51: Chapter 51: Agents Suppress Witnesses, Fund Returns

A cool breeze blew from the central air conditioning vent in the ceiling, rustling the last few pages of the documents beside Cross.

Cross stood where he was, stubbornly pressing the documents down onto the desktop.

He was like a young hound whose prey had been suddenly snatched from its mouth; unwilling to accept it, yet afraid to make too much noise at its master.

"Director, I just want to understand. I want to know the reason."

He lifted his chin forcefully, forcing himself to stare directly at the motionless statue behind the desk.

"I ran to Nevada and California twice to investigate these clues, sometimes sleeping in my car, sometimes relying on coffee and burgers to hold out until late at night..."

"I don't want a promotion. I just want to know what this lead really is... that even the Federal Bureau of Investigation cannot touch."

Whitfield looked at him.

The muscles in the young agent's face were tense with nervous agitation under the light, and half of a cheap pen cap, bought from the convenience store next to his rented apartment, poked out from the left pocket of his coat.

He came from the edge of the Rust Belt, a small town with a population of only a thousand people on the border of Iowa and Missouri.

He relied on the whole town pooling money to send him to law school, wrote his thesis every day in a dilapidated rental in the South Side, and was finally recruited into the Federal Bureau of Investigation as an honor graduate.

In his three years at the bureau, he had only handled a few low-to-mid-level corruption cases and some minor gun smuggling cases, never having touched any case that could be written into the history of federal courts.

Now, he thought he had found a fish that could be written into the history of federal courts, a fish heavy enough to carry him on its shoulders from an ordinary neighborhood into the power circles of Washington.

Whitfield still remembered that a long time ago, he had stared at another director in a conference room with a similar look.

But the past could never save anyone.

"We have already reached an agreement with the Hopkins Family," Whitfield said. "Furthermore, the Hopkins Family loves America."

"So, you had better stop while you're ahead."

"Director, I can negotiate too, and I can love..."

"The Hopkins Family is one of America's five major military-industrial giants."

"Half of The Pentagon's stealth bomber fleet relies on core components they provide."

"Department of Defense procurement officials stand during meetings in front of them."

"Your family..." Whitfield paused for a moment, his face still wearing that expression of indifference bordering on coldness.

But he swept his gaze over Daniel Cross's face, extremely slowly, as if flipping through an irrelevant old file.

"...what is their status in America?"

Cross stood there with his mouth open, as if someone had stuffed a cotton ball soaked in ice water down his throat.

It wasn't that he didn't understand.

He did understand, but after understanding, he realized that he had never been on any of the levels this conversation should have been on from the very beginning.

His lips moved twice, wanting to say something...

Wanting to say this was the Federal Bureau of Investigation, wanting to say that everyone was equal before the law,

Wanting to say he was an agent, he had a badge, and he had the legitimacy of the power granted by the Constitution.

But when he looked into the Director's eyes, all these words stuck in his throat,

because the statue across the desk knew everything and had already blocked all of these off for him.

He was not a fool.

At this moment, in this quiet Director's office where the air conditioning vent steadily blew out cold air,

Daniel Cross finally understood one thing:

The water in this case was unimaginably deep.

It was not an ordinary corruption case involving one or two senators embezzling project funds, nor was it a financial audit problem regarding kickbacks on military contracts.

Someone was silencing people for this.

Someone could make the FBI Director personally press the stop button.

Someone could simultaneously deploy five sniper rifles in Los Angeles, aimed at the heads of the number three official of the Department of Homeland Security and a state senator.

And he... he thought he was chasing a fish big enough.

He wasn't.

He was just the kind of scrap thrown on the bank that didn't even count as bait.

Whitfield watched as all the youthful anger and unwillingness on his face, which he hadn't yet managed to put away, gradually faded, replaced by a colder greyish-white that slowly seeped out from under his skin.

"Take a few days off, go back and get some rest, then come back to work."

There was no malice in Whitfield's voice, one could even say there was a faint, almost imperceptible trace of the slight pity an old bureaucrat feels for a young junior.

Cross did not raise any further objections.

He slowly loosened his fingers from the desktop, leaving the documents on the desk, but stepped back.

Then he turned and walked toward the office door.

No farewells, no honorifics, not even looking at the Director again, just mechanically lifting his legs and walking out.

Walking along the seventh-floor corridor past two rows of quiet secretary offices and closed conference rooms, he pressed the elevator button, waited for the stainless steel elevator doors to slide open before him, and stepped into the empty metal space with nothing but a floor mat bearing the FBI logo.

