74: Chapter 74 The report on the superpowered drug sends shockwaves through the White House.

In the conference room, Kevin Mosby, the Deputy Director of the Operations Division, was the first to break the silence.

He pushed a stack of intercepted signals intelligence records to the center of the table, his voice low but clear:

"Walsh was sniped, Edward and Musk have teamed up, the Hopkins Family cleared out a hundred miles around their estate, and all clues point to the Hoover Dam."

"There's something hidden in there."

"It shouldn't be money or engineering corruption; those aren't worth a military-industrial giant personally stepping in to silence people."

"And on the FBI's end, the suicides of those three agents are highly abnormal. What kind of video could make three gun-carrying federal agents swallow their barrels right after watching it?"

Ali Wu, Director of the Intelligence Analysis Division, an experienced Chinese-American analyst who had been with the CIA for twenty-five years, tracing her career back to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose, her tone dry and steady:

"No matter what that thing is, it has already crossed the line we usually draw for domestic intelligence."

"In the past, we dealt with state-level threats—hostile nations, terrorist organizations, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

"But this time, it's entirely domestic factions silencing each other, and Walsh is the number three figure in the Department of Homeland Security, not some minor player."

"If this matter continues to spread, the impact will go far beyond Nevada and Texas."

Just at that moment, the door to the conference room was violently pushed open from the outside.

The action was so swift and urgent

that the sound of the doorknob slamming against the wall instantly snapped everyone present out of their deep thoughts.

CIA Director Richard Heinlein looked up, his brow furrowing slightly.

The person who pushed open the door was Marcus Webb, the intelligence liaison officer for the Science and Technology Division. He was a veteran technocrat who had been with the agency for over a decade, usually very steady, never spilling a drop of coffee even during meetings.

Right now, his face was as pale as if he had just walked out of a morgue, his hand clutching an encrypted datapad so tightly that his knuckles were white.

"Director... over at the Starship Base, our inside source planted in the supply chain logistics team just sent over an urgent intelligence report."

He placed the datapad on the conference table and took a deep breath, trying his best to keep his tone steady, but anyone could tell that the steadiness was forced.

"Musk has developed a serum inside the Starship Base."

"We currently know nothing about the ingredients or mechanism of this serum, but based on the fragmented information pieced together by our source, its core function has been confirmed by more than one independent source:"

"Limb Regeneration!"

At that moment, the conference room fell into a silence so profound it felt as if all the air had been sucked out.

A coffee cup on the table made a very faint rattling sound as someone's elbow brushed against it inadvertently.

Before any of the senior intelligence officials present had time to digest the full implications of the words "Limb Regeneration,"

Webb immediately followed up with his next sentence.

"Furthermore, a few days ago, this serum drew a forced intervention from an external force."

"Our source's intelligence description is very vague..."

"He doesn't know who exactly that external force was, but his logistics team heard continuous underground thunder that night. Subsequently, a base-wide lockdown was initiated, and over a hundred tactical personnel were urgently deployed to the second basement level. And then..."

"And then, all the tactical personnel who entered the second basement level were defeated and incapacitated in less than a few minutes."

"Subsequent rumors within the base said it was some kind of... some kind of non-human presence."

"But as for what it specifically was, our source's clearance is too low to confirm."

"Only at the end of these rumors, some scattered words were repeatedly mentioned: Aliens."

The word "Aliens" was like a hand grenade with its pin pulled, detonating a highly unnatural silence in the conference room.

Ali Wu put down the glasses she had been slowly wiping, pressing her fingers against the tabletop with slight force, the color of her fingertips turning from normal to pale.

Kevin Mosby, the Deputy Director of the Operations Division—a veteran who had participated in countless high-risk field missions in the Middle East and had three of his command posts blown up by mortars in the Baghdad Green Zone—

blurted out in a low voice before he even realized it:

"Limb Regeneration? Aliens?!"

"Those of us in intelligence all know that even at the absolute forefront of regenerative medicine, the pharmaceutical industry has only just achieved lab-grade localized cartilage repair!"

"And now you're telling me that Musk's side can make people regrow entire limbs, and it has already attracted the attention of alien forces?!"

"Director, this matter must be reported directly to the President!"

Heinlein did not respond immediately.

He lowered his head, his gaze lingering for a long time on the densely annotated briefings on the table.

Everyone in the conference room was a veteran intelligence bureaucrat, and they all knew that the phrase "report directly to the President" meant binding the entire CIA to the same track:

subsequent funding, authorization, and even his own appointment as Director would be chained to this matter from then on.

