54: Chapter 54: All thirteen people were silenced; the UFO was modified into a bomber.

"And these people were all elite scholars from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; each of them knew they were working on an unprecedented military project."

"For such a scale of concentrated deaths to occur in the third year after the project entered service... we determined that it cannot be a coincidence."

Beatrice closed the green-labeled file and looked up at Diana.

"That's not all."

Wallace Keating took off his metal-rimmed glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb, and took over the conversation.

His voice was much rougher than his appearance, like a piece of granite that had been squeezed for too long and finally cracked.

"That Felix Randall, who was sent by Boeing just to make up the numbers..."

"Initially, we put almost all our energy into investigating the twelve-person team, leaving only a small fraction of our attention for him."

"A nominal liaison officer wasn't worth prioritizing for a deep dive."

"But right after we finished reviewing the data on how 'all twelve people died in accidents,' I casually had someone check on Randall's whereabouts."

He perched his glasses back on the bridge of his nose and swiped his finger across the search screen of the tablet beside him.

"In June 1999, a year after he was transferred back to Boeing's commercial aircraft division, he suffered a sudden heart attack and died in his Seattle office, despite having no history of heart disease."

"He was forty-one years old."

"Twelve core technicians plus one liaison officer sent to go through the motions, all concentrated within a two-year window, not a single one left out."

Diana did not look through any of the files.

She leaned back in her chair, hands folded on her knees, her face as cold as a coin taken from an ice cellar.

"It wasn't an accident; they were taken out."

She spoke up.

Her tone was like she was stating a fixed procedure she was all too familiar with,

"From the moment I saw the first name on the list, I recognized it."

"Everyone dying in 'accidents' after the project ended—we've done this kind of thing ourselves; I knew immediately who was behind it the moment I heard."

She looked up at Harlan, the corners of her mouth curling slightly, but there was only coldness, no smile lines, as she added:

"Compare the timeline of these twelve people's deaths with the pace at which we handled those five snipers; the management style is identical."

"It's all about leaving no survivors."

Harlan nodded silently.

Wallace put his glasses back on and continued to elaborate, following Diana's conclusion.

"In the information we have now, there are no traces of forged police records, nor are there any ancillary notes of threats."

"But with so many of them, scattered across every corner of the Lighthouse Country, the faster they were silenced and the wider the coverage, the more it shows how terrified the perpetrators were of them leaking even the slightest thing while alive."

He pushed the files half an inch away, leaned forward slightly, and his gaze swept over the row of clipped-together death records.

"And this 'fear' is exactly what we are looking for."

"Twelve top researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology plus one Boeing liaison officer, all of them belong in the category of smart people."

"They were all science and engineering elites who understood the gray boundaries of risk control and confidentiality agreements."

"After knowing that the B-2 bomber project they were involved in had gone from blueprints to an actual machine, each of them would have made certain sensitive deductions about the project itself."

"If these people sensed they were going to be eliminated, they definitely would have left a backup for themselves."

Wallace picked out several folders with crime scene photos from the bottom of the pile, categorizing them, and spread them out in the center of the stone table where the light was brightest.

"In the hidden compartment of a storage locker at the old family home in Manhattan, there were a few pages of stress test records for non-metallic composite sandwich materials locked away."

"In the compartment of an independent mailbox in Boston, there was an old-fashioned disk backup recording metallurgical experimental data for some unknown alloy."

"At the bottom of a coffin in Wisconsin... we dug up Stolman's grave during the last rainstorm."

"The coffin was lined with a layer of oilcloth, inside of which were several pages of old writing paper, covered in drawings of the transition process of the fuselage's aerodynamic shape, from a narrowing oval to flattening out into an approximate diamond-shaped airfoil."

He pressed out the mold-stained piece of oilcloth that had been clipped in the folder and spread it out for Diana to see.

Beatrice took over, her voice colder and faster than Keating's, her finger pointing at different file photos:

"Someone hid the improved cross-section diagrams of the turbine blades for the propulsion system."

"Someone converted the flight control algorithm code they were responsible for into old-fashioned punch tape and stuffed it into the base of a soccer trophy in their basement."

"Someone mixed the stealth coating formula into the lining of the cover of their wife's recipe book, which was left behind as a keepsake..."

She took a breath and laid out the last few pieces of paper—dug up from graves, hidden wall compartments in old houses, and bank safe deposit boxes—one by one in front of Diana.

These pages were mostly fragile and yellowed, many stained with soil and solidified wax, the handwriting on them extremely blurred, showing signs of having been soaked in water, dried, and then molded.

But now that every scrap had been pieced back together onto large cardboard backings, they could still form a main thread that no one dared to openly admit, yet everyone could see.

