72: Chapter 72: Old Photos Reveal Family History, Starship Banned

Diana closed the diary, set it aside, and reached into the very bottom of the file box.

Her fingertips touched several pieces of thick cardboard; they weren't files, but photographs.

She had never seen these photos in the family albums.

The person in the picture was Leo. He was much younger than the dignified, white-haired old man in the family portraits she remembered—probably in his early thirties, lean, slightly hunched, wearing a faded, washed-out old shirt and a pair of coarse cloth trousers with patches on the knees. He was sitting on a canvas folding stool on a street corner, with a wooden shoe-shining box in front of him.

The background was a street corner in some unrecognizable city. Sunlight slanted in from the edge of the frame, illuminating half of Leo's face, while his customer, whether intentionally or unintentionally excluded by the composition of the photo, was kept out of the frame, with only one hand visible, resting beside the shoe brush.

Diana's fingertips tightened slightly as she held the photo.

The pair of hands reaching into the frame wore gloves. Even in the black-and-white photo, one could discern a texture different from ordinary gloves; they clung to the skin, their surface lacking the rough reflection of fabric, instead forming a colder, denser sheen at the knuckles.

She spread out the remaining old photos one by one. The composition of each was similar: different street corners, different lighting, Leo shining shoes in various locations. In every photo, the person he was shining shoes for never showed their face, but in every single one, that hand—the hand wearing those special gloves—was visible.

She had seen the exact same thing on the two Men in Black she had encountered yesterday, who had stuffed the Grey Alien into a grey bag.

And on the hands of the handsome man she had watched walk out of the lightning yesterday, who had then sat in her great-grandfather's boxwood tea room drinking tea—the exact same gloves.

She sat on the floor, spreading the diaries and photos on her lap, and looked at them for a long time.

The records in the diary were too fragmented and vague to reconstruct exactly what specific tasks Leo had performed for the Deep State back then, but she didn't need to know the content of the tasks; she only needed to confirm that the chain of relationships was real.

Zhang Long hadn't fabricated anything.

The Hopkins Family had been tied to the Deep State since the first generation. Her great-grandfather Leo had used the trust he gained from shining shoes to earn the qualification to run peripheral errands, and then used the pay from those errands to complete his initial capital accumulation.

And the other side of this intergenerational relationship was this: if the Hopkins Family failed to complete the tasks assigned by the Deep State, the fate of the family would revert from being a partner of the Deep State back to being ants that could be easily crushed.

The risk was as sharp and direct as the color of those gloves.

Diana pushed the file box back to its original place, stood up from the floor, straightened her collar, and left the archives with a gait even calmer than when she arrived.

The core issue was now on the table. The Deep State had assigned the Hopkins Family a task: kill Edward Warren and Elon Musk, and retrieve the right eyeball of that Grey Alien.

If completed, the Hopkins Family could enter the core of the Deep State's inner circle; if not, the family would be exterminated.

Edward Warren was the head of a century-old political family in Nevada. After the assassination of Walsh, his security level had been raised to wartime status, and all of Nevada had been turned into an impenetrable fortress.

Musk was hunkered down at the Starship Base in Texas. The tactical squads around him were equipped with infrasonic weapons capable of paralyzing the consciousness of hundreds of people, and the perimeter was covered by a satellite surveillance array spanning his entire private property.

The assassination method previously used—relying on five snipers to set an ambush in the abandoned warehouse district of Los Angeles—had already been used once; the targets would not give them a second chance.

Relying on the strength of the Hopkins Family alone, they could not break through the defense systems of these two men.

Thus, Diana turned her gaze toward the other two behind-the-scenes families among the Lighthouse Country's five major military-industrial giants that held status equivalent to the Hopkins Family: the Remington family, who controlled General Dynamics, and the Knox family, who controlled Raytheon Technologies.

General Dynamics was the prime contractor for ground armor and nuclear submarines, while Raytheon Technologies monopolized the entire supply chain for Patriot air defense missiles and Aegis radar systems.

If she could pull these two into the game, the combined influence over the national defense supply chain of the three major military-industrial giants would be enough to strangle the throat of the Starship Base and the lifeline of the Warren Family in Nevada.

She didn't rush to make the calls.

She sat in her study and used an encrypted terminal to package several key videos filmed at Casablanca Manor last night: the alien spacecraft hovering over the manor, the two Grey Aliens walking down from the beam of light, the two Men in Black carrying a grey bag oozing green blood onto the spacecraft, and the final bolt of lightning striking inside the manor...

