Mounting Suspicions

Xu Chen was finally released and invited into the meeting room. Many of the people there had a document in hand and were debating heatedly. When Xu Chen entered, some of them looked over.

It all seemed just like yesterday.

Captain Chu strode over, brought Xu Chen a chair, and patted him on the shoulder. "Xu Chen, I'm sorry you had to go through that, but the information Old Ge told you is simply too important. I guarantee you'll be satisfied with the compensation afterward. For now, just answer what you know when you're asked, all right?"

Xu Chen felt a little aggrieved. He had been interrogated almost until midnight yesterday, unable even to sleep. Those two had acted as though they couldn't understand plain speech, asking the same questions over and over until he had nearly had a breakdown. And now Captain Chu expected him to cooperate with just a few words? Did he think Xu Chen had no temper at all?

But the thought of Old Ge weighed heavily on him.

More than those grievances, he cared about what Old Ge had told him.

That information was more urgent.

It was a warning.

It needed to be passed on.

So Xu Chen agreed.

At the very end of the conference table sat a middle-aged man who carried himself with an air of composure. He wore an officer's uniform, though he had no epaulettes to indicate his identity. Judging by the way those around him treated him, however, he seemed to be the highest-ranking and most senior person there, as well as the leader of this meeting.

He studied Xu Chen carefully and nodded to Captain Chu.

Captain Chu then placed a document in front of Xu Chen.

"Let me explain. You were detained and interrogated earlier, right?"

"Mm?" Xu Chen responded.

"You heard what the interrogators said, so I imagine you've guessed some of it. The Voice Recorder you took in didn't do its job."

At the thought of the ordeal he had suffered in the Interrogation Room, Xu Chen's face tightened with pain. Then he put it together and found it a little hard to believe.

The recording equipment had malfunctioned, the Drug Pump hadn't worked properly, and, above all, he had been the only one present. Thinking of it that way, even he thought he was a spy.

"There's no use saying more. I'll play you the audio, and you'll understand."

Someone switched on the meeting room's sound system and started playback.

There was the sound of footsteps, crystal clear. This recording device was apparently no ordinary piece of equipment.

Then came the rustle of something being placed on a soft surface.

Xu Chen was surprised. It had picked up even that?

Afterward, a device let out a long beep.

Xu Chen recognized it as the Vital Signs Monitor's periodic beep.

Then came silence.

Xu Chen frowned.

After a long while, the Vital Signs Monitor beeped again.

A series of altered beeps followed. That was the unusual sound the Vital Signs Monitor made when it detected abnormal readings.

Then the beeps returned to normal.

The altered beeps started again, accompanied by the sound of friction against the bed.

Then came another kind of beeping, the sound of the Drug Pump...

The sounds returned to normal.

After a long stretch of normal beeping, the altered beeps and the Drug Pump sounded again, growing increasingly frequent.

Then came the sounds of the bed shifting and banging, things rattling around, and someone getting to his feet.

Finally, the Vital Signs Monitor sounded a long, continuous alarm as the heartbeat stopped.

Listening to it left Xu Chen feeling as uncomfortable as if he had been watching a silent play. He might as well have heard nothing at all. Although he still had some recollection of what he had done, he remained utterly baffled and had no idea what was going on with the recording.

"That's not right, is it? Didn't the two comrades who interrogated me say the Voice Recorder had picked up at least some of the conversation?"

"That was a bluff, just an extraordinary measure."

He looked at the sound system and noticed what was missing from the strange recording. "That's still not right. How come this thing didn't record my conversation with Old Ge?!"

Captain Chu pressed a hand to his forehead, thinking Xu Chen was somewhat unreliable. Shouldn't he have realized that after listening to just a short part of it?

Xu Chen glanced at Captain Chu and asked to hear it again.

But the recording remained unchanged. There were no voices.

Listening to it made Xu Chen question everything. Had he really gone in and said nothing? Had he started hallucinating after he went in?

"The Technical Department has already checked it. The audio is normal and hasn't been altered by technical means. There's nothing wrong with the Voice Recorder either. In other words..." Captain Chu looked at Xu Chen.

Xu Chen understood immediately. If there was nothing wrong with the Voice Recorder, then the problem was him.

"However, we also have a Think Tank working behind the scenes. They believe your behavior and speech make you credible, which is why you're able to sit here."

