52: Chapter 52: A scheme to find a scapegoat, the pursuit of the truth encounters crisis.

Michael Whitaker had been sitting in this chair for six years, and one of the reasons he was able to stand out from countless candidates to become the director was:

He never walked alone; he always had to have a scapegoat by his side.

He picked up the black desk phone, the dedicated line connecting Internal Affairs to the Deputy Director's office.

The phone rang three times before he hung up and dialed another encrypted internal extension. The indifference on his face while speaking to Daniel Cross just moments ago had now transformed into a layer of cold calculation.

He needed a suitable candidate: Deputy Director Philip Moran.

Moran and he had never gotten along.

He had vied with him for the head seat at Senate hearings,

and at last month's personnel review meeting, he had confronted Whitaker about his decisions, criticizing the "excessive politicization of agent resource distribution" in front of everyone.

He had always been working in the shadows, using every reasonable and compliant method to try to topple him from his position.

Furthermore, Moran was eager to accumulate political capital.

That eagerness was identical to the brightness in Daniel Cross's eyes when he first walked in, only more seasoned, more sinister, and better at concealment.

He only needed to have a few people planted on Moran's side quietly pass him a few words:

"There might be a major case in California recently."

Then, leave a few printed summaries of the classified Hoover Dam project files that had been accessed.

He would start running on his own.

He would definitely go and investigate what exactly happened between Edward, Musk, and the Hopkins Family.

And when he finished his investigation, according to the chain of command of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he would still have to report his findings and final conclusions to the Director.

If he found something, it would belong to the Director.

If he didn't find anything, the one left to take the blame—the one who would be killed in an "accident"—would be Moran.

Whitaker placed the receiver back on the cradle and glanced out the window at the grayish-white afternoon skyline, sliced into fragments by the blinds.

He then raised his hand to the command registration interface next to the phone, opened the internal directory, found the Deputy Director's office, and slowly typed a few lines with his fingertips.

...

Los Angeles, California, inside the stealth tent at Silver Lake Park.

Zhang Yi sat cross-legged on his sleeping bag, the floating system interface in front of him emitting a cold blue light that only he could see.

The emotion point balance at the top of the interface was fixed at 80,000 points.

From the moment Walsh's engineering team dug up that Grey Alien eyeball one kilometer beneath the Westfield Center,

to Walsh falling dead with a gunshot wound between his eyebrows,

to Edward and Musk fleeing in a panic amidst a hail of bullets,

to Diana ordering Harlan to blow up the snipers at the Scottsdale estate,

to Edward and Musk setting the strategy of "ensuring one's own invincibility first" at the Starlink test base,

to Diana's confrontation with Charles at the Carver auto repair shop,

and finally to the tragedy at the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Hoover Building where Daniel Cross was suppressed by the Director and subsequently struck by a truck...

The emotional fluctuations generated by this series of events were like an invisible oil pipeline, continuously pumping a full 60,000 emotion points into his account.

Added to the 20,000 remaining from before, he now held 80,000 in his hands.

80,000.

The highest savings since he transmigrated.

In the past, Zhang Yi would certainly have been lying on his sleeping bag with his legs crossed, laughing out loud at the number on the system interface.

But today, he didn't.

He just glanced at the number and confirmed one thing in his heart:

Enough.

Enough for him to upgrade his gear, bid farewell to this stealth tent that had held up for nearly two months, and move into a proper residence.

A tent was still a tent; no matter how powerful the optical camouflage was, the feeling of lying inside was still just a thin layer of nylon fabric separating you from the entire world.

He wanted a real bed, a door that could lock, and a bathroom where he could stand up to shower.

But this matter had to be put on hold.

His gaze fell on another monitoring screen on the system interface.

In the image, Diana was standing outside the rolling metal shutter of the Carver auto repair shop, holding the old-fashioned button phone that Charles had given her,

the expression on her face was no longer sarcasm and mockery, but a kind of cold flame that had been suppressed but was still smoldering in the dark.

Zhang Yi knew what she was going to do next.

She had obtained control of the Colt Association, and the first thing she would do was to investigate the truth about how Northrop Grumman had built the b-2 bomber in three years back then.

On the system interface, the status of the research and development data for the b-2 bomber by Northrop Grumman was clearly marked:

All process documentation had been destroyed.

Northrop Grumman still possessed the complete manufacturing capability for the b-2 to this day, but as for the part about "why they were able to build it"—the design deductions, technical routes, trial-and-error records of early prototypes, and the source explanations for key technologies...

It was all gone.

Not lost, but destroyed.

Someone, after the b-2 officially entered service in 1997, had used extremely professional methods to burn away everything that could trace the development process, leaving only the final result.

This in itself spoke volumes.

