United Kingdom, MI6.
Mei Wa sat alone in her office, gently running her fingers over the USB Drive Doyle had handed over. The metal casing flickered between light and shadow as she turned it beneath the lamp.
The list was like a ticking time bomb. Doyle's all-or-nothing attitude made that clear. But what truly made her hesitate was whether she should open it.
Her fingertips hovered above the USB port, then slowly drew back.
What if she saw a name she shouldn't? The people implicated might drag her into even greater danger. Mei Wa took a deep breath, clenched the USB Drive in her hand, and turned her gaze to the gloomy London sky outside.
"Knock, knock!"
The brief rapping at the door interrupted Mei Wa's thoughts.
She put the USB Drive in a drawer and said, "Come in."
Her deputy came in and gently placed a file on Mei Wa's desk. "Chief, there's been a new development in the Forest Club case involving Eliot's murder. The missing money has been found in a black suitcase. A camper discovered it on the riverbank downstream. Thinking it was a body dump, they called the police right away."
"As for Operation Mosquito Hunt, the screening has still yielded no progress. We conducted a broad sweep of people active in the relevant areas around the time of the incident, but so far we haven't received any useful leads or voluntary reports."
"Also," he added, "we've found the taxi β abandoned after assassinating the American businessman. The technical department conducted a thorough examination, but unfortunately, they couldn't recover any useful biological evidence from the car."
Mei Wa took the file. Her fingers flipped quickly through the pages as her eyes scanned each line of the report. For a while, the only sound in the