Then, she sent them separately to Sterling Remington, the head of the Remington family, and Augustus Knox, the head of the Knox family.

The attached message contained only one line: "After watching this, you will want to make this call."

After sending them, Diana leaned back in her chair and took a sip of the coffee beside her.

Before the coffee had even cooled, the first encrypted call made the terminal on her desk vibrate.

The caller displayed on the screen was Sterling Remington, the true controller behind General Dynamics, the 68-year-old godfather of main battle tanks and nuclear submarines.

She didn't answer, just watched the caller's avatar flash on the screen, and continued drinking her coffee.

The ringing continued until it automatically cut off.

Less than ten seconds later, the second call burst in: Augustus Knox, the head of Raytheon Technologies, 55 years old, the king of missile systems.

Diana still didn't answer.

One must know that the Lighthouse Country's five major military-industrial giants had never been a harmonious big family.

Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Raytheon Technologies—these five fought tooth and nail every year in the battle for procurement budgets from The Pentagon. The heads of their respective behind-the-scenes families usually only communicated through proxies for years on end, never easily engaging in direct dialogue.

Something like today—where Sterling Remington and Augustus Knox personally lowered their status to call her private encrypted terminal repeatedly within an hour—had never happened in the history of the five major military-industrial giants.

But it happened today.

Because that video wasn't ordinary commercial intelligence, nor was it confidential material from some competitor; it was a slap in the face delivered from space, shattering the perception these military-industrial giants held of themselves as top-tier predators on this planet, right in front of their encrypted screens.

Diana watched the second round of calls on the screen cut off automatically. After a few seconds, Augustus's name lit up for the third time, and a faint, confident curve of victory appeared at the corner of her mouth.

She didn't need to answer the phone.

The video itself was the most powerful opening statement for negotiations. She held something in her hands that they had never seen before, and they could no longer sit still.

She set her coffee cup down on the desk, stood up, and walked out.

Behind her, on the encrypted terminal, the third round of ringing from Augustus Knox echoed over and over in the empty study. She never looked back.

In the hallway, Harlan was waiting for her, leaning against the sandstone wall. He still had bandages wrapped under his ribs, but his posture had returned to its usual granite-like straightness.

Diana walked up to him without stopping, her voice steady: "Notify the Remington family and the Knox family: they have seen the video."

"If they want to know the truth, have them come to Casablanca Manor in person."

"Within three days. After that, the offer expires."

Harlan bowed slightly and turned to carry out the order.

...

Three days later, Texas, Boca Chica, Starship Base.

Musk was pulled back to his office from the experimental zone early in the morning by an urgent message from his assistant.

The content of the message was so concise it was almost brutal: The Pentagon had frozen all launch licenses for the SpaceX Starship project on the grounds of a "national security review."

Not just one license, but all of them.

Every approval channel, from suborbital test flights to orbital deployment, was suspended at the same time.

The Starship project was currently in the final testing window before the fourth full-stack test flight. Every week of delay meant the evaporation of tens of millions of dollars in capital, and if the ban lasted more than a quarter, the entire Mars colonization plan would directly stall financially.

Before Musk could even digest this news, a second anonymous message popped up on his encrypted terminal.

The sender could not be traced, but the wording of the message clearly conveyed the pressure without needing any technical tracking: "Tomorrow night at 21:00 sharp, Joint Base San Antonio, Lackland Air Force Base Commander's Banquet Hall."

"Attend the banquet, and the licenses will be unfrozen."

"Do not attend, and the Starship project will be terminated permanently."

Joint Base.

About a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Boca Chica, it was a high-level banquet facility within the Joint Base San Antonio military installation, usually only used for hosting military diplomatic events for foreign defense ministers or higher.

The fact that the other party chose a military base for the banquet location, rather than a civilian hotel or private club, meant that The Pentagon's defense license ban and this "invitation" were the work of the same force.

The other party had the ability to mobilize the resources of a military base to host a banquet, and they were also willing to make this point clear and plain for him to see.

This was not a private threat hidden away; this was them using the administrative power of the entire national defense supply chain to tell him: the cost of refusal was not just the death of the Starship project.

"A Hongmen Banquet, premium edition."

Musk stared at the line of text on the encrypted terminal. His voice was calm, but every syllable sounded like it had been crushed flat.