Several people at the conference table nodded to Xu Chen. They seemed to be members of the Think Tank. He had them to thank for working hard enough to save his worthless life.

Xu Chen played the recording again. There were still no voices, a fact as strange as ever. He kept going over what he had learned, trying to see if anything could explain the phenomenon.

Soon, Xu Chen remembered something Captain Chu had told him earlier. "Old Ge said he wouldn't allow you to listen in! Did he know something?"

Captain Chu gave Xu Chen a surprised look, then shook his head helplessly.

"No, he wouldn't let you listen in, which means he probably didn't want our conversation to get out.

"It's very possible he did something himself."

Captain Chu shook his head again. "The Think Tank has information support from Old Ge's students and colleagues. Let's put it this way: Old Ge might have had that idea, but he definitely didn't have the technical means. Producing a recording like this, with only the voices missing, would take almost miraculous skill."

Xu Chen fell silent again. He realized that if Old Ge hadn't done it himself, then... was it a supernatural phenomenon that Old Ge hadn't caused?

He suddenly thought of the being Old Ge had mentioned earlier.

If that was possible, could He be the mastermind behind this?

The more Xu Chen thought about it, the more likely it seemed. As he considered it carefully, even Old Ge's death seemed to have an evil quality to it.

"Captain Chu, I remember being told when I was brought over that all of Old Ge's organs were already failing. But the last time I saw him, he seemed perfectly healthy?"

Captain Chu fell silent for a moment.

An elderly man in white beside him spoke up. "It was free radicals. For some unknown reason, there was a huge amount of them in Old Ge's body. These free radicals attacked everything in his body indiscriminately. You can think of it as Old Ge aging at an extraordinarily abnormal rate. If not for the Drug Pump incident, he would most likely have aged to death in the end."

"Is that normal?"

"No. That level of free radicals is far beyond what the human body can produce on its own."

Captain Chu continued, "As for the free radicals, we've also checked Old Ge's experimental activities and ruled out chemical poisoning as the cause."

Xu Chen understood. It seemed this organization, whose ability to get things done had to be the best in the world, had left no stone unturned. He had only just suspected that someone might have poisoned Old Ge, and they were already giving him the result.

After all, though free radicals were somewhat unfamiliar to him, Xu Chen knew there were many ways to cause an excess of them in the human body. The best known were Paraquat and Parkinson's disease: the former was a poison, the latter a disease.

He silently reviewed what had happened and suddenly realized something. "Right, the last time I saw Old Ge, he said he had some theories about the special corrosion of the cultural relics. He suspected there was an organization behind their destruction."

Captain Chu frowned. "As for that, the relevant departments are still investigating, but it probably had nothing to do with Old Ge's death. After all, if they really did it..."

He gestured at everyone in the meeting room. "Then there'd be no need for us to hold a meeting. It wouldn't take much effort for that organization to overthrow the entire country, or even the world."

Xu Chen was shocked, but immediately pressed on. "Old Ge said then that he had some theories about the special corrosion of the cultural relics. Has there been any progress?"

"Which of you is Old Ge's student?"

"Me!" A somewhat reserved young man in a white coat stood up nearby. "Old Ge did make progress on the special corrosion."

Having said that, the man in the white coat looked troubled.

Captain Chu looked at him. "Then tell us what progress he made."

"That's not it." The young man in the white coat looked troubled. "Old Ge handled every project concerning the special corrosion himself. He did record his work, but... we can't understand it?"

Someone beside him looked stunned. "That can't be right. You have master's degrees in both physics and chemistry, and you're one of Old Ge's most valued students. You can't understand your own teacher's notes?"

"No, no." The man in the white coat scratched his head. "The main problem is that we can't make out what Old Ge wrote. His handwriting isn't very clear."

"So that means no one knows how far the special corrosion research has progressed?" Xu Chen pressed.

The young man in the white coat thought for a moment, then nodded. "I can only be roughly certain that our teacher seemed to have made a discovery in high-energy physics while researching the special corrosion. The data is still there, too. Now that our teacher has fallen, we can still take over his research and continue it."

"Then what have you discovered?"

"Nothing," the young man in the white coat said awkwardly.

The sense of crisis in Xu Chen's heart reached its peak. He felt as ill at ease as if he were walking on a glass walkway high up a towering mountain.

Especially when several panes of glass up ahead were broken.