Outside the Hoover Building, the afternoon sun on Pennsylvania Avenue stung his eyes.

He walked two blocks along the sidewalk, his mind filled with the trailing sound of the Director's "stop while you're ahead" from just a moment ago.

He didn't even notice the engine of the old delivery truck at the corner suddenly accelerate with an abnormal roar.

The moment before he turned his head, the massive iron-grey front of the truck was already pressing toward him like a collapsing wall.

After a screeching sound of brakes, only a patch of sticky black rubber skid marks remained on the ground.

Daniel Cross was hit and sent flying into mid-air, tumbling a few times as he lost his center of gravity,

and then fell heavily onto the asphalt road twenty feet away.

Blood rapidly spread from the gaps beneath his body, drawing an irregular dark red circle on the afternoon sidewalk of Washington.

The truck that hit him did not accelerate as it drove away from the scene, showing no change, as if it were performing a routine delivery task.

At the same moment, on the second floor of a building slightly further away across the street, there was an old-fashioned community cafe.

There were only a few scattered customers in the shop, huddled in booths drinking coffee.

At the corner table near the window sat a man around fifty years old, wearing dark grey casual clothes.

In front of him sat a cup of espresso that had gone cold, having taken only one sip since he sat down.

His right hand rested on the table, his gaze quietly passing through the cafe's glass window, which was stained with some rain marks, just enough to see the entire driveway outside the side door of the Hoover Building across the street.

Harlan Croft watched Daniel Cross walk out of the building, pass the first intersection, and turn onto the sidewalk where the truck was approaching.

When the young agent's body was sent flying into mid-air and finally fell to the ground, soaking in his own pool of blood, Harlan had no extra expression.

He simply watched the event unfold.

He withdrew his gaze to the table and picked up the black phone next to his coffee cup, which looked no different in essence from the low-cost keypad phones used by any elderly person,

and with his thumb, he slowly typed a few characters on the physical keys: "Resolved", then pressed send.

After he settled the bill and turned to leave the cafe,

the sirens on the street only just began to approach from afar, drilling into this shaded street full of old granite and large office buildings.

...

Seventh floor of the Hoover Building.

Michael Whitfield was still sitting behind his walnut desk.

After Cross left, he did not immediately deal with the next document, nor did he pick up the red landline that rang intermittently.

His right hand rested on the table, and his personal mobile phone on the left corner of the desk had just vibrated.

He gently swiped his index finger across the screen and saw a short record popped up from the "Fund Manager" channel:

"Mr. Whitfield, the private trust share of $100,000 you invested one year ago has completed its automatic settlement and exit today, with a net value settlement return of thirty times."

"The funds have been transferred into your designated joint account."

$100,000, thirty times, $3,000,000.

Not a cent more, not a cent less.

That "fund" had never truly existed, except for the bookkeeping on paper.

But the numbers arrived.

At the same time he learned that Cross was digging along those lines, this money appeared on his phone screen right on time.

Whitfield pressed the sleep button on his phone screen and turned his face toward the thick glass curtain wall beside the desk, which was forever sealed off from the outside world by blinds.

The Hoover Building in Washington was never transparent to the outside.

He silently assembled all the known fragments in his mind into an increasingly heavy skeleton.

Edward Warren, Elon Musk, Eli Walsh, Diana Hopkins...

Walsh's death, Diana's shooting, Edward and Musk's escape, plus Daniel Cross who was hit and killed at the entrance of the Hoover Building today.

These people were drawn into a matter by the same invisible way, not engineering corruption, not political scandal, not military contract kickbacks.

No matter what it was, it was using silencing as a basic cost, and had already caused at least three key figures belonging to different factions to pay the most tragic price within a few weeks.

As the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, if he were ignorant and sat idly by regarding such a massive case, once it was poked to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence or the Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility, trouble would follow one after another.

Those who coveted this position, the high-ranking reviewers from the Office of the Inspector General, the senior Democratic senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the high-level officials inside the Department of Justice who were eyeing him like tigers...

would all twist him off this chair on the grounds of "dereliction of duty."

But he couldn't investigate it himself.

The image of young Agent Cross's body being crushed into a blood painting on the asphalt by the truck, and the flashing text message on his phone screen about a "thirty-fold return," were separated by barely a minute.

If he dared to take one more step forward himself...

the next time he crossed another street, that truck maintaining its cruising speed would be unable to stop and would roll right over him.