite the contrary, this was the deepest trust.

There are some quagmires that your best subordinate shouldn't touch even a little bit.

There are some secrets where the fewer people who know, the higher the probability of survival.

"Leave this here to me," Trent said, his voice very steady. "If there's anything in the office that needs dealing with, I'll keep an eye on it at all times. You can go without worry."

Walsh looked at him.

"Boss," Trent said before he turned, his voice lowered, but that deep voice carried something firm,

"...Stay safe."

Walsh's footsteps paused.

He turned his head, glanced at Trent, then nodded slightly, pulled open the iron door, and walked out.

The door to the secret room closed heavily behind him, emitting a dull sigh like a large metal mouth gasping for air.

The fluorescent light continued to hum, illuminating the files, hand-drawn relationship diagrams, and scanned old newspaper articles on the table that hadn't been put away yet, and illuminating Trent's figure standing alone in front of the iron table.

And Walsh's footsteps had already started along the stairs of the old factory, walking up to the world above, one step at a time.