A normal military industrial enterprise, having created an epoch-making stealth bomber, would be eager to frame every milestone along the development path and hang it in the corporate museum to prove its technical prowess.

Northrop Grumman did not do that.

They had blocked off the path of origin.

Diana now wanted to find that path of origin.

And her intuition, along with the intelligence she possessed, all pointed in the same direction:

In 1994, the newly merged Northrop Grumman, despite having the backing of the Hopkins Family's massive capital, was still a novice in the field of aviation R&D.

To launch a project of the caliber of the b-2, capital alone was not enough; it also required technical endorsement and academic support.

So she bet on the two partners introduced during the R&D phase back then: Boeing and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Northrop Grumman had erased the traces on their side, but what about Boeing and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology?

It was impossible to have also severed the path of borrowing blueprints from other people's laboratories.

Through the system screen, Zhang Yi saw that the first batch of field personnel from the Colt Association had already set off, with their targets being Chicago, where Boeing headquarters was located, and Cambridge, where the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was located.

He frowned.

Diana Hopkins was not a spoiled brat like Link Warren who was scared out of his wits,

not an old-school politician like Edward who was restricted by centuries of traditional thinking,

nor was she an intelligence veteran like Walsh who was locked in a double-locked safe by the caution of a professional bureaucrat and the warnings of a retired old director.

She was someone who had seen blood.

She ordered hits herself, she planned sniper attacks herself, and she could even stuff C4 into the payment boxes for the five snipers she hired, blowing them into pieces of meat.

Once a person like this started investigating, she wouldn't just want fragments; she would plaster every piece of the puzzle she could find on the wall until she pieced together a conclusion she was convinced by.

If that conclusion didn't align with Zhang Yi's script, given her personality, she wouldn't automatically fill in the gaps like Edward; instead, she would keep digging until she dug through the lies.

By then, the system's forced de-binding warning wouldn't just be for show.

Zhang Yi stared at Diana's cold profile in the image, quickly deducing one thing in his heart:

If he didn't intervene at all, and Diana investigated down the two lines of Boeing and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, what would she find?

Northrop Grumman had destroyed the R&D data back then; there had to be a plausible explanation.

The most natural explanation, deduced from the timeline and historical background, could not be separated from World War II.

In 1945, the little mustache shot himself in the bunker, and the German Third Reich collapsed.

The Allies captured mountains of military scientific research achievements from the ruins:

jet fighters, ballistic missiles, infrared night vision devices, synthetic fuel technology,

and those German scientists who contributed their wisdom to these technologies.

Von Braun was the most famous of them.

He developed the V-2 rocket for the little mustache at the Peenemünde base during the war. This world's first ballistic missile slammed into London and Antwerp at the end of the war, causing tens of thousands of civilian casualties.

But after the war, Von Braun was secretly sent to the Lighthouse Country through "Operation Paperclip," along with his team and the knowledge in his head.

More than twenty years later, the Saturn V launch vehicle he led the development of sent Armstrong to the moon, and he himself became a household name in the Lighthouse Country.

Von Braun had been whitewashed.

In his file, the history of Peenemünde was understated as "a German engineer coerced by the Nazi regime," and the war crimes of the V-2 attacking civilians were selectively ignored.

But Von Braun was just the cleanest little tip of the iceberg.

There were nearly 1,600 German scientists transported into the Lighthouse Country before and after Operation Paperclip,

a considerable portion of whom had hands stained with blood deeper and darker than Von Braun's:

medical experiments in concentration camps, management regulations for slave labor camps, chemical formulas for gas chambers, and plans for large-scale forced migration of civilians in occupied territories.

These people did not meet the conditions to be whitewashed.

Their R&D careers in the Lighthouse Country had to be kept strictly confidential,

their research achievements could not be labeled with their true origins,

and the original files for every project they participated in had to be completely destroyed at some point in time.

Otherwise, once someone asked, "Why did a certain key breakthrough in the American defense industry happen to align with the timeline of the Nazi scientists' immigration wave?" the trouble would be endless.

Northrop Grumman's action of destroying the b-2 R&D data in 1997, if viewed under this historical logic, was as reasonable as could be.

If Diana investigated to this step, the conclusion she would most likely reach was this:

The core technology of the b-2 bomber originated from the former Nazi scientist team secretly introduced to Northrop Grumman, and the R&D data was destroyed to cover up the existence of this group of scientists.

This conclusion was logically self-consistent, fit the information framework Diana possessed, and could satisfy her—at least enough to make her stop digging further.

But it did not fit Zhang Yi's script.

In Zhang Yi's script, the core technology of the b-2 bomber was not created by former Nazi scientists,

but was gradually reverse-engineered from the alien technology of the craft that crashed in Roswell in 1947.