97: Chapter 97: The Unbelievable Secret Revealed, Causing a Stir Among the Audience

Director of National Intelligence Alan Holt suddenly spoke up at the end of the table.

His voice was not loud, but everyone present turned their heads to look at him simultaneously.

Holt was a man who never voluntarily spoke in the Situation Room.

He had been immersed in the intelligence community for nearly thirty years, and the only rule he believed in was to never speak first on matters that were not one hundred percent confirmed.

Yet, he had spoken now.

"According to the intelligence I have obtained, the Long Live Alliance of Musk and Warren, as well as the three military-industrial giants—Hopkins, Remington, and Knox—are all involved in an affair concerning Aliens."

"The reason they are currently gathering near that abandoned spillway at the Hoover Dam is because there is a secret base there with the codename 'Warehouse 18'."

"Inside it are stored reverse-engineering data of Alien technology, as well as secrets involving... the Deep State."

"And that Deep State seems to be divided into two factions."

"These two factions are currently at war with each other."

"This is perhaps the reason for the two-hundred-thousand-strong fleet battle we are seeing on the screen right now."

All eyes on both sides of the curved long table shifted simultaneously from the screen to Holt.

Then they heard that word:

The Deep State.

Every high-ranking Washington official present heard it.

Everyone made the same physical reaction at the exact same moment:

They leaned their body weight slightly, almost imperceptibly, against the back of their chairs.

Then they all looked at the same person.

Not the President.

It was Madeline Rasmussen and Ronald Sawyer, sitting on the small chairs against the wall.

These two were not sitting at the conference table.

Their rank was not high enough.

But in this room, around this curved long table, in the eyes of every top-level official who possessed veto power and war authorization power,

The person who truly held the country's trump cards was not the old man sitting at the head of the table,

But these two spokespeople who relayed messages for the real financier behind the scenes, Solomon Crane.

The private definition of the term "Deep State" for all the high officials present had always been just one person:

That Jewish tycoon who had paved an entire invisible network of power with three thousand offshore accounts and four hundred shell companies.

But now, these old foxes who had long been seasoned in the political arena read the same expression on the faces of Madeleine and Sawyer:

Confusion.

The two of them, under the gazes cast by everyone, had their mouths slightly agape, brows furrowed, and they glanced at each other for a split second, their eyes filled with bewilderment.

It wasn't an act.

If it were an act, the old foxes present would not have been deceived simultaneously.

Then it was real; the Deep State was not Solomon Crane.

But before they could digest this shock, Holt spoke again.

"That Deep State... has been reverse-engineering Alien technology ever since the Roswell UFO crash in 1947."

"And according to existing evidence, for nearly fifty years, they have continuously intercepted twenty to thirty percent of the Hoover Dam's hydraulic resources, and thirty to forty percent of its electrical resources, to supply a certain secret research facility or facilities."

He pushed a prepared chart onto the table, marked with the timeline of the Hoover Dam's hydroelectric shortages and the time of the Roswell crash, and continued:

"And the most active operational department among them, the agency responsible for dealing directly with Aliens and executing capture missions, seems to be called the 'Federal Urban Pipeline Maintenance Department'."

Clarence Cole, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had his brows knit together the moment Holt mentioned the word "capture."

He did not interrupt, but quickly turned his hands, which had been crossed on the table, palms down and flattened; this was his usual precursor to unease.

Holt did not look at him.

"According to existing intelligence, the Deep State's method of capturing Aliens is extremely direct, extremely brutal, and lacks any trace of attempted communication or civilized contact: they go up and beat the target half to death."

"They beat them until they are bloody and broken, until they cannot move, and then stuff the Aliens into gray bags, throw them over their shoulders, and take them away."

"This has been cross-confirmed by multiple independent sources."

Secretary of Defense Graves's fists, almost subconsciously, slammed onto the table with a "bang," causing the folder in front of him to jump half an inch.

He stood up, his voice suppressing rage but still trembling:

"Absurd! Are you kidding me? A group of people beating Aliens until they're bloody and broken, then stuffing them into sacks?"

"What would their home planet think?"

"Once the home planet learns that some organization on Earth is hunting their kin like livestock, when their fleet crosses who knows how many light-years to arrive, they will never ask whether you are the Deep State or the Patriot Alliance!"

"They will launch an interstellar strike directly against the entire Earth! This is a tragedy that fundamentally endangers the survival of the entire human species!"

Director of National Intelligence Holt placed his hands flat on the files on the table, his voice remaining calm, but the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes were trembling slightly:

"This intelligence has been submitted to the President according to regulations every day; Mr. President has received the intelligence briefings I summarized every single day."

Graves turned his head abruptly:

"Then why... have all of us here only heard this intelligence for the first time today?"

Biden raised a hand.

The back of his hand was covered in age spots, his knuckles gaunt, but when that hand was raised, the entire Situation Room suddenly fell silent.

He did not look at Graves, nor did he look at Holt,

He simply lowered that hand slowly and placed it on the side of the thick intelligence folder on the table, his voice as flat as if recalling a trivial matter he had accidentally encountered in the hallway yesterday afternoon:

"The Director of National Intelligence has done his job very well."

"He reports to me according to regulations every day, so all the intelligence you see now regarding Aliens and the Deep State is actually something I have received every single day."

The President tapped his fingers lightly on the table.

"The problem is, I have too much intelligence to read every day."

"There are not only Aliens, but also underground dwellers, undersea dwellers, dinosaur people, lizard people, and even eyewitness accounts of Jesus descending to Tennessee to change tires for cars."

"Which is real and which is a hallucination, no one can tell just by looking at the files."

Holt added after the President finished speaking:

"The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is only responsible for collecting intelligence."

"The authority to verify the authenticity is not in our hands."

"To verify, one needs authorized cross-departmental investigative resources, and that authorization has never been issued."

NASA Administrator Glenn Callahan stood up from his chair the moment these words landed.

The sound of the chair being pushed was too loud, and the Secretary of State next to him instinctively pulled his folder closer to his chest.

On Callahan's face was a fury that had been suppressed for decades and had just suddenly overturned all restraints:

"So it turns out that since 1947, someone has already been reverse-engineering Alien spacecraft!"

"We apply to Congress for billions, tens of billions of dollars in funding every year to build the Hubble Space Telescope! To build the Kepler Space Telescope! To build the James Webb Space Telescope!"

"We tie our most elite engineers to the consoles! Counting galaxy by galaxy facing deep space! Looking for Alien civilizations! Looking for Alien signals! Looking for any evidence that might prove humans are not alone in the universe!"

"And someone has long been running a reverse-engineering laboratory under the Hoover Dam, conducting research for decades on these spacecraft fragments that were already in their possession!"

He pressed his hand onto the table, his elbows braced straight on the table; his voice was no longer excited, shifting to an extreme lowness, filled with the weight of decades of wasted effort:

"I feel like all of us at NASA... from the 1969 Apollo moon landing until now, have all been played for fools!!"