He remained silent for a long time, then slowly straightened his back, placing the unverified inside source's report on top of the rigorously verified information about Walsh's sniping.

"The intelligence evidence is still incomplete, but... it's enough."

His voice was very slow and steady, but every word carried the weight of a decision made, never to be rescinded.

"Prepare the car."

"I'm going to the White House."

...

Washington, D.C., 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House.

The doors of the Oval Office were pushed open from both sides by two Secret Service agents in front of Richard Heinlein.

Heinlein had served as CIA Director for nearly four years, but he had not entered this room many times.

The CIA's operations were overseas; the Director personally coming to the White House for a briefing usually meant one of two situations:

either an imminent foreign threat had emerged that required the President's immediate decision,

or an event had occurred that even the CIA itself was unsure whether to report, one that was sufficient to reclassify global intelligence priorities.

Today's situation clearly belonged to the latter.

Joseph Biden sat behind that world-famous desk, eyes cast down, flipping through a routine diplomatic security briefing handed in a few minutes ago by National Security Advisor Ronald Sawyer.

He wore a deep navy blue suit, his tie meticulously knotted, his white hair gleaming dryly under the soft lights of the Oval Office.

"Mr. President, CIA Director Richard Heinlein requests a briefing."

"It concerns the domestic security situation and is marked as top priority."

Sawyer stepped aside to report to the President, while casting a glance at Heinlein.

That glance lacked the usual politeness of a staffer toward an independent intelligence agency bureaucrat; instead, it held an urgency suppressed only by professional decorum.

Biden looked up, closed the routine briefing in front of him, pushed it to the side of the desk, and nodded slightly to Heinlein.

"Heinlein, sit down and speak."

"Your briefing today has a very high classification. It seems this is not a report on routine field progress."

Heinlein sat in the chair opposite the President's desk, leaning forward slightly. He placed the carefully organized classified folder he had brought into the Oval Office on his lap and began to report point by point.

His speaking speed was not fast, his tone steady, progressing linearly from the earliest event node according to the standard briefing format of the intelligence system:

Senator Edward Warren of Nevada's abnormal retrieval pattern of Hoover Dam data,

the deep involvement of Eli Walsh, the number three figure in the Department of Homeland Security, after being drawn in,

Walsh's secret drilling project in downtown Los Angeles,

the ballistic truth of Walsh's death, and the Hopkins Family's hiring of assassins,

the chain of events of the FBI agents' suicide by swallowing their guns,

and to the unusual alliance structure between Warren and Musk, integrated into the "Long Live Alliance"...

Each event was presented with its time, location, participants, and cross-referenced sources, without any sensationalism or omissions.

When he first began reporting on the contact between Warren and Walsh, the President was still listening intently, occasionally nodding slightly to signal him to continue.

But about seven minutes into the briefing, a situation began to arise.

The President's eyes inadvertently closed slowly and heavily, and his center of gravity began to unconsciously slide toward the back of the chair. The fabric at the shoulders of his suit arched slightly, his white hair coming very close to the dark red leather high-back chair.

The first nod of dozing off occurred when he heard the name of the agency, the "Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,"

He wasn't completely on the edge of sleep, but rather seemed to be struggling to resist some heavy inertia from within his body:

his upper body leaned forward very slowly and then straightened back up very slowly, maintaining a listening posture, but his eyelids drooped over his lower sockets and barely lifted.

Heinlein's voice unconsciously lowered after a few minutes, his gaze quickly sweeping over the staffers standing to the side and behind the President.

One or two of the White House staffers opposite him began to take a half-step forward, approaching the side of the President's armrest.

One of them bent down and, in an extremely soft voice, called "Mr. President" in the President's ear,

while another simultaneously picked up the water cup on the table and handed it to the President's hand.

Biden's breathing paused, and then, as if snapping out of a brief lapse of consciousness, he suddenly opened his eyes.

When his eyelids lifted, his lower eyelids had not yet fully reset, and between the corner of his mouth and his jaw, a trace of transparent drool could vaguely be seen hanging from his slightly parted lips.

The person next to him, the President's personal assistant, had already used a soft tissue he carried with him to skillfully and naturally wipe away that trace of drool before the CIA Director could even look away,

as if this was a standard action they had repeatedly executed countless times in recent months.

Heinlein did not react to this at all.

Having spent decades in the intelligence community, he knew better than anyone when to keep talking and when to pretend to look elsewhere.

He chose to keep talking.

When Heinlein's report progressed to the ballistic details of Walsh's sniping,

the President suddenly woke up completely,

his eyes wide open, a certain focused light of an old political animal returning to his grayish-blue pupils.