"These materials were scattered across different locations where their personal effects were kept, and each person's research direction was different."

"But the bottom line of the 'backups' left by each of them all pointed to the same convergence point."

Beatrice snapped open a summary page that she and Keating had annotated together and pushed it to Diana's hand.

"What they received was not just the research funding and conventional experimental parameters allocated by Northrop Grumman."

"In the supplementary documents to the confidentiality agreement when joining the B-2 bomber project team, they signed a waiver regarding the disclosure of technical sources; that is the only logical source gap found after cross-referencing all remaining records."

"And the source corresponding to this gap, all these anomalous material samples, strange alien alloys, and aerodynamic curve drafts that had never appeared in any known aircraft design that they secretly backed up in their private stashes..."

"...were not original designs from any known human industrial laboratory."

She paused for a moment and lowered her voice, "...They were all reverse-engineered and deduced from a non-human source that they called the 'Source Specimen.'"

The room was so quiet that one could hear the extremely faint hum of the inverter inside the chandelier's light ring.

Harlan's knuckles, which had been gripping his ice water glass, froze on the surface of the cup.

Wallace took off his glasses and put them back on; this action, which he repeated twice unconsciously, was in itself a highly uncharacteristic loss of composure for a fifteen-year veteran of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Diana reached out and picked up the summary page.

On it, a timeline connected the person responsible for each key material discovery, the corresponding technical target, and the evolution of the sixth-generation shape of that stealth flying wing eventually named the B-2 bomber.

She didn't say a word, but her eyes were like a pair of pliers, gripping every connection, twisting them hard in her mind again and again to ensure there was no looseness.

The set of physical evidence that Beatrice finally brought to the table was a series of small, sequentially numbered models.

Each model was made of composite materials: from the rough wooden model numbered one, to the intermediate skeleton models welded from metal sheets, and transitioning to the later matte-painted display models that were close to the actual scale. They were placed in order on the center of the stone table, under the cold white light, as neat as a three-year retrospective exhibition of reverse engineering.

The first model was circular, a precise circular UFO shape, convex on top and flat on the bottom, rotating along the central axis, with a ring of tiny protruding structures on the outer edge, like some kind of miniature openings for ventilation or propulsion.

The second model was still circular, but the chassis had flattened, and the curvature of the dome had been slightly leveled out. Beside the annotation, a handwritten early quote read: "Original aerodynamic profile of the baseline specimen, non-rotational stability."

The third began to show angles; it was no longer a complete circular UFO, but had two almost imperceptible beveled angles cut out from the rear edge of the disk, with a tiny aerodynamic flap folded downward on one side.

The fourth annotation featured the words "lift-to-drag ratio improvement" for the first time.

The fifth's disk edge began to narrow, extending more triangular facets outward, and the middle section of the fuselage showed lines that momentarily reminded one of a modern fighter jet's blended wing-body.

Between the sixth and seventh, the disk no longer looked like a disk; the leading edge of its wing surface began to straighten, the middle section extended to both sides, and the arc at the rear was split into two symmetrical, slowly flattening lines.

By the ninth model, the thing in Diana's hand was no different in essence from the black flying wing she had seen in The Pentagon's promotional videos; the traditional UFO had disappeared, replaced by the flying wing layout familiar to humans.

The only remaining difference was that the wingtips still had a very slight sweep, and the correction of the angle with the leading-edge fold was exactly the item that had been adjusted during the final wind tunnel test before the B-2 bomber officially entered service.

The tenth... the last model, reflecting light quietly under the glow of the chandelier.

A full flying wing, diamond-shaped midsection, dark gray matte finish, no vertical tail surfaces on the exterior; the leading-edge angles and trailing-edge configuration were so precise that even a layman could instantly recognize it as the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber that shocked global media when it first debuted in 1996.

All the divergent versions, sacrificial versions, and wind tunnel test specimen damage records throughout the entire process were all contained within this row of sequentially arranged transition models; not a single leap was made without being based on the reverse deduction of the previous model.

Beatrice didn't speak. Neither did Wallace Keating.

A ring of wet condensation had formed on the stone table under Harlan's ice water glass; his fingers gripped the rim of the cup, the color in his nail beds fading to a very pale shade under the light.

In the silence, only the background hum of the chandelier's transformer and the sound of everyone's breathing intertwined.

Diana placed the last B-2 bomber scale model back on the stone table, setting it down very gently.

Three full years. Those geniuses from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in front of the wreckage of an aircraft that did not belong to humanity, used the most primitive methods—surveying, imitating, trial and error, and imitating again—to change a circular UFO, inch by inch, into humanity's first stealth strategic bomber. And then they all died.