28: Chapter 28: Coordinates point to the old house; digging a kilometer underground.

No one would care how high a "jumper's" body, with not a single bone broken in its entire body, had actually fallen from.

No one would bother to check the bones for poison residue.

In 1945, in the post-WWII Lighthouse Country, the Los Angeles police had far more pressing matters to worry about than the death of a newspaper publisher.

Walsh refolded the ziplock bag and stuffed it into his inner jacket pocket.

Leaning back against the seat of his pickup truck, he stared through the windshield as the distant silhouette of Los Angeles grew clearer in the final moments before dawn.

A night flight took off from the direction of Los Angeles International Airport, its taillights blinking high in the sky.

In his mind, he replayed the entire chain of events over and over again—

starting from when Kramer received the message from the base worker, to Gore's drunken ramblings outside the bar being uncovered by a reporter, to Kramer stepping into death in absolute terror,

and finally to this moment, the skeleton he had just dug up from the coffin, which showed no fractures but bore traces of poisoning...

The end of everyone's path had been snapped by the very same hand.

Just then, his fingers brushed against something as he was stuffing the bag away.

It felt like something was wedged in the bottom layer of the oilpaper wrapping, harder and heavier than the paper scraps.

He pulled the bag back out and searched through it carefully under the light of his flashlight.

In the corner, a tiny, dark brown oilpaper packet lay buried beneath the very bottom of the scraps.

He hadn't noticed it when he poured the scraps out earlier;

it was too small, a tiny package only about a centimeter in diameter.

He unwrapped it.

Inside was a bullet.

Not a spent casing.

It was a complete, unfired lead pistol bullet.

The caliber was small, seemingly an old-fashioned pistol round by the look of it, and the surface of the copper-nickel alloy casing had already begun to oxidize and turn green.

But at the base of the bullet, a small area of the lead surface had been filed flat, and on it, a tiny line of characters had been engraved with some sharp tool.

Walsh held the bullet close to the flashlight's beam, squinting to make out the writing.

Engraved on it was a set of coordinates.

Latitude and longitude.

As he stared at the line of numbers and symbols, his mind automatically calculated the location.

The coordinates pointed to a location right here in Los Angeles, not somewhere else.

The latitude was north, and the longitude was west.

He mapped the coordinates in his head, arriving at a much more precise determination.

Just west of downtown Los Angeles, in a certain area, at a depth of...

Right after the coordinates was a negative vertical elevation value, with the geometric unit in meters.

One thousand meters underground.

Walsh stared at the numbers engraved on the bullet for a long time.

Before his death, Kramer had split the evidence into two parts.

One part was sealed in the double bottom of his coffin—the very scraps he now held in his hand, containing scattered fragments of text documenting the base worker's attempt to blow the whistle.

Although these fragments were incomplete, they were enough to serve as corroborating evidence, supporting the suspicions of anyone looking closely enough.

The other part was buried at the location indicated by the coordinates—one thousand meters underground.

Kramer's choice of a depth of one thousand meters meant this thing hadn't just been buried haphazardly.

It was a deliberately constructed underground space, a premeditated plan, a secret that could only be found decades later by someone holding the coordinates on this bullet.

Thus, this bullet was not just a set of coordinates, but a key.

Walsh put the bullet back into the ziplock bag, tucked it away, and started up the pickup.

He drove through the early morning of Los Angeles back toward downtown, finding a quiet spot to park just as the sun was rising. Then, he pulled out his personal phone and connected to Trent's secure communication channel using an encrypted frequency.

"Trent."

"Boss," Trent's voice on the other end of the line was as steady as ever.

"Look up a set of coordinates for me. Get the exact location and find out who owns the land."

After Walsh gave him the coordinates, it only took Trent a few minutes.

This kind of records search was basic protocol for an intelligence veteran like him.

"Boss," Trent quickly came back on the line, a hint of surprise in his voice. "I found the coordinates."

"They're right here in Los Angeles."

"Specific location," Walsh said.

"Currently, that area is a commercial office district, located just west of downtown Los Angeles."

"Near the intersection of Colter Street and Seventh Street."

"That land is now completely covered in high-rise skyscrapers, bulldozed and rebuilt over a decade ago."

"I checked the municipal land registry records from before the redevelopment. In the 1940s, the point corresponding to the coordinates was originally a private residential area, a four-story red brick building. The registered address was 124 Colter Street."

"Who was registered as the homeowner of that address?"

"Burton Cramer. Publisher of the West Coast Observer."

Trent fell silent on the other end of the line.

Walsh didn't reply immediately.

124 Colter Street, the place where Kramer had lived during his lifetime.

He had buried that bullet right beneath his own home, at a depth of one thousand meters.

He had split the evidence into two parts:

one placed far away, in the double bottom of his coffin in the cemetery, letting death itself serve as the final barrier protecting the evidence;

and the other hidden directly beneath the land where he once lived, buried at a depth that, even if one knew the coordinates, would require immense effort to excavate.

Walsh hung up the phone and leaned back against the driver's seat, silently running through the data in his head.

His own home, one thousand meters underground.

In that era, in 1945, right after World War II had ended, construction and excavation engineering technology were still in a fairly primitive stage.

Even for a large enterprise building bases for the Federal Government, digging a one-thousand-meter shaft beneath downtown Los Angeles would have required heavy drilling equipment, municipal zoning approvals, construction permits, and geological survey reports.

Where would they dump the soil dug up from below a hundred meters?

With dozens of machines moving in and out of the construction site every day, it would have been impossible for the nearby residents not to notice, and impossible for the city not to have any records.

Yet, whether from Trent's investigation or Raymond's digging on Edward's side earlier, there were absolutely no records mentioning any construction ever taking place at Kramer's home.

There were no land relocation permits, no drilling well approvals, and no eyewitness accounts from any neighbors.

A newspaper publisher had dug a one-thousand-meter-deep shaft beneath his residence, sealed a crucial piece of physical evidence inside,

and then calmly went to drink poison, only to be thrown onto the street below.

This entire process had unfolded in less than seven days, completely unbeknownst to his neighbors and the local municipal authorities.

Was that even possible?

It was impossible.

But immediately after, Walsh's train of thought hit a snag.

When even Aliens could be stationed deep beneath the Nevada desert for decades, how could he still apply conventional logic to this case?

He had no idea what actually lay at that depth of one thousand meters underground, as indicated by the coordinates on the bullet.

Perhaps Kramer had dug a shaft, or perhaps he hadn't.

Perhaps there was another explanation.

Maybe those who had struck a deal with Kramer had lent him a hand, or, on a deeper level, Kramer had obtained more than just news material during his process of leaking to the press.

On those shredded document fragments, "alien technology" and "they got that thing" were clearly written...

Perhaps, after matching clues with Gore, Kramer had not only received the distress letter from the base worker, but also certain "tools" that the worker had slipped into the envelope.

Tools that did not belong to the level of human industry.

Walsh stopped dwelling on the matter of the shaft.

Any wild speculation before obtaining evidence would only be a waste of time, and that was not where he drew his drive.

The next step before him was already clear:

This evidence had to be dug up!

He turned off the engine, leaned back in his seat, and took another look at the bullet in his hand.

The bullet lay quietly in his palm.

On the oxidized green casing, the coordinate point engraved at the base of the lead bullet shone in the dim morning light, like a silent guidepost spanning eighty years.